Author Archives: John Howson

Unknown's avatar

About John Howson

Former county councillor in Oxfordshire and sometime cabinet member for children services, education and youth.

Home to School transport

Posted on by
Reply

What level of transport from home to school should the State provide for parents? At present, this is an area of policy that rarely seems to be reviewed. For instance, when the learning leaving age was raised to eighteen, the rules on free transport to school were not changed. As a result, many pupils that receive free transport up to age sixteen, and the end of Year 11, no longer qualify for free transport in Years 12 or 13, even if they remain at the same school.

Yes, some local authorities do pay for SEND transport for post-16 students, but it is not a requirement to do so. TfL still provide generous free transport for young people resident in London, although the Elizabeth Line beyond West Drayton to Reading isn’t included.

The question must be: if young people in London can qualify for free bus and tram travel, why must those living elsewhere in England depend upon local rules set by the upper tier local authority? The answer, of course, is that local authorities must fund the home to school transport budget, and it needs to compete against all other priorities, whereas in London, the transport authority, TfL, foots the bill for transport costs.  

Most authorities now only pay for transport over three miles (2 miles for pupils under eight, but above statutory school age) to the nearest school if selected first at the time of the admissions process. There may be different rules for selective secondary schools, and some authorities won’t pay for travel to these schools if located in the area of another authority despite the fact that most are now academies.

For instance, Essex County Council and Castle Point Unitary Authority state that:

Grammar (selective) school

Children from low income families qualify for school transport if they live 2 or more miles from the selective school.

School transport will also be provided if the selective school is closer than the nearest maintained school or academy and 3 miles or more away. School transport: Who qualifies for home to school transport – Essex County Council

This means that many parents have to pay to send a child to a selective school unless they qualify as a low-income family.

In rural areas there may not be bus services, and local authorities will only pay where a road is deemed unsafe due to traffic. Any alternative route less than three miles, even if an unlit footpath across fields, often doesn’t qualify for free transport unless an appeal panel is willing to go outside the rules.

In their 2023-24 budget, Oxfordshire has a figure of around £30 million for home to school transport, so it isn’t an insignificant issue for rural counties. The bulk of this was for transporting pupils to mainstream schools and not for SEND transport.

So here are some policy suggestions for discussion

  • Raise the current age level for transport to the same school from 16 to 18
  • Ensure SEND transport to both schools and colleges
  • Negotiate student fares with both bus and train operators as similar rates for same journey
  • Merge school transport with active travel policies to encourage car pooling or use of local community transport
  • Pay bike vouchers to encourage cycling to school
  • Review national guidelines on what constitutes ‘safe routes’ to exclude footpaths or bridleways for inclusion and only include roads
  • Create a national policy for travel to selective schools funded by central government as these schools are no longer ’local’ schools
  • Prevent state schools from running their own buses
  • Ensure any child offered a paid for place has the place available for a whole school year.
  • Amend the mileage rule to cover all sites for split site schools

The present distance rules were set many years ago. Is it still acceptable in this modern age to use a three-mile limit or should it be reduced?

Finally, how should any changes be paid for? Should there be a national scheme, as for the bus pass for the elderly, and should the rules be more favourable for London than for rural areas, especially where house prices may be more expensive in the rural areas than in London, and salaries don’t take this into account?

Please sue the comments section to discuss.

Recruit now or never

Posted on by
Reply

How bad is the current recruitment crisis in teaching likely to become, and what effects might it have on the staffing of schools for September 2023? We already know that the recruitment to postgraduate ITT courses for secondary school subjects, whether located in schools or higher education was dire last September. I discussed some of the reasons this week with a researcher. We didn’t discuss the attractiveness of teaching in terms of pay for graduates, as it is well known where on the public/private sector graduate pay scale teaching is currently located.

For this blog, I want to look at the data from TeachVac on the current supply side. Of course, the supply side is influenced by what happens on the demand side of the equation, and we know the increased pupil numbers will increase demand for teachers by secondary schools this year, even if all other factors stay the same; we can also reckon that a worsening of the pay gap will both take more teachers out of state school classrooms and deter more returners while there are other job opportunities available.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has for some years used the data obtained from matching vacancies to jobseekers to also construct an index that measures the health of the supply side in relation to new entrants. A worsening index puts the pressure on certain schools to find other sources of supply or to alter their curriculum.

