Category Archives: economic

Possible improvements in Key Stage 2 outcomes?

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The DfE has today published the provisional Key Stage 2 assessments. There are some in the Liberal Democrats that would do away with these measures. I think there is a need to make them less stressful for both pupils and teachers but equally there is a need to demonstrate an informed understanding of how our education system is performing. The data and DfE’s comments can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-curriculum-assessments-key-stage-2-2018-provisional The data are provisional at this stage. In December more finalised data will be published. However, I suspect the overall figures will remain broadly the same.

One interesting observation in the DfE’s comments on page 18 of their analysis is that local authorities with lower attainment levels tended to see the biggest changes in attainment since 2017. This is both good news and not unexpected. If 80% of children are reaching the expected standard, then the other 20% may require significant resources to help them achieve what is expected. Whereas, where it is less than 60% of pupils there are probably easier gains. It would be interesting when the final figures appear to see how pupils receiving the Pupil Premium have fared in term s of improvements.

Cartographers might question the selection of grade boundaries used in the DfE’s map as they provide a representational view that focuses on local authorities in the middle of the range. (Incidentally, the map is difficult to read as far as local authority names are concerned and could be improved). There isn’t anything wrong with this approach, but the range between the bottom of the light blue and the top of the darker blue is only six points, whereas the range in the outliers is much greater. Tough on a local authority with a score of 61 such as West Sussex that is the same colour as Peterborough with 52%. Incidentally, I am not clear why the scale starts at 42%? But, perhaps the DfE aren’t using the data from Table L1 for the map. They don’t provide a link to the data.

As in the past, girls generally outperform boys, except in mathematics, where in the scaled score, boys have a higher score than girls, as is also the case for those performing at the higher ability level. For detailed data about other characteristics we must wait until December. The data for middle schools can largely be regarded as being based upon so few schools as not to be really representative, unless you live in an area with these schools and might want to question their future.

The data won’t help the Humanists that want to see an end to faith schools as, the more specific the faith, the better the outcome in their schools with; Jewish, Muslim and Sikh schools all performing better than other schools and especially better than schools with no religious character.  This may well tell us more about parental choice and support by parents that make a positive choice of school than about anything else.

Finally, as the DfE helpfully points out, attainment in all of reading, writing and maths is not directly comparable to previous years because of changes to writing TA frameworks. That doesn’t stop the DfE producing some comparisons.

Welcome for BERA Bites series

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BERA, The British Educational Research Association today publishes the second in its series of BERA Bites https://www.bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/issue-2-educational-leadership-are-our-schools-fit-for-the-future

The BERA Bites series presents selected articles from the BERA Blog on key topics in education, presented in an easily printable and digestible format to serve as teaching and learning resources for students and professionals in education. Each collection features an introduction by editors with expertise in the field, and each article includes questions for discussion, composed by the authors, prompting readers to further explore the ideas and arguments put forward in the original articles.

This second BERA Bite is especially of interest to this blog as it contains a post from almost exactly two years ago. The post appeared on this blog on the 7th September 2016 and you can read it be either downloading the BERA bits of searching the archive on this blog for September 2016. The post was entitled ‘Recruitment, Retention and Region The three ‘R’s’ challenging school performance in England’.

I am grateful to BERA for putting this series together. It is a new form of peer review to have blog posts reviewed as well as more formal articles and the BITES series can become useful teaching aids for particular topics if kept regularly up to date. The issue of relevance is key. I turned to writing a blog, partly because for 11 years I wrote a variety of weekly columns for the TES and partly because, in a fast moving area such as the labour marker for teachers, writing academic articles is fine and dandy, but by the time they appear they are often only of historical interest in terms of policy development.

This is best seen in the series of posts on this blog during August 2013, when I wrote a post on the 7th August predicting a teacher supply crisis in London starting in 2014. The subsequent posts show the government reacted to my conclusions. Had I written an article for an academic journal about a possible teacher supply crisis and submitted it in August 2013, some reviewers might have rejected it as lacking sufficient evidence and, even if sufficiently articulate and scholarly, neither outcomes I can guarantee to produce, it would have been sometime in 2014 before it saw the light of day.

