Category Archives: leadership

Does anyone care about Design and Technology teaching?

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It wasn’t just trees that were falling on Friday. Available new entrants for teaching jobs in September in design and technology hit new lows on TeachVac’s index.

Here is a snapshot of the first seven weeks of the year in terms of remaining trainee numbers in D&T matched to vacancies on a score of two vacancies means one less trainee available for future jobs.

Datevacancies 2016vacancies 2017vacancies 2018vacancies 2019vacancies 2020vacancies 2021vacancies 2022
01/01/2021
08/01/2021412.5371.5217219343580231
15/01/2021399356201.5202312561178
22/01/2021381.5342.5181.5191270533114
29/01/2021370321172.513122650353
05/02/2021352.5311.5157.5971854780
12/02/2021341290.514174136444-63
19/02/2021332.5286126.54478427-116
Source; TeachVac

Now we can debate the methodology, but it has remained consistent over the eight years, so even if the numbers are too alarming this year to seem to be credible, the trend is still there to see. The numbers in the table are for the whole of England, so some areas may be better, but others might be worse. The data doesn’t include Teach First or other ‘off programme’ courses that are not reported as a part of the core ITT Census from the DfE. The index does make some assumptions about completion rates based upon past evidence and that those on salaried routes won’t be looking for jobs on the open market.

Design and Technology is a portmanteau subject, and the data cannot reveal whether particular aspects are faring better or worse. Of course, some posts may attract art and design teachers, where there is no shortage of trainees, but they won’t help in any shortage of say, food technology teachers.

What’s to be done? First, there has to be an acknowledgement by policymakers that there is an issue before solutions can be found. Then, we need to ask, is this a subject we still need to teach in our schools? Will our nation be impoverished if it disappears? I think the answer to that is in the name of the subject.

Do we need a strategic approach that also recognises the current situation impacts upon the levelling up agenda cherished by the present government? In my humble opinion we do.

Perhaps the Education Select Committee might like to take an evidence session on the topic of ‘teaching D&T in our schools’. The DfE has this evidence now that it is managing a job board, so cannot claim ignorance of any problem. However, it can produce evidence to prove me wrong in my assertions in this post. Does ofsted have a role here? Should they conduct a thematic review of the teaching and staffing of D&T departments to advise Ministers?

How many of the trainees funded by student loans and public money end up in the private sector or in further education, or even teaching overseas? Do these losses compound the problem?

Finally, where do we go from here with Design and Technology, if I am correct in my judgement that the issue is now too serious to ignore?

Bye-bye ESFA: Hello ESFA

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Yesterday, the DfE published the outcome of the review into the Education and Skills Funding Agency led by Sir David Bell plus its response to the review and the resulting changes from 1st April 2022.

Review of the Education and Skills Funding Agency – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are a lot of detailed proposals, but some that struck me of more general interest are these – with the government’s response below the recommendation.

We recommend that further work is done as part of school system reform to create a more strategic and shared understanding of responsibilities between DfE, ESFA, and Ofsted, and that the outcomes of this work are communicated widely

Agreed.

We recommend that the department should have a unified directing voice at a regional level. We have contributed to the current Future DfE project which is bringing together functions in the regional tier, and which will resolve the form and nature of that directing voice

Agreed. Assessing the functions and approach to post-16 regional work will be taken forward as part of developing the Further Education, Higher Education and Employers work set out above and be led by the Director General. We will benefit from learning from the experience of establishing the pre-16 regional tier.

We recommend that, in keeping with our finding that ESFA should focus on funding delivery, the functions in Academies and Maintained Schools Directorate not linked to the funding delivery role, and not required by ESFA’s Accounting Officer to provide assurance, should move to DfE. This means that the non-financial regulatory functions for academies and the functions related to school/trust governance should move to DfE’s pre-16 regional tier, as should new trust and free school activity, UTC engagement, and networking events.

Agreed.

We recommend DfE considers bringing the complaints functions for maintained schools and academies together in a fully centralised complaints system within the department

Agreed.

We recommend that ownership of the Academy Trust Handbook should move to DfE’s School Systems, Academies and Reform Directorate, unless the focus of the Handbook is narrowed back towards a tool for financial management only.

