Category Archives: leadership

Youth Theatre in action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do means matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home to School transport

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

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

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

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

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

Grammar (selective) school

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

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

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

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

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

So here are some policy suggestions for discussion

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

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

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

Please sue the comments section to discuss.

The pay of senior staff in academies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Are you paying too much to advertise a teaching vacancy?

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

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

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

Turnover             2022                     2021

UK                        £68.2 mn          £54.0 mn

Europe                £  2.9 mn             £ 2.6 mn

Rest of World     £  9.0  mn           £ 9.0 mn

Income

Staff

Management    £61.2 mn          £56.5  mn

All activities      £80.2 mn           £66.1  mn

TES accounts – see link above page 29

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

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

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

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

How challenging is teacher recruitment?

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The staffing crisis in the NHS often receives more publicity than the festering crisis in teacher recruitment. This week, TeachVac has supplied data for articles in tes, and by the Press Association. The latter story make many local newspapers, but little impact on the broadcast media that still seems obsessed with the NHS.

Next week, TeachVac will publish its two detailed reviews: one on the labour market for school leaders and the other looking at the labour market for classroom teachers during 2022. Schools signed-up to TeachVac’s £500 recruitment deal for unlimited matches of their jobs can ask for a free copy of both reports. Copies are priced at £100 for each report to non-subscribers. www.teachvac.co.uk

Both reports comment on what is now history. January marks the start of the key recruitment round for September 2023. As part of its data collection, TeachVac, where I am chair, monitors its collected vacancies against the numbers recorded in the DfE’s annual ITT census of trainees. Of course, some of those trainees are already in the classroom on programmes that mean they will be unlikely to be job seeking for September in any large numbers. TeachVac’s index takes these numbers into account when calculating its end of week numbers.

Despite only being at the end of week 2 of 2022, I thought it might be useful to compare 2023 with 2022 at the same point. When looking at the table, it is worth recalling that in many subjects the number of trainees is lower than it was last year, so the supply side is reduced. As a result, it would take a reduction in demand for the index to improve on week 2 of 2022.

Subject13th January 202314th January 2022Difference
Computing76%90%-14%
RE80%93%-13%
Business Studies70%82%-12%
All Sciences85%92%-7%
Music84%91%-7%
Languages87%94%-7%
Mathematics87%93%-6%
English87%93%-6%
Geography87%92%-5%
Art93%97%-4%
PE96%98%-2%
D&T73%75%-2%
History97%98%-1%
Source TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

Sadly, the reduction in trainee numbers hasn’t been offset by any reduction in demand: quite the opposite. All the subjects in the table are indicating a worse position at the end of week 2 in 2023 than at the same point in 2022; even history.

Design and technology’s apparently favourable position is due more to how badly it was faring in 2022 than to any real improvement, as it still has the second lowest index score in 2023, only business studies – the DfE’s forgotten subject – is in a worse position, and will certainly register an amber warning of recruitment challenges by next Friday.

Indeed, computing and design and technology will both also almost certainly have posted amber warning by the end of week 3! Several other subjects might have amber warning in place by the end of the month.

I am sure that the worsening trend in recruitment is why schools and MATs are signing up to TeachVac’s recruitment offer. At less than £10 per week for all a schools’ vacancies to be matched to TeachVac’s database, with no extra work required by the school than doing what it already does, must be the best deal in town. Schools not signed up with TeachVac will no longer see their vacancies matched each day. The fee for primary schools is just £75.

School Leadership trends in 2022

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This week TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has published its 2022 Review of Leadership Vacancies in schools across England. Next week, the report on classroom teacher vacancies will be published. If you would like a copy of either then email enquiries@oxteachserv.com Schools signed up to the TeachVac platform can request a copy of both reports.

These are challenging times for the public sector. Education, and in particular schools, has not escaped the challenges of a period of high inflation and full employment. However, the most serious effects in schools are to be found at classroom teacher and middle leader levels and the recruitment of non-teaching staff. These will be discussed in a future post once the Classroom Teacher Review of 2022 is published.

Leadership vacancies are mostly filled by those already working in schools or other posts in the education sector. Headteacher posts are frequently the final post in a teacher’s career, although some headteachers do change schools, often from a smaller school to a larger school, specially in the primary sector.