This is not to argue for the demise of academic journals, their place is firmly established in the academic discourses but to welcome the move BERA and others are making to recognise that some areas of education policy move at a different pace to others and may need different forms of discourse and that there is a need for teaching materials prompting readers to further explore the discussions put forward in the original articles.

So, please do read the BERA Bites both 1 & 2 and let BERA know what you think of the new series. If you are not a BERA member, but a regular reader of this blog, then you might want to consider whether it would be worth joining BERA, even if only for the access to the range research and information it provides to those interested in education.

Bulk buying back in vogue

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When I was a young teacher in London there was a large central buying organisation for schools, called something like Greater London Supplies. I recall that they had a big depot at Tottenham Hale in north London. Purchasing basic supplies on behalf of large numbers of schools made good business sense, even to the most socialist of Labour councils. However, it didn’t make sense to the Thatcher government that believed market competition at a school level was the way forward.

Reading the DfE’s recent announcement on procurement and helping schools with costs, suggests that this is yet another move back in the direction of levering the purchasing power of schools as a combined unit, rather than expecting them to operate as individual business sites. How long will it be before Ofsted is asked to include in their inspection report whether a school is making full use effective purchasing decisions to target as much cash as possible on teaching and learning?

TeachVac, the free vacancy site for schools and teachers, www.teachvac.co.uk  where I am chair of the board, doesn’t yet feature in the DfE list. I am sure that they will find a good reason not to list it, as they don’t yet list any vacancy advertising services, whether they are either paid for services like all the others or free like TeachVac and their own nascent service. Maybe they don’t want competition?

The government’s actions in driving down costs aren’t completely risk free. After all, if prices are driven down too far then suppliers will exit the market and leave just one monopoly provider. At that point, it becomes an issue as to whether the State should regulate the provision of the service or actually take over the running.

As I have suggested in previous posts on this topic, once prices have been reduced by increasing efficiency then it can become very difficult to make a profit. Then there is also the reason why local decision-making was favoured by many: the speed of service delivery. A central maintenance contract may be cheaper, but what is the true cost of waiting several days for a window to be replaced or a leaking toilet mended?

I am sure that there is a unit within the DfE thinking of other areas where schools can either save money or increase their incomes without putting more pressure on parents. They might want to ensure deals there are good deals on school uniforms and sports kit and make schools explain why they are requiring a uniform that is more expensive than the average. Tradition, would not be a good enough answer.

My own suggestion for research is, as mentioned before, school playgrounds. They must be the least used piece of real estate in the country. I don’t suggest they are done away with, as when needed they perform a vital function, but what can we do with them for the other 99% of the year? More all-weather community pitches; a source of generating renewable energy; even vegetable growing spaces areas with a playground on top.

We are spending millions on research into driverless cars; how about a couple of million for more effective playground spaces?

 

 

Will teacher supply worsen in 2019?

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The problem with reports like the one published by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) yesterday is that they don’t help policy makers very much. Headlines of a teacher shortage are nothing new and looking at the position in 2016 doesn’t tell anyone what is happening now and will happen in the 2019 labour market. As I said in yesterday’s blog post, knowing where the hot spots are is a useful piece of extra knowledge, but is that really what the leading think tank on education sees as the best use of its resources?

I promised in my blog about the UCAS data, also published yesterday, to look at trends in August offer numbers. The following table looks at key subjects for this August and the previous two years, as well as the change between 2016 and 2018.

Subject 2016 offers Number of Placed and conditional firm 2017 Number of Placed and conditional firm 2018 Difference 2018 on 2016
ART & DESIGN 635 505 460 -175
BIOLOGY 1305 965 920 -385
BUSINESS STUDIES 205 165 150 -55
CHEMISTRY 965 855 830 -135
CLASSICS 50 55 70 20
COMPUTING 520 520 590 70
DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY 465 315 460 -5
DRAMA 375 350 300 -75
ENGLISH 1825 1855 1890 65
GEOGRAPHY 875 1175 1150 275
HISTORY 920 1135 1070 150
MATHEMATICS 2395 2335 2380 -15
MFL 4470 4530 3850 -620
MUSIC 360 310 280 -80
PHYSICAL EDUCATION 1225 1195 1120 -105
PHYSICS 830 690 680 -150
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 470 430 380 -90
17890 17385 16580 -1310

Source: UCAS monthly reports, August 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Despite the upward trend in pupil numbers, the trend in the number of offers has been downwards over the past two years. This suggests an even greater ‘crisis’ for schools in the 2019 labour market across some subjects, although the science numbers must be treated with  degree of discretion until the census appears in November due to a change in the method of recording offers by UCAS this year for applications. I doubt that Teach First will be riding to the rescue this year, although we must wait until November to find out their recruitment figures.