Agreed.

The ESFA had become rather unwieldy over time and these changes will move it back towards its original core function relating to the handling of the financing of the school system.

More interestingly is the re-alignment of the school system with the wider government regional framework. With the levelling up agenda being a cross-department exercise in government, this re-alignment makes sense. However, it doesn’t fit with the boundaries of Headteacher boards and Regional School Commissioners. Could the days of this unelected post be numbered? After all, might there be some cash savings to be made and, if all schools were academies of one sort or another, then one key function would have disappeared.

The DfE still has to work out the 16-18 phase where some students are in the school sector, but more are in the further education sector. There still seems to be room for overlap or avoidance of difficult issues unless the protocol of responsibilities between the directorates is made clear.

One interesting side effect of all schools becoming academies would be the shift in financial year for all schools back to a unified position. However, the financial year would be totally uncoupled from the municipal year, but aligned to the higher education funding rounds.

This review helps sort out the framework for the ‘top’ tier. Now it remains to work out the framework for the middle tier. That will probably be more of a challenge.

Funding schools: how far to hypothecate?

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No sooner do we have a National Funding Formula for schools than it starts to dawn on some people that’ equal’ shares may not be the best way to achieve the policy goal of levelling up outcomes. How funds are distributed to schools are key to education outcomes, and have been ever since the State mandated schooling as the default position for the education of children whose parents did not, could not, or would not make other arrangements.

At the heart of the debate about the distribution of funds are two key principles: equity and the identification of the point of decision on how to spend funds. For much of the past 100 years the issues around the degree of hypothecation of funds was centre stage. With the devolution of budgets to schools in the 1990s, this issue was replaced for a long period by the debate over how much cash should be allocated to schooling.

Of course, the problem of creating an education system where all may enjoy success meant that the issue of how funds were allocated didn’t entirely disappear from the political agenda. However, the simple view of a hard National Funding Formula approach that put the view that ‘equal means the same for all’ centre stage – except of course that pay differentials and London weighting meant that it was never as simple as some would have liked – gained supremacy in thinking, although there were always other exceptions such as Education Opportunity Areas.

Funding policy is now under scrutiny once again, with the national levelling up agenda taking centre stage in the political agenda around policymaking. This policy hasn’t been fully worked through in terms of what it means for education and the hypothecation agenda. I wrote in an earlier blog post about how you enforce retention payments to teachers if that is a mechanism to be used in the prosecution of levelling up. Mandate schools and provide a hypothecated grant?

This week there have been two helpful additions to help the discussions on the funding debate. The House of Commons library has published a research briefing, excellent, as always, on School Funding https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8419/CBP-8419.pdf

Teach First, the charity whose aims now extend well beyond just training teachers to work in schools with high levels of disadvantage pupils, has published a  report around rethinking the Pupil Premium Rethinking pupil premium: a costed proposal for levelling up | Teach First The Pupil Premium is, of course,  a great example of a semi-hypothecated grant to schools, in that its criteria for distribution are made clear, but its actual use by schools is not determined closely as part of the funding.

At present, different rules also apply as between maintained schools and academies and Academy Trusts in how funds distributed through the National Funding formula may be aggregated to cover central costs. This is an interesting area of the hypothecation debate that merits further discussion.

But in the end, decisions about the allocation of funds will always be in the hands of those that provide the funding. Local council taxpayers can be grateful that funding schools is no longer a part of their costs in urban areas. In the countryside, and where there are large bills for special needs transport, it is a different matter, as school transport costs are left to local council taxpayers to cover.

The Labour market for Teachers in England – some thoughts for 2022

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The following piece first appeared in a recent SSAT Sunday Supplement piece

As recently as a decade ago, the process of advertising for teachers was simple. A school advised with its local authority HR department’s bulletin and paid for an advert in the TES. This ritual hadn’t altered much since the early 1990s when schools gained control of their budgets for the first time. However, much has changed in the past few years: tes is on its fourth set of owners, and now most schools pay a subscription fee; the DfE has entered the market with a job board; local authority job boards mostly don’t handle vacancies in academies, and recruitment agencies along with a plethora of new entrants on-line are seeking custom from schools with ever more eye catching products that are handling advertising and selection as a package.

