Monthly Archives: October 2015

Tergiversate

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The Lord Adonis is one of the few politicians in recent British history to have tergiversated twice in his career. He started life as an SDP councillor on Oxford City Council and then joined the newly formed Liberal Democrats, I believe even going so far as to win the Party’s nomination as prospective parliamentary candidate for Westbury in the mid-1990s. However, before the 1997 election, he had left the Party and eventually became a Labour supporter and took the Labour Whip when appointed a peer. Now he has it has been reported resigned from that Party to take up an appointment under the Conservative government.

I first met Lord Adonis in the 1980s when I was chairman of the Costwold Line Promotion Group that was campaigning initially to save and then to improve the line between Oxford and Worcester – he was already interested in railways at that time. Incidentally, that was ten years after I met Jeremy Corbyn in Hornsey during the two 1974 general elections where I was the agent for the Liberal candidate and he was part of Labour’s election team in Hornsey.

After Oxford, Lord Adonis went on to be the Education correspondent at the Financial Times for several years and I recall feeding him stories about data on education issues such as pupil teacher ratios and the cuts to music services under the Thatcher government.

Lord Adonis is a very able man with concerns about issues such as transport and education that he is able to articulate effectively. He has a concern for those the system doesn’t protect; hence his early support for academies after he spent a period while in Oxford as a governor of a secondary school in Blackbird Leys, the estate in south Oxford located in a part of the city where there is significant deprivation.

As someone who has remained a Liberal for more than 50 years, despite two periods of political neutrality during my career, once as a civil servant and the other as vice-chairman of a national charity, I would never have surrendered my basic beliefs and, despite differences with my Party at times, would never have wanted to leave it.

No doubt some journalist or other will ask Lord Adonis how he has been able to reconcile a political life with adherence to three different political ideologies, assuming he now accepts the basic direction of travel of the Conservative government in taking on his new job. If he doesn’t, then he should make clear the grounds on which he has accepted the post.

I cannot also help but wonder if there are some Conservative Party members that will feel just a tiny bit put out at the appointment of Lord Adonis. The message to them being, even if you work hard for the Party, we will take the best person even if traditionally they have been part of the opposition to our values.

One wonders if this act of tergiversation will be the first of many in a re-alignment of political opinion in England or just a rare footnote in British political history and the career of one individual?

Incentives and ageism

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This week the DfE announced the new bursary rates for trainees starting teacher preparation courses in the autumn of 2016. The headline grabbing rate is the £30,000 tax free bursary or scholarship available to a small number of Physics graduates with either a first class degree or a doctorate in the subject.

A bursary at this level amounts to a starting salary before tax and other deductions of around £40,000 after training, unless the teacher is expected to take a pay cut after training: a bizarre suggestion. Whether schools will be willing to pay such a salary in 2017 to these trainees is an interesting question. Fortunately, there probably won’t be very many of them and the extra £5,000 each it will cost the government compared with the rates this year. In the unlikely event that even 100 of the 800 or so Physics trainees would qualify, that number only means an extra half a million pounds of government expenditure. Such an amount can easily be found from the under-spend on the total amount due to under-recruitment against the Teacher Supply Model number of trainees required and the cash set aside if it was met.

The headline figure looks very much like a marketing ploy. The adverts can now say in large letters ‘£30,000 to train as a teacher tax free’ followed by an ‘*’ and in small letters ‘terms and conditions apply – read the small print’. This seems a legitimate marketing strategy, whatever you think of its dubious moral value by offering something not obtainable to the majority of those attracted by the advertising. No doubt the Advertising Standards Authority has a code of practice for this sort of activity.

One group that should be especially wary of such adverts to become a teacher are the career switchers. An analysis of the percentage of applicants offered places shows that older applicants are far less likely to be offered a place on a teacher preparation course than younger +-graduates.

Age Group Placed
21 under 58%
22 59%
23 57%
24 55%
25-29 50%
30-39 42%
40+ 39%
all ages 51%

On average half of all applicants were placed by mid-September, but this reduces from 59% of those aged 22 on application to just 39% of those in their forties or older. The older applicants are more likely to be holding conditional offers in September than younger applicants, perhaps because of issues with the skills tests?

