Monthly Archives: December 2019

What headteachers told PISA about schools in England

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The holiday season has provided me with time to read the full PISA Report for England https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pisa-2018-national-report-for-england as well as look at the comparisons with the other Home Nations, while they remain a part of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Anyway, buried in the details is a section that looks at the results of questionnaires sent to headteachers. Now one must assume that headteachers are influenced by the current mood at the time that they completed the questionnaire, and that mood may differ from country to country. What might have been the mood in England and how does it compare with the OECD average?

Generally, it seems that headeachers in England were more optimistic than the average headteacher in the OECD in their answers to a range of questions about factors that might hinder student learning.

Table 6.5 Pupil and teacher behaviour for learning, reported by headteachers
Percentage of headteachers who responded “A lot” and “To some extent” to In your school, to what extent is the learning of students hindered by the following?
  England OECD Percentage point difference England-OECD
Pupil behaviours
Students not paying attention 40 59 -19
Student truancy 20 38 -18
Students lacking respect for teachers 11 22 -10
Students skipping classes 9 34 -25
Students intimidating or bullying other students 4 12 -8
Student use of alcohol or illegal drugs 3 10 -7
Teacher behaviours
Teachers not meeting individual students’ needs 28 30 -2
Teacher absenteeism 20 18 2
Staff resisting change 10 29 -19
Teachers not being well prepared for classes 5 13 -8
Teachers being too strict with students 3 12 -10

Source: PISA Report England 2019

Only in teacher absenteeism were headteachers in England gloomier than the OECD average. This seems somewhat surprising given the relatively low level of term-time teacher absence in many schools. Generally, although  lack of attention by students was recognised as an issue, even that concerned head teachers less than the average PECD headteacher.

Table 7.14 Hindrances to learning reported by headteachers and principals
Percentage of headteachers who responded “A lot” and “To some extent” to In your school, to what extent is the learning of students hindered by the following?
  England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales
Pupil behaviours
Students not paying attention 40 35 49 30
Student truancy 20 8 35 20
Students lacking respect for teachers 11 19 22 19
Students skipping classes 9 7 31 14
Students intimidating or bullying other students 4 8 13 6
Student use of alcohol or illegal drugs 3 3 5 7
Teacher behaviours
Teachers not meeting individual students’ needs 28 14 29 15
Teacher absenteeism 20 19 30 14
Staff resisting change 10 14 23 12
Teachers not being well prepared for classes 5 3 3 9
Teachers being too strict with students 3 0 6 7

Source: PISA Report England 2019

However, it is interesting to put the views of headteachers in England alongside those of their colleagues in the other Home Nations that completed the PISA questionnaire. On the basis of these responses, one wonder what is going on in some schools in Scotland? The figure for students skipping classes seems difficult to believe if the sample is representative of schools across Scotland and probably also accounts for the high figure for headteachers agreeing that truancy is also seen as an issue by a third of the headteachers compared with a fifth of headteachers in England.

I am not sure what the teacher associations make of the data from these questionnaires, but I am surprised that the government hasn’t made more of it. But, perhaps the views of headteachers looking at schools from their offices isn’t the same as the view from the staffroom?

 

No room in the school

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Last week the Children’s Commissioner for England published a disturbing report about children placed into care and moved away form their local area. Entitled Pass the parcel: children posted around the care system is resonated with concerns raised by this blog in the past about the education of these children. https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cco-pass-the-parcel-children-posted-around-the-care-system.pdf

The report highlighted the fact that 30,000 children are placed in care setting ‘out of their area’. Of these, some 11,000 are more than 20 miles from what they term ‘home’, with 2,000 placed more than 100 miles away. There may be good reasons for such a move. These include safeguarding issues such as avoiding former gangs or groups that were sexually exploiting the child.

