Category Archives: media

DfE Vacancy site: Value for money?

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Like many company chairman, I read the recent story of the Eurotunnel payment with real interest. As chair of TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk I know that my company wasn’t invited to bid for the DfE’s vacancy web site last year, when the decision was taken to undertake a procurement exercise. I am not sure whether any of the other sites providing vacancies for teachers were invited to tender either?

The government can point to the general rules it has in place for procurement and tendering for starting afresh in the market, but not to explore with existing providers whether they can offer a cheaper service may raise the question about of ‘value for money’ over the cost of starting from scratch.

After all, as the DfE has found out for the third time – Think SRS, a decade ago and the failed attempts to create sites to recruit middle and senior leaders – it is not just designing a piece of software that matters with a recruitment site, but also attracting both schools and teachers to use the site. Providing either a platform for existing sites or asking one to provide a DfE backed service at a specified price would have significantly reduced these marketing costs for the DfE as existing providers would have brought an current base of teachers seeking jobs and a marketing strategy for identifying vacancies already in place.

The fact that the DfE site contained at least once simple design error when it started publishing vacancies, and still has only a fraction of the vacancies to be found on some other sites, such as TeachVac, must raise questions about how much the DFE’s efforts are costing the taxpayer.

The DfE site is still only providing information about a fraction of the available jobs where schools are hiring teachers at the present time, and it completely ignores the needs of both the private schools and other institutions that hire qualified teachers, such as elements of the further education sector where teachers may be looking for jobs. For those reasons, others will have to continue to provide a service to those employers.

I am not sure when the period of ‘beta’ testing for the DfE site comes to an end, but serious questions will need to be asked about why the DfE chose to operate the site from London, where costs are inevitably higher than in the rest of the country.

As TeachVac already provides a free service to schools and teachers, I have offered the DfE either notification of vacancies they are missing or a feed of these missing vacancies in a form that can be uploaded to the DfE site; both for a small fee. This would, at least, solve one issue for the DfE in ensuring teachers weren’t missing vacancies by using the DfE site.

After all, the DfE site will never be successful if it doesn’t offer teachers at least the majority of posts on offer. Teachers only want to register with one universal site to be told of jobs.

At present, TeachVac has the most comprehensive list of teaching jobs across both private and state funded schools in England, and teachers are recognising that fact by registering in ever greater numbers as the 2019 recruitment round gathers pace.

Gas cooking?

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According to the BBC new this morning, the Prime Minister addressed a gathering of Tory activists in Oxford yesterday, at their National Conservative Convention. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47346630

At the same time as the Conservatives were gathering in the City, I was attending the spring meeting of the Liberal Democrat Education Association also being held in Oxford. Now it is worth pointing out that the Lib Dem meeting was attended by the Lib Dem MP for part of the City and some of the county and city councillors elected as Liberal Democrats for wards and divisions across the City. On the other hand, the Conservatives currently only have an elected MEP to represent the City; irony or irony. There are no Conservative MPs, County or city councillors elected anywhere in the City of Oxford, and their lack isn’t due to any defections, recent or otherwise.

Anyway, enough of political facts and on to campaigns. At the Lib Dem education conference, I proposed that we build on the report of the Committee on Climate Change issued last week that stated as an aim that, ‘From 2025 at the latest, no new homes should be connected to the gas grid.’ https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/UK-housing-Fit-for-the-future-CCC-2019.pdf The same aim should be true for new public buildings, including new schools, of which there are likely to many built in Oxfordshire over the next decade to cope with the 100,000 new homes to be constructed across the county.

However, I would go further than just eradicating gas from the design of new buildings, and I proposed a campaign to start by looking at school and college kitchens in both state and private schools and colleges, as well as our universities and asking, ‘are you cooking with gas?’

