Monthly Archives: March 2023

Has DfE ignored the Coronation?

Posted on by
Reply

Less than two months before the date of the Coronation of King Charles, and close to the end of this term, I have finally found some suggestions for schools about activities around the Coronation. Unlike Twentieth century coronations, when schoolchildren were often provided with mementoes of the day, nothing like that is planned for 2023. No mug, spoons, New Testaments or other books, as in 1953, just a few suggested activities and a photographic competition.

The suggestions was only brough to my attention after I asked a question at Oxfordshire’s County council meeting yesterday about what arrangements had been made by the DfE. At 1030 yesterday morning the Cabinet Member could not tell me of any arrangements and only sent me the details later in the afternoon after some work by the director of Children’s Services’ staff.

Royalist or Republican, the coronation is an era changing day in people’s lives, and I think the schoolchildren of England deserve better than this from their government.

All Schools

Celebrating the Coronation of King Charles III and the Queen Consort

You can check out the Coronation map to find Coronation events happening in your local area, or if your school is hosting a public event, you can add it yourself.

If you have any questions about the Coronation website, please contact: coronation@dcms.gov.uk

Get involved

Downloadable materials in the Coronation toolkit

Also on the Coronation website you’ll find the Coronation toolkit – a range of downloadable materials to help with your Coronation celebrations, including homemade bunting templates, recipe inspiration and fun activities such as word searches and colouring pages.

Children’s artwork, baking creations, bunting designs and lots of other Coronation celebrations will also be showcased in a photo gallery on the Coronation website. To share your photos, tag DCMS on social media (Twitter, Facebook or Instagram) or submit your photos via email to coronation@dcms.gov.uk with the subject line ‘Coronation Creative Challenge’.

Look out for a Coronation explainer video for primary schools

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is commissioning a short film aimed at primary school children explaining the history and significance of the Coronation. The video will be made freely available to schools for use in assemblies and lessons, and will be shared ahead of the Coronation.

Coronation Generation – poster design challenge

Award-winning educational charity, Ideas Foundation, are inviting schools and colleges across the UK to take part in a poster design challenge to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III.

Submitted designs should reflect four key themes – community, diversity, sustainability and youth. Over the Coronation weekend, selected posters will be displayed across hundreds of digital poster sites, donated by Clear Channel UK, with the potential to be viewed by thousands of people each day.

Free downloadable resources for use in classrooms are available, including the brief, a toolkit of materials and guidance on submissions.

The deadline for entries is 30th April.

More at

Resources for Schools – Coronation of His Majesty The King & Her Majesty The Queen Consort

I couldn’t find anything on the DfE website this morning the 29th March.

Compelling case for paying teachers more

Posted on by
Reply

The DfE has produced some interesting statistics about the labour market looking forward to 2035, and how the need for workers might change during that period. Labour market and skills projections: 2020 to 2035 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Two key impressions are that the demands of the labour market will be for ever more skilled and educated workers, and that teaching faces a massive replacement issue during the period between now and 2035, mainly of women if based upon the present structure of the labour force in education.

The growth period in employment in the education sector between 2015 and 2020 that resulted from both the raising of the learning leaving age to 18 and an increase in the school population that was a consequence of an upturn in the birth-rate will largely have been absorbed by the labour market by the mid-2020s, with only higher education still to see the effects of the demographic upturn. Higher education might well find those extra home based undergraduates balance any loss of earnings from a decline in overseas students if governments fail to realise the economic, social and political importance of overseas students to both the economy and society.

A period of growth in the public sector always makes it harder for The Treasury to accommodate wage demands from public sector workers such as teachers. This is especially the case where governments aim for a low taxation economy. However, going forward, the pressure for the education sector will come from competition from other sectors of the economy for highly qualified workers also need ed to become teachers.

As I see it, the government has two alternatives, either reward teachers at a level of pay and conditions that attract and retain sufficient staff to maintain an output from the school system that is sufficiently well-educated as to provide for the needs of the economy going forward or let our national competitiveness slip, with consequent effects on the standard of living for future generations.

Governments can try to extract a price for rewarding teachers with bigger class sizes, but that approach may make teaching less attractive as a career. More likely, and the Oak Academy may be a harbinger of change, the relationship between labour and capital in teaching – in the form of technology – may change significantly going forward. This may also be accompanied by structural change in how schooling is managed for change.

However, unless there is some forward thinking across education, not just in thinktanks and groups such as FED, the risk is one of drift and a pulling apart of our education system to create an under-educated group and inflationary pressures in the labour market due to a smaller than required pool of new entrants to the highly skilled workforce.

Today’s discussions about the significant increase in unauthorised absence and the pool of pupils missing up to half their schooling is a warning sign that should not be ignored. A national revival plan for education based on sufficient teachers and engagement with parents to encourage a return to schooling for the absentee pupils should be a major consideration.

