Category Archives: leadership

Mixed messages from ITT data

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On Thursday, UCAS published the data for applications to postgraduate ITT courses by mid-January 2020. I apologise for the delay in posting my comments this month, but I was on leave last week. With the DfE now trailing their own application site, it must be assumed that the UCAS data is no longer comprehensive in terms of applicants. However, I suspect it is still good enough to be able to identify trends in the recruitment cycle for September 2020.

The two key message from the data seem to be: fewer applicants, down from 14,650 last January to 14,240 this year. But, this number is so small as to make no real difference, and the whole of the decline is probably in applications to primary age courses. Applications for secondary courses increased by 130. This probably represents somewhere between 40-50 extra applicants this January compared with 2019.

What seems to be clear is that the application process has been moving faster this year, as there are more applicants that have been placed or offered unconditional offers than at this point in 2019. The other good news is that London and The South East have bucked the trend, with more applicants this January than in 2019.  The London number is impressive, with an increase of more than four per cent over last January. BY contrast, the reduction in the North East is in the order of seven per cent over last January.

Applicant numbers have held steady across most age groups, except for those aged twenty two, and 25-29 age group where applicant numbers are down slightly on last year. There are fewer male and female applicants this year, with fewer than 4,000 male applicants this January.

In terms of applications, primary courses are over 1,000 applicants below this point in 2019, with only PG Teaching Apprenticeships showing any growth over last year. For secondary courses, SCITTs are the main winner, although there are more apprenticeship and School Direct (non-salaried) applications as well. School Direct (Salaried) courses continue to lose ground, but at a slower rate; down to 1,220 from 1,280 last January. Higher Education courses still remain the largest category with 10,830 applications compared to 7,270 for School Direct (non-salaried) courses.

The picture for individual subjects is more nuanced at this stage of the cycle. Subjects with large numbers of applications and strong competition for teaching posts, such as physical education, geography and history have seen some reductions in the number of offers made to candidates possibly as a result of reductions in overall applications in these subjects. More worrying is the decline in applications for mathematics courses, as well as for chemistry and physics courses. The latter may have seen applications down by just 30, but that means a total of just 500 applications this January, with just 90 of these applications either having been placed or holding an offer.

The good news is there are more applications in art, business studies, design and technology and music than at this point in 2019. However, the increases are not yet sufficient to ensure all places will be filled this year. But, any increase is to be welcomed.

Modern Languages look to be the main casualty, with fewer than 600 offers or placed applications, compared to close to 1,000 at the same point last year.

By next month the shape of the recruitment round with have become clearer, and it should be possible to make some realistic predictions. If I were to put my money on it at this stage, and assuming exiting the EU doesn’t upset the labour market too much, then I would say the outcome might be slightly better than in September 2019, but not enough to meet the Teacher Supply model numbers from the DfE.

Stuck Schools

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This Report from Ofsted is an important addition to the discussions aound school improvement and deserves to sit alongside other HMI documents on this topic. For those of my generation these include the famous ’10 Good Schools’ report of some 40 years ago.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fight-or-flight-how-stuck-schools-are-overcoming-isolation/fight-or-flight-how-stuck-schools-are-overcoming-isolation-evaluation-report

Using the terms ‘stuck’ and ‘unstuck’ schools, tells it as it is. I was especially struck by the paragraph in the Executive Summary that said:

‘Most stuck and unstuck schools stated that they had received too much school improvement advice from too many different quarters of the school system. Often, the advice was intended to help schools with their improvement strategy. However, this rarely had the intended impact. Leaders perceived that the quality of the advice itself was often lacking. School leaders also commented on a poor match between the problems of the school and the advice on offer. While many were concerned about the lack of support available following inspection, schools often welcomed the fresh thinking and impetus that independent inspection had given them. Schools did not appear to be inhibited from discussing some of the challenges of inspection during this project.’