There should then be a operation, if necessary backed either with funds culled from excessive school balances or some other source of funding, to replace existing gas cookers with alternatives, such as induction hobs. Once gas cooking has been removed from education establishments, whether used for cooking meals or in food technology (home economics for those of my generation, and domestic science for those with even longer memories) lessons, where they still exist, we can then move on to the bigger task of asking how schools and colleges are heated and what can be done to reduce their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by changing from gas heating systems?

I also wonder whether those pupils that went on strike over climate change could start an audit of climate performance in their schools, working along with their School Councils and governing bodies. After all, Strikes demonstrate concern: actions demonstrates commitment to change. From such small acorns in individual schools, might the mighty oak or real change start to grow.

Of course the biggest resource in schools that could help climate change is the playground. As I have pointed out before, playgrounds are used for their intended purpose for a fraction of the year. Could some clever researcher help turn them into a source of power for heating and light as well as where children can gather and play?

 

Teacher Preparation: national policy or local decision?

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Schools Week recently broke a story about the STEP Academy Trust wanting to go its own way on teacher training, just at the time when the government seems to want to create a unified approach to recruitment onto courses preparing would-be teachers.

As documented previously on this blog, Mr Gibb has called for providers not to reject possible candidates wanting to become a teachers. According to Schools Week, one of the reasons for The STEP Academy Group wanting to go its own way was in order that they could demand higher standards than currently achieved by primary PGCE courses that operate through UCAS. According to the article in Schools week, the Trust apparently equates attending a Russell Group University as a key selection measure, along with a B and not a C is English and Mathematics at GCSE. Curiously, the Schools Week article didn’t mention a grade required for Science.

The DfE will have to come down hard on any provider wanting to avoid using a central application system if the government believes such a system is a good idea. Certainly, creating lots of different admissions systems, might well put off applicants. After all, that’s why centralised admission systems were invented in the first place; way back in the 1960s for undergraduate courses.

I am not a fan of the present UCAS system, as it is expensive for both candidates and providers, whilst being cost neutral for UCAS. The former GTTR system of sequential applications also allowed for better monitoring of applicants progress and also provided better data about rejections than the present Apply 1 and Apply 2 system, but it is what we have in place. There was room for improvement, as there still is. The number of places on offer and the number of offers made might help candidates assess where to apply, especially later in the recruitment round when courses are on the cusp of closing.

I assume the STEP Academy will want to operate a form of School Direct salaried training scheme, paid for by the Trust. Neither the Trust nor their suggested university partner have any allocation from the DfE for 2019-20 training places. This raises the interesting question of whether or not those on training courses need to be on courses with allocated places in order to obtain QTS? Maybe because the recruitment cap has been abolished that rule doesn’t matter, but has the cap been abolished for primary courses?

Alternatively, these could be regarded as assessment only candidates, to be presented at the end of the period of teaching in the classroom? There doesn’t seem to be any cap for the number of such people granted QTS each year.

But, none of this probably matters to the school since, under the Govian rule change, they don’t need to employ teachers with QTS; anyone will do, presumably so long as they meet the Trust’s entry requirements.

However, candidates might want to reflect upon the usefulness for a career in teaching of a non-standard entry qualification. Will schools outside of the Trust recognise their qualification? Who knows?

Finally, it may be a bit late for 2019 entry to be thinking of starting a course in September, unless the Trust have applicants knocking on their door as a result of the Schools week article.

I am also surprised that under the National Funding Formula schools in East Sussex have enough income to create such a course. Perhaps it will all be paid for by the Trust’s South London schools?

 

 

Happy 6th Birthday

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Phew, this blog has made it through another year. Six years of writing and with this piece the publishing of 850 posts – mostly somewhere around 500 words. The discipline of writing continues to be an interesting experience.  My thanks to all that read my posts, and especially to those that make comments about specific posts. My especially thanks to those that retweet a post, mention it in a newsletter or even a newspaper.

Some posts are seemingly never read by anyone; others attract a lot of attention and yet others are slow burns, starting by creating little interest and then over time acquiring a growing band of readers. ‘Bank holidays for teachers’ is one of these posts. Initially, when the idea was mooted by Labour during the spring of 2107, just before the general election, it attracted little notice. Now, it appears regularly in the list of visited previous posts.