In my previous post, I discussed the extent to which the current level of vacancies has created a ‘false market’ because of the number of re-advertisements. That factor undoubtedly has had an effect on the supply-side index – hence my continued demand for a job reference number.

TeachVac has been collecting data since 2015, and will continue to do so as long as schools continue to sign up to TeachVac’s £10 per week matching service that provides the data for analysis.

So, what might the current position be, half-way through the two weeks of half-terms across England?

Subject2023 at 17th FebCurrent figure INDEXPrevious worst INDEX  Year
HistoryNW7644282015
PENW10248812017
ArtNW2952732017
MathsW524
EnglishW375
All SciencesW343
MusicW35
REW10
LanguagesW106
ComputingW-71
GeographyW188
Business StudiesW-79
D&TW-125
NW Not worst recorded W Worst level recorded

Source: TeachVac

The data index is based upon matching the potential ‘open market’ trainee number after discounting those already in classrooms and less likely to be seeking a different teaching post in September against vacancies since 1st January.

There is little surprising in the index data, except perhaps for the severity of the current index figure in some subjects so early in the recruitment round for September.

How the index moves from here depends upon factors such as: when the government asks the Pay Review Body to Report, and whether the inevitable pay increase will be fully funded or whether schools, often already hard pushed for cash after the energy price increase, will be expected to fund the salary increase from current resourcing. This latter choice would undoubtedly reduce demand for teachers, unless it also drove more teachers out of the classroom into other jobs or retirement. With the present age profile of the profession, the former should be of more concern that the latter.

The pay of senior staff in academies

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday was Oxfordshire County Council’s Budget Day. Along with the budget itself two reports were presented; one on gender pay differences, and the other a required report of the Council’s Pay Policy. The latter included the salaries of senior staff as at the 1st January 2023. During the discussion on the Council’s Pay Policy I raised the issue of the pay of senior staff in standalone academies and multi-academy trusts.

I wrote a blog about this issue The Pay of Academy Staff | John Howson (wordpress.com) after I had raised the matter once before in council in the form of a question to the Cabinet member.

In advance of yesterday’s meeting, I checked the accounts at Companies House for all Oxfordshire Secondary Schools that are academies (one school is still not an academy because of a budget deficit). By now, all academies should have filed their 2022 accounts ending in August 2022 at Companies House. However, some have still to do so, but they will be unlikely to affected the discussion about how much senior staff should be paid if the benchmark is set, as in my previous blog, at £150,000.

Interestingly, as in my last study, no MAT or standalone academy with a headquarters in Oxfordshire paid any staff member £150,000 or more according to their accounts. However, with the September annual pay increases it seems likely that inflation will have pushed two Trusts int a position of now paying more than £150,000 in salary to their highest paid employee.

Of more concern was the fact in the accounting year to August 2022, four Trusts, all headquartered outside Oxfordshire, paid their highest paid employee more than £150,000. All were in the list of five Trusts mentioned in my previous blog. I am especially concerned about one Trust with a reported top salary of £280,000 in the year to August 2022, as that is more than twice the salary of Oxfordshire’s director of Children’s Services. As the Trust is located in an area not considered high cost for property prices, and is not as large as some other Trusts, I wonder about the reasons behind such a high salary.

The DfE remained concerned enough about Academy salaries to recently publish a list of Trusts where at least one employee earns more than £150,000. The list runs more than 14 pages in length. Academies consolidated annual report and accounts: 2020 to 2021 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Annex 6.

This issue of pay of academy employees is relevant to local authorities because managing their remaining education functions will become more challenging because the government has failed to cap MAT employees’ pay. Recruiting staff into local government, already difficult will become even more challenging for our education service.

The present government has talked about the importance of Pay Review bodies in the public sector, but so far has exempted senior staff in MATs from pay controls. Ministers have written lots of letters urging pay restraint, but, seemingly, to no effect.

