Category Archives: media

Is there a headship crisis?

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According to a story in The Times today, one in ten schools is losing its head teacher each year. Reading the headlines of the story, outside the pay wall, there are examples of schools advertising up to seven times to find a replacement and of schools without a permanent head for three years. Local authorities, still seemingly worth talking to about schools, even by this Tory supporting newspaper, tell of high turnover of heads and head teachers of small schools being enticed away to larger schools by promises of more money. All this makes for a crisis.

Between the early 1980s and 2012, I studies the labour market for head teachers on a regular basis. I stopped, partly because I didn’t’ think there was a crisis at that time and partly because I left my long-term database with my former employers. Since the establishment of TeachVac, I have gradually started to rebuild the data on leadership turnover and will report fully this time next year when there is sufficient comparative data.

A turnover of ten per cent isn’t, in historical terms, anything out of the ordinary, especially as some of the total will have been made up from head teachers required for new schools due to increasing pupil numbers and the 14-18 UTCs and studio schools as well as genuine ‘free schools’. Although there probably not as many of these as a previous Secretary of State might have wished.

For most of the early part of this century, re-advertisement rates for secondary heads were in the 20%+ range; for primary schools, the rate exceeded 30% in most years between 1997/98 and 2009/10, so re-advertisements are nothing new in the leadership market. Indeed, recruiters have made a tidy sum from encouraging schools to take ever larger and glossier advertisements on the basis of recruitment challenges. As regular readers know, TeachVac challenges this principle by offering a free service.

Any school seeking a new head teacher for September that advertises in January and runs a sensible recruitment round should have no problems recruiting unless it has one or more of the following characteristics:

It is a faith school,

It is located in London,

It is a small or very large school,

If a secondary school, it is single-sex or selective (or a secondary modern in a selective area).

Two or more factors and it needs to consider carefully how to recruit a new head teacher, especially if outside of the normal recruitment season from January to March where around 50% of vacancies are advertised each year.

Advertising outside the first quarter of the year, when fewer candidates are looking to move schools, is also often a waste of money, as is putting off candidates through the content of the advertisement or taking a long time over the process; candidates often apply for several posts and may be hired by another school if the process is too long.

Being a school in challenging circumstances has become more of a handicap as MATs and governing bodies seem to think the head teacher needs changing if there is a poor Ofsted report or a disappointing set of examination or test results. There are cases where a change of leadership is appropriate, but not, in my view, in every case.

Without a mandatory qualification for headship, it is difficult to know in details the size of the talent pool for future head teachers, something that should worry those responsible for the system at the EFA and NCTL, since a lack of supply will always drive up the price of a good or commodity and headship is no different to any other type of job in that respect.

At least some head teachers can look forward to recognition through the honours system, and I was delighted to see Professor John Furlong honoured in the latest list for his lifetime of work in teacher education. John, your OBE is a well-deserved mark of respect.

 

 

 

Is Lucy Kellaway an outlier?

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The good news seems to be that the soaring cost of tuition fees isn’t putting of new graduates from pursuing a career as a teacher: perhaps they recognise they will never repay these fees unless there is a period of rampant inflation at some point in the future.

In the ITT census for 2016, published last Thursday, the percentage of graduates under 25 entering postgraduate training has increased from 44% of the total in 2012/13 to 53% in 2016/17. There has been a corresponding fall in among older graduates, with the 25-29 age group showing the sharpest decline, down from 31% in 2012/13 to 24% in 2016/17.

Interestingly, the 25-29 age group accounts for the largest number of School Direct Salaried trainees in 2016/17, some 1,132 out of the 3,159 on this route; 36% of all such trainees. I am not sure how there can be 629 under 25s on the Salaried route, as many must just qualify for the three year post-degree requirement to be part of the programme. Indeed, there are more under 25s than there are trainees over 40 on the salaried route this year. Those on the salaried route under the age of thirty account for 56% of the trainees on this route into teaching: not, perhaps, what was intended when the scheme was devised.

The fact that only 73% of Teach First trainees are under 25 is also of interest since the scheme was designed to attract new graduates. However, 94% were under the age of thirty, so perhaps the programme is doing a good job with mature new graduates. Overall, the mean age of all Teach First’s new trainees this year was just 24.