We don’t need more geography and history teachers, or last not as many more as have been recruited over the past two years. These offers don’t relate to the Teacher Supply model estimates of numbers needed, but many subjects will again fall short of that number. We will analyses the shortfall when the census appears. For a look at recent years, it is worth consulting the School Teachers’ Review Body’s latest report issued in July or you could look back through the posts on this blog. However, it is also worth remembering that EPI only looked at new entrants and didn’t fully factor in what might be happening with returner numbers, something NfER have been considering in their studies.

Might it be time to revive the posts of regional recruitment managers, used by the Labour government nearly 20 years ago during a previous recruitment crisis? Alternatively, do we need to make the most of the resources available by moving away from a free market? If it is acceptable for academy trusts to move teachers between schools should it not be acceptable to do so on a more national scale?

 

Mixed messages on trainee numbers

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The UCAS data on the numbers applying for and accepted for postgraduate teacher preparation courses starting this autumn were published earlier today. Usually, these numbers represent a good guide to the actual numbers likely to be recorded in the DfE’s ITT census, taken shortly after courses have commenced. This year, a change in the manner of how ‘conditional place’ and’ holding offer’ numbers are recorded for applications, but not applicants, compared to previous years has led to a risk that the data may be less reliable as a guide, especially in the three science subjects.

For secondary numbers, the outcome overall looks as if it will be similar to last year, with some subjects doing slightly better than last year and other slightly worse. Overall applicant numbers are very similar to this point last year, just 850 or so down on last year for England; a decline of around two per cent. Hopefully, this means the bottom of the cycle has been reached.

Although there has been a significant recovery in applications for those under the age of 25, numbers in these age groups are still down on last year. The loss is balanced by increases in applications from those over the age of 30. However, these older applicants have not been ‘placed’ to the same extent as last year. But, there are larger numbers in the ‘conditional placed’ and ‘holding offer’ categories that are still in use for applicant numbers, even though they are not included in the applications table for secondary subjects.

Interestingly, it is a late increase in the number of women applicants that has boosted the total. The number of male applicants, at 12,570 overall, is 670 down on the 2017 August figure.

Total number offered a place with or without conditions has increased from 67% of total applicants to 72% this year. No doubt the Minister’s views on the subject, expressed in a speech earlier in the year, may have boosted offer rates.

After allowing for the fact that application numbers are expressed differently to last year, the number likely to be recruited to primary sector courses appears possibly to be around 1,500 fewer than last year according to the numbers in table B.8. This is a lot better than seemed likely the case in the early months of 2018. However, these is a difference of several thousand between this table and the numbers cited for primary course types in Table B.11. Using Table B.8 for secondary, the recorded number of applications has increased from 64,760 to 66,770, between August 2017 and August 2018. However, numbers offered places may be lower than in 2017.

School Direct offers of all types seem to be down, when compared with August 2017, in both the primary and secondary sectors, with just 990 offers for Secondary School Direct Salaried courses compared with 1,130 offers of all types for these places last August. If confirmed in the ITT census this, further reduction will present a real challenge for the future of this Scheme, celebrated by Michael Gove when Secretary of State for Education as the future route for training teachers.

Next month there will be the end of cycle preliminary figures and then nothing until the start of the 2019 recruitment round in November.

 

How has teacher expertise changed recently?

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Following on from the previous post about today’s EPI study, I thought that I would update the Table from the Migration Advisory Committee report on teacher expertise, with the findings of the 2016 and 2017 School Workforce Census.

