Monthly Archives: March 2016

Better news on teacher supply

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Whether it is a result of improved marketing; the slowdown in the Chinese economy or the introduction of recruitment controls, offers made this year to graduate applicants for teacher training in England are above the levels seen at this point last year. Total applications – candidates may make up to three applications – are up from 85,500 to just over 88,000; an increase of around three percent. But, this is still well below the 102,000 applications recorded in March 2014.

However, the number of conditional offer for both primary and secondary courses are well up on last March, with only Computing  as a subject having had a poor month. Most of the offers are conditional, only 880 of the 10,800 secondary offer as firm offers; the remainder still require applicants to either pass the skills test; gain a degree or possibly in a few cases do both. As a result, these numbers could alter. What is of more interest is whether the increase in applications will continue or whether it just represents a bringing forward of applications from those that might in the past have been slower in applying but because of the marketing and recruitment controls have been persuaded to apply earlier in the cycle: only time will tell.

What is also interesting is that applications from those aged 23 are still down on last year at the same time, and those from the 24 age group have remained almost static, whereas there are 600 more applicants from among those in the over 40 age group, more than the total increase from the 20-24 old age group combined. This might suggest that the increased fees faced by new graduates are having some effect on turning away younger students from teaching and taking on a greater degree of debt.

While the increase in applications from those in the older age-groups is welcome, it is important to know whether these applicants are more likely to be limited in their choice of location where they will be seeking a teaching job since vacancies are not evenly spread across the country. Fortunately, the increase in applications is spread across the country with London and the South East now accounting for around 29% of applicants compared with 28% this time last year.

If this increase in applications and offer continues, more subjects will meet their Teacher Supply Number including, hopefully, mathematics. However, Physics still seems likely to fall short along with Design & Technology. Such a shortfall will have implications for classroom teacher vacancies in 2017.

Nevertheless, the government will be feeling a lot more cheerful than this time last year which marked the low point in the present cycle. Hopefully, the loss of young graduates can be overcome.

Is there a teacher recruitment crisis?

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I have been asked a lot recently whether there is a teacher recruitment crisis. The answer is, it all depends upon what you mean by a crisis. In the TeachVac evidence to the Select Committee, published on the Committee’s website before Christmas, I attempted to put some numbers to the terms ‘challenge’ and ‘crisis’. So far as I am aware, nobody has offered an alternative scenario. Certainly, nobody has suggested one to me.

Ministers, however, have relied on the November Workforce census vacancies to suggest schools are fully staffed. More recently, during her speech to the NASUWT Conference, the Secretary of State quoted from a TES study that suggested 70% of vacancies were filled within four weeks of being advertised. No bad, but it means that 30% were not filled. As a head teacher I would be worried of around one in three of my vacancies weren’t filled quickly. That figure was presumably the average, so some will have done better, but others worse. Perhaps the DfE can tell schools at what point they should worry? 50% not filled within four weeks; 75%, or should they wait until they reach the position of the Oxford head teacher speaking on the BBC web site whose school attracted no applicants for a number of vacancies advertised?

At TeachVac, the free vacancy web site for schools and teachers, www.teachvac.co.uk we are gearing up for the April vacancy rush. The job market has definitely become more complex and can be divided into a number of different segments. There are probably now three groups of trainees; those on programmes such as Teach First and the School Direct Salaried route that have posts assigned to them and don’t enter the open competition for vacancies; the trainees that sign up with recruitment agencies in the hope of reducing paperwork and securing a better salary. As this group increases, and the government is doing nothing to deter agencies from signing up trainees, or indeed other teachers, and asking schools for a finder’s fee, so the free pool of applicants diminishes. The government’s offer of the DfE’s free website won’t alleviate the drain on school resources by having to pay these fees. However, it might encourage some academy chains and diocese to become more involved in School Direct or SCITTs as part of a ‘grow your own teacher’ scheme.

The third group of trainees form the traditional ‘free pool’ of new entrants competing for the vacancies offered by schools. It is difficult to see how, if the DfE’s Teacher supply model is anywhere near accurate, any substantial under-recruitment into training will not affect the size of this pool to some extent. For that reason, Ministers generalised references to the overall position aren’t helpful. The recent National Audit Office report highlighted the lack of government knowledge of the real position in the teacher labour market nationally, let alone at a sub-national level.

