Category Archives: media

1000 and out?

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Seven years ago, in January 2013, I started writing this blog. Over the years the number of posts have fluctuated, as the table below reveals.

Year Total Posts Total Words Average Words per Post
2013 108 72,284 669
2014 121 76,579 633
2015 113 66,337 587
2016 146 83,869 574
2017 164 92,350 563
2018 183 107,223 586
2019 161 88,792 552
2020 4 2,073 537
total 1,000 589,507 590

Source WordPress data

Seemingly, I have become less wordy over the years, with 2019 posts containing around 120 fewer words on average than the 2013 posts. There have been more than 1,000 likes for these posts, and slightly more comments from readers. I am especially indebted to Janet Downs for her many and helpful comments over the years.

Since early 2018, visitors numbers to the blog have started to reduce, and although Christmas Day 2019 saw someone view the whole archive of posts, making it highest day for views ever recorded, the trend has been for fewer and fewer views.

If this trend continues, is it worth my making the effort to write this blog? I started it in 2013 because I was concerned that there would be a teacher supply crisis, and I wanted a platform after writing regularly for the TES for over 10 years, and for Education Journal for a couple of years after that. It is interesting to look back at the discussions over teacher supply during the summer of 2013 that so upset some within the DfE. I would like to be able to predict when teacher supply will no longer be an issue, but on present trends that may not be until the second half of this decade for the secondary sector. There should be less of a problem in the primary sector.

Since 2013, I have established TeachVac, the largest free vacancy service for teachers, and also been elected as a county councillor in Oxfordshire – and, incidentally, stood in three general elections as a candidate– and found time for a range of other activities as well.

So I am conflicted as to whether or not either to continue this blog in its current form or just to sign off at this the 1,000 post? TeachVac continues to expand, listing more than 60,000 vacancies last year, and is already on track for more in 2020, and is consuming more and more of my time. Happily, it remains the largest free job site open to both schools and teachers in England, so is well worth the effort.

With the DfE’s move to take over the application process for graduate teacher preparation being trialed with some providers this year, even that monthly update provided by this blog may become impossible, unless the DfE allow access to the data on at least the same basis as UCAS have done over the past few years.

So, perhaps it’s time for a rest and a search for new horizons. Thank you all for your comments and questions.

 

 

Problem not yet solved

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Data from the second monthly report on applications and acceptances for postgraduate teacher preparation courses shows little overall change for last year. The trend is still not good, with 10,270 applicants domiciled in England as at 16th December 2019, compared with 10,820 on the corresponding date in 2018 and 11,430 in 2017. The good news is that there are more applicants this year from London and the surrounding regions, and the fall in numbers is more marked in applicants from the north of England where filling teacher vacancies has been less of an issue.

There are fewer applicants in all of the age groups compared with last year, and those shown as ‘age 22’ numbered just 1,510 this December compared with 1,910 in December two years ago. There are nearly 500 fewer women applicants this December, and 150 fewer male applicants. Male applicants make up less than a third of applicants in December 2019.

Fewer applicants also means fewer applications. Total applications were down in December, from 30,930 in 2018, to 29,330 in 2019. In 2017, the number of applications in December was over 33,000. Although it will concern providers, the fact that the bulk of the reduction in applications is for primary ITT courses; down from 14,720 in 2018 to 13,380 in 2019 will be something of a relief to the DfE, as the falling birth rate means fewer primary teachers are likely to be needed in the next few years that is unless schools receive a large cash injection for more teachers, rather than more pay for existing staff.

Applications for secondary courses at 15,950 were only 150 down on 2018 and very similar to the December 2017 figure of 16,070. Most subjects were at similar levels in terms of offers made by mi-December although art, design & technology, mathematics and Religious Education were slightly ahead of their 2018 position. By contrast, geography was slightly worse than in 2018 and acceptances for modern languages notably so. Is this the first sign of a reaction to Brexit? Certainly overall application levels for languages courses seem well down on last year.

Apprenticeships are the route in primary with more applications in December 2019 than in December 2018. Higher Education seems to be a major loser, with applications down from 6,150 in 2018 to 5,570 in December 2019. In December 2017, Higher Education had recorded 7,870 applications. In the secondary sector, both SCITTs and apprenticeships registered small increases in December 2019 over the previous December figure. All other routes were broadly similar to the previous December.