The percentage of hours taught in a typical week to pupils in years 7 to 13 by teachers with no subject relevant post A-level qualification
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Maths 16 16 18 17 20 18 12.8 12.9
Physics 21 24 26 26 28 25 24.6 24.8
D&T 11 15 18 17 19 17 14.2 14.1
ICT 48   44 41 39 44 38 30.6 31.3
English 12 13 15 15 17 13 9.6   9.8
Geography 11 16 18 18 17 14 12.5 12.9
History 10 13 15 15 15 11 8.6   8.8
PE   9 11 12 11 11   7    4   3.8
Source School Workforce Census as included in the Report of the Migration Advisory Committee with 2016 & 2017 data added.

Now, there is a teacher shortage and this blog had a spot of bother back in the summer of 2014 when it first revealed a possible teacher supply crisis. It is also accepted that teacher shortages overall and of those most appropriately qualified are likely to be most significant in schools with higher levels of deprivation than in areas of affluence. It is also worth recalling that pupil numbers in secondary schools were falling in the years up to 2016, and that budget pressures can also play a part in determining class sizes as well as availability of qualified teachers.

In further posts today, I will examine the UCAS data both for August this year, as a predictor of the 2019 supply side of the teacher labour market and then consider how 2019 compares with the previous two years for August’s in relation to the expectation of trainee numbers.

There is room for a genuine debate about how the teacher stock can be best used to provide the best outcomes for all pupils. But, that may require a degree of intervention by government not acceptable in a capitalist economy: hence, presumably, EPI’s suggestion of market based solutions. The failure of the attempts by the coalition government, of which David Laws the head of EPI was a serving Minister in the DfE, to create either a National Teaching Service or a method of providing head teachers to challenging schools, shows how complicated the labour market in teaching can be when no one body has overall control and budgets are allocated to individual schools. But, that debate has been well-rehearsed already on this blog.

There is also the issue of where increasing recruitment into training would mean more teacher unemployment? Can the system absorb more trainees? Evidence from TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk suggest that in mathematics that might be a challenge to employ increased numbers of trainees as there are unlikely to be many suppressed vacancies and increased supply might not be met be increased demand, unless those already teaching maths and regarded as under-qualified were either redeployed or made redundant in some way. Could making someone redundant to replace them with someone doing the same job, but with different qualifications, see some employment law challenges?

Fortunately, rising pupil numbers offers a way out of that dilemma, as does harnessing modern technology effectively to assist the teaching and learning process.

Pay physics teachers more than history teachers?

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The research report published today by the Education Policy institute (EPI) is an interesting addition to the cannon of literature on the issue of teacher shortages.  https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/EPI-Teacher-Labour-Market_2018.pdf The major new component in ‘The Teacher Labour Market in England shortages, subject expertise and incentives’ is the consideration of where shortages are located on a local authority by local authority basis. The data comes from the 2016 School Workforce Census of 2016, so is now two years out of date.

Much of the basic issues around shortages have been covered by the Migration Advisory Committee, the School Teachers’ Review Body, the Education Select Committee, the National Audit Office and the range of publications from the DfE including their index of teacher shortages as well as previous publications from EPI. In that respect, the lack of a bibliography is something of a shortcoming in this report.

Indeed, missing from any analysis of shortages in the EPI report is a discussion of the relationship between the training market and the demand for teachers by schools. Are we training teachers where they are needed or are we, as a nation, training them where they are not needed? The supply of mathematics teachers is a case in point. As this blog has pointed out, there are more trainees in maths than in English, but the number of vacancies is roughly the same since the amount of curriculum time for each subject is roughly the same.

A quick look at TeachVac’s percentage of advertisements in maths and English for 2018 in just the South East region is revealing in their shares of the overall total.

Eng % maths%
Southampton 15% 21%
Reading 17% 19%
Hampshire 18% 16%
Slough 13% 16%
East Sussex 16% 15%
Medway 15% 15%
Brighton and Hove 11% 15%
Kent 11% 14%
Oxfordshire 9% 14%
Isle of Wight 14% 14%
Windsor and Maidenhead 8% 14%
Buckinghamshire 15% 14%
Milton Keynes 10% 12%
Surrey 10% 11%
Bracknell Forest 12% 11%
West Berkshire 16% 10%
West Sussex 17% 9%
Wokingham 21% 9%
Portsmouth 18% 8%
All South East 13% 13%

 

Now these numbers haven’t been corrected for re-advertisements, so there is some over-estimates.

