Monthly Archives: October 2014

How many rural primary schools are there in England?

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This is the sort of pub quiz question that can only be answered by those that follow the DfE website and the many detailed updates to our knowledge about the education system that appear from time to time. According to the DfE’s latest announcement, there are 4,673 primary schools that qualify for the designation ‘rural’ under the annual order published as a Statutory Instrument this year on the 29th September and that came into force on the 1st October. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rural-primary-schools-designation Unlike most SIs this one is signed not by a Minister but by a DfE official.

For those of you that thought London was an entirely urban area, there are six primary schools in London boroughs designated as ‘rural’ schools. One of these is the Forty Hill Church of England Primary School in the north of the Borough of Enfield. Located within the M25 it sits in an area of green belt adjacent to its parish church on a very restricted site just nine miles from the centre of London.  Originally built as an all-age elementary school in 1851, some 20 years before the advent of formal state education, it now has 238 primary age pupils wanting a church school education.

According to the DfE Forty Hill School is classified as  being located in a category defined as ‘Hamlet and Isolated Dwelling – less sparse’ as opposed to one of the other categories such as ‘Town and Village – less sparse’ and ‘Village – sparse’ as well as the really rural ‘Hamlet and Isolated Dwelling – sparse’.

Of course, compared with Kielder First School in Northumberland, Forty Hill might be considered quite an urban school. According to the DfE, Kielder has but 13 pupils aged between 5-9 with three teachers and two classes and a unit cost of over £14,000 per pupil. Earlier this year Ofsted reported that it was ‘outstanding’ having improved since its previous inspection. Schools like this one exist because, especially in winter, it would be challenging or even impossible to transport the pupils from the adjacent area to the next nearest school.

For many rural schools this isn’t the case, and from time to time local authorities have had various degrees of success in amalgamating rural schools into larger units. However, such is the love of all schools threatened with closure that apart from amalgamating separate infant and junior schools into a single  primary school there have been relatively few  large-scale schemes of amalgamation except where authorities have removed a three tier system and reverted to the ‘normal’ two-tier system with a transfer age at eleven.

Now that the smallest school can convert to an academy the geography of primary schools in rural England is likely to remain much as it currently is until a policy change forces a re-think. However, with ever younger children in schools, and a growing school population, this isn’t likely to be an issue high up anyone’s agenda for the next decade. As a result, perhaps the DfE can stop this annual exercise and save some more cash.

 

 

 

Food for thought

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Breakfast, lunch and dinner all now seem to be on the school menu. Following the Lib Dems support for universal free school meals for infant pupils, and a desire to extend the free meals to all in primary schools, some Labour activists are championing the importance of breakfast clubs. Not to left out of the act the Tory Secretary of State said at a fringe in Birmingham something to the effect that:

schools should provide three meals a day to children at school, “You can really expand a child’s horizons by the extra-curricular activities they can do, … and maybe some tea in the afternoon. (Daily Telegraph)

So, even for Tories the emphasis is no longer on the family that eats together but on the school as the place where communal eating is learnt and the importance of regular meals is instilled in future generations.

Whether the Tory idea is a realistic one, or just an attempt to get a toe-hold on the food agenda that ever since the Thatcher government decided the issue of children eating well wasn’t a responsibility of the State and closed many school kitchens in an extension of the policy about food and schools that started with the abolition of free milk by the iron lady in the early 1970s isn’t clear, but it wasn’t one that I could have seen Michael Gove ever announcing.

The new Tory family and teacher friendly education policy stance adopted in Birmingham is possibly an interesting move away from the policies of Michael Gove during his period as Education Secretary. This is also apparent in the current Secretary of State’s concerns over workload and teacher preparation policies. Presenting an olive branch, or possibly to protect herself from possible defectors to UKIP a holly or similar native UK species branch, is probably a good idea in the run up to the general election, although whether or not it will have any effect, only time will tell. The Surveys do show teachers’ work hard during term-time and that increasingly the holidays don’t match up as a form of flexi-time compensation as I have pointed out in the past.

I like the Secretary of State’s ideas for the use of mobile phones for parents to communicate with schools and can suggest some developers if anyone wants to contact me, especially as security will be a big issue. The ‘school app’ with all interactions on it might be a good step forward, but not if left to usual government procurement methods.  I suggest a cheap trial that can be then rolled out when successful. The number of families involved eventually should have nothing to do with the price of developing the app.

Whether the idea was to make the Secretary of State seem tech savvy compared with her predecessors announcements in that field I don’t know, but it might start an interesting debate among school leaders. It might also make for some interesting exchanges in classrooms between pupils and their teachers.

Funding of academies and free schools

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I was intending to keep the 200th post on this blog for a reflective piece looking back over the first 199 posts. As a result of a Statistical Release issued today by the DfE that blog can wait. The DfE published data about academies and free school and their expenditure during 2012-13 at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/360139/SFR24_2014_Main_Text.pdf

There is a major anomaly on the front page where some headline statistics are presented. Nowhere does it say that the figures used are derived only from those relating Single Academy Trust information and thus seemingly don’t include data from schools in Multi Academy Trusts. Yet that is the message in a footnote on the un-numbered table in the spreadsheet of detailed tables associated with the release where on the index page it says of the National Median data ‘National median income and expenditure for academies with certain characteristics’. If it is the case that the data only applies to schools in SATs then the headline page should be revised to make clear that the data does not cover all schools with the title academy or free school but only those not part of MATs as it indeed does on page 2: but who will read the small print?

I haven’t had time to work out whether or not the addition of MATs would alter the figures and I haven’t yet considered in detail whether the median figure is the best of the available measures of central tendency to use with this data. Representing the data in graph form using candlestick graphs that allowed the number and range of outliers – both low and high – might have provided a more interesting picture of the range of expenditure.

Comparing two years of data when the sector is growing probably isn’t helpful either as if the balance between schools in and around London and the rest of the country was changing that would skew the income side of the picture and might account for some or the entire decline in income between the two years.

One point that did stand out was the relatively high figures studio schools and University Technical Colleges spent in teaching staff costs. As these schools were mostly in their first year of existence, teaching costs in excess of £6,000 per pupil may be acceptable. Should they fail to recruit sufficient pupils in the future, and a previous post has expressed some anxiety about their numbers and attendance patterns, then whether this is money well spent may be a subject for discussion in the future. Certainly in comparison with the three City Technology Colleges their staffing costs look very high.

It is also interesting to note that although the median figure for primary academies expenditure in 2012-13 was above their income, presumably meaning that they had to draw on reserves, the secondary academies in the median group didn’t spend all their income and put away £48 per pupil into reserves. At this stage of their existence it is too early to tell whether that is both sufficient for depreciation and other unforeseen expenditure or too much. It would have been helpful to see this figure against the school reserves to identify what has happened since these schools changed status.

Finally, as academies and free schools use a different financial year to other state-funded schools it is difficult to make any comparisons between these and other schools.