However, the Children’s Commissioner Report suggests that often this type of move is because there is nowhere locally for these children to live. Pressure on Children’s Social services was always going to intensify as the number of children taken into care increased.   With local government having experienced a period of significant funding cutbacks from government it is not a surprise that services where need is expanding, such as this, are facing particular challenges, especially as the concept of  a ‘just in time’ economy meant resources could not be funded to be on stand-by if needed..

This blog has highlighted the issue of schooling for these children placed ‘out of area’ in several previous posts. Indeed, all Oxfordshire MPs in 2017 wrote to the Minister about the matter. As a result, it is disturbing that the Children’s Commissioner’s Report highlight this issue as still a matter for concern.

We spoke to children during September and October and many of them had no school place for the beginning of the school year. This was a common occurrence for older children, a number of whom were stuck waiting for decisions from professionals. This waiting game could last weeks or months, despite statutory duties to prioritise education, and in the case of emergency placements to secure suitable education within 20 school days.14 Virtual School professionals responsible for managing education plans for looked after children informed us that when children are placed outside of their local area it can contribute to delays because different areas have different application procedures to be understood and navigated. We were advised that children with Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans15 usually suffer further setbacks because their applications must go via Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) teams and because schools take time to assess whether they can meet children’s needs. Page 15 of the Report – my emphasis.

In all, the Report concludes that ‘5% (140 children) of this out of area group missed a term of school or more, compared to 2% of those staying in their home local authority.’ The Report doesn’t identify the reasons why finding a school place should be so time-consuming for these young people whose lives have already been disrupted. Is the issue especially bad in areas where there are clusters of Children’s homes taking in children placed into care?

The Report concludes with the recommendation that:

‘The DfE ensure that its review of the role of virtual school heads looks at education processes in response to out of area placements. This review, which is already in progress, should consider: how virtual school heads can have a greater role in placement decisions; giving local authorities powers to direct academy schools to admit children placed away from their home areas; how delays in school transfers can be minimised for these children, especially unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) and children with Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans, including how admissions processes can be simplified; how children can be kept in mainstream schools as far as possible.’   Page 17 of the Report

I would add and also look at what happens when children used to a comprehensive style of schooling are placed in secondary modern schools. These young people deserve better from Society.

If nurses, why not teachers?

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When the late Frank Dobson managed to secure bursaries for trainee nurses, David Blunkett failed to do the same for trainee teachers. However, postgraduate trainees did have their fees paid, and undergraduate trainees were no worse off than any other undergraduates under the tuition fee regime introduced by the Labour government.

Come the recruitment crisis of the Millennium, and the training grant appeared, backed by additional payments of Golden Hellos to some trainees. These moves, alongside an expansion of the employment-based routes through the Graduate Teacher Training Programme helped expand trainee numbers for a few years. Whether there would have been a new recruitment crisis had the financial firestorm of 2008 not emerged is an interesting issue for debate.

However, as first predicted by the blog in the early part of 2013, a new crisis of recruitment into teaching did finally emerge, even though some Ministers were reluctant to admit its existence at first. At the same time, the revolution in education in England, started under Labour and prosecuted and extended by Michael Gove when he was Secretary of State for Education, saw not only the development of the academy and free school progamme, but also a determined switch away from higher education institutions the main trainer of teachers towards a school-led model.

Indeed, at one point it seemed as if the Coalition government might create a situation where universities, and especially the Russell Group universities involved in teacher education, ceased to have direct responsibility for the preparation of future generations of teachers. The issue of recruitment controls and the fate of the history preparation programme at the University of Cambridge probably marked a watershed moment.

Anyway, Mr Gove moved on, to be succeeded by a succession of relatively short-term holders of the officer of Secretary of State for Education. None seemed to have an abiding passion for the future shape of the school system and its teachers.

So, what has happened to the different routes for preparing graduates to become secondary school teachers?