After a lifetime in education, and forty years studying the labour market for teachers, I set up TeachVac to demonstrate what a low-cost model for advertising teacher vacancies, and indeed all vacancies in schools, would cost. Eight years on, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk handled 64,000 teaching vacancies in 2021, with more than 1,000,000 matches of interested teachers with schools.

As a spin-off to its main service, TeachVac provides significant data about the labour market for teachers. The remainder of this piece is about my predictions for the 2022 recruitment round for teachers in England. Necessarily, the comments will be general, but TeachVac has much more data that it can share with schools about local trends and matches being made.

Any current analysis of the labour market starts with the publication of the DfE’s latest ITT census of numbers on preparation courses to become a teacher (This appeared in December 2021). For the secondary sector, these trainees are mostly on course lasting one academic year. So, registrations for 2021 will be a major source of recruits for September 2022 vacancies. The other source of teachers are returners, whether from a career break or employed elsewhere, including teaching overseas and finally there are those teachers that are either switching jobs or seeking promotion.

Demand is led by an increase in pupil numbers, as in the secondary sector at present; departures, with any increase in departure boosting demand. At present, the growing international school sector is an important source of demand. One UK private school is to open its sevenths overseas campus in Tokyo. Another key source of demand is from teachers taking a career break. Finally, there are those leaving state schools for other employment in the private sector; further education or careers outside of education.

With a strong finish to 2021, and 8,000 recorded vacancies in January 2022, schools will need to pay attention to market trends if they are going to have a need to hire teachers in 2022. As the primary sector market for classroom teacher is well served with candidates, schools should not face issues at the national level, the secondary sector market is more complex and divides into three subject groupings.

Schools seeking to recruit teachers in subjects such as history, physical education, art and drama should face no issues at the national level, even for January 2023 appointments. At the other end of the scale are physics, design and technology, business studies and some of the specialist subjects such as law and psychology where recruitment is already challenging for some schools and all schools will face issues trying to recruit as 2022 progresses, and certainly for January 2023 appointments. All other subjects lie somewhere along this continuum, with some parts of the county experiencing more challenges that others, and some facing challenges earlier in the recruitment round, but all likely to face some difficulty for January 2023 appointments.

Schools that are better placed than others to deal with recruitment issues are those fortunate enough to be able to recruit trainees through school-based preparation programmes or Teach First. Next in line are those schools working with other training providers, such as universities, where they have access to links to students via mentors and school placements. Finally, those schools needing to trawl entirely on the open market are most in need of up-to-date information on the working of the labour market. MATs and MACs grouped close together geographically may be able to swop staff and certainly offer promotions to staff.

The ability to manage staff development is becoming increasingly important, as the DfE now realise, since several years of missed training targets are now affecting the market for middle leaders in some subjects and parts of the primary sector. The middle leader market is under-researched, but vital to the levelling-up agenda.

Finally, the market for headteachers in the secondary sector remains, as ever it was. Schools advertising at a sensible time of year and without specific demands usually manage to recruit. Recruitment of headteachers in the primary sector is more of a challenge, especially for faith schools in an increasingly secular society, and for specific types of school, such as infant or junior schools. Succession planning within MAT/MACs seems like a good policy at all levels, but especially for headships.

John Howson

Chair, TeachVac

White flag or shifting the blame

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There is a saying that one should beware of unexpected guests. For reasons obvious to those that know the saying, it is clear why I prefer to compare it with the other saying of ‘not looking a gift horse in the mouth’ – should that be looking an electric car in the battery these days – but without using the actual expression. No matter, what does matter is whether or not local authorities will be able to form and run Multi Academy Trusts/Committees?

Ever since Mr Gove raced the 2010 Academies Act through parliament in the period before the summer break that year, and less than three months after the 2010 General Election, the Conservatives have wanted all schools to become academies. At that time, local authorities were beyond the pale, and a model with no local democratic involvement, similar to that of the NHS, seemed on the cards for education. Peter Downes a former Cambridgeshire Lib Dem councillor and long time secondary head led the Lib Dem charge at their 2010 September Conference, an event where delegates made their support for local democratic involvement in education very clear to Nick Clegg and David Laws.