Paying extreme salaries in MATs also means higher central costs imposed on Oxfordshire schools and, as a result, less cash to spend on Oxfordshire pupils. The increase in pay of senior staff in academies isn’t the sole cause of the deterioration on Pupil Teacher Ratios secondary schools over the past decade, but it certainly hasn’t help prevent them worsening.

 

False Market

Posted on by
Reply

Last year, 2022, saw a large increase in recorded vacancies for teachers. That increase has continued in the first six weeks of 2023. TeachVac has recorded a 31% increase for the period from the start of January up to 10th February 2023. Recorded vacancies for the secondary sector increased from 8,617 to 11,304 with increases in most subjects except; classics, economic, sociology and Engineering. Increases in music were in the order of 50%, and 59% in geography.

Although the increase in computing vacancies was only 41%, such was the lack of recruitment into training for courses that started last September that there will shortly have been sufficient advertised vacancies to provide a post for every trainee likely to be available for September. Design and technology, as a subject, is in a similar situation, even though a few more trainees were recruited in 2022 than in the previous year.

Business studies has already recorded enough vacancies for every trainee to have been able to find a job. Schools now recruiting for that subject will find the task ever more of a challenge as the year progresses.

For those of us that regularly watch the labour market for teachers, the question must now be; how accurate a reflection of reality is the current market data? Indeed, is measuring vacancies any longer a worthwhile exercise? Are schools just re-advertising vacancies that they cannot fill or advertising posts they expect to have to fill to try and capture the small number of candidates actually looking for vacancies?

Normally, I would not expect new entrants to the profession to have started job hunting this early in the year, except in subjects such as history and physical education where the supply of candidates regularly exceeds the number of vacancies on offer and it makes sense to start job hunting early.

In a ‘normal’ year there might be around 60,000 vacancies across both the primary and secondary sectors in England and including both state and private schools. The 100,000+ of 2022, and the increase early in 2023, suggests that there must be a considerable amount of either repeat advertising or re-advertising, depending upon how those terms are defined.

This blog has long championed the need for a unique vacancy number to follow a post from creation to its being filled. The current market makes that concept even more pressing. Schools do not need to wait for the DfE to create an elaborate structure, but could start using their URN followed by 2301 so the first vacancy would be xxxxxx/2301 and their tenth xxxxxx/2310. If included somewhere on the advertisement such reference number would be easy for followers of the labour market to handle and would provide a much clear picture of the actual labour market rather than having to wait until the June following the start of the school year and the publication of the data from the School Workforce Census.

Maybe, the government doesn’t want real-time information on the labour market, but without out it schools are at risk of having to rely upon signals from a false market that does not accurately show the real level of demand for teachers.

UTCs: will they survive?

Posted on by
Reply

Recently, the DfE published the accounting details for academies and free schools and their Trusts and Committees for the year September 2020 to August 2021. Academies consolidated annual report and accounts: 2020 to 2021 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are several interesting annexes. One contains 15 pages of Trusts where at least one member of staff was paid more than £150,000 as recorded in the accounts for that year! However, more relevant for the purpose of this post is the list of schools with deficit balances. The list contains 12 identified University Technical Colleges (UTCs) plus a Trust with 4 UTCs in its portfolio of schools three of which appear to have negative balances in the Trust’s 2022 accounts).

This means that possibly 16 out of the 47 UTC could possibly have been in deficit in this accounting year. Home | University Technical Colleges (utcolleges.org) cites 47 colleges.

This means that at least a third of the UTC sector might have been in deficit in the 2020-21 accounting year. I cannot say that I am surprised. Way back in 2017, this blog contained my post Can UTCs survive? | John Howson (wordpress.com) asking whether UTCs could survive.

I am not opposed to the idea of a UTC, but here is part of what I wrote in a 2106 post on the topic.

‘So, might UTCs be set to become the ‘De Lorean’ of the education world; a good idea, but not financially viable? Having visited the Didcot UTC recently, I can see the attraction of the concept as supported by Lord Baker. But, they do run into a number of challenges. Firstly, changing school at 14 isn’t a normal part of the school scene, so the UTCs have to persuade young people and their parents that the change is worthwhile. Secondly, the schools that they are departing from will lose cash for every pupil that transfers. After four years a school losing ten pupils a year could be £200,000 down on income, but still be trying to offer the same curriculum to its remaining pupils. Lose twenty pupils a year and the cash burn become even more concerning. Some schools might fight to keep their pupils or only be interested in losing those that cost more to educate than they generate in revenue.’ W(h)ither UTCs? | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Since then we have had the National Funding Formula covering two years of most UTC’s rolls, with the other two years being funded by the post-16 funding that has never been seen as generous.