Secondary PG 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 2016/17 2017/18 2018/19 2019/2020
HE 7318 7193 7105 7965 7913
SCITT 1270 1794 1970 2435 2452
SD Fee 2646 3181 3822 4307 3870 4170 4678
SD Salaried 1244 1197 1475 1409 1080 905 677
Teach First 1107 953 895 760 1215
Grad Apprentice 0 0 0 20 43

The move towards a school-led system has continued, but not at any great pace. Indeed, numbers on the School Direct Salaried route, the de facto successor the GTTP programme has fallen away by this year to only around half of the peak level reached in 2015/16. The new Graduate Apprenticeship Route has yet to make any real impact on numbers, and even SCITTs have failed to recruit many more recruits after their growth spurt up to 2018/19. Only the School Direct fee route seems to be in good health, although even on this route the growth has not been spectacular. Indeed, higher education is still the one dominant route.

Does this plethora of routes make it more difficult to attract new entrants to teaching or perhaps offer choices? I debated this in my evidence to the Carter Review, posted elsewhere on this blog. However, it seems more likely that singling out graduate trainee teachers for financial punishment makes teaching seem the least desirable public sector employment opportunity.

This blog has been resolute in calling for the return of a training grant for all graduate trainee teachers: I see no reason for changing that view now, especially since nurses are once again receiving financial help from the government.

 

Update on rural schools

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In December 2017, I wrote a post on this blog about the DfE’s list of rural primary schools. At that point there were four such schools within the Greater London boroughs that were designated by the DfE as ‘rural’.  In the 2019 list, published today there are now five such schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rural-primary-schools-designation

The two each in Hillingdon and Enfield have been joined at some point in time by Downe Primary School in Bromley, classified as being in an area of ‘Rural hamlet and isolated dwellings’. For those living in truly rural areas, the notion that somewhere within Greater London can be categorised as ‘rural’ might seem a bit of a joke. But, I am sure that for the residents using these schools that are located in what is presumably ‘green belt’ locations, the designation as ‘rural’ seems accurate. However, it is still within the TfL transport area, so pupils attending the schools from within the Greater London area can have free travel on the 146 bus, or presumably the R8 as well.

Across England, this year, the DfE has classified 3,353 primary schools as being in ‘rural’ .locations. The designation is important, as with school rolls in the primary sector now falling, and the absurdities of the National Funding Formula view of equality not yet fully understood, the added protection from closure being a ‘rural’ school provides may still be useful in the future.

However, it won’t stop closures happening. Culham Parochial Church of England School in Oxfordshire is shown in the table as, ‘open, and proposed to close’ and the County Council has now agreed that the school should close as it is no longer a viable education establishment in its own right. This follows a series of battles over its future, stretching back into at least the late 1980s. This fate also hangs over another 26 primary schools in the list, including five schools in Nottinghamshire and three in Staffordshire.

Fifteen of the 26 schools proposed for closure are designated as Church of England schools. This reveals something of the heritage of schooling in England as we approach the 150th anniversary of State Funded Schools next year. It would be interesting to know the date when these schools, now up for closure, were first opened. There is fertile ground here for those interested in the history of education in England. I gather that this subject is being considered as a topic for an optional module in a Masters’ level degree currently being put together by the University of Buckingham.  Such units or modules already exist in some other programmes.

There are many interesting stories contained within this list of schools. Picking just two at random. The Bliss Charity School in Northamptonshire was first opened several centuries ago, and the Charity still owns the former school house built for a head teacher in the Nineteenth Century. The rent from the house is used to fund extras at the school. Holy island Church of England First School in Northumberland is federated with a school on the mainland and is shown in some DfE tables as currently having just one pupil. The school web site says that ‘Holy Island and Lowick C of E First Schools are a federation – the children study together at Lowick with the children who live on the island coming to Lowick when the tide allows.’

There are many more interesting stories within the rich tapestry of our school system. Will these be lost because of a rigid financial system that takes little or no account of communities and their needs? I hope not.

 

 

Who is in control of education spending?

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On Election Day, the DfE published the annual dataset for expenditure by local authorities on children services, including maintained schools. The figures, as they relate to schools, are generally meaningless on a year by year comparison basis as the DfE doesn’t remove the new academies from the previous years’ data when they were still maintained schools.

