Monthly Archives: March 2014

No role for local authorities in education

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NOTE: This document appears to have been removed from the DfE’s web site shortly after this post appeared. There may, of course, be no connection between the two events.

A report on research priorities and questions published today by the DfE under the title ‘Accountability and governance’ makes it clear that there is no role in the new national schooling world for local authorities. The document can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/288118/Accountability_and_governance_research_priorities_and_questions.pdf and within it the government makes clear that:

Our vision is for an accountability system which is challenging, fair and transparent – one in which school level governance and national arrangements hold autonomous schools and colleges to account for the education they provide.

So there is seemingly no role there for local authorities.

The document also states that:

where children are at risk of being failed through poor providers, central government will intervene swiftly – primarily through Ofsted. High-quality Ofsted inspection will challenge all schools and Colleges to strive for excellence in achievement, leadership, teaching and behaviour (schools only). (sic)

Local authorities risk being relegated to little more than educational trading standards watchdogs, having to report concerns to big sibling in Whitehall or their regional Commissioner Representative. For the document concludes that:

There are now many types of governance structures, including standalone and federations of maintained schools, single academy trusts, sponsored academies, multi-academy trusts and umbrella trusts. We want to understand the factors that lead to the most robust governance arrangements and hence the most effective school-level accountability, particularly for education standards.

Again there is no mention of any local accountability other than through governing bodies since multi-academy trusts are not required to have a geographical coherence, although many do in reality.

The absence of mentions of diocesan responsibility might provide the faith communities with pause for thought were it not for the fact that they have seen a local elected body replaced by one at Westminster that is far more remote to most of them. The challenge will come when Ofsted, having obtained powers to inspect academy chains, as it surely will, then asks to inspect diocesan education arrangements where faith schools are under-performing, and some undoubtedly are  not doing as well as they might as schools.

Startling for its absence from the document is any mention of teachers, their training and employment. Who is concerned about the governance of that process, so vital for any achievement by schools? I have expressed concern before about the lack of supervision of the National College now that its Board has been abolished. Presumably, it is good enough that the DfE Board can monitor its performance;: but who sets standards for success and failure in say, recruitment into the profession, and what are the sanctions?

The 2015 general election will mark the passing of local education services, whatever the polite fiction that is maintained. Sadly, none of the main political parties were prepared to stand-up and fight for local political involvement in education. It may be self-seeking, since I am an elected county councillor in Oxfordshire, but I regard the change as likely to be detrimental for our education system.

Better Maths for the Millions: well that’s the aim

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Schools have four weeks to express an interest in becoming a Mathematics Hub. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/288817/DRAFT_Maths_hubs_guidance_doc_v10.pdf The aim of providing professional development through some 30 hubs that in the first instance will both host the visiting teachers from Shanghai and identify those teachers from schools across England that will be offered a visit to China’s booming port city is a laudable idea. However, 30 hubs for even 20,000 schools means that, on average, each hub will have more than 600 schools that could associate with it. Put it another way, if there are 4 hubs in each of London, the North West, South East and Yorkshire & the Humber Regions, and three in all other regions except the North East, where there might be just two, you get an idea of how thinly spread the resources will be.

The long list of tasks the Hubs are eventually going to have to manage includes supporting wider partnerships on:

  • leading on national innovation projects such as the Shanghai Teacher Exchange Programme

•     recruitment of maths specialists into teaching;

•     initial training of maths teachers and supporting existing teachers of other subjects wanting

to change to maths teaching;

•     co-ordinating and delivering a wide range of maths continuing professional development

(CPD) and school-to-school support;

•     ensuring maths leadership is developed, for example by coordinating programmes for aspiring        and new heads of maths departments;

•     helping maths enrichment programmes to reach a large number of pupils from primary school onwards.

Interestingly, the development of Subject Knowledge Courses for would-be mathematics teachers is not specifically mentioned in the list, but would no doubt be just as important as helping existing teachers of other subjects convert to become competent maths teachers.