Even with increasing pupil numbers in the secondary sector, the fact that most UTCs recruit at age 14 and don’t have free travel probably restricts their ability to grow unless they are in an area of significant housebuilding, as is the Didcot UTC mentioned above. Even there, the issue of loss at 16 to other institutions or apprenticeships can significantly affect the UTC’s income. For many, being science and technology biased in their curriculum, also affects their outgoings, both in resources and in attracting STEM subject teachers.

So, where will the UTC programme go, even with the support of Lord Baker?

Is ‘A’ Level Physics too easy?

Posted on by
2

This is a silly question, but you might not think so looking at the revised data published by the DfE on the 2022 results for STEM subjects. A level and other 16 to 18 results: 2022 (revised) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

If you look at the percentages gaining the top two grades of A* and A grade, then you might be misled into reaching this conclusion. After all, only 34.4% of those taking biology achieved those grades, compared with 39% in Physics and 38.6% in Chemistry.

The answer lies by also looking at the data for Further mathematics, where 67.8% achieved the top two grades. But there were only just over 14,000 entrants, and 99% achieved a grade from A* to E.

Subjects can try and match each other for difficulty, and so they should, as the amount of achievement needed to achieve the same result should be proportional to the effort required. However, that approach cannot compensate for entry policies. Some subjects seem to have more open entry policies than others. The gateway may be at the start of the course, where only those likely to be successful are selected, as may be the case in Further Mathematics courses, or at the point of entry into the examination, where only those needing the subject for further study and likely to achieve a god grade are entered.

Assuming that computer studies isn’t that much more challenging to those that have studied it for two years than those studying physics for two years, it would seem computer studies has a longer tail than Further Mathematics.

Then there is the issue of teacher supply to consider. How far does their ability to attract staff result in the higher Average Point Score (APS) achieved by private schools over other institutions, and how far does the fact the general Further Education colleges have the lowest APS reflect their staffing or the students that they receive from schools, and the adults engaging in lifelong learning?

And why are the APS scores for ‘A’ levels lower in the Midlands regions than in London and the South East, where there is generally thought to be more of a teacher recruitment crisis. Could the greater incidence of private schools in the latter two regions be part of the answer?

The London Borough of Sutton and Buckinghamshire both rank amongst the highest placed local authorities for A level APS outcomes. Both have selective secondary education. However, Slough, also with selective secondary schools has a lower APS than either Surrey or Oxfordshire that are both non-selective local authorities, although with a significant number of private schools located within their boundaries.

Interpreting examination results isn’t easy, due to the multiple factors that affect the outcomes. Best wishes to the 2023 cohort as they enter the final lap before the start of their examination season. May the travails of the covid pandemic be behind them as they come to the final point of their school or college careers.

Recruiting teachers: a real challenge

Posted on by
2

This morning a school complained on a social media site that they had advertised a senior maths teacher post, but received no applications at all. Is it right to interpret this fact to mean that there is a real crisis in teacher recruitment? Regular readers of this blog – and thank you to those that sent me comments after the 10th anniversary post last week – will know that I have highlighted the issue of shortage of entrants into the profession that eventually feeds through to create a shortage of middle leaders in some subjects in several posts. The assumption must be that this is what has happened in this instance.

However, while not decrying that analysis, there are some other questions to ask first. Why did nobody from inside the school apply? Is it because the department is full of young and inexperienced teachers that spend only a few years in the school before moving on to posts that pay more?

Was the incentive offered in line with others locally, and enough to attract incomers if the school is in a high-cost housing area?

Why did nobody from the local area apply? Is it to do with the school or the salary?

I asked TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk to look up the data for promoted posts in mathematics advertised by schools during January 2023 for the East of England region, as an example of what the school might expect. There were 27 such vacancies up to the 30th of January, and around 50 registered jobseekers targeting such posts in that part of England. On average that is less than two potential applicants per school. Assuming most applicants make more than one application, let’s assume the school might have expected up to 10 visits to the web site to look at the details of the job, and somewhere between 2-5 applications.

