Category Archives: politics

6,500 more teachers: is Labour’s pledge dead in the water?

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, I wrote the following in this blog:

“The Spending Review also needs to come clean on what the pledge around the 6,500 extra teachers means, and how they will be paid for? The IFS makes the point that the college sector needs more than 6,500 extra lecturers to cope with the fact that rolls there won’t be falling over the next few years, and any added working in adult learning will put up the demand for lecturers even more. Switching funds to the college sector solves the issue of how to pay for these extra staff, but will leave the secondary sector with a pupil-teacher ratio in many areas little different to what it was 50 years ago. Hard times for schools ahead?” More thoughts on funding schools, ahead of the spending Review | John Howson

Will, we will know if it is hard times, status quo going forward or genuinely more cash for the school’s sector on Wednesday, when the waiting and teasing will finally be over.  

However, there appears to be news about the pledge to create an additional 6,500 teachers that formed part of Labour’s 2024 general election campaign. Labour said that they would:

Enable school staff to help our children to succeed

  • With over 6,500 more teachers in schools
  • All new teachers to be qualified
  • A new national voice for school support staff
  • A Teacher Training Entitlement for all our teachers
  • Everyone in our schools treated with the respect they deserve. Labour’s plan for schools – The Labour Party

According to the tes, and other sources, the pledge of 6,500 more teachers is dead in the water. Labour ‘abandons’ manifesto pledge to hire more teachers This follows the publication of the annual workforce data by the DfE showing that unsurprisingly showed that with falling rolls, the number of teachers in the primary school sector actual fell between November 2023 and November 2024. The primary school total of teachers dropped by about 2,900, while the number of secondary and special school teachers, as well as those working in pupil referral units, went up by about 2,350.

Now, Labour can argue that the November 2024 data was based upon the funding of schools under the previous Conservative government, and they would be correct. However, it would make the pledge even harder to achieve if it was assumed that the 6,500 additional teachers were to be added to the November 2023 total that was the latest figure at the time of the general election.

Creating more than 7,000 additional teaching posts was just never going to happen, especially as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that there is a staffing crisis in the further education sector, and that’s where funding for any addiitonal staffing probably ought to be directed first.

Will Labour pull a rabbit out of the hat between now and Wednesday, after all it was VAT on private schools that was supposed to be used as hypothecated cash to fund the extra staff. We shall see what is announced.

And what of the other pledges? Will there be a new national voice for support staff already being told that they are less valuable that teachers by being awarded a lower pay increase: bad news for the beleaguered special school sector.

A broken system: not just mismanagement

Posted on by
Reply

When searching the DfE website this morning for the latest numbers about schools and pupils to allow me to compare the number of teachers per school for different subjects, I was distracted into looking at the number of ‘open notices’ from the DfE to Councils across England. Currently they total around 30 such notices and there are others that have been closed in recent times. These notices refer to the provision of either special needs (SEND) or children’s social services.

There really must be something wrong with a system where nearly 20%, or one in five, of all upper tier local authorities have such notices that are issued to councils for ‘poor’ or ‘inadequate’ performance. I had expected the majority of such notices to be for SEND services, but in fact half are for Children’s Social Services. This raises the question of whether in some authorities, and especially smaller unitary authorities, there is the funding to cope with both SEND and Children’s Social Services?

Of the local authorities with ‘open’ improvement notices for children’s social services, most are small metropolitan districts of unitary authorities.: Liverpool, Nottingham City and the counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire are the exceptions. The pattern for SEND notices is different, with six counties, four metropolitan districts, four unitary councils and one London borough with ‘open notices.

What is striking about both lists is the geographical split. The relative absence from the list of well-funded London boroughs – only three appear, and only one in the SEND list, compared with eight metropolitan districts really is worthy of note and discussion. Comparing the distribution with my recent report on pupil teacher ratios does suggest that funding, or the lack of it, may play a part.  

If the 16 other authorities with closed notices since 2020 are added to those with ‘open’ notices, then almost a third of all local authorities have been on the ‘naughty step’ with the DfE and Care Quality commission so far in this decade.

If that percentage and the split between types of authorities doesn’t raise questions about why and why some authorities are more likely to be faced with improvement notices than others, then I think we have a serious lack of inquiry.