Ofsted’s suggests that there is enough capacity in the system to move ‘stuck’ schools forward, but that the content of the support, including whether it enables focused may be lacking.  There also needs to be effective action that responds directly to the issues identified. Additionally, is the support for a ‘stuck’ school best provided internally or externally to the school or MAT and there is also a question about the quality of those coordinating or delivering the support?

This last point is important as the fractured governance model for schools sometimes makes it difficult to identify the organisation responsible for taking the lead role in actually improving these schools.

What is the penalty for failure? Obviously, for local authorities and maintained schools, it is a transfer to become an academy. But what of academies? And, especially what of academies that are part of faith-led MATs where the Church doesn’t want to give up running the school, but cannot stop it being a ‘stuck’ school within a reasonable period of time?

Should there be a review of each Office of Regional School Commissioner to establish a baseline of the number of ‘stuck’ schools and a target for improvement that has consequences if not met? Alternatively, should the Office of Regional School Commissioner be abolished and a closer link to local democracy be once again added to our school system?

Finally, there needs to be a discussion about both funding for ‘stuck’ schools and how any extra funding is allocated under a National Funding Formula that clearly doesn’t take fully into account the fact that some pupils need more resources to achieve a desired level of outcome than do others.

Staff Development, and especially leadership development, also needs to be looked at afresh by the DfE. Should we re-introduce a qualification for leadership with modules about leading a ‘stuck school’? At least then the system would have a better idea of capacity to support and ‘unstick’ these schools.

We cannot allow the next decade to be wasted as the last one has been in so many cases as far as the education of these young people is concerned.

 

What headteachers told PISA about schools in England

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The holiday season has provided me with time to read the full PISA Report for England https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pisa-2018-national-report-for-england as well as look at the comparisons with the other Home Nations, while they remain a part of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Anyway, buried in the details is a section that looks at the results of questionnaires sent to headteachers. Now one must assume that headteachers are influenced by the current mood at the time that they completed the questionnaire, and that mood may differ from country to country. What might have been the mood in England and how does it compare with the OECD average?

Generally, it seems that headeachers in England were more optimistic than the average headteacher in the OECD in their answers to a range of questions about factors that might hinder student learning.

Table 6.5 Pupil and teacher behaviour for learning, reported by headteachers
Percentage of headteachers who responded “A lot” and “To some extent” to In your school, to what extent is the learning of students hindered by the following?
  England OECD Percentage point difference England-OECD
Pupil behaviours
Students not paying attention 40 59 -19
Student truancy 20 38 -18
Students lacking respect for teachers 11 22 -10
Students skipping classes 9 34 -25
Students intimidating or bullying other students 4 12 -8
Student use of alcohol or illegal drugs 3 10 -7
Teacher behaviours
Teachers not meeting individual students’ needs 28 30 -2
Teacher absenteeism 20 18 2
Staff resisting change 10 29 -19
Teachers not being well prepared for classes 5 13 -8
Teachers being too strict with students 3 12 -10

Source: PISA Report England 2019

Only in teacher absenteeism were headteachers in England gloomier than the OECD average. This seems somewhat surprising given the relatively low level of term-time teacher absence in many schools. Generally, although  lack of attention by students was recognised as an issue, even that concerned head teachers less than the average PECD headteacher.

Table 7.14 Hindrances to learning reported by headteachers and principals
Percentage of headteachers who responded “A lot” and “To some extent” to In your school, to what extent is the learning of students hindered by the following?
  England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales
Pupil behaviours
Students not paying attention 40 35 49 30
Student truancy 20 8 35 20
Students lacking respect for teachers 11 19 22 19
Students skipping classes 9 7 31 14
Students intimidating or bullying other students 4 8 13 6
Student use of alcohol or illegal drugs 3 3 5 7
Teacher behaviours
Teachers not meeting individual students’ needs 28 14 29 15
Teacher absenteeism 20 19 30 14
Staff resisting change 10 14 23 12
Teachers not being well prepared for classes 5 3 3 9
Teachers being too strict with students 3 0 6 7

Source: PISA Report England 2019

However, it is interesting to put the views of headteachers in England alongside those of their colleagues in the other Home Nations that completed the PISA questionnaire. On the basis of these responses, one wonder what is going on in some schools in Scotland? The figure for students skipping classes seems difficult to believe if the sample is representative of schools across Scotland and probably also accounts for the high figure for headteachers agreeing that truancy is also seen as an issue by a third of the headteachers compared with a fifth of headteachers in England.