The last year saw about 17,000 visitors to this bog – a bit down on the previous couple of years – with, on average, two reads per visitor. However, I suspect that the mode is actually one read. A few hardy souls read lots of the posts. Overseas visitors were thin on the ground for most of 2018, but have picked up again in 2019. I am not sure whether this is due to how WordPress record visitors, as it is often possible to have several likes for a post, but no record of anyone having read it!

Posts about the labour market for teachers and numbers applying for training tend to attract a band of regular readers, helped by the notice they are awarded by the umbrella organisations supporting those that prepare teachers. Posts about TeachVac, www.teachvac.co.uk where I am the Chair of the Board, are attracting more interest, especially now that the DfE has a free site for the state-funded sector. TeachVac also covers private schools in the secondary sector, so offers a more comprehensive free service to both teachers and schools than the DfE. The companion site for international schools – TeachVac Global – had a successful first full year of operation.

The aim, for 2019 and into January 2020, is to reach the round number of 1,000 posts by the blog’s seventh birthday, but without compromising either the length or quality of the writing. It would be easy to reach the 1,000 figure with a series of short posts, but I would rather fall short than just hit the target anyhow.

Sometimes, posts are written, but not published. There are some that I deemed too political after writing them, such as my thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn after his appointment as Labour Leader. I first met him during the 1974 general elections, when I was Liberal Agent in Hornsey and he had a similar position for the Labour Party.

As pieces written quickly, there are often mistakes and poor punctuation. I apologise and do try to clean up mistakes later.

Thank you for reading, and I hope finds the posts interesting, and that you will continue to read.

 

 

Bad deal for rural students

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The fact that student living in London are provided with free travel to school or college by Transport for London has always been great for them, but I felt unfair on those living in the rest of the country. Free travel is also a great help to the family budget. This benefit to London sort of mirrors the complaints of the f40 group about how schools are funded across England.

The announcement by the Secretary of State for Transport on the 2nd January 2019 of a new railcard for 16 and 17 year olds just adds insult to injury for many young people living in rural areas. The new railcard isn’t an initiative from the rail industry. The department of Transport press release is very clear that the 26-30 year olds railcard is an industry initiative backed by the government, but that the card for 16 and 17 year olds is a government initiative and, therefore, can be seen as a political move.

Indeed, the press notice points out that the new card for 16 and 17 year olds includes half price for peak and season tickets, something not generally available on other railcards.

To rub salt in the wounds, the press notice goes on to announce that the ‘railcard could cut the cost of travel by hundreds of pounds a year for young people and their parents [sic], making it cheaper to get to school, college and work’. All very well if you live near a railway line.

At Oxfordshire’s Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, I asked a question about how the card would affect those not living near a railway line? For many, once the card comes into operation and the £30 purchase fee has been discounted, rail travel will be half the price of a similar bus journey, even assuming there is a bus after the rounds of cuts to such services.

The withdrawal of the Education Maintenance Allowance for 16-18 year olds in England by the Coalition and the refusal to change the rules on home to school transport after the raising of the learning leaving age, was an unfair allocation of resources that penalised students not able to walk or cycle to school or college.

Doing something for those that have a handy railway, but ignoring everyone else in rural areas, is an own goal for the government that may well feature in campaigning for the district council elections this May in the worst affected areas.

In Oxfordshire the 16-17 year olds in Wantage could well be paying twice the price of their college buddies that live in Didcot in order to attend classes, because the County has never progressed the re-opening of Grove Station that has been an aspiration for more than 20 years.

Similarly, those 16 and 17 year old student living in Charlbury will benefit if travelling to college in Oxford, but those living in Chipping Norton or Burford won’t when travelling to Witney.

Time for a rethink Mr Grayling.