The relationship between the size of an authority and competence to deliver high quality services is important, both because of the Reform Party’s pledge to cut out waste, and the Labour government’s intention to reform local government. Both need to be seen in light of this list. Is bigger better, or is local government outside London just not well-enough funded

Of course, I must declare a personal interest, since I look over as Cabinet Member for Children’s Service (excluding SEND) after Oxfordshire received a ‘notice’ in the autumn of 2023 about the quality of its SEND provision.

To some extent with SEND, authorities are at the mercy of the NHS, over which they have little power, and that relationship with SEND needs to be investigated thoroughly. Penalizing democratically elected local government for the failing of a nationally run NHS is neither fair not equitable. That the government’s funding of the High Needs Block may add to local government’s problems also needs to be taken into account. Oxfordshire is in the bottom 30% for SEND funding.

Teacher training numbers set to fall for next few years

Posted on by
Reply

The May 2025 data on applications to ITT courses was published today Initial teacher training application statistics for courses starting in the 2025 to 2026 academic year – Apply for teacher training – GOV.UK The news is almost, but not entirely good, with offers ahead of last year across the board, although only by 14 in Religious Education, nine in Drama and 43 in design and technology. Still, at the macro level, the teacher supply crisis can almost certainly be declared as having come to an end if those offered places all turn up at the start of their courses.

Of course, there are still three months of the recruitment round left, and those subjects not yet likely to hit their DfE targets, announced in April, may yet do so. I think it is possible that Chemistry and English will meet the targets, but I am doubtful about business studies 212 offers (900 target); Classics 44 (60); design and technology 466 (965); drama 235 (620); music 276 (565); religions education 347 (780) and subjects in the ‘others’ group 2,520 (375).

The 1,762 offers to applicants classified as from the ’rest of the world’ amount to 6% of all offers and, I suspect, somewhat higher percentage in some secondary subjects. Still, it is good to see more younger applicants applying, even if the percentage of those 21 and under – i.e. new graduates – being made offers has dropped from 84% to 77% as a result. By comparison offers to those career changers in the 25 to 29 age group have stayed stable at 52% last year and 51% this year.  

Male applicants are doing slightly better this year with 45% offered places compared with 42% last May. For women applicants, the offer rate has remained at 59%. London still leads the way, with around 15% of all applicants.

One of the reasons why some subjects won’t meet their targets is the decision of the DfE Teacher Workforce Model team to include some element of carry-over where some subjects failed to meet their target last year. The DfE Postgraduate initial teacher training targets, Academic year 2025/26 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK document explains the decision as follows:

“The drivers behind changes in target vary by subject. The key factor as to whether the 2025/26 targets have increased or decreased for specific secondary subjects is the extent to which those targets have been adjusted to build in the impacts of recruitment being below target in the two ITT recruitment rounds before 2025/26. This is done via the under-supply adjustments [1], which account for approximately a sixth of the combined primary and secondary target.” My emphasis

“[1] Under-supply adjustments calculated in the TWM assess the impacts of retention and recruitment via all routes. They use ITT recruitment data, and ITT completion & post-ITT employment rates to estimate the number of NQEs entering the workforce, having trained via PGITT, from the two ITT cycles immediately before 2025/26. It uses these figures, along with estimates for both the corresponding numbers of entrants into the stock via other routes (e.g. returners) and leavers, to estimate the size of the workforce in the target year. This figure is then compared to previously estimated teacher demand & supply, to identify if enough teachers were recruited/retained/re-entered to meet the needs of the system. If there is a supply shortage, an under-supply adjustment is made. The model does not apply an over-supply adjustment.” DfE Postgraduate initial teacher training targets, Academic year 2025/26 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK

Now, this is a perfectly respectable method of helping schools replenish their teaching stock in ‘shortage’ subjects once recruitment starts to pick up. However, it comes with policy implications. Firstly, changing targets each year so late in the process makes life difficult for ITT providers to manage the staffing for their courses. What is going to happen in the three subjects where offers already exceed targets? Thirty years ago, targets were issued on a three -year cycle with years two and three being indicative, but rarely subject to wide swings, unless there was a policy change.