I am not sure what the teacher associations make of the data from these questionnaires, but I am surprised that the government hasn’t made more of it. But, perhaps the views of headteachers looking at schools from their offices isn’t the same as the view from the staffroom?

 

If nurses, why not teachers?

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When the late Frank Dobson managed to secure bursaries for trainee nurses, David Blunkett failed to do the same for trainee teachers. However, postgraduate trainees did have their fees paid, and undergraduate trainees were no worse off than any other undergraduates under the tuition fee regime introduced by the Labour government.

Come the recruitment crisis of the Millennium, and the training grant appeared, backed by additional payments of Golden Hellos to some trainees. These moves, alongside an expansion of the employment-based routes through the Graduate Teacher Training Programme helped expand trainee numbers for a few years. Whether there would have been a new recruitment crisis had the financial firestorm of 2008 not emerged is an interesting issue for debate.

However, as first predicted by the blog in the early part of 2013, a new crisis of recruitment into teaching did finally emerge, even though some Ministers were reluctant to admit its existence at first. At the same time, the revolution in education in England, started under Labour and prosecuted and extended by Michael Gove when he was Secretary of State for Education, saw not only the development of the academy and free school progamme, but also a determined switch away from higher education institutions the main trainer of teachers towards a school-led model.

Indeed, at one point it seemed as if the Coalition government might create a situation where universities, and especially the Russell Group universities involved in teacher education, ceased to have direct responsibility for the preparation of future generations of teachers. The issue of recruitment controls and the fate of the history preparation programme at the University of Cambridge probably marked a watershed moment.

Anyway, Mr Gove moved on, to be succeeded by a succession of relatively short-term holders of the officer of Secretary of State for Education. None seemed to have an abiding passion for the future shape of the school system and its teachers.

So, what has happened to the different routes for preparing graduates to become secondary school teachers?

Secondary PG 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 2016/17 2017/18 2018/19 2019/2020
HE 7318 7193 7105 7965 7913
SCITT 1270 1794 1970 2435 2452
SD Fee 2646 3181 3822 4307 3870 4170 4678
SD Salaried 1244 1197 1475 1409 1080 905 677
Teach First 1107 953 895 760 1215
Grad Apprentice 0 0 0 20 43

The move towards a school-led system has continued, but not at any great pace. Indeed, numbers on the School Direct Salaried route, the de facto successor the GTTP programme has fallen away by this year to only around half of the peak level reached in 2015/16. The new Graduate Apprenticeship Route has yet to make any real impact on numbers, and even SCITTs have failed to recruit many more recruits after their growth spurt up to 2018/19. Only the School Direct fee route seems to be in good health, although even on this route the growth has not been spectacular. Indeed, higher education is still the one dominant route.

Does this plethora of routes make it more difficult to attract new entrants to teaching or perhaps offer choices? I debated this in my evidence to the Carter Review, posted elsewhere on this blog. However, it seems more likely that singling out graduate trainee teachers for financial punishment makes teaching seem the least desirable public sector employment opportunity.

This blog has been resolute in calling for the return of a training grant for all graduate trainee teachers: I see no reason for changing that view now, especially since nurses are once again receiving financial help from the government.

 

Who is in control of education spending?

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On Election Day, the DfE published the annual dataset for expenditure by local authorities on children services, including maintained schools. The figures, as they relate to schools, are generally meaningless on a year by year comparison basis as the DfE doesn’t remove the new academies from the previous years’ data when they were still maintained schools.