On the basis that you have to invest to achieve progress, the Hubs will no doubt initially take some of the scare maths teachers away from classrooms and department leadership to run the programmes. I worry that the initiative is too secondary orientated when what may be required is a national scheme for upgrading the maths capability of primary school teachers. If they can gain confidence is delivering the subject, then a higher proportion of pupils will achieve the expected level at Key Stage 2, and maths teaching in secondary schools will be more interesting for more teachers. It is not enrichment after primary school that is needed as much as the ability of pupils to achieve their full potential before they move on to secondary schools.

I hope that while the DfE has opened the scheme to ‘expressions of interest’ there will be attempts to ensure national coverage rather than leaving schools in some parts of England devoid of any support. Market-based schemes may have their place, but ensuring national coverage must take precedence over other factors. I am also not sure whether a programme developing maths leader solely alongside other maths teachers is a good idea. Personally, I think groups of teachers from different subjects undertaking leadership development together is a better model, and helps those eventually going forward to senior leadership to start to understand whole school issues as well as those relating to their own subject. No doubt the National College has a view on middle leadership development but, despite having been taken into the DfE, they don’t seem to rate a mention in this document. Hopefully, that is only a temporary oversight in the rush to produce a programme to coincide with the Minister’s visit to Shanghai.

Free Schools now account for around 1% of all schools

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The DfE has just published updated lists of existing and proposed Free Schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/free-schools-successful-applications-and-open-schools-2014 There are 296 schools in the two lists. Of these, 112, or some 38%, are located within one of the London boroughs. Once the Home Counties regions of the East of England and the South East are added to the London figure the percentage increases to 62% of the national total. By contrast, there are just seven schools in the North East and 12 in the East Midlands. Birmingham, with 13 schools, is the local authority where the largest numbers of schools are located, although Enfield, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Tower Hamlets, three much smaller authorities than Birmingham: each have seven schools located or to be located with their borough.

The majority of the schools, some 232, are mainstream schools, but there are 49 either SEN or alternative provision schools, with 15 schools (sic) listed as 16-19 establishments – 7 of these are in London. Traditional primary (109) and secondary (93) schools dominate the age groupings. However, there are some 43 all-through schools, a number of which are in the special school sector. Personally, I am not yet a fan of such schools in the mainstream sectors where grouping all primary schools that feed a secondary school seems a more enlightened proposition than giving some pupils the opportunity to be part of the school for the whole of their careers while adding others later. Avoiding newcomers being seen as second class citizens seems like a wasteful and unnecessary use of resources. But, no doubt there is some research that shows such schools perform well for all pupils.

Free schools are still contentious with some groups, so it is interesting to see that 7 of the schools are ARK schools, already a large provider of academies in London, and 10 are under the Harris umbrella that has extended north of the river with its free schools, including into Tottenham, the most deprived part of Haringey. There are also three Oasis schools, and a number with E-Act in their name featured in the list.  The DfE don’t provide a faith analysis of the schools, but a number are clearly linked to faith groups of both the Christian denominations and other faiths.

This DfE report also doesn’t say anything about the size of the schools, both on opening and in terms of their future maximum numbers. There is no doubt the primary schools will help, especially in and around London, in providing places to cope with the boom in pupil numbers. The presence of some secondary schools in areas of falling rolls or adequate provisions seems rather more wasteful of scare resources. Once the Studio Schools and UTCs are added to this list, the shape of schooling will have changed more between 2010 and 2015 than at any time for a generation. Now might finally be the time to question the continued presence of selective secondary schools? How diverse a school system do we actually want and need? And is diversity and choice being put before the provision of a good school for all pupils?

Footnote

Since I wrote this piece last night Channel 4 News have carried a report of another school that has failed its Ofsted inspection. Unlike other free schools that have failed, where the promoters were new to education or offering a type of education not previously recognised within the state funded system, this is a school run by a group with extensive mainstream school experience, albeit overseas. Perhaps, this goes to show that running schools in England isn’t as easy as some might have thought and that some local authorities of all political persuasions should have been given more credit for their work.