 

Trends shaping Education

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In a recent post, I wrote about the effect of the housing market on schools and what might happen if there was a slowdown in transactions. Interestingly, the OECD yesterday published a much more high level approach to the same sort of question. Entitled, ‘Trends shaping education 2019’ it looks at some key trends the authors feels will affect and shape education policy. https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/trends-shaping-education-2019_trends_edu-2019-en#page1

Previous editions of the book appeared in 2008, the first edition, and then in 2010, 2013 and 2016.

This time the authors have identified a number of key themes; shifting global gravity towards Asia and China in particular; public matters; security; living longer and living better and finally, modern cultures.

Some of these trends have already had an impact on education on England. Michael Gove tried to kickstart the learning of Mandarin in schools. However, in terms of what is being taught, it is still way behind common EU languages spoken by our neighbours, but few others around the world.

Security in schools became a big issue in England after the classroom shooting at Dumblane in the 1990s, where the concern was about intruders entering schools. In more recent times, the concerns have been about ensuring pupils, especially very young ones, cannot leave without permission. How far should schools be fortresses?

With the increase in school shootings across the USA it often seems that arrival and departure times are the greatest risks for schools, certainly in the USA, rather than planned meetings with the head teacher. Total security is probably almost impossible to achieve without a huge investment in time, effort and resources. I recall visiting a high school in New York almost 20 years ago where there were metal detectors for all to pass through. Yet, there had been a shooting the previous day, with the weapon having been passed through an open window to avoid the detection system.

As we are living longer, we are also creating fewer children, despite the current bulge hitting the secondary school sector. Schools are often seeing older parents than a couple of generations ago and that may mean these parents know more about life and are more prepared to stand up for their perceived rights. This can make the job of being a head more demanding and reduce the number of teachers willing to take on the role.

Living longer means some teachers are happy to retire later, thus helping the teacher supply situation. Should the DfE run an ad campaign along the lines of ‘one year more’ and provide a bonus for those taking later rather than early retirement?

I think the current technological revolution will impact very heavily on schools and education. One year the big CES exhibition held in Las Vegas every January will major on technology and education not widescreen TVs or health devices. Not sure when, but it will happen and will challenge our whole notion of schooling and education and the link between the student, their family and educators.

 

How do you teach politics today?

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One of the more interesting side effects of what is happening in Westminster, Paris and Washington at the present time, is how those staff teaching politics syllabuses prepare candidates for examinations this summer? Do they a] ignore everything happening at present and assume the status quo ante in terms of what they expect in answers to questions and essays, regardless of what they teach in lessons, or b] do they try and provide students with an understanding that they can convey in their essays when by the time the examinations arrive the situation might yet be different again.

Take the following section from a syllabus published on the internet:

 Parliament and government relationships
  • Accountability 
  • Executive dominance 
  • Elective dictatorship 
  • Bicamera

 The roles of the House of Commons and House of Lords in scrutinising legislation and holding the government to account. The influence of backbenchers, frontbenchers, whips and the Opposition.

Answering that section after the events of the past ten days is going to be interesting, let alone what might happen over the next four months leading up to the examination day. The same is true of the section about ‘The role of parliament in the political system’.

I guess the safe way forwards will be to start any answer with something such as ‘Received wisdom and understanding up to the start of 2019 was …. This is expressed by writers such as …’ and then delve into what has changed if the candidate feels comfortable with being able to explain the new reality.

Earlier today I posed this dilemma to a well-known educationalist and former teacher of politics and was reminded by her that there have been occasions in the past, such as a change of Prime Minister between the setting of the exam paper and the date the examination is taken that can make the expected predicable answer no longer accurate, unless it is place in a historical context.

I guess this is the risk with a subject that deals with contemporary life. Fortunately for economics and business studies examiners, stock market crashes has a greater tendency to occur in the autumn, after the harvest has been gathered in, than at other times of year. Although the same cannot be said for inflation or interest rate changes.