Over the ensuing decade, most secondary schools have either opted or been forced to become an academy. All new schools are required to become an academy. However, except in a few parts of the country, academisation of the primary sector schools has been slow and patchy. Many primary schools only became academies are a visit from ofsted resulted in compulsory academisation.

The picture that has emerged around the county is of an expensive mess that could make the reputation of a Secretary of State if change is handled properly with a view to the longer-term effectiveness of the school sector.

There are now noises in the press suggesting that the next White Paper from the DfE might allow local authorities to establish and run Multi Academy Trusts or Committees or some new structure such as a Multi Academy Board might be created. Such a suggestion would effectively be a change of direction on the part of central government. Is it either a white flag or preparing the ground to shift the blame for a period of challenge that will face the primary sector where most maintained schools are still to be found?

There is a third possibility. This is that civil servants have been so impressed by how some local authorities have handled the covid crisis that they now recognise their value as part of the middle tier, especially in handling the large number of small primary schools spread across rural England. Certainly, the work by the local authority team in Oxfordshire, where I am a county councillor, has resulted in an email from a headteacher of a private school expressing thanks for the work of local authority staff. Not something you receive every day.

Allowing or even forcing local authorities to take all schools not already academies into a LAB or Local Academy Board would allow the government to tell the public that all schools were now academies. It would allow local authorities to feel that they might be back in the game of education politics and it would allow for more coherent planning for the primary sector less hampered by the legislation on closing rural schools. This may be important should the National Funding Formula create the need to rationalise the school estate.

Attendance Group must address in-year admissions issue

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I recently caught up with news about the DfE’s Attendance Group, and the Minutes of its December meeting.  Attendance Action Alliance January meeting notes: 9 December 2021 (publishing.service.gov.uk)

I am delighted to discover the high-profile nature of membership the Group and that the Secretary of State has taken an interest, as owner of the work. However, although the Group discussed the question of a register for home educated children and the concerns over those children just missing school on a regular basis, I didn’t find any emphasis on ensuring that children taken into care are offered a school palace as swiftly as possible and within set time limits. The same standards also need to be put in place for children with special needs whose parents move to a new location during the school year and need a new school placement.

Taking a new job should not be conditional on whether there is a special school place available for your child.

In a previous post on this blog, calling for a ‘Jacob’s Law’, I laid out the case for in-year admissions to academies not to be held up by such schools not wanting to admit such children. The 2016 Education White Paper: Education Excellence Everywhere recognised there was an issue with in-year admissions to academies because local authorities had no powers to over-rule the decision of a school not to admit a pupil. This was why Jacob was out of school when he died. Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Sadly, nothing significant has changed since 2016. I hope that the Attendance Group will consider the issue of in-year admissions at a future meeting, and not just focus on the parents that don’t send their children to school. The system must work for the benefit of all and not just those that are easy to educate. The same is the case of children with SEND requiring in-year admission to a school.

These young people must not be ignored, and just offering tutoring is not the same as admission to a school. Home tutoring doesn’t provide the same social interaction that being in a school provides however good the ‘virtual school’ is at its job.

Of course, there are risks where the school community is hostile to incomers and many schools could well look to improve the transfer experience for in-year admissions that can be even worse than that experienced by pupils transferring at the start of the school-year.

Being taken into care as a school-age child is a traumatic experience, and we owe it to these children to make sure that their education is affected as little as possible. So, it is my hope that the Attendance Group will as a minimum endorse the 2016 White Paper suggestions and, if possible, go further and set time limits for school places to be offered to children taken into care and requiring a new school placement. For most, it wasn’t their fault that they have ended up in the care of the local authority where all the secondary schools are academies.

Academies increase cash balances

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Hard on the heels of the Treasury Select Committee’s Report, with its comments on government funding of education – see previous post on this bog – comes the 10th Annual Academy Benchmark Report from Kreston Global Kreston-Academies-Benchmark-Report-2022-Web.pdf (krestonreeves.com) This detailed report raises a set of interesting questions, and also offers pointers as to why the labour market for teachers in the secondary sector may have been so buoyant during January 2022.