For children’s social services and youth Justice, the data does have meaning over several years because local authorities still administer these services. However, there are few indicators to link expenditure to demand. In areas such as ‘children taken into care’, where numbers of children have been increasing in some areas this fact isn’t clear from the presentation of the data.

Research by the Reform think tank using this data shows that 28% of local authority maintained secondary schools in England were in the red at the end of 2018-19, with an average deficit of £570,000.

Reform found that since 2010-11, the proportion of local authority-funded secondary schools with no cash reserves has almost doubled. However, this is not surprising since to become an academy a school must normally not have a deficit.

The proportion of primary schools in deficit is smaller at 8%, having increased by 2.1 percentage points over the same period. The study also found “drastic” variations between schools, with 36% of maintained secondary schools having an “excessive surplus” of cash in the bank – on average more than £390,000.

Generally, in 2018-19 the gap between the average surplus and the average deficit has doubled over the period since 2010-11. At the end of 2018-19 there was more than 30 secondary schools with deficits in excess of £1 million. Only six of these schools were in London, with the Boroughs of Croydon and Enfield each containing two such schools. There were no schools in either the East of England or the East Midlands with deficits in excess of £1 million. The West Midlands, on the other hand, had six such schools.

The largest deficit, of more than £3 was linked to a school in West London that has run deficits in excess of £400,000 in each of the last four years, according to the DfE financial monitoring site for schools https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/school/detail?urn=102449&tab=Balance&unit=AbsoluteMoney&format=Charts#financialSummary Its revenue reserve per pupil were running at a staggering minus £4,614 per pupil at the end of 2018-19. Interestingly, an Ofsted monitoring visit report from October this year doesn’t mention the financial situation at all, so presumably there isn’t seen to be an issue with a deficit of this magnitude? The last full inspection report from October 2018 also fails to mention the financial situation, and any effect it might have on the school’s ability to perform its core function of teaching and learning.

The data on maintained school finances does seem to suggest that there might be a lack of accountability for financial stability and the methods of managing deficits. There seems little point in a National Funding Formula if some schools can drive a coach and horses through the outcomes and rack up large deficits.

What is probably revealed is that some schools need more funding to achieve their aims, and with devolved budgets and governance it isn’t clear who has to take overall responsibility in the present climate.

A Minister for Education Trade?

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Following on from the general election last Thursday, the period of Purdah has come to an end and the routine of government has re-started. This includes the publication of a whole swath of education statistics.

One set of statistics published during Purdah was the annual update on the United Kingdom’s annual revenue from education related exports and transnational education activity. Post Breixt, this part of the service sector is going to continue to be an important part of our economy. The data published related to the calendar year 2017, so almost two years ago. The statistics can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-revenue-from-education-related-exports-and-tne-activity-2017

As in the past, the higher education sector dominates the data, accounting for two thirds of the revenue. Changes at the overall percentage level tend to be slow, but it is clear that the further education sector now contributes little by way of expert revenue, recorded in these statistics as accounting for just one per cent of revenue. In, 2010, it accounted for six per cent. After the issue of bogus college that harmed this sector, there does seem to be room to explore whether there might new avenues of export generated revenue around the area of teaching and learning in the skills sector that could be led by the further education sector.

English Language training has been the other sector in decline in terms of export revenue; down from 14% of revenue in 2010 to 7% in 2017. In cash terms this is a decline from £2,230 to £1,570 (both to the nearest £10 million). However, there has been continued limited growth in this sector from transnational revenue earned overseas.

The independent school sector in the United Kingdom has increased its revenue, as has these schools contribution to transnational education. This is presumably due to the number of overseas campuses now in operation by schools. However, this sector only contributes some five per cent to total revenue.  Even so, this is five per cent that might have disappeared has the outcome of the general election been different.