The EPI conclusion that in many areas schools with a greater degree of deprivation among their school population have fewer teachers with degrees most closely connected to shortage subjects, is revealing, but not surprising. This was a tenant of the former Secondary School Curriculum and Staffing Surveys that the Department for Education and its predecessors used to use before the School Workforce Census to measure expertise among the workforce. How to teach Physics at ‘A’ level in schools where there is no teacher with a Physics degree is a real challenge for a fractured education system, where cooperation between schools is not encouraged. But, it is not a revelation. Indeed, the EPI study might have benefitted from looking at changes over time in the use of under-qualified teachers as the Migration Advisory Committee achieved in Table 4.19 of their 2017 Report.

Finally, the EPI solutions proposed   provide a real sense of deja vue. Salary supplements for working in challenging schools seems very like the ‘Schools of exceptional difficulty’ payments of the Heath government in the 1970s and schools can already pay recruitment and retention allowances to teachers in shortage subjects, but don’t seem to do so. However, they seem more willing to pay heads of department in shortage subjects more either through higher TLRs or offering posts on the Leadership Scale. This is an area EPI might like to investigate at some point in the future.

EPI did not consider the DfE’s CPD programme in mathematics that is trying to improve the qualifications of those already teaching the subject. Such an approach can be more helpful than salary supplements that pay teachers different amounts for performing the same task. There would need to be an index of shortages and although it would be headed by Physics – where the country just doesn’t produce enough graduates – business studies would probably come next; a subject not mentioned by EPI.

 

 

 

 

Am MIS system for teachers?

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Does the government need a Management Information System (MIS) for teachers? In the past the answer was obviously no, as teachers were employed by schools operated by local authorities, diocese or various charities, including some London livery company foundations. The government needed a register of Qualified Teachers, not least so it has something to bar miscreants from that prevented them working as teachers, but presumably not as always calling themselves teachers, since ‘teacher’ isn’t a reserved occupation term that can be only used by appropriately qualified professionals. However, a barred teacher might still be guilty of an offence, such as ‘obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception’, if they held themselves out to be a teacher when on the barred list.

But, I digress from the question of whether the government needs an MIS system? It clearly also need to know who are members of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme and their service record, but again, that isn’t an MIS system.

What the government does have, in place of an MIS system, is the School Workforce Census, taken annually in November that records teachers currently in service. Since the mistaken abolition of the General Teaching Council for England, in the bonfire of the QUANGOs that also saw several other useful bodies disappear for little good reason, it hasn’t had a registration scheme to track both current teachers and those that might possibly be available at some point in the future to the profession, although it knows the number of ‘out of service’ teachers not working in state-funded schools.

Now, as can be seen by the manner in which the DfE’s Teacher Supply Model uses the School Workforce Census data for planning purposes, what data there is can be helpful to government in managing the future shape of the workforce. However, it is always out of date and backward looking. As a result, unlike a good MIS system, it cannot spot changes that might be vital for future planning as they happen in real time, and certainly not as early as the end of the recruitment round for September of any year.

Just to provide one example; how is the battle between tighter resources for schools and the growth in secondary school pupil numbers at Key Stage 3 while they are still falling or level at Key Stage 5 playing out in the labour market for teachers in 2018? And, is the fall in pupil numbers at Key Stage 1 already affecting the demand for teachers?

If a curious MP asks a question in September of the DfE about the recruitment round for 2018 they will be referred to the 2017 School Workforce Census that provides the most recent data available to the DfE. Is that good enough in this day and age?

The School Workforce Census has been amended and is likely to be further amended in 2019 to ask questions both about recruitment and why vacancies have arisen, thus making it more like a MIS system.

Schools already have complex databases about their staff and TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk already tracks the majority of vacancies in state-funded schools across England as they arise. To create a MIS system would be to create a dynamic system that recorded changes in the workforce as they happen.

For instance, how many NQTs will leave their first jobs in the autumn term and is there anything similar about the characteristics of the schools, the new teachers, or the type of school in which they were working?

In 1991, I visited Pakistan to help with some CPD for school leaders. At that time the government’s MIS system for teachers, provided by an aid package could have answered that question. Ministers here, still won’t be able to answer it until spring 2020, and the results of the 2019 School Workforce Census are published. Not good enough?