The Kreston Report comments that

“Once again, we are seeing record breaking in-year surpluses for MATs, whilst secondaries are showing a small increase and Primaries have fallen to 2019 levels. But this top level statistic hides the complex mix of variables giving rise to the surpluses. This result is likely to be a by-product of Covid-19 factors rather than an intentional result. The good news is that fewer Trusts are now in a cumulative deficit position and only 19% had an in-year deficit (2020: 25%).”

And

“The size of the in-year surpluses has gone up to record levels; there are less Trusts making in-year deficits, there are less Trusts with cumulative deficits, free reserves are up, and cash balances are up.” (page 12).

The Kreston Report adds that: “From conversations we have had with our Academy clients many were budgeting for in-year deficits or to break even, and were on track for this to happen. “(page 11).

Now, does this mean that a lot of the cash for catch-up programmes is already sitting in secondary school bank accounts? Why wasn’t the saving on supply teachers and other budget heading immediately transferred into support for pupils?

To allow reserves to increase during the pandemic raises questions abut either a lack of congruence between values and budgets or a less than perfect understanding of financial affairs by school leaders? Surely, neither is the case. However, the increase in balances, even if unexpected, does raise some interesting questions about the relationship between decision-making and educational values.

Way back in the 1990s, when I first worked on Assessment Centres for would-be headteachers, this was an issue of concern. Those in education are good at talking, but do they always possess the skills to put their values into actions? What is the relationship between the values of school business managers and education leaders, especially when faced with challenges for which there is no rulebook?

One reason for high cash balances cited by Kreston in the report is my old bugbear, saving for future capital spending. The Kreston Report says this “Some MATs do have a strategy of accumulating funds within the central fund to meet the costs of future capital projects, so this could explain why there are sizeable balances carried forward in some cases.” (page 20) My view has always been that revenue spending should be for today’s pupils, not those of tomorrow, especially when the non-physical environment is so challenged as it has been during the pandemic.

The Kreston report concludes with some interesting benchmark data, but not, as far as I can see, anything on staff recruitment costs. In view of the amount schools can spend in this area, that seems like a curious admission not to extrapolate it from the measure where it is no doubt currently buried.

Taken together, both the Select Committee Report on future spending and the Kreston Report on past trends make for interesting reading for anyone concerned with the education of the nation’s young people.

Teacher Supply – long term strategy needed

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Here is a short piece commissioned by the ‘foundation for education development’ that first appeared on their website as a think piece .

The long-term planning of teacher supply in England is once again in a ‘bit of a mess’. After renewed interest by graduates in teaching as a career at the start of the pandemic, there is now little chance that the government will hit its 2022 target for the number of secondary trainees required to meet the demand from schools in 2023 as modelled by DfE statisticians.

2022 marks nearly a decade of missed training targets in subjects such as physics, business studies and design and technology across the country as a whole and for a wider range of subjects in much of southern England where the state sector is competing in the labour market with private schools and tutorial colleges for the services of teachers. In recent years, the new factor of a growing global market for teachers, fuelled to some extent by schools founded in England opening campuses overseas, has created new competition for the scarce resource that is secondary school teachers in some subjects.

Any shortage of teachers affects the campaign to level up outcomes. Ever since I joined the teaching profession over 50 years ago, schools in challenging circumstances and serving communities with high levels of deprivation have usually suffered the effects of teacher shortages more than schools where teaching is a delight and ofsted awards good grades.

So, if the problem isn’t new, and is well known, what are the solutions? Making teaching an attractive career starts with three basic requirements. These are pay; conditions and reputation. The last is the easiest to deal with: Ministers need to talk up teaching and recognise the work of classroom teachers and not just school leaders. A great deal of work was undertaken on conditions of service in the first decade of this century: now is the time to revisit and review that work. Finally, if new lawyers in London are starting with top firms at £150,000 a year, £35,000 or so to start in a challenging school in London may not look attractive to many graduates in key subjects: pay matters.