TeachVac’s main findings for 2022 are that:

  • There were more leadership vacancies on offer during 2022 that during the previous two years, when recruitment was badly affected by the covid pandemic
  • In the primary sector 2034 headteacher vacancies were recorded during 2022, compared with 1,556 during 2021. In the secondary sector, the numbers were 585 headteacher vacancies in 2022 compared with 368 during 2021.
  • For schools advertising during the 2021-22 school-year there was a re-advertisement rate for primary schools of 25%, and 19% for secondary schools. The South East was the region with the highest re-advertisement rate for primary headteachers
  • Schools advertising for a headteacher outside of the first quarter of the year were more likely to need to re-advertise their vacancy, as are schools that differ from the norm in size, type of school or control by a faith grouping.
  • After two years of lower vacancy number for deputy headteachers, 2022 levels recorded a rebound to pre-pandemic numbers across both the primary and secondary sectors.
  • There was a strong demand for assistant headteachers in both the primary and secondary sectors during 2022. The grade is now popular in schools across more regions than previously.
  • One effect of the covid pandemic may have been more retirements of senior leaders. Any effects resulting from ‘long covid’ on the labour market for senior staff in schools is yet to be fully appreciated. 

Readvertisement rates are for the 2021-22 school year to allow for re-advertisements during the autumn term to be included in the totals. Re-advertisement rates in the primary for headteacher vacancies are towards the lower end of expectations, whereas re-advertisements for secondary headships are at a percentage more in common with long-term trends.

The most interesting statistic is the increase in vacancies for assistant heads during 2022. Is this because middle leaders of large departments need the salary available on the Leadership Scale to attract them to apply for such posts, especially in high cost areas in and around London? Some of the increase may be due to new schools building up their leadership teams, but that fact alone does not seem sufficient to account for the increases.

What will 2023 bring in terms of leadership vacancies? As around half of such vacancies appear during the first three months of the year, we won’t have long to wait to find out.

Is your school using TeachVac?

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Created eight years ago, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has already matched nearly 4,000 teaching posts so far in 2023 with teachers and other interested in filling these jobs.

After eight years of being a free service TeachVac now charges secondary schools less than £10 per week -£500 per year plus VAT – for matching all their teaching posts for a year with its ever growing database of new and experienced teachers and recruitment companies. Primary schools pay £75 per year and can be free to academy trusts and other groups of schools that sign-on together with at least one secondary school.

Schools can sign up on the website – use the button to start the registration process or email enquiries@teachvac.co.uk and the staff will answer any queries about the service.

As TeachVac has traditionally had more jobs that the DfE site, it is a better place for jobseekers to register to be sent the links to jobs that meet with their specifications and a few that they might not have thought about. New registrations are being added to the list of those matched with vacancies every day.

With 75% of the teaching posts in 2023 posted by schools in or around London, schools in London, the south East and East of England should be at the front of the queue in signing up to TeachVac. Can you afford to miss out on access to the jobseekers in TeachVac’s database that receive relevant new jobs every afternoon. www.teachvac.co.uk

As an example, those teachers looking for a maths teacher post in North London will have received details of 14 different vacancies over the past two days from TeachVac. If your school isn’t using TeachVac then your vacancy won’t have been one of these sent to TeachVac’s users, if you posted one.

TeachVac is looking to use the income from schools to expand into offering a similar service for non-teaching posts and if enough schools sign-up the additional cost would be minimal. In the school-term, where schools offer a visa service for overseas applicants we will be introducing that fact into the matching service shortly.

TeachVac’s users are loyal, with 75% of all registered users still receiving daily matches,. This allows teachers considering a  move or looking for promotion to monitor the job market in the area where they are interested in working. Feedback tells us teachers used TeachVac to secure their job.

However, there are shortages of teachers in some subjects and TeachVac acknowledges that fact. But by not using the TeachVac platform for less than £10 per week schools can miss out on TeachVac sending their job details to those that are registered with TeachVac. Is it worth the risk for just £10 per week?

Tomorrow, TeachVac will publish an analysis of the first two weeks of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022 and compare the position with the government’s ITT census of trainees expected to be job hunting for a September 2023 post. The figures in some subjects will look extremely worrying.

Don’t forget Jacob

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At the end of January, this blog will celebrate its 10th birthday: a decade of writing. As of today, the blog has published 1,364 posts during those 10 years, with a total wordcount, according to WordPress analytics, of around 800,000 words, or around nine or 10 PhDs. Of course, blogs aren’t peer reviewed in the same way as academic articles are pre-publication, but, like journalism, they are subject to the gaze of readers from around the world. What I think are important posts are sometimes barely read, whereas other posts have been read much more frequently. The most read posts each year are listed below:

2022 Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?