 

 

Marketing matters

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TeachVac, the free recruitment site for schools and teachers, www.teachvac.co.uk is having a bumper August in terms of visitors. That’s not really a surprise, as Teachvac has upped the marketing budget to widen our reach even further than the record numbers of teachers reached during the recent peak recruitment season. The months between March and June witnessed records being broken every month.

August is a good time to market to teachers as they are often interacting with social media and may have more time than at other points in the year, apart from that week between Christmas and New Year.

TeachVac staff are also busy working away at updating all our information about schools. What was Edubase – now GIAS, ‘Government Information About Schools’ – seems to contain a proportion of errors. Most are trivial, names not yet updated or re-brokered academies were the data hasn’t caught up with the change. But, there are a small number of more serious issues, such as the primary school listed as a post-16 establishment and the multi-academy trusts where all schools are listed under the central office site, making it difficult for parents to know where each school is located and possibly skewing the data associated with the school that can affect the results for several different geographical areas.

Once TeachVac’s staff have completed their update, we will see if the DfE is interested in knowing of these issues? As it is a free service to schools and teachers, should TeachVac make a charge for such a service to the DfE?

On a different but not unrelated front, BERA, the British Education Research Association will publish a blog from 2016 posted on this site that I wrote about school recruitment differences across the country. This will form part of a new series BERA is promoting. I will provide the link to their site on the 5th September when it becomes active. It may also be possible to provide an update on the situation in 2018 to compare with the outcomes in 2016 what I wrote two years’ ago.

Next week will also see the August data from UCAS about recruitment to postgraduate teacher preparation courses starting this September. Although not the final figures, the August numbers do provide a clear direction of travel for the 2019 recruitment round. I hope to publish a three-year comparison of the August figures along with the regular monthly commentary.

 

CEOs pay: what’s happening?

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A recent Chartered Institute of Personnel Development survey found that median pay for bosses of the UK’s biggest companies hit almost £4m last year – up from about £3.5m in 2016. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45183881

That set me thinking about the work the DfE undertook earlier this year in relation to the pay of CEOs of Multi Academy Trusts and whether or not the findings had been published anywhere?

Readers will recall that Eileen Milner, the chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency, wrote in February to the chairs of 87 MATs employing individuals earning more than £150,000, asking them to explain their rationale for doing so by early March and to justify paying these salaries.

The intervention comes two days after the Department for Education minister, Lord Agnew, said that no MAT boss should receive a larger pay increase than their teaching staff and that CEOs should have their pay cut if there is a downturn in the performance of their schools. It follows a similar letter sent in December 2016 to single-academy trusts paying leaders more than £150,000. Lord Agnew’s February letter can be accessed at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/683075/Lord_Theodore_Agnew_letter_to_chairs_of_academy_trusts.pdf

Further letters appear to have been written to some MATs in April and July seeking more information. These can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/letters-to-academy-trusts-about-levels-of-executive-pay 28 letters were sent in December 2017; 88 in February 2018 and a further 96 letters in either April or July 2018. With a final return date of 20th July, the EFSC should now have sufficient information to publish a report on the state of the most highly paid staff in the public education service.

There may be an issue relating to pensions should those not undertaking any teaching or direct site leadership of a school remain in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. In the past, when becoming local authority staff most would have moved out of the TPS into the relevant LGPS for their authority. I don’t’ know how LGPS scheme managers and trustees, of which I am one for Oxfordshire’s scheme, would approach the arrival of such highly paid staff so near pensionable age, but the DfE does need to make clear the boundary for who can belong to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme even if they aren’t actually in a school?

The level of salaries paid to senior staff in the school system is clearly a matter that won’t go away. After all, perhaps 100 MATs paying more than most local authorities pay their Director of Children’s Services must be of concern in term of expenditure, especially once pension and other on-costs are added to the basic salary.

The problem really dates back to the Labour government and the development of Executive Headteacher roles without the government making it clear how such professionals should be paid. However, the seeds of that confusion date even further back into the early 1990s and the refusal to police the upper end of the Leadership Pay Scale for large schools facing recruitment difficulties. Failure to deal with a problem doesn’t always make it go away; sometimes it allows it to grow into a serious issue that is much harder to tackle as is now the case with the pay of CEOs of MATs.