The 7,328 under 25s that started a teacher preparation course in a higher education institution this September still account for the largest single group of new post-graduate trainees.

Men remain firmly in the minority among those with a declared gender. Only 20% of postgraduate and 15% of undergraduate entrants to primary courses are men this year. Although the undergraduate percentage has remained stable for some years now, the postgraduate percentage has declined from 23% as recently as 2013/14 to 20% this year and men accounted for only 17% of trainees recruited to the primary Teach First route. Still, there percentages are better than 20 years ago, when men only accounted for 16% of primary PGCE trainees in 1995.

There is relatively better news in the secondary sector, where men accounted for 40% of recruitment this year, up from 37% in 2012/13. This means that an extra 1,000 men started secondary teacher preparation courses this year compared with in 2012/13. However, even here Teach First lagged behind other routes, as men accounted for only 35% of their new secondary trainees this year.

There is more god news for the government in the fact that 2016/17 sees 15% of trainees coming from minority ethnic groups; the best percentage since before 2012/13. Here Teach First does better than the school based routes, but higher education institutions lead the way with nearly one in five of their trainees from minority ethnic groups. The location of schools and their propensity to recruit from their localities may account for the relatively low overall recruitment percentage from minority ethnic groups since the distribution of graduates in these groups is not spread evenly across England.

Lucy kellaway will find that there are 117 trainee teachers aged 55+ this year, with a further 421 between 50-54. Together, those over 50, account for 2% of new trainees.

 

School budget under pressure: use TeachVac

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The BBC are running a story today about school budgets being under pressure http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-37860682 although I cannot find under link to new evidence to suggest why the story should suddenly have emerged again today. After all, it isn’t news, but maybe the joint NUT/ATL launch of the website on school funding cuts at http://www.schoolcuts.org.uk/#/ is what has prompted the renewed interest in the issue.

As readers will know, I have long worried about the fate of small schools in the tightening funding climate. These schools saw off the Gove decision to remove any block grant that is needed to help with overheads. A straight per pupil formula would wipe out many remaining village schools and also small infant schools in urban areas. Church schools would be especially badly affected.

However, if the teacher associations are serious about the need for more funding they should also be serious about ensuring schools use the cash they already have as cost effectively as possible. What follows is as near as a rant as you will read on this blog so, if that worries you, don’t read on.

More than two years ago I did the round of teacher associations with my concept of the free vacancy matching service for schools based upon the advances in technology. I was listened to politely by all of them, but that was as far as any interest went, despite the fact that I explicitly made it clear that the aim was to save schools money.

Fast forward to November 2016 and TeachVac has been operating on a daily basis for more than two years, matching teachers and vacancies, all for no cost to either the schools or the teachers. Have the developers of TeachVac seen the teacher associations beating a path to their door to see how their members can save on the millions of pounds they spend on recruitment advertising? Well no, not really, although I did have the first meeting instigated by a teacher association on this issue less than two weeks ago. I understand the caution, after all nobody wants to be associated with a shooting star or a one-day wonder, and they have followed Teachvac’s progress through its regular reports to groups such as SATTAG and its evidence to the Select Committee. But, this is such a major drain on some schools budgets that it might have been something where options could have been explored.

The same can be said for the DfE, although they had more justification to say it wasn’t their concern about how schools spent their money, at least until the White Paper in March expressed an opinion that more should be achieved in the recruitment field by government. The NCTL, Education Funding Agency and Regional School Commissioners, as a group, have also seemingly shown no interest in how schools can save money on recruitment. MATs, on the other hand, have recognised the value of a service such as TeachVac and many of the largest ones have signed up.

If budgets really are coming under pressure, then by all means campaign for more money, but also look to use the existing funds as wisely as possible.

You read it here first

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The BBC Education page is carrying an interesting story today about exclusions as if it is news. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37340042 Regular readers of this blog will of course know that the data under discussion in the BBC piece first appeared on the DfE web site way back in July of this year and was featured in a blog post here on the 23rd July 2016. I look a slightly different line to that of the BBC in their item today as readers can see.

Should the BBC have indicated somewhere that this was catching up on data published nearly three months ago? Or is it just enough to allow those that use the click-through function to discover this when they are taken to the DfE’s web site?