Later this week TeachVac will publish its April newsletters for schools and teachers containing our analysis of the vacancy trends during the first three months of 2016. These are free to subscribers to the TeachVac site.

 

Austerity Tory style

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In 2011 I discovered that the Key stage 1 results in Oxford City were the worst in the country. I drew this fact to the attention of the press and they alerted the County Council that had oversight for schools across Oxfordshire. In turn the district council, Oxford City, became involved because the schools were all located in their area. There were also two diocese, one Church of England and one Roman Catholic with oversight of some of the schools. That was a total of four bodies concerned with putting together a plan to improve the success of education in the City of Oxford: I am pleased to report that there has been an improvement.

Now fast forward to the present time. If the same circumstances arose, how many bodies would need to be contacted? There are 9 primary academies and one free school in the city at presenti addition to the remaining community and voluntary schools. The academies and the free school are managed by 6 different trusts, including one where a notice to deal with a budget deficit was issued earlier this year. The headquarters of that trust isn’t located in Oxfordshire.

So, were there to be the same need for a concerted effort across the City of Oxford there would now be the original bodies plus six more to deal with. If the diocese manage their MAT schools with the same teams as their voluntary schools that would reduce the number to four new MATs, but one would also need to add in the Regional School Commissioner that didn’t exist in 2011 and probably the Education Funding agency as well, as the funding body, so that takes us back to six more organisations for the 10 primary schools not managed through Oxfordshire County Council.

How many more MATs would there be if all primary schools became academies. The new schools being built in the county are now manged by other MATs, mostly with no geographical links to the county, but just selected from bodies that were on the DfE list of sponsors.

I am not convinced that a MAT managing a random geographical spread of primary schools is the best answer to secure high standards. In the 1980s all Oxfordshire primary schools were grouped into partnerships for some of the very reasons Ministers cite for their conversion into academies.  Before schools gained financial independence, the local authority regularly held meetings with groups of primary heads. After budgets were devolved it was up to the head to decide whether to attend or not. I wonder how many MATs hold meetings of their head teachers, and whether they are regarded as compulsory with regard to attendance.

I saw a comment from a Minister to the effect that creating all primary schools as academies would drive up standards. If so, one wonders why the government has wasted parliamentary time on the recent Act of Parliament requiring coasting schools to convert to academy status.

A free recruitment web site may help schools save money, although as readers know one already exists in TeachVac, but I doubt it will offset the extra costs associated with operating a system where all schools are academies: not my idea of tackling austerity and raising school standards.

 

 

Education not a priority for voters?

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The Conservative Party seems to have calculated that because education in general and schools in particular didn’t feature prominently in the 2015 general election campaign parents and voters generally were content with the direction of travel. This means Tory policy-makers think voters support the move towards a school system that deprived local authorities of most of their remaining functions regarding schools and required all schools, including all primary schools, to become academies.

The forthcoming local elections in May are an opportunity for many voters to prove the government spin doctors wrong. As this blog has asserted, primary schools should remain under local support and direction as part of a national system. Schools are an important part of their local community, indeed in many rural areas they are the only manifestation of the community other than a village hall. The pub, shop, church and all other services have disappeared. Many Tory councillors recognise this point. Indeed, I suspect than some even entered active politics in support of their local school.

Announcing the policy that all schools must become academies just before Easter and both the teacher conference season and local election campaigning was either an act of supreme self-confidence on the part of the prime minister – for he must have sanctioned the Chancellor telling the world about the policy in the budget – or a staggering lack of understanding of the feelings of voters for their local school and its place in the community. Why the Tories would want to offer opposition parties a campaign against wholesale nationalisation of schools is beyond my understanding.

So far, despite their important as operators of primary schools, the churches and other faith groups seem to have bene relatively silent on the announcement about academisation. Easter Sunday sermons would be a good time for the Archbishops to convey to the faithful whether they back the government or will support those that want local authorities to retain an interest in schooling.

The honourable way out might be for Mrs Morgan to announce that in the first stage all secondary schools will become academies and that the policy will then be reviewed in the light of how MATs are working before moving on to the primary sector if the policy has proved successful. After all, we live in an age of austerity, as the government keeps telling us, and creating academies for the sake of it uses money that could be better spent protecting children’s centres, rural bus subsidies, disability benefits or a host of other more useful projects.