Then there is the issue of whether schools will have the vacancies for any increased recruitment by September 2026. These targets were set ahead of the Spending Review. Schools staff their timetable to be fully staffed each September even if some staff are less than ideally qualified.

As long-time readers will know, I think there should be a closer alignment between ITT targets and the actual behaviour of the labour market. By waiting until the end of April to announce targets, the DfE has managed to use data from recruitment in 2023, and that helps, but is still a risk when pupil rolls are falling and school funding is also under pressure. However, as many of the targets adjusted upwards still won’t be met, even with increased recruitment, this is all a bit academic, but worth discussing for future years.

The next few years, especially for anyone contemplating a career as a primary school teacher, might well be challenging when it comes to finding a teaching post after training.

What do you know of EOTAS?

Posted on by
Reply

Even though it pains me to say so, the following FOI question and answer from a well-respected county council raises some interesting questions about audit and governance, and the monitoring of expenditure on SEND pupils.

Question: How many young people had EOTAS packages of over £100,000 granted by xxx County Council during the 2024/25 financial year, and of these packages, what was the largest amount of any package in operation during the financial year?

Answer: The information is not held in a centralised format. Therefore, to be able to obtain it, a manual audit would need to happen to cross-reference systems for 153 individual electronic records and associated financial systems to determine the total cost of each child or young person’s combined EOTAS package, each taking 20 minutes to locate, retrieve and collate, totalling 51 hours.

So, it appears that the county council in question does not know how much it is spending on each child with an EOTAS (Education Other than at School) package. It seemingly knows how much is being spent on each element of the package, but doesn’t have a spreadsheet that allows all elements to be brought together in a total per child.

Now it is not for me to question the lack of curiosity of the Director of Children’s Services or the Lead Member in the authority, let alone the Director of Finance, but it was an element of spending that I was concerned enough about to monitor when I was a cabinet member.

I have the same question out to a number of other local authorities, so it will be interesting to see whether I receive the same sort of answer. What is probably the case is that these packages are contributing to the High Needs block deficits in many local authorities.

A second shire county told me it couldn’t answer the question because the number was less than five, and might thus reveal details about an individual: fair enough, but I assume it means that there are somewhere between one and five such packages of more than £100,000 per child. It would be interesting to know what such education packages might contain, and why they are so expensive.

At a Scrutiny Committee meeting in November 2024, Oxfordshire County Council officers told the committee in a Report about EOTAS in 2024 “The annual spend as of November 2024 is £2.1 million for 52 children and young people.” (para 18 Report to Scrutiny Committee) That is an average of £40,000 per child with an EOTAS package.

EOTAs packages are as a result of s61 of the Children and Families Act 2014.

61Special educational provision otherwise than in schools, post-16 institutions etc

(1) A local authority in England may arrange for any special educational provision that it has decided is necessary for a child or young person for whom it is responsible to be made otherwise than in a school or post-16 institution or a place at which relevant early years education is provided.

(2) An authority may do so only if satisfied that it would be inappropriate for the provision to be made in a school or post-16 institution or at such a place.

(3) Before doing so, the authority must consult the child’s parent or the young person.

Might it be time for the National Audit Office to have a deep dive into this part of SEND spending to see whether the expenditure is producing the desired results for these young people?

More thoughts on funding schools, ahead of the spending Review

Posted on by
1

Yesterday, I published a post about my initial thoughts on the forthcoming spending review, due next week, and how saving might be made in the education sector.  For a more detailed analysis at the macro level there is also the Institute for Fiscal Studies review Schools and colleges in the 2025 Spending Review | Institute for Fiscal Studies that lays out the options for the government against the background of falling rolls and the challenging economic situation, and now The Defence Review, and all that entails for government spending priorities.

My guess is that the government will direct any extra funding in education to skills and the college sector, especially where it is related to spending on training for employment, and let the schools sector sort out its own future. One exception to this general thesis is SEND, where the government will have to take some action. Sadly, without yet a Report from the Select Committee that has been looking at SEND for the past sixth months.

The nuclear option on spending open to the government, and one that local authorities might have used in the past when they controlled the financing of the schools’ sector, would be to top slice the Schools Block and transfer that funding to the High Needs Block, used to fund special needs, and leave the schools sector to sort out the consequences.