Hopefully, the government’s recruitment advertising campaign will improve matters in 2020, but compared to the defence forces, I have seen relatively little recruitment advertising for teaching over the festive period. This is despite the massive difference in recruitment needs between teaching and the whole of the armed forces.

If there is not a pickup in early 2020 in the number of applicants into secondary subjects, 2020 will begin to look like another year when training targets are not met and schools will have to make up the shortfall in teachers from other sources. With increasing pupil numbers, the need for more teachers is going to be an on-going challenge for secondary schools.

 

150th Anniversary 1870 Elementary Education Act

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Although the Elementary Education Act didn’t receive the Royal Assent and become law until the 9th August 1870, it is fair to treat the whole of 2020 as the 150th anniversary year of this key piece of education legislation in England.

The 1870 Elementary Education Act stands as the very first piece of legislation to deal specifically with the provision of education in Britain. Most importantly, it demonstrated a commitment to provision of schooling on a national scale rather than the piecemeal provision that had existed before this date.

The 1870 Act allowed existing voluntary schools to carry on unchanged, but established a system of ‘school boards’ to build and manage schools in areas where they were needed. The boards were locally elected bodies which drew their funding from the local rates. Unlike the voluntary schools, religious teaching in the board schools was to be ‘non-denominational’.

This compromise saved the government a great deal of money, as it didn’t have to deal with either buying or replacing the existing schools, many of which were run by the various churches and especially the Church of England. The legacy of that decision is still obvious in the governance of schools in England in 2020.

Although the 1870 Education Act was a start, like many pieces of legislation it didn’t fully achieve the aims of its supporters, and further Acts of Parliament were necessary to ensure that all young children were attending school and not working. However, right up until the 1970s, some children were identified as medically ineducable and not required to attend school, even though the concept of ‘special schools’ had been introduced in 1893.

How will we celebrate this key anniversary in education? Not I suspect in the same way that the government will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the ending of World War 2 in 1945. How many local libraries and museums will arrange exhibitions to record the value of education to Society across the generations since 1870?

Many of the board Schools built as a result of the 1870 Act still exist, and their recognisable brick built outlines, often three stories in height under a pitched roof, can still be seen across the urban areas of England, built where schools in sufficient numbers had not existed in 1870. Some have been converted into flats, but many that survived the bombings of the two world wars still serve their original purpose of providing a building for schooling. Today they are often primary schools and not all-through elementary schools.

According to English Heritage, there are over 5,000 listed school buildings in England https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/planning/local-heritage/historic-school-buildings/ Their search mechanism doesn’t make it easy to identify whether there are Board Schools built as a result of the 1870 Act that have been listed. Certainly, many listed school buildings either pre-date the 1870 Act or are of a much more recent construction.

I look forward to hearing of celebrations to mark this important piece of legislation as 2020 unfolds.

 

 

 

 

Update on rural schools

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In December 2017, I wrote a post on this blog about the DfE’s list of rural primary schools. At that point there were four such schools within the Greater London boroughs that were designated by the DfE as ‘rural’.  In the 2019 list, published today there are now five such schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rural-primary-schools-designation

The two each in Hillingdon and Enfield have been joined at some point in time by Downe Primary School in Bromley, classified as being in an area of ‘Rural hamlet and isolated dwellings’. For those living in truly rural areas, the notion that somewhere within Greater London can be categorised as ‘rural’ might seem a bit of a joke. But, I am sure that for the residents using these schools that are located in what is presumably ‘green belt’ locations, the designation as ‘rural’ seems accurate. However, it is still within the TfL transport area, so pupils attending the schools from within the Greater London area can have free travel on the 146 bus, or presumably the R8 as well.

Across England, this year, the DfE has classified 3,353 primary schools as being in ‘rural’ .locations. The designation is important, as with school rolls in the primary sector now falling, and the absurdities of the National Funding Formula view of equality not yet fully understood, the added protection from closure being a ‘rural’ school provides may still be useful in the future.