The Perry Beeches warning letter from the Education Funding Agency published on Maundy Thursday will just add fuel to the fire of those that worry about how MATs operate. Of course there were schools that broke financial regulations under local control, and even heads that went to prison for mis-appropriating public or parents’ funds. But, it would be interesting to know whether the trend towards financial mis-management is more likely in MATs with no geographical basis than those where they work closely with local authorities?

Who runs our schools could become the key battle of the 2016 local elections. If it does, there is no guarantee that the Tory programme for all schools to become academies will meet with universal voter approval.

 

Keep Primary Schools Local

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Now is the time for all those that believe primary schools are best kept under local democratic control to take action.

Please email or write to your MP asking them to defend the present position and to stop the government forcing all schools to become nationally controlled academies.

If you go to church this weekend, lobby your priest, vicar, minister or other faith leader, since the Churches, and to a much lesser extent other faiths, have a large interest in primary schools. Contact your local councillor and find out their views.

This is not a new campaign on my part to keep primary schools under local democratic control. Before the budget announcement I wrote on this blog about the BBC announcement foreshadowing the nationalisation of all schools that:

The interesting question is whether there is enough unity in the Conservative Party at Westminster to agree to ditch their chums in local government and fully nationalise the school system. Local government won’t enjoy being left with schools places, annual admissions and transport plus, presumably, special needs.

As I have pointed out in previous posts it is difficult to see how a fully academy structure built around MATs can save the government money to spend on the front-line. It is also an open question whether there is enough leadership capacity to staff such a system. I predicted this outcome way back in a post in February 2013https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/02/ when I wrote that:

“a National School Service is quietly emerging, with Whitehall connecting directly to schools. Localism it may be, but not democratically elected localism. A national funding formula, administered by schools where the Secretary of State determines who will be able to be a governor, and whether or not new schools are needed, and who will operate them, seems more like a NHS model than a local school system.”

So, I welcome the support of a number of Tory local cabinet members from across the country for the view that local authorities should still to decide how local education works and retain a general oversight of education, rather than transferring such powers to Westminster; especially for primary schools.

I heard Melinda Tilley, the Tory cabinet member for Education in Oxfordshire, where I have been a Lib Dem county councillor since May 2103, calling the government’s move to academisation a ‘diktat’. This contrast sharply with the silence from Labour on the issue, but then it was Labour that invented the academy programme.

Primary schools are an essential part of local communities, some face immense challenges in serving those communities, and not all may achieve their best every year for a whole host of reasons. There will always be a need for a school improvement service, and primary schools have worked in partnerships for years before governments at Westminster decided a free for all market approach was better than cooperation. The fact that the market approach failed wasn’t the fault of local authorities; nationalisation isn’t the answer.

 

Regional recruitment patterns are still largely an unknown quantity

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Easter is early this year, so, although the teacher conference season will undoubtedly discuss the issue of teacher recruitment and retention, the full implications for September 2016 won’t be known. This is because the main recruitment period for September vacancies is during April, and that is the period immediately after Easter this year.

No doubt, when the government has its free recruitment site up and running, as foreshadowed in the White Paper, they will be able to tell schools what the current position is regarding the state of play in the recruitment cycle.

Until then, schools and journalists may have to rely upon the data from TeachVac. One of the drawbacks with the current version of TeachVac is that the government has continually refused to provide data on a sub-national basis for the ITT census. As a result, TeachVac has only been able to provide a national figure for the rate of decline in the trainee pool. This lack of regional data in all but a few subjects has continued in the recently DfE’s published methodology document that accompanied the White Paper.

However, there was some ITT data at a regional level for mathematics in the methodology document. However, the data was only in the form of overall regional totals, so it hasn’t been possible to remove either Teach First numbers or School Direct Salaried trainees as TeachVac does in its other modelling processes. As a result, the data is less than helpful in respect of some regions, especially London, where the bulk of Teach First trainees are still located. Nevertheless, the rankings are interesting

MATHEMATICS  % LEFT
Yorkshire & The Humber 82
London 77
North West 75
West Midlands 72
ALL ENGLAND 69
South West 67
South East 63
East Midlands 59
North East 59
East of England 22

The 77% remaining in the pool figure in London is obviously an over-estimate, it might be closer to a percentage in the high 50% range once Teach First and School Direct Salaried trainees have been removed.