Amongst education products and services, growth between 2016 and 2107 was steady, with equipment sales showing the strongest growth year on year, and a 20% growth over two years.

In terms of higher education, the bulk of fee income originates from students arriving from outside the EU, so this should not be at risk after the United Kingdom exists the EU in 2020. Whether EU income changes as a result of our exiting the EU won’t be obvious in this dataset until probably 2022 or even 2025 when existing EU students have completed their courses. However, any changes in research funding will most likely become apparent much sooner. In these figures, research income is not differentiated between EU and non-EU sources, so it is not possible to calculate the likely outcomes from the UK’s departure from the EU.

Education is an important and growing part of the United Kingdom’s expert drive, and I am sure that the new government will recognise this fact and want to ensure that as much as possible of the growth is directed to areas away from London towards parts of the United Kingdom that can benefit from this economic activity in their localities. Perhaps there should now be a Minister for Education Trade in the new government?

Free Education does not mean Equality of Education

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The Town Mayor of Thame has as her charity this year, Lord Williams’s School Young Carers. I though of this when I read apiece on the BBC about parents making donations to schools. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50732685 The BBC found that in 2017-18 the average school in London raised some £43,000 from donations. In Yorkshire, it was just £13,000. Although incomes may differ between the two regions, the price of goods the schools purchase probalby doesn’t to anything like the same extent.

This disparity between areas even short distances apart has troubled me ever since I started teaching in Tottenham in the 1970s. Schools in the Highgate and Muswell Hill areas of Haringey regularly used to raise substantial sums even the, both from parents and school activities, whereas those in South Tottenham would be lucky to bring in a fraction of the same amount. Not only did parents not earn the same, but they also didn’t have access to figures in the media and entertainment worlds that could open the summer fete and attract large crowds by doing so.

When I came to Oxford in 1979, I found a similar pattern between parts of the South and East of the City and the North West wards. Such a difference still exists.

One difference from now was that when all schools were under local authority control, local politicians could arrange the funding in ways that might support less well-off schools. An objection to the National Funding Formula is that in its purest form it doesn’t really allow for such differences between schools to be overcome.

Where schools can access support from charities, the addition of Gift Aid tax recovery can make the difference even greater. Now, I think the Mayor of Thame’s Charity is excellent, in that it is clear where within the school the money raised will be used.

Another school I know used its fundraising to benefit the community as a whole by creating an all-weather pitch that could be used outside of school hours.

Despite pressure on school budgets over the past few years, education unlike the NHS, hasn’t really featured in the general election. Possibly because every main Party is promising more for schools; something for post-16s, but whatever happened to higher education?

So, should the National Funding Formula take into account the amounts raised by schools? Such a move might help, but it wouldn’t stop parents supporting their own children: something that troubles the Labour Party in this election, if their plans to abolish private schools are to be believed.

As I have already noted on this blog, in Essex, the Tories take the opposite view, by refusing free transport to selective schools and thus making it a challenge for the less well-off to take up places at such schools where if they live some distance away from the school.

Perhaps we can start a charity to fund the bus fares of children attending selective schools that cannot afford the fare. But, why should they have to rely upon the charity of others, rather than the acknowledgement of the State that if you have a selective system, then every child should be able to attend a school as which they have secured a place.

10 Adverts per school in 2019

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The average secondary school has placed 10 adverts for teachers during 2019. The figure is higher for most schools in London and the Home Counties and lower for many schools in the north of England.

The data are from TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the leading job boards for teachers looking for posts anywhere in England.

Of course, the average is a crude measure, as it isn’t related to the size of the school in terms of its pupil population. There are schools with more than 2,000 pupils and also at the opposite end of the scale there are those with only a few hundred pupils.

Once the year is over, TeachVac will link the number of vacancies to the pupil roll of the school, as supplied by the DfE in its data, and compare the outcome with indicators such as the percentage of pupils with Free School Meals. As TeachVac has data for several years, it will be possible to start to identify trends and whether there are certain types of school where staff turnover is more common.