The pandemic has also shown the value of technology and the balance between teachers and learning technology needs to be addressed. This may be the simplest way to pay teachers more. Finally, good employers recognise the need for professional development. The government now needs to fund programmes that keep teachers in the profession and nurture them during career breaks. Is it time for a Teaching Czar?

Start Recruiting now

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This is the stark warning to schools across much of Southern England that may need staff this September and especially to secondary schools. TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk data has shown that the first three weeks of January have witnessed a continuation of the trend at the end of 2021 with a considerable increase in vacancies recorded.

TeachVac hasn’t changed its vacancy collection methods since 2020 but it has seen vacancies listed in the first 19 days of the month in 2022 increase by 14% over the recorded numbers recorded in early January 2020 pre-pandemic, and by a whopping 135% over the depressed level of last January.

As reported in a previous post, design and technology staff will be especially hard to recruit in 2022. Already in 2022, vacancies recorded are 48% up on the same period in 2020. Vacancies for teachers of music are up by an eyewatering 73% on 2020 vacancies in early January.

All these vacancies mean that the pool of new entrants will be reducing at a faster rate than in previous years. High quality trainees will be offered vacancies by schools that understand these trends and are aware of the state of the pool of trainees, either because they run school-based programmes or because their mentors have told them what higher education providers are saying.

TeachVac’s low-cost service can keep school up to date with trends for as little as £100 and a maximum of £1,000 per year that includes listing and matching all the school’s teaching vacancies with TeachVac’s growing pool of register users.

Registration also provides access to far better data than on the DfE site and also intelligence on the state of the recruitment round for trainees for September 2022 and hence the labour market in 2023.

Signing up today at www.teachvac.co.uk and the tab matching service will also bring a free copy of TeachVac report.  Message me if you want more information or use the comment box.

Recruitment 2022: a rough ride to come

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Can you tell anything about the 2022 recruitment round for teachers in England based upon just four days of vacancy data? One of the advantages of a job board such as TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk is the it has sufficient cumulative data on vacancies that can be allied with data about the numbers of teachers on preparation courses to be able to provide some helpful comments on the labour market, even after just four days of data.

For those that are sceptical of such a claim, consider sampling theory. A simple example is to assume a bowl of soup. A small spoonful will tell you whether or not the bowl if full of hot soup. Now scale up to a vat size container. Will a small sample tell you the same answer for the whole? Now purists might maintain that the bottom of the vat could be hotter than the top; I would agree. Taking that comment to vacancy data means that the comments for England as a whole might well include differences across the regions. Such an objection is true, and that is why each month TeachVac produces regional data for most secondary subjects and the primary sector. But it doesn’t invalidate sampling as a useful tool.

Anyway, back to our sample of 2022, and what I think it tells schools about the recruitment round this year. The first point is that it confirms what was being said at the end of 2021, appointments for September 2022 will be more of a challenge almost across the board as the 2020 bounce in interest in teaching as a career drops out of the supply side.

How bad will 2022 be? Well, nothing of concern in art, PE and history. Indeed, schools might well be starting to consider whether they can make use of an extra history teacher and perhaps an extra PE teacher to make use of the best of the trainees with second subject expertise in the pool of jobseekers.

At the other end of the scale, the usual suspects of design and technology where there will be real issues with recruitment have been joined this year by geography, modern languages and English. In the case of the latter two subjects this is partly because of the number of trainees on courses that will either already have placed them in the classroom or make it likely that they won’t be looking on the open market for a teaching post. Independent schools should take especial note of this fact when considering how easy it will be to recruit a teacher.

Most of the other subjects have seen the size of their ‘free pool’ decline this year compared with 2021, and that will have implications for January 2023 appointments. Such vacancies may be hard to fill in many subjects in those parts of England where recruitment is a challenge; namely London and the Home Counties.

Schools that have signed up to TeachVac’s £1,000 maximum annual recruitment package will receive regular updates on the state of the labour market, including local knowledge. On registration, and at no cost, schools receive a detailed report on the labour market.

Recruiters tell me that TeachVac is ‘too cheap’ to succeed because nothing that cheap could be any good. My principle in founding the job board was to show that recruitment advertising need not cost a lot of money. I still believe that to be true. Do you?