For children’s social services and youth Justice, the data does have meaning over several years because local authorities still administer these services. However, there are few indicators to link expenditure to demand. In areas such as ‘children taken into care’, where numbers of children have been increasing in some areas this fact isn’t clear from the presentation of the data.

Research by the Reform think tank using this data shows that 28% of local authority maintained secondary schools in England were in the red at the end of 2018-19, with an average deficit of £570,000.

Reform found that since 2010-11, the proportion of local authority-funded secondary schools with no cash reserves has almost doubled. However, this is not surprising since to become an academy a school must normally not have a deficit.

The proportion of primary schools in deficit is smaller at 8%, having increased by 2.1 percentage points over the same period. The study also found “drastic” variations between schools, with 36% of maintained secondary schools having an “excessive surplus” of cash in the bank – on average more than £390,000.

Generally, in 2018-19 the gap between the average surplus and the average deficit has doubled over the period since 2010-11. At the end of 2018-19 there was more than 30 secondary schools with deficits in excess of £1 million. Only six of these schools were in London, with the Boroughs of Croydon and Enfield each containing two such schools. There were no schools in either the East of England or the East Midlands with deficits in excess of £1 million. The West Midlands, on the other hand, had six such schools.

The largest deficit, of more than £3 was linked to a school in West London that has run deficits in excess of £400,000 in each of the last four years, according to the DfE financial monitoring site for schools https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/school/detail?urn=102449&tab=Balance&unit=AbsoluteMoney&format=Charts#financialSummary Its revenue reserve per pupil were running at a staggering minus £4,614 per pupil at the end of 2018-19. Interestingly, an Ofsted monitoring visit report from October this year doesn’t mention the financial situation at all, so presumably there isn’t seen to be an issue with a deficit of this magnitude? The last full inspection report from October 2018 also fails to mention the financial situation, and any effect it might have on the school’s ability to perform its core function of teaching and learning.

The data on maintained school finances does seem to suggest that there might be a lack of accountability for financial stability and the methods of managing deficits. There seems little point in a National Funding Formula if some schools can drive a coach and horses through the outcomes and rack up large deficits.

What is probably revealed is that some schools need more funding to achieve their aims, and with devolved budgets and governance it isn’t clear who has to take overall responsibility in the present climate.

Does Nationalisation always work?

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Discussions about State ownership has been a feature of this general election campaign. As a Liberal Democrat (Candidate in Castle Point in Essex including the Canvey Island) I prefer J S Mill’s approach as espoused in his treatise ‘On Liberty’. Writing about the role of the state and education, Mill concluded that generally, it is not the role of the State to educate its citizens, but to see that they are educated. Not a view of liberty that is accepted by Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.

However, even Tory governments are not afraid of a spot of nationalisation when it suits them. And here I must declare another interest, for the remainder of this blog is about teacher recruitment, and I am both the chair and the largest shareholder in TeachVac, the free on-line job board for teachers and schools.

Over the past year, the DfE has been developing its national vacancy site for those in schools; teachers and non-teachers alike. The genesis was a NAO Report followed closely by a Select Committee report and a Public Accounts Committee session that all highlighted how little the DfE know of the labour market for teachers in real-time. At the same time head teachers were complaining about the cost of advertising vacancies, one reason for the creation of TeachVac and its free service to schools and teachers.

The DfE could have created a portal to existing sites for teacher vacancies that would have cost little by way of public money. Instead, Ministers sanctioned a full frontal attack on the private sector with a government funded site where state-funded schools could place vacancies for free, with only the cost of training their staff to use the site being borne by the school. Fine, if it works and is value for money.

So how is the DfE doing with this use of public money? Taking a day in late November as a snapshot, it would seem not very well.

An analysis across the core platforms revealed the following numbers of vacancies for teaching posts being listed.

TeachVac 2,053
TES 1,808
Eteach 845
Guardian 593
DfE 580

Of course, the DfE is hampered by not accepting vacancies from private schools, and that will always limit the attraction of the DfE site to teachers looking for vacancies in any type of school.