Nevertheless, it is politics lessons that must be the most interesting lesson on the curriculum this week. In higher education, students can often attend courses just out of interest and one wonders whether some sixth formers might want to do so for politics lessons at present. Alternatively, for most it might be a big bore, even though it is up there with Peel and reform of The Corn Laws and the decline of the Liberal Party in the 1920s and the effects of the Great Crash of 1929 in terms of its magnitude as a parliamentary event.

Finally, I understood the term bicameral for a parliamentary system of two chambers, but the syllabus quoted above was the first time I had come across the use of ‘bicamera’ to describe such a system.

 

 

 

 

School funding – is it ever enough?

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The Education Policy Institute, where David Laws, ex-Education Minister is Chair of the Board, published a report on school revenue balances today. The data on school balances discussed in the report in maintained schools comes partly from the same DfE source discussed in a post on this blog on the 12th December 2018.

Simplistic analysis of the report produced comments that the Report showed schools were under-funded. This was because one in ten of the remaining maintained secondary schools had a deficit overall and many others were in deficit in the latest year data was available for from the government. In reality, as the EPI report discussed, the picture is both more nuanced and more complicated than a bald assessment that schools don’t have enough funding, although pressure on 16-19 funding almost certainly does need attention.

What is less clear is the extent to which the former funding formula created winners and losers and whether the new formula will help redress the balance in the future. Personally, I don’t think it will. However, there also needs to be more understanding as to why these one in ten maintained secondary schools cannot live within their means for several years and more schools are now in that position?

As EPI note, academy chains have fewer schools with deficits and are able to move money around between schools. Local Authorities cannot do this to help schools over a temporary crisis. Should the remaining maintained schools now be treated as if they were a Multi-Academy Trust, allowing cash to be moved between schools?  If local financial management means the cash provided for a school is for that school, then MATs should not be allowed to take any cash away from one school to help another and can only charge for services provided.

The EPI report covers this point in their policy recommendations

  1. With increasing financial pressures on schools – particularly in secondaries – the government should consider before the Spending Review whether higher per pupil funding is needed, or whether efficiency savings can make up part of the current shortfalls. It should especially focus on the strains faced by many secondary schools, and assess whether changes in pupil numbers are likely to ease financial pressures, or whether these will prove more enduring.
  2. Further consideration should be given to what extra help or advice can be offered to those schools facing large deficits.
  3. The government should determine the reasons for the lower level of in-year deficits in academy trusts, and whether there are any lessons to learn from this.
  4. The government should also look closely at the level of “excessive”, unallocated, surpluses and consider if existing rules allow for these resources to be used effectively.

The last recommendation from EPI is interesting, especially in view of the concerns over deficits. As I noted in December, some schools have balances equivalent to 20% of their annual income and there are schools with more than £1,000,000 in reserves. My view, as expressed in December, is that revenue income is for spending in the year it is provided ad for the current pupils, although setting a sum aside for depreciation is now acceptable.

Finally, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk was established to help schools cut costs by providing a free vacancy service to schools. I am delighted to record TeachVac handled nearly 55,000 vacancies in 2018 and has a great start to 2019, breaking records. Just why the DfE needs to run a rival scheme isn’t clear.

 

 

Further reflections

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The Daily Mail is apparently carrying a story today of a leaked DfE email revealing a fall in teacher numbers. This is seen as a revelation, even though Table 2a of the DfE’s analysis of the Teacher Workforce, published in June 2018, showed a fall in teacher numbers between the 2016 and 2017 census points. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/school-workforce-in-england-november-2017

However, I suppose that when a staunchly Tory supporting newspaper starts printing bad news stories about the working of a Conservative government one must anticipate that either the end is nigh or that editorial control is weak over the Christmas and New Year period.

Had either the Daily Mail or any other media outlet wanted to pick a more up to the minute bad news story about teacher numbers, they could have done no better to use my previous post as the basis for a news item. Readers will recall that based on data released yesterday by UCAS, it appears that fewer graduates want to become primary school teachers than in the past.  The Daily Mail could have run a headline around ‘Who will teach Tiny Tim?’ about this fall in applications to train as a primary teacher.