However, it won’t stop closures happening. Culham Parochial Church of England School in Oxfordshire is shown in the table as, ‘open, and proposed to close’ and the County Council has now agreed that the school should close as it is no longer a viable education establishment in its own right. This follows a series of battles over its future, stretching back into at least the late 1980s. This fate also hangs over another 26 primary schools in the list, including five schools in Nottinghamshire and three in Staffordshire.

Fifteen of the 26 schools proposed for closure are designated as Church of England schools. This reveals something of the heritage of schooling in England as we approach the 150th anniversary of State Funded Schools next year. It would be interesting to know the date when these schools, now up for closure, were first opened. There is fertile ground here for those interested in the history of education in England. I gather that this subject is being considered as a topic for an optional module in a Masters’ level degree currently being put together by the University of Buckingham.  Such units or modules already exist in some other programmes.

There are many interesting stories contained within this list of schools. Picking just two at random. The Bliss Charity School in Northamptonshire was first opened several centuries ago, and the Charity still owns the former school house built for a head teacher in the Nineteenth Century. The rent from the house is used to fund extras at the school. Holy island Church of England First School in Northumberland is federated with a school on the mainland and is shown in some DfE tables as currently having just one pupil. The school web site says that ‘Holy Island and Lowick C of E First Schools are a federation – the children study together at Lowick with the children who live on the island coming to Lowick when the tide allows.’

There are many more interesting stories within the rich tapestry of our school system. Will these be lost because of a rigid financial system that takes little or no account of communities and their needs? I hope not.

 

 

Free Education does not mean Equality of Education

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The Town Mayor of Thame has as her charity this year, Lord Williams’s School Young Carers. I though of this when I read apiece on the BBC about parents making donations to schools. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50732685 The BBC found that in 2017-18 the average school in London raised some £43,000 from donations. In Yorkshire, it was just £13,000. Although incomes may differ between the two regions, the price of goods the schools purchase probalby doesn’t to anything like the same extent.

This disparity between areas even short distances apart has troubled me ever since I started teaching in Tottenham in the 1970s. Schools in the Highgate and Muswell Hill areas of Haringey regularly used to raise substantial sums even the, both from parents and school activities, whereas those in South Tottenham would be lucky to bring in a fraction of the same amount. Not only did parents not earn the same, but they also didn’t have access to figures in the media and entertainment worlds that could open the summer fete and attract large crowds by doing so.

When I came to Oxford in 1979, I found a similar pattern between parts of the South and East of the City and the North West wards. Such a difference still exists.

One difference from now was that when all schools were under local authority control, local politicians could arrange the funding in ways that might support less well-off schools. An objection to the National Funding Formula is that in its purest form it doesn’t really allow for such differences between schools to be overcome.

Where schools can access support from charities, the addition of Gift Aid tax recovery can make the difference even greater. Now, I think the Mayor of Thame’s Charity is excellent, in that it is clear where within the school the money raised will be used.

Another school I know used its fundraising to benefit the community as a whole by creating an all-weather pitch that could be used outside of school hours.

Despite pressure on school budgets over the past few years, education unlike the NHS, hasn’t really featured in the general election. Possibly because every main Party is promising more for schools; something for post-16s, but whatever happened to higher education?

So, should the National Funding Formula take into account the amounts raised by schools? Such a move might help, but it wouldn’t stop parents supporting their own children: something that troubles the Labour Party in this election, if their plans to abolish private schools are to be believed.

As I have already noted on this blog, in Essex, the Tories take the opposite view, by refusing free transport to selective schools and thus making it a challenge for the less well-off to take up places at such schools where if they live some distance away from the school.

Perhaps we can start a charity to fund the bus fares of children attending selective schools that cannot afford the fare. But, why should they have to rely upon the charity of others, rather than the acknowledgement of the State that if you have a selective system, then every child should be able to attend a school as which they have secured a place.

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.

 

 

No Great Flood: ITT data November 2019

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November data from UCAS on applications to postgraduate ITT courses, published yesterday, is always the first data from the new cycle; a cycle that will end next September. As such, the numbers already offered places, holding offers or already placed are small. However, we now have four years of data from November, so something might be inferred about trends from even these small numbers.

Suffice to say, in secondary subjects at least, there is no great change, at the offer level, in most subjects areas, with six of those subjects followed showing higher offers than last year; six lower and three the same. Of course, with rounding and such small numbers, the inferences must be limited.