Apart from TeachVac, all other sites mix non-teaching vacancies up with teaching posts to some extent or other on their sites. This makes the numbers even more difficult to calculate. TeachVac only records teacher vacancies.

Then there is the question of how long vacancies are allowed to remain on a site. Best practice is to remove them the day after the closing date specified by the school in the advert. Some adverts don’t have a closing date these days, and TeachVac will generally ignore these as there is a question about whether there is a real current vacancy at the school or these are just attempts, quite legitimate, at talent banking for the future.

So, on this evidence the DfE is not using public money wisely. Might it, perhaps, be cheaper for the new government to buy a feed from either the TES or TeachVac than to continue to operate its own site.

 

 

Secondary Sector PTRs worsen

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Government statistics whose dates have already been announced before an election is called generally escape being caught up in Purdah during the run-in to the general election. Thus, it was that the DfE announced its Education and Training Statistics for 2018/19 earlier today, along with some revisions and updates to the 2017/18 data.

Much of the data on education and training are uncontroversial, but there are some tables that may cause ripples. The most notable is the table on Pupil Teacher Ratios and Pupil Adult Ratios.

In the primary sector, there was no change in PTRs nationally at 22.9 pupils per teacher. However, this is still way worse than the 15.7 pupils per teacher of 2000/01. In the secondary sector, ratios worsened over the last year from 16.0 in 2017/18 to 16.3 in 2018/19. Again these ratios were well adrift of the 14.0:1 of the millennium.

The secondary school ratio almost certainly reflects the fact that sixth form numbers are either static or still falling, while the number of pupils at Key Stage 3 is on the increase. The latter are, of course, taught in larger class for the most part. The fact that the adult to pupil ratio also worsened in the secondary sector is a testimony to the financial pressure schools have found themselves under and why, in the new post-austerity world, political parties of all colours, including my own (the Liberal Democrats) are announcing more cash for schools.

The pressure on education spending is best illustrated in the table that shows education spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. This equates to a spending of some £88.6 billion in 2018/19.

Education Expenditure as % of GDP
2012/13 4.90%
2013/14 4.70%
2014/15 4.50%
2015/16 4.40%
2016/17 4.20%
2017/18 4.20%
2018/19 4.10%

There is a long way to go just to return to the levels under the Coalition. Much of the increase, when it finally appears in schools’ bank accounts, is likely to be absorbed in higher staffing costs.

This is especially likely to be the case in those parts of England where house prices are high and private sector graduate wages for many professionals have risen to recognise the competitive state of the labour market. Teachers’ wages will have to increase to allow teaching to remain competitive. How far and how fast may become obvious next week, when the ITT Census for 2019 is slated for publication.

More pupils means a demand for more teachers, and anything less than an improvement on the figures for trainee numbers in 2018 will make uncomfortable reading for Ministers, especially if mathematics and physics were to record reductions on the 2018 numbers.

Further improvements in workload will also come at a price, but may be necessary to retain teachers overloaded with unnecessary busy work driven by a culture based around quality control rather than one of quality assurance and professional development.

Ministers might also reflect that improving the morale of the school workforce is probably the least expensive route to greater satisfaction, and should be used alongside improvements to pay and conditions.

 

Technology and Education

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A recent event I attended, ahead of BETT 2020, led me to think about the place of technology in education. A simple typology would be to look at teaching, learning and support as three different areas where technology can be involved in schools. Of course, the first two are an arbitrary distinction, and technology can cover both teaching and learning at the same time.

I was interested to see the use of the term AI by many exhibitors at the HMC deputy heads conference I addressed last Friday about teacher supply matters. After all, TeachVac uses sophisticated and proprietary AI to handle job vacancies much more efficiently that say the DfE vacancy site that requires schools to upload every vacancy they have created.