However the dramatic figure in the table is the fact that the trainee pool in the East of England might be down as low as 22%. This is even before a figure for School Direct Salaried and non-completers has been factored in to the dataset. The 22% might be an over-estimate because, in a few cases, a school uses the terms mathematics and maths in the same vacancy advert and where the school hasn’t directly entered the vacancy there is a small risk of double counting these vacancies. This just illustrates how complicated the government will find it to create their own version of TeachVac.

Since the publication of the White Paper, TeachVac has seen an increase in registrations from both schools, trainees and teachers. The more directly entered vacancies there are, the more accurate TeachVac becomes.

If you read this and know anyone that is either responsible for teacher recruitment or interested in the topic please do draw their attention to TeachVac. www.teachvac.co.uk There are helpful videos of how to register and, yes, it really is as simple as it sounds.

 

 

Try TeachVac: don’t waste money reinventing the wheel

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For me, the most interesting paragraph in the White Paper issued today by the Secretary of State at

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/508501/430653_WL_GOVT_Educational_Excellence_Everywhere_-_print_ready.PDF

is paragraph 1.36 that I have reproduced below

Recruitment: we will reform the National College for Teaching and Leadership, ensuring that in addition to delivering our leadership remit, we are better able to design and deliver well-targeted incentives, teacher recruitment campaigns and opportunities that attract sufficient, high quality new entrants to the profession, including those who are looking to return to the classroom. To reduce the costs of recruitment for schools in a more challenging labour market, we will create simple web tools that enable schools to advertise vacancies for free and a new national teacher vacancy website so that aspiring and current teachers can find posts quickly and easily

The text in bold has been highlighted by me. This is because, as many readers know, I helped establish TeachVac last year to do this very thing.

Indeed, on the 7th March, during a visit to the DfE, I handed a civil servant a letter for the Secretary of State drawing her attention to TeachVac and asking that it be passed to Mrs Morgan’s via her Private Office. I have heard nothing since, presumably because to have replied might have compromised the White Paper. However, the fact that previous letters on this subject also went unanswered suggests the DfE wants to develop its own scheme. It is worth remembering that the last time they tried, it didn’t last very long.

As Chairman of TeachVac, I am happy to discuss saving the government money by demonstrating TeachVac to the DfE, NCTL, College of Teachers or indeed any other body that is to be charged with meeting the DfE’s aim in the White Paper. There really is no need to re-invent the wheel or waste money on something that already exists.

TeachVac has been growing rapidly this year and secondary schools using the system already receive information on the state of the market; this can be expanded to cover all schools very easily.

Our latest assessment of the trainee pool depletion rates for 2016 are reproduced below.

ITT pool numbers as of 17/03/16

Group ITT Number left % left
Art 503 404 80.32
Science 2604 1158 44.49
English 1940 913 47.09
Mathematics 2197 1205 54.87
Languages 1226 826 67.41
IT 498 316 63.45
Design & Technology 518 273 52.80
Business 174 61 35.34
RE 386 217 56.35
PE 1230 1004 81.63
Music 358 224 62.71
Geography 580 309 53.36
History 847 580 68.48

Now is the time for the remaining schools to sign up to TeachVac for nothing and show the government that this isn’t something that they need to re-invent from scratch.

As I have been monitoring trends in vacancies in schools at all levels since I started counting headships in 1983, I would be delighted to see schools able to save substantial sums of money on recruitment. After all, that was the aim of TeachVac and why is was free to use from Day 1.

 

 

Education in the budget

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Never mind what the Chancellor said, pasted below is what the Treasury are really saying about education in the budget.

Here are my thoughts:

How will the 10% of schools that could gain under the National Funding Formula, but won’t receive the full amount, be identified?

Where is the funding for the extra pupils to come from? Some 700,000 extra pupils at £4,000 would generate a need for 32.8 billion extra funding by early in the next parliament. There isn’t anything about this in the budget.

This sort of basic need funding makes the extra money from the sugar tax look less than generous, even if it is a job creation scheme funded by the drinks industry for art, PE and drama teachers. I also note that while the figure for primary schools is clear; an extra £160 million per year, the figure for secondary of £285 million is only expressed as ‘up to’ – so no guarantee there.

If all 1,600 schools take up the £10 million for breakfast clubs they will receive £32.89 per day based upon a 190 day school-year. Helpful, but not a huge amount.