This is a legitimate question since Greg Hurst, the Education Editor of The Times picked up on the BBC story and ran with it in today’s paper. I don’t know why the BBC decided to do a piece on the increase in exclusions today and it is an important tissue. Digging more deeply into the figures it is important to know whether children in care are more likely to be excluded than those living at home and whether it is more of a challenge for local authorities to find places for some pupils that are excluded.

We are right to be intolerant of abuse, whether physical or verbal which represents the main reasons for exclusions, but why do some schools in challenging areas manage with far fewer exclusions that other schools in similar circumstances? It is easy for me to write those words as I am not a young teacher in a new classroom faced by a disruptive group of adolescents or a new head teacher trying to re-assert authority in a school where behaviour is not always at acceptable levels.

How important are school to school support mechanisms, whether from MATs, diocese or even, perish the through, local authorities? Do stand-alone schools exclude more pupils than those in some form of association with other schools? There are lots of legitimate questions to be asked from the data beyond focussing on the geography, as I admit I did in the start of my post in July and the BBC did in their item today, as I have indicated above.

Once the secondary school population starts increasing again it is likely the absolute numbers of exclusions could increase, but we much try and do everything possible to make schools secure and safe places for everyone, even those that create the challenges to authority.

 

 

Application apathy?

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I have a lot of time for Stewart McCoy, the operations director of Randstad Education, the global recruiter that is a player in the UK education recruitment market. As a result, I read Randstad’s latest survey and report with interest. Entitled, The Invisible Barrier: https://www.randstad.co.uk/employers/areas-of-expertise/education/the-invisible-barrier/ it raises some important issues.

The most important concern is the plethora of different application forms teachers can face when applying for jobs in different schools. It is possible for each and every academy to have a different form and certainly for different MATs and local authorities to use subtly different forms for applicants.

Of course, this is nothing new, when I first started teaching many local authorities still had space on the form for national service details and every form was different. Not very helpful to new entrants, but for many serving teachers changing jobs their service record was part of their employment history.

With the proper concerns these days about child welfare and the need for more rigorous vetting of applicants for posts working with children and young people it is understandable that application forms have become more complex and demanding of a person’s life history and less standardised. Randstad’s survey found 90% of the teachers that they surveyed wanted a ‘simple, universal application process’ and that the present system was off-putting and persuaded teachers to apply for fewer jobs at any one time.

Of course, there may also be other explanations of why teachers only apply for one job at a time. In some subjects, where demand outstrips supply, why make multiple applications if you might succeed with your first. After all, if you don’t, there will certainly be other jobs to apply for. Then there is also the effect of trainee and teacher workloads during the key March to March recruitment season for permanent vacancies. This problem does indeed point towards the need to simplify the application process with, at the very least, a common form for essential details. For every specific vacancy an applicant is always wise to tailor the free text part of the form to sell their unique characteristics that make them suitable for the school to hire to fill the advertised vacancy.

Of course, agencies can operate rather like the local authority ‘pool’ arrangements that used to be so common for primary school classroom teacher vacancies, where the overall suitability is measured through the initial application process and it is left to the interview stage for the real ‘sell’ by the candidate either selected by the school from the ‘pool’ or put forward as suitable by an agency. This avoids the need for tailoring the free text to the job being applied for, but can leave schools guessing about suitability of some candidates.

Incidentally, I was interested that Randstad conducted their survey in March, but have not published it until now. Their comment that September and October are two of the busiest months for teacher recruitment is an interesting one. There is always a small surge in vacancies in September, but Teachvac’s (www.teachvac.co.uk) evidence is that October is often a quieter month for permanent vacancies. Perhaps, this is the month that Randstad see their supply teacher work pick up as schools start to face their first staffing issues of the new school year.

The Randstad Report does contain some interesting issues for the DfE as they no doubt ponder the future of any possible national recruitment portal and the lessons they have learnt about the application process from the work to date on the National Teaching Service.

 

 

 

Resign

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As some readers may know, TeachVac, the free to use recruitment site for schools, teachers, trainees and returners to teaching, has its operational base on the Isle of Wight. I was, therefore, disgusted to read of the comments by the Chair of Ofsted about the islanders. The comments themselves don’t dignify with repeating, but I am firmly of the opinion that Mr Hoare, the Ofsted chairman, having made the remarks at a public event should now do the decent thing and resign in line with the principles of public life he presumably accepted when offered his appointment.