However, early January may just be too early in the recruitment cycle for September appointments for most teachers seeking either a promotion or their first teaching post to have commenced their job searches. January is a great month to be looking for a new headteacher, but may not be the optimal time for recruiting for other posts.

Schools also need to understand how the job board methodology works. When a school posts a new job, it will be matched that day or the next by most boards with registered users that meet the criteria for subject, job level and locality. Although the vacancy will remain on display for anyone searching the site, it is often not sent to existing users again for a period of time.

Job boards should be able to tell schools how many matches they have made with the school’s vacancies. For one Multi Academy Trust in the South East using TeachVac, the current average for all jobs is around 180 matches since September.

I would suggest that schools need to think carefully about each vacancy and plan a campaign to fill the job. A main scale history post advertised in February should be filled by just putting the job on the school’s own website, and if necessary a job board. A physics teacher post for January occurring in November needs an entirely different approach. Is it worth spending the same amount on each vacancy? And how good is your market intelligence?

Per Pupil Funding set to fall

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, the DfE released data on the change in per pupil funding for 5-16 year olds between 2010-11 and 2023/-24

One the face of it, this is a good news story. Funding per pupil has increased in cash terms from £5,180 in 2010-11 to £7,460 in 2023-24. After falling in the first few years, per pupil funding increased from 2018-19 onwards, according to the DfE data. School funding statistics: 2022 to 2023 financial year – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Looking at the same data using 2022-23 prices reveals a similar picture up to the projections for 2023-24 funding per pupil where, using 2022-23 cash prices, the increase for 2023-24 is not currently enough to allow for the effects of inflation, and funding per pupil falls below funding in cash terms. After taking into account the extra funds received by schools to deal with the pandemic that have either ended already or are likely to do so soon, and weren’t incorporated into the headline figure to ensure the integrity of the time series data, it is possible to see why some schools, especially in the primary sector may be facing a real funding dilemma once again.

According to the DfE, the figures for 2023-24 are based on a combination of published funding allocations, the budget settlements agreed at the 2021 Spending Review and 2022 Autumn Statement, and some estimates of small grant and high needs spending. Of course, the final outturn might prove to be different, in part depending upon how the government and the STRB deal with the issue of teachers’ pay and pay levels for non-teaching staff.

Will the DfE add funds to cover the eventual pay settlement that will recognise the effects of high inflation or will they expect schools to handle the additional costs within the presently agreed funding envelope?

As I have remarked before, the Pay Review body system worked relatively well in times of low inflation and the date for reporting became decoupled from the pay year. The STRB’s 2022 report was published in January of that year, well in time for the new funding cycle to be adjusted to mee the cost of the settlement.

I guess the political shambles at Westminster in the early autumn, and the revolving door of ministers, prevented both the Treasury and spending departments from making the case for bringing Pay Review body Reports forward once it was clear inflation was going to reach a 40-year high.  

The DfE data aggregates all 5-16 spending, so these data don’t show the potential differential impact on the primary sector of the current Funding formula, high fixed costs and in many cases falling rolls. The policy for handing demographic decline doesn’t seem clear to me. Is the government willing to see large numbers of small schools close or will it expect academy trusts to cross-subsidise between sectors as a means of forcing the remaining primary schools to become part of a MAT in order to survive, since local authorities cannot vire funds between schools as MATs are able to do.

Are you paying too much to advertise a teaching vacancy?

Posted on by
Reply

The most read blog post this month is the one from 2020 entitled ‘How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?’ Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) So far, yesterday’s 10th birthday post comes in second highes, with 20 views as against the vacancy post that reviewed the publication of the tes company accounts for 2019.

