Monthly Archives: August 2017

Buy British education

Posted on by
1

At the end of July the DfE published a research report into ‘the UK revenue from education related exports and transnational education activity 2010-2014’ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-related-exports-and-transnational-education-activity The higher education sector is by far and away the largest contributor to revenue in this sector, increasing from 60% to 66% of the total income during this period.

Non-EU student income across the higher education sector increased by around 30% in current prices from £6.56 billion to £8.55 billion between 2010 and 2014. Income from research and other contracts rose by around 56% in current prices from £0.77 billion to £1.19 billion over the same period. Interestingly, income from both the further education sector and from English Language training fell during this period. The latter, it is said, because courses were shorter in length, thus providing lower fee income. The FE sector now accounts for just two per cent of overseas income. Some of the reduction may have as a result of the crackdown on private colleges and potential visa applications from those that after entry didn’t actually become students.

Independent schools witnessed a 28% growth in income from their UK based operations. They will also have benefitted from the return to the UK of any profits from their overseas campuses established in recent years. The transnational income for the schools sector increased by some 47%, based upon an estimate of the trend data. The local spending associated with this type of activity is excluded from the figures when calculating the transnational revenue figure.

Education publishing, the most mature of the product sectors selling education overseas, saw only an eight per cent growth during the period 2010 to 2014, whereas education related equipment sales increased in revenue terms by 20%, based on the estimate of trend data and education-related broadcasting by nearly a third at 31%. Publishing may find it hard to grown in the future, especially if students continue to switch from paper to on-line sources for information and learning materials. Books generally carry a much high profit margin than resources in new technologies in the same way that print advertising is more profitable than on-line for many publishers.

After BREXIT, the value of EU sales will be added to those generated in the rest of the world. This should pride a one-off change even if registrations from EU students and sales to schools and students in EU countries actually fall post 2019.

Education exporting is an area where both the Business Department and the DfE need to work closely together to encourage exports of educational goods and services and to support both education trade bodies and individual exporters. Fortunately, there is plenty of demand, as is shown on the government’s exporting web site.  However, the range of countries is quite narrow and excludes large sections of the world, especially in the Americas.

There are new potential sources of income such as those from on-line courses increasingly provided by both universities and private sector trainers. This could provide some companies with a lucrative new form of income that allows them to export without ever leaving the comfort of their home base.

 

 

Why are some pupils missing out on a free lunch?

Posted on by
Reply

Why are families in the South East, along with some others from across the country, ignoring the chance to increase their spending power by not taking up the free infant lunch programme on offer in schools? Many of the authorities with the lowest take up in the latest DfE statistics of census day are located in the South East. They include unitary authorities, such as Brighton & Hove, Slough, Reading, Medway and Milton Keynes and counties such as East Sussex and Oxfordshire. All these authorities had a take-up of less than 81% of pupils eating lunch on census day.

At the other end of the scale, Inner London averaged a nearly 91% take-up and Solihull managed to achieve just over 96% take-up. Now, I guess there may be some parents that regard the food on offer as not acceptable for culinary, cultural or dietary reasons, but it is difficult to see why so many parents in some authorities not only forgo an extra £400 or spending money, but presumably also shell out hard cash on creating meals for their children to eat instead. If they don’t think that the food on offer is good enough then they should be lobbying the governing body or MAT trustees for an improvement.

Now, I am sure some of the difference could be a result of how important the local authority still sees its role in education and thus in encouraging schools to provide meals that are attractive and nutritional. This may be less of a concern in areas with lots of academies and free schools.

It could also be that some of these families have children in schools where more emphasis is placed on the breakfast club than on lunch to ensure a healthy start to the day. Of course, locally high incidences of sickness in specific schools may also have played a part in an authority’s position in the rankings. However, it does seem that the further north you travel in England, the higher the take-up was, with London, and specifically the inner London boroughs, being the main exception to this rule of thumb analysis.

The should be sufficient data now available to identify whether pupils in schools with low take-up fare any differently at the end of Key State 1 than pupils in schools where take-up is much higher once  researchers have standardised for all other possible variables; a tough ask.

I guess, with the present funding problems facing schools, there won’t be any real pressure from government for a scheme to extend the free lunch arrangements to Key Stage 2 pupils and, no doubt, some politicians may see the whole exercise as an ineffective use of money, forgetting the benefits to both parents and children achieved by the was the scheme is resourced. The initiative to roll out the scheme for Key Stage 1 pupils was a Coalition government action with some parts of the Labour strongly supporting and other being either lukewarm or downright hostile to the idea.

 

Celebrating Diversity

Posted on by
2

Twenty years ago this autumn, the then Teacher Training Agency (TTA) launched an advertising campaign to attract new recruits to train as a teacher. There were two adverts. The talking heads one with the strap line, ‘no one forgets a good teacher’ remains memorable, but the other, although more innovative as an advertisement, doesn’t register in the collective memory to the same degree. In a sign of how far society has changed since 1997, when published, neither advert contained either a web site or email contact address; unthinkable these days.

At the same time the TTA was launching its advertising campaign it was also starting its first drive to recruit minority groups into teaching, starting with a focus on ethnic minority groups. There were a series of conferences to launch the policy, including one in East London addressed by the new Minister, Estelle Morris, newly launched on her career in government.

A decade later I conducted a detailed study for the then TDA into progress in recruitment of minorities into teaching and some years later I replicated the work just on the progress of recruiting ethnic minority candidates both into training and into teaching. As a result, it is interesting to see the data in the recently published ITT provider profiles about the change in percentages of minority groups recruited into training. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-performance-profiles-2015-to-2016

n many respects, 2015/16 as a good year for minority groups seeking to enter teaching. The percentage of male recruits broke through the 30% barrier for the first time since 2010/11; the percentage of students with a declared disability increased to its highest in the past decade, to reach nine per cent of postgraduate students; similarly, students from a minority ethnic background reached a new high for the decade of 14% of postgraduate entrants. There was even an increase among older trainees over the age of 25, although, at 54%, is still well below the record 62% of trainees over 25 that was reached 2010/11.

How far these percentages reflect either a genuine change in policy or just the outcome of falling overall application levels isn’t clear from the data. An analysis of the provider data for trainees from an ethnic minority background, where numbers are large enough to be reported, shows that London providers dominate the scene, with half the top twenty providers with the best ratio of ethnic minority trainees to overall numbers of postgraduates recruited being located in London. Of the other ten providers, five are located in the West Midlands; two in Yorkshire and The Humber and one in each of the South East, East Midlands and East of England. There were no providers north of the West Midlands or in the South West in the top 20 providers for graduate trainees where data is reported. Indeed, six of the next ten are also in London and the first identified provider in the South West is only in the 39th highest position.

In this context, the reduction in offers to new applicants for 2017 by London providers, reported in previous blogs, will be watched with interest to see what effect it has on recruitment profiles. However, it won’t be until the summer of 2019 that we will know the outcomes.