An extract from the Secretary of State’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference

‘Every child deserves a great teacher. And every teacher deserves great training.

” I will bring forward a schools white paper in the new year outlining plans to tackle innumeracy and illiteracy “

So as the foundation of the next decade of reform during this parliament we will deliver 500,000 teacher training opportunities. We are carrying out a fundamental overhaul that will make this country the best in the world to train and learn as a teacher.’

50,000 training places a year will be hard to achieve under any regime, especially if some universities decide to pull out of ITT or ITE because of the government changes to the curriculum for preparing teahcers

.Interestingly, the Gatsby Foundation has published a pamphlet of essays on the topic of reforming teacher education in response to the government’s market review. itt-reform-expert-perspectives-2021.pdf (gatsby.org.uk) I was especially taken by the essay by Ben Rogers of the Paradigm Trust about the distribution of ITT places, something that featured in the previous post on this blog

With a government now seemingly committed to a high wage; high skill level economy, education will be an important player in driving forward the success of that policy. Now, of course, the government having seen the outcome of the tutoring programme, might want to turn over the skills agenda to the private sector and leave schools with the basic curriculum centred around literacy and numeracy to teach. May be that will be the focus of the White Paper that seems to hark back to the Blair government’s education play book.

However, there are other problems facing the Secretary of State. This blog has recently reminded readers that the lorry driver shortage is as nothing compared to the shortage of design and technology teachers, not to mention business studies and physics teachers.

It is no use telling the private sector to ‘get its house in order’ when the public sector, where the Conservative Party has been in control of government for the past decade, has failed to deal with teacher shortages. The DfE site for teaching now explicitly shows whether a course provider will handle visa applications.

Ahead of the Spending Review, a Review that is unlikely to be kind to education, the Secretary of State would have been hard put to announce costly new policies, especially since he has little control over how schools actually spend their cash. There are saving to be made still in the school sector. These range from cutting recruitment costs that might save £40 million or so to a major rethink about the diseconomies of scale of the academy programme.

Now the Conservative Party has created a Labour style NHS model of central control for the school system, shorn of local democracy, it is surely time to look seriously at what the system now costs to administer. Local Authorities may have had their faults, but a high cost structure wasn’t generally one of them. Time for a savings task force?