However, modern foreign languages; music; mathematics; geography; computing and chemistry are all lower than last year in terms of all the offer categories. Of these, mathematics, chemistry and computing will be the subjects where even now there should be a watch on what is happening, because the DfE’s ITT Census, published yesterday, revealed lower numbers this year compared with 2018. In mathematics and chemistry, the Teacher Supply Model number for September 2020 is higher than last year: the mountain peak just became a bit further to climb than last year.

So, what about overall applications? Applications for primary phase courses are down this November on both last year and the year before at 7,980 compared with 9,750 two years ago. In the secondary sector, the number at 9,860 is 50 above this point last year and 700 up on two years ago: so that’s good news at the overall level. But, just taking mathematics as an example, the all states number this November is 830 compared with 930 last year: still well above the 640 of November 2017, but heading in the wrong direction.

As with the ITT Census, it seems as if the trend towards older applicants has continued. More over 30s and fewer early applicants from final year undergraduates and those in the 22 year old age bracket. Applications are down from both men and women; women by just under 400 applicants and men by around 80 applicants, to only 1,950. At this stage, we don’t have the gender breakdown by phase or subject in term of applicants.

In terms of overall applications, there has been a modest increase in applications for Teaching Apprenticeships at the postgraduate level, up from 80 applications to 150. Applications to SCITTs are at similar levels to this point last year, but other routes have seen declines in overall applications. In the case of higher education down from 9,230 two years ago to 7,910 this year. For School Direct Salaried, applications are down from 2,760 last year to 2,360 this year; about the same level as two years ago.

I don’t know whether the strikes in the university sector will affect offers being made to candidates over the next month or so, but it shouldn’t make much, if any, difference to applications since UCAS is the first point of entry.

So, no great tidal wave of applicants this year as the recruitment process opened. The increase in the starting salary and the funds for schools being offered as part of the general election campaign have yet to bear any significant fruits, at least in terms of increased applications for teaching as a career by graduates.

However, it is only the start of the cycle and at this point one must remain positive and hopeful.

 

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?

Military Matters

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Today, as well as attending the Two Minutes Silence and wreath laying ceremony at County Hall, I also attended some training about the role of the Military Covenant and Military Champions in local government. During the training, Education emerged as a key concern for many service families. Despite the almost complete removal of our forces from family accompanied postings in mainland Europe, many service families are still expected to move location to a new posting, possibly as frequently as every two years.

These moves can play havoc with children’s schooling. Of particular concern, in this age of academies, is the lack of the same degree of oversight of in-year admissions as for the September round of admissions. Indeed, most academies act as their own admission authority for in-year admissions. Most moves within the services do not conform to the school year for obvious operational reasons.

One person said at the training ‘well, if one pupil moves out and another moves in, what is the issue?’ For many in education the answer is obvious in terms of the ages of the children and the schools that they might attend. Unit moves where only the local primary school is affected are now something of a rarity, and even then the ‘march out’ and arrival of the in-coming unit might not coincide. Differing numbers might mean that the school might not immediately receive the appropriate level of funding, depending upon when the move takes place.

One solution would be to return oversight of in-year admissions, at least for service children, to local authorities, with the power to direct academies to admit pupils arriving mid-year. Another person at the training told a story of a senior officer being told there was no place for his son at a secondary school while overhearing the person on the other end of the phone say to someone that the school didn’t want any more service children on roll: how disheartening.

I know that children of service personnel are eligible for the Service Children Premium, but the amount hasn’t been increased and is, therefore, of less value than when introduced, and it is not clear how the spending is monitored.

There are also stories of children being denied free transport to school because they arrived mid-year. I wonder about the legality of such a move by any  local authority, and whether any authority has put such a clause in their Home to School Transport Policy? I also wonder whether service children posted into areas such as Kent and Essex where there is selective education receive a fair deal over access to grammar schools. Indeed, do other children moving mid-year because a parent has been relocated by their employer also suffer if they arrive into selective systems?

One final military gripe is the difference in funding between Cadet Units and Combined Cadet Force Units. The former are community based and the latter school based. However, that should not affect the level of funding each receives for the same tasks.

These are all issued for the new government after the general election.