Afterall, education is low down in the polling pecking order for national elections. This also makes sense with the supposed reorganisation of local authorities making the issue of the SEND balances and off-balance sheet deficits being carried by local authorities more of a challenge to fund in the future. However, my bet is that local government reorganisation will be off the agenda while Reform is riding high in the opinion polls. As a result, a top slice this year could be an option.

The Secretary of State has also solved the issue of how to deal with the underachievement of poor White families, by setting up an inquiry. In my view that approach is just kicking the can down the road to avoid taking difficult decisions in the Spending Review. Everyone in education knows the issues, and probably the answers as well: bring back Sure Start or something like it for the under-5s, and focus on making the secondary school curriculum more meaningful for those pupils not heading for higher education at eighteen, and who will probably leave school for college at sixteen.

The Spending Review also needs to come clean on what the pledge around the 6,500 extra teachers means, and how they will be paid for? The IFS makes the point that the college sector needs more than 6,500 extra lecturers to cope with the fact that rolls there won’t be falling over the next few years, and any added working in adult learning will put up the demand for lecturers even more. Switching funds to the college sector solves the issue of how to pay for these extra staff, but will leave the secondary sector with a pupil-teacher ratio in many areas little different to what it was 50 years ago. Hard times for schools ahead?

Sutton Trust and the London effect

Posted on by
Reply

The recent publication of  an Opportunity Index Interactive Map – The Sutton Trust by the Sutton Trust raises some interesting questions about both methodology and the funding of schools.

I am in the process of completing an article discussing changes in pupil teacher ratios in England over the past 50 years between period of local government re-organisation. What struck me in doing that research was how often London boroughs had the most favourable PTRs, both in the late 1970s, and fifty years later in the 2020s.

Now, the Sutton Trust uses constituencies not borough in their mapping, but there is the same result: London parliamentary constituencies in the 2024 general election fill the top 20 places in a number of the Sutton Trust rankings, including the attainment 8 score for pupils with Free School Meals – not sure whether that is entitlement or take up, as they can be different in the secondary sector.

The Sutton Trust map illustrates the high rankings for much of London and parts of the Home Counties to the north and west of London. I am sure that the f40 Group of Local authorities will find this a useful tool to show how badly rural areas are funded, with many rural constituencies falling into the lowest toe categories of ‘very low’ and ‘low’.

Someone might also want to look at rural areas where there are selective secondary schools. I was struck by the fact that Weald of Kent constituency, where I stood in the 2024 general election for the Liberal Democrats, ranked 526th out of 533 constituencies in the Opportunity Index listing. Pupils in the constituency are in the Kent selective school system, and most don’t qualify for free transport to a selective school, even if they pass the entry test. Does that make a difference?

Looking at pupils that grew up in Oxfordshire, there are large differences. in the rankings in the Opportunity Index, with Bicester & Woodstock constituency ranked 68th in the opportunity rankings, and Oxford East some 398 places lower,  with a ranking of 466 out of the 533 constituencies.

ConstituencyRank out of 533Top 50% earners by age 28Top 20% of earners by 28Attainment 8 for Free School Meals Pupils
Banbury41037729
Bicester & Woodstock68431236
Didcot & Wantage260361231
Henley & Thame211461632
Oxford East466351029
Oxford West & Abingdon259401235
Witney324431027

This disparity helps to make the point I have made before, that the present funding formula for schools doesn’t work for pockets of deprivation in relatively affluent upper tier authorities. This has been the message of the f40 Group for some considerable time, and is supported by my study of PTRs across the past 50 years.

The last paragraph is not to deny the fact that urban constituencies in the metropolitan areas take up many of the lowest ranking positions, but it is worth looking at those constituencies that are near the bottom of the rankings, such as Clacton and Weald of Kent, and that don’t fit the normal perception of areas where opportunities are mor limited than in other constituencies.

Tis it once again time to discuss again how we fund our schools, and what society wants its schooling system to try to achieve.

Are teacher redundancies inevitable?

Posted on by
Reply

The blunt answer is probably yes. Falling rolls, and a pupil driven National Funding Formula mean that even if a pay settlement is fully funded, some schools won’t be able to cover their present levels of expenditure with fewer pupils.