Sadly, I fear the present government hasn’t the wherewithal to start such a task, let alone achieve it in the present parliament, despite the many government MPs that won seats in 2019 where this is a critical issue for the future wealth of their local economies.

Youth Theatre in action

Posted on by
Reply

Last evening I attended the Chipping Norton Theatre’s Youth Theatre production of ‘Tales for the traveller’s inn’ an adaptation of some of Chaucer’s tales for the 21st century by young people of different age groups.

Chipping Norton is fortunate to have its own theatre. The main auditorium was originally built as a salvation Army citadel, in 1888. After some years as a furniture warehouse, it was rediscovered in 1968; fundraising began in 1973, the theatre was registered as a charity in 1974, and it opened as a theatre in 1975. It subsequently acquired adjoining properties to provide space for a bar, gallery, green rooms, offices and rehearsal space.

The Youth Theatre is part of their outreach work and last night’s production included children from a wide range of different ages from Year 4 upwards.

The hard work and original scripts were visible for the audience packing the theatre to see. There were some real stars in the making on display last evening and the mixture of mime, music and the spoken work went well with the themes behind Chaucer’s timeless tales. Fr many of these young people it will have been their first time on a full-size stage and they performed admirably.

The Theatre at Chipping Norton has an extensive outreach programme including putting on 41 mental health workshops in schools; providing 970 art packs for children from low income families; sourcing 9,000 lunches for local families and providing 45 free holiday workshop places for children on Free School Meals.

Sadly, tonight is the final production, but I am sure it will be playing to a full house of family, friends and locals. It was a privilege to have been invited to attend and to witness the work of both the young people and their tutors. The arts can provide so much enrichment to the lives of those that both participate and also those that just come to watch.

Thank you to the hardworking team at Chipping Norton Theatre and I look forward to returning next year.

Do means matter?

Posted on by
Reply

The DfE has published some performance data for academies and multi academy trusts Multi-academy trust performance measures (key stages 2, 4 and 5) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) The outcomes are quite rightly heavily hedged about with qualifications about how schools have become academies, and also that schools differ in size, character and parental choice. Indeed, I wonder whether the original reason for why a school became an academy, perhaps more than a decade ago is still relevant?

What struck me at first glance was that as the secondary sector becomes dominated by academies there is a reduction to the mean (average). Various Secretaries of State have wanted all schools to be above average, as this exchange with Michael Gove when in front of the Education Select Committee revealed. Michael Gove’s Kafkaesque logic – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate However, I don’t think he was the only Secretary of State to fall foul of this aspiration. Academies in the group forced to change their status because of under-performance not surprisingly do less well than those that chose to become an academy.

The key question for the current Secretary of State must be what do you take from this data in terms of the ‘levelling up’ agenda? I don’t think the present incumbent of the post of Secretary of State for Education has been asked the question about averages, but that shouldn’t stop her asking the question about what policy changes are needed based upon these outcomes?

As an additional discussion point, the secretary of State might like to ask her officials two further questions. What is the relationship between the schools in these tables and the percentages of NEETs produced by different types of schools, and how can schooling work to help ensure as many as possible of our young people eventually enter the labour market at the end of their initial education and training journey? After all, we should all be life-long learners.

After last year’s aborted attempt to make all schools academies, and the mauling of the Bill in the House of Lords there is still a need to ensure the middle tier works to the best advantage for all children. Whether there is a role for local democracy in schooling is still a live issue, but not one that will feature highly at the next election.

But, regardless of who runs schools, there is still work to be done to achieve excellence for all and that no child is left behind, to quote just two aspirational messages from past attempts at improving the outcomes for our schooling system.

Of course, without sufficient teachers, the risk is of deterioration not improvement in outcomes; not what the Chancellor wants to see if the economy is to continue to grow.

Teacher Recruitment Crisis: is the end in sight?

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, Silicon Valley Bank hit a bump in the road. Most readers won’t have heard of this American bank that has created a niche for itself by lending to technology start-ups, including in the famous Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco.

However, might yesterday’s event prove as significant as Northern Rock’s fall from grace was in the first decade of the century at marking a turning point in the business cycle. If it does, then whatever the outcome of the current teachers’ pay dispute, teaching will look like a safe haven in a disturbed economic order. And, as in past bouts of turmoil, more people will seek to become teachers in any uncertain times, and those that quit for pastures new will seek to return in greater number.

Three years ago there was a spike in interest in teaching as a career when lockdown and the covid pandemic looked as if it would create disruption in the labour market. The furlough scheme and other government initiatives meant that spike in interest in teaching as a career was short-lived. 

The banking crisis of 2008 led to record numbers of graduates seeking to train as a teacher, reaching 67,000 applicants in the course of the 2009/10 cycle. By contrast, in 2021/22 cycle the total number of applicants only reached 39,288 according to DfE data: less than two per place.

Of course, by tomorrow, Silicon Valley Bank will no doubt have calmed investors and the risks will have been reassessed. However, the fundamental point about the relationship between the health of the economy and teaching as a career, at least in England where there is a well-developed labour market for graduates, will still hold good. Booming economies are bad for teaching as a career: recessions encourage more to consider teaching as a career, and current teachers not to take the risk of leaving.