This does not mean that there should be an unwillingness to confront some of the deep-seated issues within schooling on the Island that go back many years. The Tory government in the early 1970s was probably wrong to create a single unitary council for the Island and not instead to enforce closer working with Hampshire or even Dorset. The island may have made an unfortunate choice in opting for the three tier school system when creating a comprehensive school system. It probably fitted the use of buildings best of any system but, along with other councils that opted for such systems, they weren’t to know that changes in the way teachers were trained for secondary schools, away from undergraduate courses and towards a one-year PGCE, may not have helped provide sufficient teachers willing, able, properly trained and motived to work in ‘middle schools’, especially the 9-13 middle schools in use on the Isle of Wight.

These middle schools eventually also faced challenges finding head teachers willing to run what were increasingly isolated pockets of such schools, a fact pointed  out in some of the annual reports that I complied about the leadership market for NAHT and from time to time ASCL as well.

Then there is the issue of location. Much has been made in recent years of the challenges of coastal schools. In practice, this really means more isolated schools wherever they are, but the issue was first noticed in relation to coastal schools with a more limited hinterland than other schools. The Island has a limited travel to work area and that can restrict recruitment as can the very nature of being an island and the extra time it takes to reach the mainland.

The fact that all of these issues are well known makes Mr Hoare’s comments even more unforgivable, if he said what has been reported.

TeachVac is proud to be located on the Isle of Wight and has employed some excellent staff since we started operations just over two years ago. The company will continue to put its faith in the Island as a location and I join in on the call on Mr Hoare to resign. Whatever the reason for his remarks, they were uncalled for and should not have been made.

Coda

Mr Hoare resigned on the 23rd August 2016 just over two weeks after his remarks became public knowledge.

Bring back local democracy for schools

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At the last county council meeting in Oxfordshire we discussed school organisation and the government’s proposals for making all schools academies. During the debate one Tory councillor said he didn’t believe in the need for trained teachers. As he is the Tory representative on the committee overseeing the Police & Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley I asked him bluntly whether I could enrol as a police officer without training and, if so, could I be issued with a firearm? Not surprisingly, he said the two jobs were different.

In the past I have asked journalists that question me on the need for teacher training whether I could become their editor without having been a journalist; most say that’s not how it works. Of course, it is the way it worked in the past as Lord Adonis will tell you if you ask what training he received before becoming the education reporter at the Financial Times.

With this background of establishment belief that anyone can be a teacher, and indeed run a school, I read this week’s Profile interview in Schools Week with interest. This is a regular series that I was proud to be part of when it first started and they were looking volunteers to interview. This week the interviewee was Toby Young, http://schoolsweek.co.uk/toby-young-free-school-chief-executive/ He was the man that helped start the free school movement and has more recently been paid £50,000 a year as CEO of the Trust, according to the last accounts of the MAT that now runs three schools in West London and is about to open a fourth (visit https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07493696/filing-history and click on accounts for details).

According to Toby Young in his Schools Week interview he said;

“I was very critical of England’s public education system under the last Labour government, and I hadn’t grasped how difficult it is to do better, and to bring about system-wide improvement.

“The last government and this government have achieved a remarkable amount, and I do think the direction of travel is the right direction, but there is no question that it was arrogant of me to believe that just having high expectations and believing in the benefits of a knowledge-based education for all, that those things alone would be enough to create successful schools.”

 “As someone coming into education from the outside, the bits you see of other schools are only the tip of the iceberg. You’re not aware of everything that is going on beneath the surface. You think, ‘well, I could do better than that’, as you are pointing to the tip of the iceberg, without realising how much more there is to it.”

He sighs. “If I could rewind six years, and know then what I know now, I would have been much less critical of other schools, local authorities, and England’s public education system in general.”

At this point I might rest my case for a return to local democratic control after the Thatcher/Blair assault on local government’s role in education. Sure, there were bad local authorities and taking control of them for a period has been a good idea, but throwing the baby out with the bath water was plain daft.

If Toby Young had seen free schools as a new type of voluntary school for the 21st century then much of the grief of the past few years might have been avoided and the government wouldn’t have been faced with having to make Friday’s –U- turn.