In the past 50 years, during periods when school rolls were falling, some redundancies took place, but new entrants from ITT often bore the brunt of the disappearing jobs. I recall doing a radio interview around 2010 about new teachers stacking shelves in Tesco because they couldn’t find a teaching post. For some primary school trainees, it might yet come to that state of affairs again.

The key issue for the next few years is, how will HM Treasury react to falling rolls when it sees funding for schools is now largely pupil driven. The creation of a National Funding formula so heavily tied to pupil numbers was a big risk. It was easy enough to turn a blind eye at the time the Formula was being created, as rolls across the country were on the increase. However, those of us with a longer vision could foresee that when rolls were falling, school budgets would quickly come under pressure. With staffing the largest component of school spending: less cash means less staff, even when there was the buffer of high levels of reserves accumulated for a ‘rainy year’.

In the past, HM Treasury has generally allowed the spending department at Westminster responsible for schooling o keep the same funding levels, even as rolls were falling, and when schooling was a local service councils could also prop up schools from Council Tax. I doubt that such an approach will be possible this time.

Falling rolls will mean falling income for schools and hence, redundancies. Such a scenario allied to parental choice means that some popular schools will up their marketing, and ride out the crisis, but less popular schools, and I include some faith schools in that group these days, with either face closure or the need to operate with lower costs and fewer staff.

With education probably lower down the pecking order in the forthcoming Spending Review than many other departments of state, certainly below defence and the NHS, and also not scoring highly in polling with voters, I can see HM treasury wanting to clawback some of the expenditure on education necessary when rolls were higher as an alternative to tax increases.

The macro picture doesn’t look great, and the new General Secretaries of the main teacher unions are going to face a tough battle, and almost certainly industrial action against a Labour government. In such action, the losers will be those living in our most deprived communities and not the parents that can make alternative arrangements: just look back to 2020, and what happened when covid hit our schools.

We are already seeing entrepreneurs marketing courses on ‘how to recruit pupils’ to schools worried about falling rolls.

What will be done for teachers either made redundant or unable to find their first teaching post? In the 2000s, I ran a regular career clinic for the ‘tes’, and offered career guidance and seminars for those worried about their futures. Maybe, it is time for some of the bigger MATs to work together to provide a service for teachers. The first action might be to allow those facing redundancy priority look at any vacancies as they arise. With modern technology, posting jobs to a defined group before general circulation seems like a good idea, and could save on redundancy costs if redeployment is possible. Perhaps, I should restart TeachVac now I am no longer a councillor in Oxfordshire?

Home Guard or Civil Defence Force?

Posted on by
Reply

A new home guard will be established to protect key British infrastructure from attacks by hostile states and terrorists , under plans reportedly put forward in a major defence review. The Independent Sunday 18 May 2025

Less than a year after the issue of whether or not conscription was under consideration by a Conservative government surfaced during the early days of the 2024 general election, we now have a Labour Prime Minister presiding over a defence review that apparently wants to revive a part-time volunteer army. Whatever happened to The Territorials and their companion volunteer reserve forces in the other armed services?

We will have to await the full Defence Review to understand what is in the minds of those charged with the defence of the ream in the 21st century. At a time when there are more teachers in training than the whole establishment of the Royal Navy, (a factoid that never ceases to amaze me), something clearly has to be done about staffing our defence forces.

With the armed services no doubt open to pressure to reduce their numbers of Commonwealth recruits, a group that don’t often receive a mention in the debate about immigration, a review is obviously necessary if we need more people in our defence forces. Incidentally, I saw a post on LinkedIn recently that suggested there were days when the recruiting offices across the whole of Scotland only managed to recruit one person a day into all arms of the forces.

Will the Review consider the issue of cadet forces for young people. The remnants of these units are now rather haphazardly spread across the country, although the private schools have still, at least in the boys’ school sector, managed to retain many of their Combined Cadet Forces.

The CCF also used to be a feature in the State secondary school sector, at least in selective schools, but largely disappeared in the early 1960s, around the time that conscription was abolished. I recall that the school I attended has such a Force in 1958, when I joined the school, but by the time I reached the possible age to join, it had been disbanded.

Will an expansion of such forces be part of the proposals, or will the needs be just for adult volunteers. And what about the Royal Observer Corps – will that again feature as a part of the volunteer defence force?