Government statisticians are still predicting the possibility of a mild recession in the United Kingdom at some point this year, so perhaps we can predict the end of the current recruitment crisis in teaching?

Sadly, I think it will take more than mild recession to bail out the teacher labour market, at least in the secondary school sector. Falling rolls helps, as the divergence between the labour markets in the primary and secondary school sectors is now starting to make clear. Ironically, a high pay settlement, not fully funded for schools, would also reduce demand, but push up class sizes and affect the quality of learning in other ways.

However, if a recession doesn’t bail out the teacher labour market, might the very type of companies that the Silicon Valley Bank supports help out? Teaching as an occupation has made remarkably little use of technology to support the teacher pupil interface. The government might well set up a research institute to identify how to improve the capital/labour relationship in teaching so as to widen the range of qualifications acceptable to become a teacher. They might focus less on subject knowledge and more on human interactions and motivation as a means of promoting learning. They might also reduce teacher’s workload by taking away as many administrative chores as possible.

But, as we have seen in the recruitment of teachers, driving down costs by new technology doesn’t always change spending habits. Pay teachers more: use technology more effectively and create a 21st century schooling system. Now there’s a thought for the ASCL Conference this weekend.

Golden Helloes for overseas nationals

Posted on by
Reply

Yet another scheme has emerged from the portals of Sanctuary Buildings to help stem this years’ teacher supply crisis. The International Relocation Payment Scheme  International relocation payments – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) is designed to attract non-UK nationals to either teach or train to teach languages or physics. Up to £10,000 will be available for successful applicants and the scheme has different rules for non-salaried trainees; salaried trainees, and teachers.

Both fee-paying trainees and salaried trainees should receive the IRP around the end of their first term and teachers will also receive their payment at the same stage of employment subject to them teaching the appropriate subjects.

For teachers the rules include the following:

To be eligible, teachers must meet all 3 of the following requirements.

Firstly, you must have accepted a languages or physics teaching job in a state secondary school in England on a contract lasting at least one academic year.

Teachers of all languages (except English) offered in English state secondary schools are eligible to apply for the IRP. The language or languages can be combined with another subject, but must make up at least 50% of teaching time.

Physics can be combined with another subject, but must make up at least 50% of teaching time. Teachers of general science are also eligible to apply for the IRP if they are teaching the physics elements of general science. It can be combined with another subject, but general science must make up at least 50% of teaching time.

Secondly, any teacher must come to England on one of the following visas:

  • Skilled worker visa
  • Youth Mobility Scheme
  • Family visa
  • UK Ancestry visa
  • British National (Overseas) visa
  • High Potential Individual visa
  • Afghan citizens resettlement scheme
  • Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy
  • Ukraine Family Scheme visa
  • Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme

Thirdly, and teacher must move to England no more than 3 months before the start of the teaching job in September.

How to apply for the IRP

Any teacher applying will need to have started their teaching job in a state secondary school to make your application. Teach in England if you trained outside the UK | Get Into Teaching GOV.UK (education.gov.uk)

Applications will be open from 1 September to 31 October 2023. This is a short window for applications.

The obvious question is what happens if a recipient of the cash quits as soon as the funds have cleared their bank accounts, and returns home? I am sure that vetting will do everything to prevent such an occurrence, but the question is at least worth asking.

It is interesting that the DfE only cite their own job board as a source of vacancies despite the fact that the tes and TeachVac often have a wider  range of job opportunities than the DfE site.

As usual, this new scheme ignores the really serious shortage subjects such as design and technology; business studies and computing.

The DfE will need to ensure schools understand the scheme as they will be receiving applications for these posts almost immediately. They will need to be able to ensure timetables that meet the requirements, especially in the sciences where most vacancies are advertised as for a ‘teacher of science’ and not a teacher of physics.

Will the scheme succeed? It is only for 2023-24 at present, so might be regarded as a trial. Previous schemes, have disappeared. I don’t recall the evaluation of this one from 2016 mentioned in a previous blog post. More on BREXIT | John Howson (wordpress.com)

On a similar topic of recruiting teachers from overseas, in December the DfE issued tender RFX159 – Supply of teachers qualified outside of England. This specified within the terms:

‘The Contractor must work in consultation with the Client Organisation to prepare a Business Brief, which may include, but not be exclusive to, the following: a. scoping of the work required by the business area in respect of; i) single or multiple recruitment campaigns targeting qualified maths and physics teachers primarily from Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and USA. Further high performing countries subject to agreement. Ii) Any other recruitment and supply of teachers to English schools.’

Schemes such as this one will not solve the teacher supply crisis that secondary schools have been experiencing for far too long. After all, the Select Committee was concerned enough in 2015 to mount an inquiry and the situation now is far worse than it was then. We must not fail a generation of young people.