Delving further into the UCAS data than I had time to do yesterday, it seems as if more career changers were queuing up to apply to train as a teacher in 2019, than were new young graduates. However, the 230 additional graduates in their 30s and 40s compared with December 2017 were not enough to offset the reduction of 400 in those from the 22-22 age group that have not applied this year. Hopefully, they are still weighing up their options.

For the first time in some years, fewer than 1,000 men from the 21-22 age group have applied for a place to train as a teacher on either a primary or secondary course starting in 2019. However, it is the continued relative lack of interest from young female graduates that should concern officials even more. This group in the past has been the bedrock of those applying in the early part of the recruitment round.

Rather than evaluating the overall success or otherwise of the marketing campaign, the DfE should urgently be investigating why this group, of whom there will be fewer emerging from universities over the next few years, are taking longer to think about teaching as a career. Last year, enough came around in the end to ensure all places for primary teachers were filled, but the warning signs are there and need investigation.

Perhaps the DfE has over-emphasised the need for secondary subject teachers and rather taken the primary sector for granted, apart from the need to ensure sufficient teachers with expertise in mathematics. The DfE doesn’t have a policy of ensuring sufficient subject knowledge across the curriculum to ensure that able pupils can be motivated and intellectually stretched either within the primary school or in other ways.

Perhaps it is time to reconstruct those local CDP offering managed by teams of staff than know their schools and teachers. Doing so in a cost effective manner might mean upsetting some MATs and even diocese, but can we afford anything other than the most cost effective system for such CPD?

 

Teacher Shortages in the USA

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The issue of teacher supply, and more specifically increases in the number of teachers quitting their jobs, featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal last week https://www.wsj.com/articles/teachers-quit-jobs-at-highest-rate-on-record-11545993052 It seems that the issue of teacher supply isn’t just a problem this side of the Atlantic, but one that has now hit the headlines in the USA. As a result, I am slightly surprised not to have seen a tweet from Donald Trump on the subject, perhaps stating that anyone can be a teacher.

A tight labor market, years of uncompetitive salary increases and a challenging job are all familiar reasons for the departure of experienced teachers cited in the article and known to those of us that study the labour market for teachers in England.

Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal didn’t mention a possible move overseas, in order to teach in an international school, as another reason teachers might be quitting. The article also didn’t mention whether there was also an issue of recruiting potential teachers into training courses in parts of the USA. However, it did raise the spectre of an increase in the number of unqualified teachers. I don’t think that the article mentioned Teach for America, one of the original alternative certification programs created during an earlier teacher supply crisis around the turn of the century. It also didn’t reflect upon whether technology might help overcome a shortage of teachers.

Education in the USA is generally a local activity managed by School Boards and largely overseen by the individual States. Some States have traditionally had good teacher planning mechanisms, such as we enjoy in England, but others have been less concerned with planning and more interested in a market-based approach.

One question, if the shortage continues and even worsens, is whether some States might go shopping for teachers overseas in order to help fill their vacancies in the same way that heads in England turn to Canada, Australia and New Zealand for potential recruits when the pipeline dries up at home.

Some US States have turned to the Caribbean countries in the past, but might they look further afield if the supply problem deteriorates further. Could we see competition between US and UK schools for the same teachers and could there even be attempts to entice UK teachers to take up work in the USA? I don’t think that is especially likely, but it is worth recalling that Michael Gove, when Education Secretary, did grant QTS to all teachers in the USA that are qualified, to allow them to teach in England without any need for further qualifications.

I will look at the agenda for this spring’s AERA Conference to see whether teacher supply is once again back on the radar of academics, as well as of journalists. I might just also delve into the archives and dust off some of the articles from conferences 20 years ago to see whether this is a case of history repeating itself or whether there is a new twist to the tale this time around.