Of course, now that the number of pupils entering secondary schools is on the increase, and there are also new schools being established, the picture is not as clear cut as if it were a steady state in relation to the size of the secondary school population.

The data also reveals how the demand for teachers corresponds to the supply, at least for new entrants. Data on returners seeing work is still patchy, and a national register might be a useful tool for the new government to consider.

After all, what is the point of training teachers if there are also returners willing to work as teachers? As I have said before on this blog, enticing mature entrants into teaching and then not offering them work is a wasteful misuse of human resources. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the Humanities.

There are far more history and geography trainees than required by schools. History trainees, unless lucky to be on Teach First or School Direct Salaried Scheme, have to pay fees and find the cost of looking after themselves during their training, all this expenditure with no guarantee of a job.

This year, 2019-2020, according to DfE figures, some 178 history trainees are being supported by public funds (65 on School Direct Salaried Scheme and 113 on Teach First). By comparison, some 1400+ trainees are using student loans and other funds to train as a teacher.

With such over-recruitment into training, it isn’t clear why the government allowed spending on 178 history trainees at a cost of perhaps £400,000 of public money? That’s unnecessary public expenditure. Add in those 130 geography and PE trainees also on salary schemes, subjects where supply of trainees also exceeds demand for teachers, and the cost to the public purse is well over half a million pounds.

The current hybrid system of training teachers looks overdue for a re-think. Whether it will get one from the next government is probably unlikely while planning for Brexit continues to dominate the agenda.

 

Does Nationalisation always work?

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Discussions about State ownership has been a feature of this general election campaign. As a Liberal Democrat (Candidate in Castle Point in Essex including the Canvey Island) I prefer J S Mill’s approach as espoused in his treatise ‘On Liberty’. Writing about the role of the state and education, Mill concluded that generally, it is not the role of the State to educate its citizens, but to see that they are educated. Not a view of liberty that is accepted by Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.

However, even Tory governments are not afraid of a spot of nationalisation when it suits them. And here I must declare another interest, for the remainder of this blog is about teacher recruitment, and I am both the chair and the largest shareholder in TeachVac, the free on-line job board for teachers and schools.

Over the past year, the DfE has been developing its national vacancy site for those in schools; teachers and non-teachers alike. The genesis was a NAO Report followed closely by a Select Committee report and a Public Accounts Committee session that all highlighted how little the DfE know of the labour market for teachers in real-time. At the same time head teachers were complaining about the cost of advertising vacancies, one reason for the creation of TeachVac and its free service to schools and teachers.

The DfE could have created a portal to existing sites for teacher vacancies that would have cost little by way of public money. Instead, Ministers sanctioned a full frontal attack on the private sector with a government funded site where state-funded schools could place vacancies for free, with only the cost of training their staff to use the site being borne by the school. Fine, if it works and is value for money.

So how is the DfE doing with this use of public money? Taking a day in late November as a snapshot, it would seem not very well.

An analysis across the core platforms revealed the following numbers of vacancies for teaching posts being listed.

TeachVac 2,053
TES 1,808
Eteach 845
Guardian 593
DfE 580

Of course, the DfE is hampered by not accepting vacancies from private schools, and that will always limit the attraction of the DfE site to teachers looking for vacancies in any type of school.

Apart from TeachVac, all other sites mix non-teaching vacancies up with teaching posts to some extent or other on their sites. This makes the numbers even more difficult to calculate. TeachVac only records teacher vacancies.

Then there is the question of how long vacancies are allowed to remain on a site. Best practice is to remove them the day after the closing date specified by the school in the advert. Some adverts don’t have a closing date these days, and TeachVac will generally ignore these as there is a question about whether there is a real current vacancy at the school or these are just attempts, quite legitimate, at talent banking for the future.

So, on this evidence the DfE is not using public money wisely. Might it, perhaps, be cheaper for the new government to buy a feed from either the TES or TeachVac than to continue to operate its own site.