What happens as the industry cuts out sugar and reduces the amount the levy will raise isn’t, of course, clear.

Interestingly, there was no comment on the costs associated with the big gamble to make all schools academies. This isn’t a cost free exercise, as one of my earlier posts has shown.

The 2016 budget

Education

1.89 This Budget accelerates the government’s schools reforms and takes steps to create a gold standard education throughout England. The government will:

  • drive forward the radical devolution of power to school leaders, expecting all schools to become academies by 2020, or to have an academy order in place to convert by 2022. The academies programme is transforming education for thousands of pupils, helping to turn around struggling schools while offering our best schools the freedom to excel even further
  • accelerate the move to fairer funding for schools. The arbitrary and unfair system for allocating school funding will be replaced by the first National Funding Formula for schools from 2017-18. Subject to consultation, the government’s aim is for 90% of schools who gain additional funding to receive the full amount they are due by 2020. To enable this the government will provide around £500 million of additional core funding to schools over the course of this Spending Review, on top of the commitment to maintain per pupil funding in cash terms. The government will retain a minimum funding guarantee
  • ask Professor Sir Adrian Smith to review the case for how to improve the study of maths from 16 to 18, to ensure the future workforce is skilled and competitive, including looking at the case and feasibility for more or all students continuing to study maths to 18, in the longer-term. The review will report during 2016
  • invest £20 million a year of new funding in a Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy. This new funding will ensure rapid action is taken to tackle the unacceptable divides that have seen educational progress in some parts of the North lag behind the rest of the country. In support of this, Sir Nick Weller will lead a report into transforming education across the Northern Powerhouse

Soft drinks industry levy to pay for school sport

1.90 Childhood obesity is a national problem.

The UK currently has one of the highest overall obesity rates amongst developed countries In England 1 in 10 children are obese when they start primary school, and this rises to 2 in 10 by the time they leave.

1.91 The evidence shows that 80% of children who are obese between the ages of 10 and 14 will go on to become obese adults, and this has widespread costs to society, including through lost productivity and the direct costs of treating obesity-related illness. The estimated cost to the UK economy today from obesity is approximately £27 billion, with the NHS currently spending over £5 billion on obesity-related costs.

1.92 Sugar consumption is a major factor in childhood obesity, and sugar-sweetened soft drinks are now the single biggest source of dietary sugar for children and teenagers. A single 330ml can of cola can contain more than a child’s daily recommended intake of added sugar. Public health experts have identified sugar-sweetened soft drinks of this kind as a major factor in the prevalence of childhood obesity.

1.93 Budget 2016 announces a new soft drinks industry levy targeted at producers and importers of soft drinks that contain added sugar. The levy will be designed to encourage companies to reformulate by reducing the amount of added sugar in the drinks they sell, moving consumers towards lower sugar alternatives, and reducing portion sizes.

1.94 Under this levy, if producers change their behaviour, they will pay less tax. The levy is expected to raise £520 million in the first year. The OBR expect that this number will fall over time as the total consumption of soft drinks in scope of the levy drops, in part as a result of producers changing their behaviour and helping consumers to make healthier choices.

1.95 In England, revenue from the soft drinks industry levy over the scorecard period will be used to:

  • double the primary school PE and sport premium from £160 million per year to £320 million per year from September 2017 to help schools support healthier, more active lifestyles. This funding will enable primary schools to make further improvements to the quality and breadth of PE and sport they offer, such as by introducing new activities and after school clubs and making greater use of coaches
  • provide up to £285 million a year to give 25% of secondary schools increased opportunity to extend their school day to offer a wider range of activities for pupils, including more sport
  • provide £10 million funding a year to expand breakfast clubs in up to 1,600 schools starting from September 2017, to ensure more children have a nutritious breakfast as a healthy start to their school day

There are also some regional developments associated with the northern Powerhouse developments.

Finally, Gordon Brown meddled in education as Chancellor; one result was the 2002 staffing crisis after schools were handed cash, but the extra teachers they tried to recruit with the money hadn’t been trained. Will this Chancellor fare better with his announcements on academies and will Tory backbenchers go along with making their local primary schools all academies?

The risk to selective schools in the Chancellor’s announcement

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The Chancellor is putting in place an education system that will make it easier for a future government to end selective state secondary schools. By making all schools academies the government is ending the historic partnership between local authorities and the government at Westminster over the direction of education policy that has lasted for more than a century.