Stick to the day job Vince

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Early in the 1990s I once spent three-days on a placement at what is now BMW’s Cowley works in Oxford, where the mini is produced. I was on a scheme was designed to help those of us in education, at all levels from the classroom to senior leaders in universities, understand more about how industry and commerce ticked. Indeed, there are still such schemes around today, most notably for school leaders.

It was, therefore interesting to read in today’s Independent newspaper that Business Secretary Vince Cable apparently had some unflattering remarks to say about secondary school teacher’s knowledge of life outside the schoolroom. During my Cowley visit what struck me forcibly was the lack of reciprocal knowledge on the part of those working in industry about what was happening in schools. For instance, many businesses have been caught out in recent years by the growth in the numbers of young people attending university, and have in some cases struggled to make better use of the extra knowledge and skills that graduates bring to the workplace compared with those that leave school after ‘A’ levels.

Still, where I do agree with the Business Secretary is that much more needs to be achieved on the careers education front. I suggested in a recent post that the large recruitment agencies might help with this task. I confess to chairing one of the education panels for the Recruitment Employers Confederation, so I am not a totally unbiased or objective observer. Nevertheless, far more than say the CBI or Institute of Directors, REC already has links with schools through the supply teacher market and could use its expertise in the wider employment scene to work with government on developing a new approach to careers education and work experience. The short section in ‘Tough Young Teachers’, shown recently on BBC3, was an interesting cameo of how a pupil benefitted from even an effectively developed placement in a high street opticians shop.

But, it is time to return to Mr Cable’s remarks. While it is true that the majority of graduates that apply for teaching are below 25 when they decide on a career in the classroom, there are a sizeable minority of career changes that have in most cases had experience of the workplace.

In 2012, the latest year data are available for, of the 55,000 or so graduate would-be teachers, and virtually all would-be secondary school teachers, nearly 20,000 were over the age of 25 when they applied for teacher training according to the figures produced by the GTTR arm of UCAS. In addition, there were around 5,000 direct entrants to teaching that year through the Graduate Training Programme that largely will have come from the wider workforce. This is before you consider any other teachers whose partners work outside education and can discuss the differences between the work of commerce and that of education over the dinner table.

Characterising teachers as ignorant of the world of commerce may have raised a laugh with Mr Cable’s audience, but it doesn’t really convey the whole picture of how schools and business interact. There is room for improvement, but it certainly won’t come about by creating mutual distrust and antipathy.

Be a teacher: earn £12-15 per hour?

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After an absence of a number of years, the DfE has once again conducted a diary survey of the workload of around 1,000 teachers. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285941/DFE-RR316.pdf  That’s about 0.2% of the workforce. On average, all the school teachers surveyed reported working over 50 hours during the survey week, primary classroom teachers averaged 59.3 hours per week, slightly longer than the 55.7 hours averaged by secondary classroom teachers, and the 55.2 hours worked by classroom teachers in academies: both primary and secondary school head teachers reporting working more than 60 hours per week.  Classroom teachers in most school types reported teaching 19 to 20 hours a week. The exception to this was teachers in special schools who reported teaching 16.8 hours.

Teachers of all types worked around 12 hours a week outside what might be regarded as their normal working week. Head teachers spent around half of this time on school and staff management while classroom teachers spent at least three quarters of it on planning, preparation and assessment (PPA). Time spent on PPA was as common for classroom teachers in primary, secondary and academy schools as teaching at around a third of their total workload. The fact that despite the introduction of non-contact time in the primary sector some years ago teachers still report having to send time outside of the normal working week on these activities shows how intense the job has become.

However, as the dairy recorded a term-time week it would be different in weeks outside of the 190 days when pupils are present. As I have said in the past, teachers are required to work a form of employer directed flexi-time, with part of their so-called long holidays really being compensation for the extra hours worked during term time.