However, the job is only half done. We still need a governance system for schools that is credible, reliable and is geared to improving outcomes for all young people at every stage of the education process. Personally, I believe that should involve democratically elected local representatives in mutli-service authorities responsible to a single government department at Westminster.

A first step would be to identify how many system leaders we need and where we are going to find them? We also need to train them in a first-class education leadership academy led by professionals but supported by those with a wide range of skills. Something like the concept I mentioned in a recent post. Toby Young may have good ideas, but perhaps he has now discovered that good intentions are not enough.

Oh, and by the way, his MAT has been looking for a chief finance officer http://www.wlfsat.org/vacancies although the vacancy for a CEO has yet to appear on their web site.

Education not a priority for voters?

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The Conservative Party seems to have calculated that because education in general and schools in particular didn’t feature prominently in the 2015 general election campaign parents and voters generally were content with the direction of travel. This means Tory policy-makers think voters support the move towards a school system that deprived local authorities of most of their remaining functions regarding schools and required all schools, including all primary schools, to become academies.

The forthcoming local elections in May are an opportunity for many voters to prove the government spin doctors wrong. As this blog has asserted, primary schools should remain under local support and direction as part of a national system. Schools are an important part of their local community, indeed in many rural areas they are the only manifestation of the community other than a village hall. The pub, shop, church and all other services have disappeared. Many Tory councillors recognise this point. Indeed, I suspect than some even entered active politics in support of their local school.

Announcing the policy that all schools must become academies just before Easter and both the teacher conference season and local election campaigning was either an act of supreme self-confidence on the part of the prime minister – for he must have sanctioned the Chancellor telling the world about the policy in the budget – or a staggering lack of understanding of the feelings of voters for their local school and its place in the community. Why the Tories would want to offer opposition parties a campaign against wholesale nationalisation of schools is beyond my understanding.

So far, despite their important as operators of primary schools, the churches and other faith groups seem to have bene relatively silent on the announcement about academisation. Easter Sunday sermons would be a good time for the Archbishops to convey to the faithful whether they back the government or will support those that want local authorities to retain an interest in schooling.

The honourable way out might be for Mrs Morgan to announce that in the first stage all secondary schools will become academies and that the policy will then be reviewed in the light of how MATs are working before moving on to the primary sector if the policy has proved successful. After all, we live in an age of austerity, as the government keeps telling us, and creating academies for the sake of it uses money that could be better spent protecting children’s centres, rural bus subsidies, disability benefits or a host of other more useful projects.

The Perry Beeches warning letter from the Education Funding Agency published on Maundy Thursday will just add fuel to the fire of those that worry about how MATs operate. Of course there were schools that broke financial regulations under local control, and even heads that went to prison for mis-appropriating public or parents’ funds. But, it would be interesting to know whether the trend towards financial mis-management is more likely in MATs with no geographical basis than those where they work closely with local authorities?

Who runs our schools could become the key battle of the 2016 local elections. If it does, there is no guarantee that the Tory programme for all schools to become academies will meet with universal voter approval.

 

Try TeachVac: don’t waste money reinventing the wheel

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For me, the most interesting paragraph in the White Paper issued today by the Secretary of State at

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/508501/430653_WL_GOVT_Educational_Excellence_Everywhere_-_print_ready.PDF

is paragraph 1.36 that I have reproduced below

Recruitment: we will reform the National College for Teaching and Leadership, ensuring that in addition to delivering our leadership remit, we are better able to design and deliver well-targeted incentives, teacher recruitment campaigns and opportunities that attract sufficient, high quality new entrants to the profession, including those who are looking to return to the classroom. To reduce the costs of recruitment for schools in a more challenging labour market, we will create simple web tools that enable schools to advertise vacancies for free and a new national teacher vacancy website so that aspiring and current teachers can find posts quickly and easily

The text in bold has been highlighted by me. This is because, as many readers know, I helped establish TeachVac last year to do this very thing.

Indeed, on the 7th March, during a visit to the DfE, I handed a civil servant a letter for the Secretary of State drawing her attention to TeachVac and asking that it be passed to Mrs Morgan’s via her Private Office. I have heard nothing since, presumably because to have replied might have compromised the White Paper. However, the fact that previous letters on this subject also went unanswered suggests the DfE wants to develop its own scheme. It is worth remembering that the last time they tried, it didn’t last very long.