Now this may or may not be the right time to take this step – I personally think primary schools should be a local service supported nationally – but one consequence is that policy, including the rules on admissions and selection, will be firmly set out by Westminster.

Supporters of the academisation, or nationalisation, of schooling will no doubt suggest that Westminster already has the power to act over selection. However, as a weak Labour government found, after it passed the 1976 Education Act requiring all local authorities to provide schemes of non-selective education, the barrier to action presented by dilatory local authorities meant that supporters of selective schools just sat on their hands. For anyone interested in this period of education history, a read of the North Yorkshire court case over re-organisation in Ripon, would be very informative. Not for nothing was the first action of the Thatcher government to pass a short Bill through parliament to repeal the 1976 Act.

With all schools financed and managed from London, a future government with a majority at Westminster that was so minded could either direct Regional Commissioners to create selective forms of education across all areas or alternatively remove all existing selective schools. I am sure that neither option is in the Chancellor’s mind as he makes his announcement today.

His other announcement of what seems like a job creation scheme for unemployed art, PE and drama teachers is small beer in the £40 billion spent on schooling. However, £500 million a year is a sizeable amount if divided among 1,000 secondary schools, but decreases rapidly if the number of schools able to benefit increases significantly. Whether the money might have been better used to fund the overall growth in pupil numbers won’t be known until the second part of the consultation on the national funding formula takes place, when winners and losers will become clear. Indeed, the announcement already calls into question the national formula approach.

One consequence of this new fund might be that those school that have relied on PE teachers to teach Key Stage 3 science may now need to start looking for a new source of science teachers if they will now all running after school activities. But, until the details are made clear we won’t know whether it is possible for them to do both.

Will the Chancellor say anything about the National Teaching Service? One wonder what is happening on that front.

Finally, I am always suspicious when Chancellors start announcing plans for spending departments. History tells us it is often because they want to draw attention away from the Treasury side of the budget. This year, it may be the effects of the slowdown since the enthusiastic Autumn Statement. Still, the slowdown in the wider economy may help recruitment into teaching so it’s an ill wind …

Farewell to local authorities

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The BBC is now reporting that the government wants every school to become an academy. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35814215  This has been an open secret for some time. The only real surprise is that they didn’t amend the recent legislation on its passage through parliament to remove the word ‘coasting’ and replace it will ‘all schools not currently an academy’.

The interesting question is whether there is enough unity in the Conservative Party at Westminster to agree to ditch their chums in local government and fully nationalise the school system. Local government won’t enjoy being left with schools places, annual admissions and transport plus, presumably, special needs.

As I have pointed out in previous posts it is difficult to see how a fully academy structure built around MATs can save the government money to spend on the front-line. It is also an open question whether there is enough leadership capacity to staff such a system. I predicted this outcome way back in a post in February 2013 https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/02/ when I wrote that:

“a National School Service is quietly emerging, with Whitehall connecting directly to schools. Localism it may be, but not democratically elected localism. A national funding formula, administered by schools where the Secretary of State determines who will be able to be a governor, and whether or not new schools are needed, and who will operate them, seems more like a NHS model than a local school system.”

Now it seems it is to finally emerge. Will the Chancellor say something in the budget tomorrow or will the announcement be left to the Secretary of State for Education?

I am old enough to mourn the passing of the local government involvement in education policy. After all, my second ever academic article was about local authority variations in funding on education.

Politically, the issue is should education remain a local service accountable to locally elected councillors or, like health, a national service run from Whitehall – or more likely Coventry – with the aim of creating uniform outcomes across the country? You decide. I certainly think primary schools and pre-schools are a local function as most children go to a school close to where they live and if councils must still provide the places then they should also manage the way schools operate.

With a national school system can come saving on issues like recruitment. May be the National Teaching Service will arise to become more than a press release and blossom into reality.

However, after the Sunday trading defeat and with, post June, disgruntled Tory MPs of one or other view on Europe it will be interesting to see whether the government can command a majority in parliament for the nationalisation move.

What it will mean is that the old phrases of a ‘partnership’ or a ‘national service locally administered’ will finally be confined to the history books or websites and future commentators will have to see whether the Education Secretary has learnt anything from the actions of successive politicians that have run the Health Service.