2021 Half of secondary ITT applicants in just 3 subjects

2020 Poverty is not destiny – OECD PISA Report

2019 How do you teach politics today?

2018 Applications to train as a teacher still far too low for comfort

2017 Coasting schools

2016 1% pay rise for most teachers likely in 2016

2015 Grim news on teacher training

2014 More on made not born: how teachers are created

2013 Has Michael Gove failed to learn the lessons of history?

The most read of these was the September 2020 post entitled ‘Poverty is not destiny’ that was read 1,544 times during that October and was read more than 1,600 times in all during the autumn of 2020.

Older posts can collect more ‘reads’ overall as new readers browse the back catalogue. Just before Christmas 2022, someone browsed the whole of the back catalogue, resulting in the highest monthly figures recorded for any single month since the blog started.

The genesis for the blog was the columns that I wrote for the then TES between the late 1990s and my retirement in 2011. I am lucky to have many of those columns in a presentation book created for my retirement.

This column has looked at numbers to do with education, mostly statistics, but also management information. Some of the latter has been provided by TeachVac, the job matching site I helped create and run some eight years ago.

There are a few other posts of which my, so far unsuccessful, campaign for a Jacob’s Law is the most important. This Law would ensure no child was left without a school place for longer than three weeks and is especially important for the many children taken into care. If we want to stop them becoming NEETs, we need to keep them in education not cast them aside because they might be a ‘bit of challenge’. Who would be a challenge if taken from home without any warning as a young person and moved to a different location away from friends and familiar locations and your school. (Search for Jacob for the various posts about this issue)

Please campaign to ensure a place for every child in a school. These young people are the education equivalent of the patients in A&E waiting on trolleys, but their wait can be six months, and just as life changing! Lt’s make 2023 the year the DfE tackled this issue.

Happy New Year: we can but hope

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For most of the past 30 years, I have spent the week between Christmas and New Year drafting annual reports on aspects of the labour market for teachers during the previous 12 months for TeachVac’s and its predecessors, and also making a prognosis of what might happen in the labour market during the year to come. The finished reports; one on classroom teachers and promoted posts, and the other on leadership scale vacancies should, this year, be completed by the middle of the month.

Headlines include the steep increase in recorded vacancies across all grades during 2022; and the fact that schools in an around London recorded more vacancies than schools elsewhere in England. The problems, although not confined to the secondary sector are worse in that sector than in the primary school sector, where pupil numbers are now falling across much of England.

Of more interest that what happened in 2022 for most readers of this blog is, no doubt, my predictions for 2023. Based upon the trainee numbers in the DfE’s ITT census as a starting point, and abstracting those trainees already in the classroom and less likely to be job hunting, at least for a teaching post, for September 2023 from the totals, the numbers must be of concern.

After factoring in non-completions; those seeking posts in Sixth Form Colleges or elsewhere in publicly funded education outside of schools; and allowing for the demand form the private school sector, especially in the south of England, where a large number of such schools are concentrated; the final numbers may be the worst this century.

If the London region is taken as an example, using 2022 vacancies as the basis for the calculations, and assuming 40% of classroom teacher vacancies are taken by new entrants to the profession, with the remainder filled by those returning to teaching or switching schools, then some subjects do not have enough trainees to meet the possible demand from London’s schools

Open MarketLondon Vacancies in 202240% Vacancies from TraineesRemaining Trainees % Open Market Remaining
Business Studies164837335-171-104%
Religious Education249715286-37-15%
Computing304818327-23-8%
Music2285112042410%
Design & Technology3728293324011%
Physics3667442986819%
Geography52391436615730%
Modern Languages60099039620434%
Biology49574429819740%
English1214162965256246%
Chemistry64474429834654%
Mathematics1467151860786059%
Art & Design44043517426660%
History95040216178983%
Physical Education129522690120593%
Source TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk

Business Studies, religious education and computing might be the most worrying subjects for London schools seeking to fill vacancies. Of course, a school advertising in January will always fare better than one looking for an unexpected appointment for January 2024 late in the autumn, but schools should not need to be worrying about filling vacancies advertised as early as February this year.

TeachVac is increasing its registers of teachers looking to be matched to jobs, and secondary schools wanting their vacancies matched can sign up for £10 a week (£500 per year plus VAT) or miss out on this resource that aims to match 15,000 teachers this year. Sign up at www.teachvac.co.uk