AI is still at an early stage, and as a phrase can raise false hope of a new era for learning that are generally not yet justified. However, one only has to think of the rise of ‘contactless’ in the payment field to see the speed of change.

Contactless, as with smart phones and especially their cameras, demonstrates the problems of technology and inter-generational use. How many heads use contactless payments; how many teachers above 40, and how many teachers below the age of 40 don’t? The same can be asked about any photos taken during the summer break, and also how they were swapped; displayed or generally archived.

The speed of change has an important relationship to the power structure in schools. Are head teachers aware of what is happening and what represent good investment for the future and are they prepared to delegate downwards to those that understand technology and can make the case?

My first job as a teacher involved responsibility for hard technology in the school – 16mm and slide projectors, plus reel to reel tape recorders – and I recall asking for a video tape recorder to help both the drama and PE departments with their work. The first time the kit was used, the 6th form group entering the local one act paly festivals swept the board. They were a great group, but I hope seeing their rehearsals played back made them even better.

In the 1990s, I wrote that we were on the cusp of a revolution as profound as the introduction of printing in the 15th century. Looking back to the changes in the past quarter century, and how it has affected power relationships across the globe, I don’t think I was wrong. You only have to compare what is going on with Extinction Rebellion now with the CND protest of the 1950s and 1960s.

Scrapping BECTA in the Tory bonfire of the Quangos was probably the right thing to do; not replacing it with an advisory body on technology and education was a serious mistake.

I suspect that unless this blog post attracts attention, technology and the role of big tech and start-ups in education won’t feature in the general election: it should do so. Will 5 days a week and 40 weeks a year be the norm for schools for another 10 years, let alone for another 150 years it has been the framework for learning in this country?

APPG paper for cancelled meeting

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As a result of the general election, the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Teaching Profession meeting fixed for Monday has been cancelled. Below is the report I would have provided to the meeting about my views on the labour market for teachers in 2020.

APPG on The Teaching Profession – November 2019 meeting

By John Howson johnohowson@gmail.com

At present, reading the runes of teacher preparation courses starting this September, courses that will provide the bulk of new entrants into the labour market in 2020, especially in the secondary sector, the picture is still one of shortages. The DfE’s ITT Census will be published on Thursday 28th November, (presumably subject to any purdah restrictions as a result of the general election).  The following is based upon an analysis of UCAS offers data published in September 2019. The DfE has unfortunately cancelled an update to the Teacher Compendium that would have provided more data on retention for individual sectors and subjects.

Sadly, many subjects do not appear to have reached the DfE’s estimate of trainee numbers, as set out in their Teach Supply Model (TSM) for 2019. I am especially anxious for both mathematics and physics, where the UCAS data has likely outcomes below the numbers accepted in 2018. In both cases this number was not enough to satisfy demand from schools in 2019, even before the increase in pupil numbers is factored into the equation for 2020. Fortunately, the number of biologists is likely to be at a record level, and this supply line will help offset any shortages of physical scientists.

The lack of mathematics teachers may need to be covered by trainees from subjects such as geography, where trainee numbers remain healthy, as they do in history and physical education. Many history trainees will need to find a second subject, as there is unlikely to be enough vacancies to support the present level of trainee numbers.

Happily, Religious Education has had a good year, with offers coming close to its projected need identified by the TSM, assuming all those offered places actually turned up at the start of their courses. Design and Technology fared slightly better this year than last year’s disastrous recruitment round, but will still fall far short of requirements, as will Business Studies. IT also appears to have suffered from a poor recruitment round into courses in 2019.  Elsewhere, outcomes may be close to last year’s, so there should be enough teachers of modern languages overall, although whether with the combination of languages needed is not known. Similarly, the number of trainee teachers of English may cause problems in some parts of the country in 2020, most notably London and the Home Counties and any other areas where the school population is growing.