Teachers and heads generally thought the amount of time they spent on unnecessary and unnecessarily bureaucratic tasks had increased over the last 12 months, with 35.8% of head teachers and 44.6% of deputy and classroom teachers surveyed expressing this opinion.

The fact that preparation for Ofsted took time out of the working week for some teachers should be no surprise to anyone. The other big issue was over the data collection necessary for individual pupil tracking. There is clearly some way to go in some schools where the survey group worked to stop this becoming a tiresome burden for classroom teachers. Several years ago I advocated a new grade of data technician for schools to both collect and analyse data on behalf of classroom teachers. Despite handing budgets to schools, there still seems to be a way to go before this type of assistance permeates the sector as a whole.

If a classroom teacher works 60 hours a week for the 40 weeks of term-time then they will clock up 2,400 hours a year before counting any time spent on school work during the rest of the year, such as secondary teachers being present when examination results are handed over, or the five INSET days that are compulsory for all teachers. By contrast, an admin assistant working for 46 weeks a year at 40 hours per week will only work 1,840 hours a year. This means that if a teacher does work 2,500 hours per year, and earns £30,000, then their hourly rate is just £12. Even at 2,000 hours the rate is just £15 per hour.

Expect some hard pay bargaining in schools where this is the case now that national scales have been abolished. Many teachers might well be better off doing regular supply work rather than working at the bottom of the current scale. Indeed, it might be time to reassess the way that teachers’ contracts are established.

Lotteries for teachers not pupils

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This blog has already registered the fact that tomorrow, the 3rd of March, is ‘national admissions day’ when parents in England will hear about whether their offspring have been offered a place at the secondary school of their choice. As has already been revealed by the media, more schools are using lotteries to select pupils where there is over-subscription, often as part of a ‘banding’ system, eroding the number of schools merely using distance as a criteria.

Now the whole issue of lotteries for school places was comprehensively discussed by Conall Boyle in his book ‘Lotteries for Education’, published in 2010 by Imprint Academic. In those days, most academies were parts of chains, and local authorities still had responsibility for admissions to the majority of other schools, so the issues raised in my earlier post about unsuccessful lottery entrants were largely dealt with in theory by Boyle.

One notion that he does discuss in the book is whether it might be cheaper and more efficient to assign teachers to schools by lottery, and place pupils at their local schools. He credits The Guardian article of the 1st April 1998, by Martin Wainwright, who picked up on Boyle’s mention of the idea by a blogger – an early exponent of the art – who had suggested it as a way of saving parents having to shop-around.

Now, where teachers are a scare resource, it might be an interesting way of ensuring some schools don’t hoard say Physics or Mathematics teachers in order to ensure good results throughout their schools. It might also sort out any price competition for these scare resources resulting from the abolition of national pay scales, and the introduction of a market derived free-for-all in wages.

To achieve this end would require a radical ditching of the philosophy of parental choice, and the unfettered use of markets, and the introduction of the notion of a national teaching stock. Is this something already being considered by parts of the DfE since it is not a million miles away from David Laws idea of national leaders of education assignable to particular schools, although he is looking to place these leaders in failing schools rather than randomly.

Taking the concept further might be too radical a step at present, but there does need to be a discussion about the national requirement for higher quality education, and the current use of the market to allocate teaching resources, especially if the winners are teachers able to enhance their earnings because of their scarcity even though they were content to enter teaching and work for a national wage. Allocating teachers by lottery would also be against the philosophy behind the School Direct training route, where schools are encouraged to train and recruit staff. School Direct doesn’t overcome the issue of the allocation of new teachers unless all schools are involved. Even then it may just move the problem to the selection stage from the current end of training job market.

If the emphasis is switching from allowing parents to choose schools to a desire either to create a fairer system or better still to raise the standard of schooling across the country, there is certainly a need to discuss how teachers are distributed through the system. Might a lottery be the answer?