I haven’t been able to look at the data by the different routes into teaching as it isn’t published by UCAS. As there are no details of ethnicity published by UCAS in the monthly statistics, it isn’t possible to see whether there are still differential rates of places being offered to different ethnic groups as has been the case at some points in the past.

In the new slimmed down civil service, I do still hope that someone somewhere is paying attention to these figures and asking questions that probe what may lie behind the numbers: are older graduates just not up to being teachers or is their knowledge, despite boosted by time in the real world, not up to modern degree standards. Surely that cannot be the case since degrees are supposed to be easier than they were a generation ago. Certainly there are more First Class degrees awarded that in the past. A fact that will cost the government more in bursary payments.

Is the lack of a London allowance affecting teacher training numbers in London?

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What is happening in London? The data released by UCAS yesterday on applications and applicants for graduate teacher training courses as at the middle of September – after most courses will have started – shows that the data for applicants with a domicile in London seem way out of line when compared with the data for applicants domiciled in other parts of England.

According to the UCAS data, only 39% of applicants domiciled in London have been placed on a course. This compares with a national average of 51%. By contrast, 16% of applicants with a London domicile were shown in the data as holding a conditional offer, compared with a national percentage of 11%. In the North East, the conditional offers were 8% of those applicants domiciled there; half the percentage in London.

Now it is perfectly possible that providers that recruited applicants domiciled in London were less good at informing UCAS that applicants had been converted from a conditional offer to a confirmed place. Indeed, I hope that is the case. The alternative and more worrying scenario is that the conditionally placed total represents candidates that weren’t going to take up the place offered to them earlier in the year and failed to meet all the conditions such as the pre-entry skills tests without informing the provider that they weren’t going to take up their place.  Were that to be the case, then there might only be around 3,500 trainees in London, outwith Teach First, on courses that started this autumn.

As that’s both primary and secondary trainees, the figure must be of concern. As schools in London have advertised a similar 3,500 vacancies for secondary school classroom teachers so far in the 2015 recruitment round  according to TeachVac (www.teachvac.co.uk), the number of secondary trainees would need to be more than half the trainee total to ensure sufficient entrants to the London labour market in 2016, if vacancies are at a similar level next year. With pupil numbers on the increase, it seems unlikely that vacancies will fall very much unless London schools’ budgets are restricted next year.

As we don’t know the spread of offers between subjects among London providers, it is impossible to tell whether certain subjects might be even more adversely affected by these figures. They certainly need further investigation. Now it may well be that the large-scale operation of Teach First across London is having an effect on the market for training places in the capital. As we know, from TV programmes, such as ‘Tough Young Teachers’, Teach First has its own approach to preparing teachers. However, unless it has the same retention rate as other programmes that presumably aim to train career teachers, any programme seen as a short-service approach to teaching as a career could affect training numbers when pupil numbers are on the increase.

Let’s assume a normal training programme places 75% of its teachers in post: say 75 out of 100. By the end of year 1, 20% leave, taking the number down to 60. If a further 15% leave at the end of year 2, that means 51 are still teaching. However, if the figures were 80% for the entry rate and 10% leaving at the end of each year, there would be 57 still remaining at the start of year 3. How does that compare with Teach First over a similar period from entry to summer school to start of year 3 of teaching?

Fortunately, as a result of a PQ in the House of Lords, we know that the 2014 cohort for Teach First was 1,387 at the start of the Summer Institute. By the end of year 1, some 1,272 gained QTS. However, the government dodged the part of the question from Lord Storey that asked how many entered teaching the following September. As not all of the 1,272 are in London, we cannot really complete the comparison except to say that if all Teach First were in London they would have needed to lose just under 600 trainees between year 1 and entering year 3 of teaching to match the hypothetical figures for other training provision.

The point of this discussion is that any route that retains fewer teachers over the first three to five years of teaching than the norm just adds to the recruitment problems. This is something that should be monitored to allow for the most cost-effective training provision that best meets the recruitment needs of schools in London, especially if there are fewer trainees entering in the first instance than there are places on offer.