As a result of this analysis, there could be three possible scenarios for 2020:

Continuing shortages

Assuming no changes to the supply situation, and a cash injection into schools that is not entirely absorbed by increased salaries for the existing workforce, then the present supply crisis will continue and could intensify in some subjects and the parts of the country already most challenged by teacher shortages and increases in the secondary school population.

A return to normal market conditions

As the supply of new entrants will be less than required to meet the demands of schools in 2020, this state of affairs is only likely to occur if both the rate of departure by the present workforce slows down and there is an increase in teachers seeking to return to work in state schools. In the short-term for 2020, any pay increase would likely attract returners in greater numbers if accompanied by improvements in workload and pupil behaviour initiatives. The recent decline in the birth rate may start to affect teacher vacancy levels in the primary sector in 2020, as some schools consider the effect of declining rolls on future budgets and start to take steps to avoid creating deficit budgets.

More teachers than vacancies

This situation usually only occurs during a significant recession, such as that experienced ten years ago after the financial meltdown. It is an extremely unlikely scenario for 2020 unless EU teachers also opt to remain teaching in England post-Brexit rather than return home, and there is a flood of returners to teaching concerned about redundancies elsewhere in the economy and a lack of other job opportunities. Such a scenario would also lead to increased applications for teacher preparation courses making it a more likely prospect for the labour market of 2021 than in 2020.

Data regarding vacancies can be supplied for a small fee by TeachVac: enquiries@oxteachserv.com

Data are available down to local authority level and by subject and phase for primary and secondary sectors.

Gifts may not be the same as presents

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As many readers of this blog will know, the DfE is planning a new digital application service for prospective trainee teachers. Apart from being trendy, I am not sure what the word ‘digital’ adds to the title, as surely nobody would create a new paper-based application service these days.

You can read about the service at https://dfedigital.blog.gov.uk/2019/09/05/testing-apply/ The new service will eventually replace the existing service run by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), probably by the start of the application round for 2021 courses, if the trial stages go well.

Now, I have had my differences with UCAS over the present system, introduced when I sat on a Committee representing ITT interests as an independent member. Some of my concerns seems to be being replicated by the DfE in designing their system. However, I have a much more fundamental concern than the design of the system about the DfE’s proposal. UCAS isn’t a government body. Instead, it is owned by its members. The new system will transfer ownership of the postgraduate application process for teaching to the government.

Is that change of ownership a good idea? Certainly, it will directly save both candidates and the providers of courses money as, like the DfE teacher recruitment service, it will be free at the point of delivery. It am sure it will also be well designed.

However, ownership of the process will then be in the hands of politicians and not the providers. Imagine a future government that recognises the need to balance supply and demand for teachers across the country and closes off courses when sufficient applications have been received, but before providers have made their choice of applicants. This could force later applicants to choose from the remaining courses that are short of applicants. Now, in some ways this is similar to the recruitment controls imposed upon the sector a few years ago. Any such regulation might reduce the freedom of providers to select candidates. You could envisage other interventions.

The DfE team running the service will need to know a great deal about the complexities of the teacher preparation market. If it is an in-house set-up at the DfE, what oversight will there be? Is there to be an advisory board or some other form of governance structure or will the system just be run by a changing stream of civil servants, supervised by a senior policy officer and just keeping ‘in contact’ with the providers?

As a government function, the application service will always be subject to Ministerial oversight and direction. Whether that is a ‘good thing’ or not will depend upon your views about services run by government. Certainly, as a public service, there should be more data available than is currently the case with the UCAS service.

It is also worth recalling that the DfE ran the admissions process for School Direct in 2013 and allowed me to comment in May of that year about the state of applications in a post entitled Applications Good: Acceptances better. https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/applications-good-acceptances-better/

As Ed Dorrell of the Tes remarked at the NABTT Conference, during his talk on teacher supply, Ministers don’t like talking about a crisis, and my analysis of the data that year certainly landed me in hot water, as anyone that reads the August 2013 posts on this blog can discover.

Whatever I think, the DfE is presenting the new system to the sector. I just hope it is a gift worth receiving.