Today, the tes group, now entirely shorn of it print heritage, released its accounts for 2021-22 to August 2022. The company, fronted by its UK management, is ultimately owned by Onex Partners V, part of the Canadian ONEX Group of equity investors. Their third quarter report for 2022 identifies an investment of $98 US in the Tes Global (“Tes”), an international provider of comprehensive software solutions for the education sector  18d46e0 f-a5b9-435a-a039-9849ef723683 (onex.com) page 9

So, our major teacher recruitment platform, now offering a much wider staff management service to schools, increased its UK (mainly England) turnover from £54 million to £68 million in the year to August 2022. How important both staff management and the UK are to the profit of ONEX can be determined form the following figures

Turnover             2022                     2021

UK                        £68.2 mn          £54.0 mn

Europe                £  2.9 mn             £ 2.6 mn

Rest of World     £  9.0  mn           £ 9.0 mn

Income

Staff

Management    £61.2 mn          £56.5  mn

All activities      £80.2 mn           £66.1  mn

TES accounts – see link above page 29

So, in the last school year the tes took £68 million pounds from UK schools, the bulk of the money for recruitment and staff management by subscriptions from schools. 84% of staff management revenue came from subscription income and, as the accounts note (page 2) this was a 26% increase in revenue, presumably as more schools and Trusts migrated to subscription packages from point of sale purchase of advertising. The profit for the operating year was £28.7 million compared with £2.3 million the previous year that was badly affected by covid.

The group values its software at £46 million. That leaves me wondering what the book value of TeachVac’s simple but effective job matching service should be? Perhaps the £3 million suggested by our advisers is a little on the mean side.

TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk costs less than £150,000 a year to operate. Being generous, it might cost £500,000 if operating on a similar cost model to the tes. The DfE job site probably costs a bit more, but we don’t actually know how much. The question for schools, MATs and the education sector is ‘How much of the money you are spending with the tes is for the downstream activities on staff management and how much for the job bord and matching service, and is it value for money?

Assume only 10% is for the matching, that could be £5-6 million of the subscription income after allowing for the tes turnover on Hibernia and other activities. TeachVac was established to demonstrate to the sector the cost-effective nature of modern technology over the former print advertising methods of recruitment. Readers can make up their own minds over value for money when comparing the £500 annual subscription to TeachVac that will reduce as more schools sign-up, and the cost of a subscription to tes.

A decade of blogs

Posted on by
5

Today, 25th January 2023 is the official 10th birthday of this blog. Earlier this month, I wrote a blog reviewing the past ten years. That was entitled ‘Don’t forget Jacob’ Don’t forget Jacob | John Howson (wordpress.com) as a salute to the, as yet, unsuccessful campaign to ensure all children taken into care or arriving new to an area can be placed on the roll of a school within three weeks, regardless of whether the schools is an academy, free school or a maintained school. Every child has a right to an education with their peers and not just at home supported by worksheets and the occasional visit from a tutor.

Supporting that campaign shows how this blog has evolved over the past decade. Started just to deal with stories around the numbers in education (mostly the school sector) it has taken on a wider role as a consequence of two events in my life. In May 2013, I was elected to Oxfordshire County Council for a North Oxford Division, and for eight years was the Lib Dem spokesperson on education on the county.

In 2015, I helped establish TeachVac, the job board for teachers that has flourished, if measured by the number of users and the data it has gathered, but for a variety of reasons has yet to be a commercial success: perhaps I have had too many other distractions, including this blog, to become a successful business owner.

After, ten years and 1,372 posts (including this one) that have been seen by more than 80,000 visitors from all around the world, I have to decide: what next? Two years ago, I nearly decided to close down the blog as readership had fallen dramatically from around 22,000 visitors a year to just 11,000, but I kept going. Once again, I face the same dilemma. For the past quarter of a century, I have written pieces every week, first for the TES, as it then was, and then for this blog.

Is it time to call a day? I think the unfinished business of inadequate recruitment into teaching need regular highlighting, but NfER and Jack Worth can do that as easily and with better graphics that I can do. Most of the other posts are opportunistic, and some garner very few views; In some cases none at all, as with the post about this blog highlighted above.

So, you may notice that rather than the average of some ten posts a month of the past, the number drops off from now onwards, and I concentrate on other matters.  

Thank you to those that do read the blog. It has been a labour of love to write, and I have never regretted composing these posts, although there are a few that once written never saw the light of day. Finally, last December, someone downloaded every single post that I had written. I would love to know why and what they have done with them? Happy Birthday, and thanks, especially to Frank.