As Chairman of TeachVac, I am happy to discuss saving the government money by demonstrating TeachVac to the DfE, NCTL, College of Teachers or indeed any other body that is to be charged with meeting the DfE’s aim in the White Paper. There really is no need to re-invent the wheel or waste money on something that already exists.

TeachVac has been growing rapidly this year and secondary schools using the system already receive information on the state of the market; this can be expanded to cover all schools very easily.

Our latest assessment of the trainee pool depletion rates for 2016 are reproduced below.

ITT pool numbers as of 17/03/16

Group ITT Number left % left
Art 503 404 80.32
Science 2604 1158 44.49
English 1940 913 47.09
Mathematics 2197 1205 54.87
Languages 1226 826 67.41
IT 498 316 63.45
Design & Technology 518 273 52.80
Business 174 61 35.34
RE 386 217 56.35
PE 1230 1004 81.63
Music 358 224 62.71
Geography 580 309 53.36
History 847 580 68.48

Now is the time for the remaining schools to sign up to TeachVac for nothing and show the government that this isn’t something that they need to re-invent from scratch.

As I have been monitoring trends in vacancies in schools at all levels since I started counting headships in 1983, I would be delighted to see schools able to save substantial sums of money on recruitment. After all, that was the aim of TeachVac and why is was free to use from Day 1.

 

 

Funding and equality

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In the good old days Cabinet office guidelines recommended 13 weeks for a public consultation by a government department. The stage one consultation on the ‘Schools national funding formula’ was published on the 7th March and closes on the 17th April. This is but five weeks including Easter. The closing day is a Sunday. (There might have been an exclamation mark here, but I am trying to conform to the new DfE guidelines).

The interesting feature for me of the proposals centres on the attempt by the government to marry together two different notions of equality. The first of these is the notion that everyone should have the same funding. In essence it is the argument of the F40 Group of authorities that felt they were short-changed when the current rules were introduced. The second notion is that of equal outcomes. If every child is to achieve the maximum possible from their education some will need more resources than others. This principle has long been accepted in relation to SEN and with the Pupil Premium the issue of the need for other forms of additional support was formalised at a national rate. The Pupil Premium will remain for the lifetime of this parliament, but no guarantee has been given for after 2020. The consultation identifies three categories of additional needs.

Without fully worked examples, it is difficult to do more than comment on the building blocks of the new formula. I suspect the one that will worry schools that might be potential losers under a new formula is the area cost adjustment. The level this is set at will need to be able to compensate for areas where salaries are higher because of high cost of living and working in the area. However, if it doesn’t recognise the high cost of housing in some areas outside London, it won’t help schools in those areas attract and retain staff. This is important because, as the consultation recognises, staffing costs are the major part of any school’s budget. Ever since the introduction of Local Management of Schools in the early 1990s, the decision to fund on ‘average salaries’ rather than actual salary bills has benefitted schools with a relatively young staff profile and eaten up more of the budget of those schools with a high proportion of staff at the top of the Upper Pay Band. The new formula won’t change that. Indeed, it might see the end of scales and move towards a single point or a first year starting salary and then the same basic salary for all with additions for responsibilities and other reasons depending on what the school could afford.

The notion of support for exceptional circumstance such as split sites, sparsity and business rates, not to mention the PfI payments from the Building Schools for the Future programme, is welcome news, assuming the funding is enough to cover all current needs.

And here lies the issue. With more pupils to educate, how much more cash will there be in real terms? Personally, I would also want to see modelling of outcomes when the current pupil numbers currently going through primary schools move into the secondary sector. What will be the effects on primary schools, especially small primary schools, when secondary numbers are rising and primary numbers are static or again falling? The nature of the formula will especially affect small rural primary schools. Does a Conservative government want to design a formula that might lead to their wholesale closure or will the sparsity factor balance off against the area cost adjustment? This will, I am sure, worry some of the more rural areas of England, not least Northumberland where, according to the DfE website, Holy Island Church of England First School currently has a per pupil expenditure or more than £27,000. I am not sure whether the statutory walking distance to the nearest schools works in cases like that but it might be another factor to add to the list of exceptions that can be covered through additional funding.

This just goes to show how much work DfE officials have done on trying to create a fair formula, but how complex the issue remains until there is agreement on what a fair formula is. What it isn’t is just allocating the same amount to every pupil.