Personally, I think a civil defence force that has wider uses than just preparing for a war is a more attractive proposition to sell to the general public. Afterall, even if saboteurs were to play an important part in the scheme of things, we already have the Civil Nuclear Police force to guard our high-risk power stations – and, incidentally, they are the only police force where all officers are trained and can carry firearms on a regular basis.

A civil defence force could help in times of national emergencies, such as floods, fires and other times of high risk – where increasingly firefighters are already a mixture of full-time professional and part-time retained officers, such as those that tragically lost their lives last week at the Bicester Motion conflagration –.

You only have to think of the fire bombs of the animal extremists that were inserted into clothing in shops to know how recruiting soldiers to stamp around outside possible targets is little more than gesture defending.

I will wait with interest, to see what actually the government will be proposing.  


‘Fully funded’ often doesn’t mean what it says for school budgets

Posted on by
Reply

As usual, there is discussion about whether the recommendation of the School Teachers Remuneration Body (the STRB) about the level of increase for teachers’ salaries will be fully funded by the DfE this year. Of course, it depends upon what you mean by ‘fully funded’.  If the amount set aside by the DfE is less than the total pay bill, then clearly it won’t be fully funded.

However, even if it is ‘fully funded’ at the overall level, will that mean it will be fully funded for each and every individual school? Such an outcome is highly unlikely. Consider two schools; one has many young teachers and a high annual turnover of staff; the other, has a settled staff, mostly being paid at the top of their pay grade. Now also assume the first school is a maintained school with no top slicing, and the other part of a MAT that both top slices and pool reserves.

Are the two schools funded differently, assuming they are in the same local authority, with no differences in area cost adjustments or other factors. For the most part they won’t be, because of the working of the National Funding Formula that is largely based upon an amount per pupil.

There was less concern among school leaders about whether the pay bill was being met in full when pupil numbers were on the increase: it becomes much more an issue under the National Funding Formula when rolls are falling, and, as a result, a school’s income is set to reduce going forward.  

How did schools get into this position? In the 1990s when budgets were being devolved to schools from local authorities, schools could for the first time use their new freedoms to set their own staffing patterns.

Before the changes resulting from the Education Reform Act of 1988, local authorities set the staffing patterns for schools. Each school was allocated a Group, mostly from Grade 1 for the smallest of primary schools to Grade 7 for the largest secondary schools. Each grade had a point score, and that related to factors such as the number of promoted posts, and whether the school could employ a deputy head or heads. Special schools had their own grading that reflected their more complex staffing structure. The local authority picked up the staffing tab, much as some MATs do today.

All this central funding largely went out of the window with the devolution of funding to schools, although the salary of headteachers – especially in the primary sector – remained largely tied to the former group sizes for many years, often until the uncontrolled introduction of executive headteachers.

In these days of modern technology, it would be perfectly possible for the DfE to provide an uplift of the percentage recommended by the STRB that was related to each school’s salary bill. This would meet the need to ensure no school lost out from an average pay increase for all schools, but would have other consequences. I doubt the DfE would allow schools complete freedom over their staffing structure that they currently enjoy. Perhaps we might even see a return to the sort of structure that disappeared after schools’ gained control of their budgets: now there’s an interesting thought for a Labour government.

What should we do about children not in school?

Posted on by
Reply

Is it time to start looking for a new solution to the issues surrounding children not in school? Currently too many young people are missing school for a variety of different reasons.

How about a ‘virtual school’ for all children not on a ‘normal’ school roll? The Local Authority where they live would assume responsibility on day one for any child without a school place, whether the child has moved into an area, and there is no mid-year SEND place available, (or other school places) or the young person has been excluded by a school, and has not yet been assigned another school.

Then there are those for who the normal school environment is not longer suitable. They should have a clearly defined place within the education system, managed by the local authority. Only in exceptional cases should responsibility for education be ceded to those parents that ask the state to educate their children.

Many young people might remain on the roll of the virtual school for a short-period of time. However, it would ensure no child for whom the state had assumed responsibility went missing from schooling.

Using the expertise gathered from the established model of virtual schools for children in care together with the work of hospital schools and services should ensure that a body of expertise would quickly develop to ensure all young people, whatever their challenges, had a programme of schooling mapped out for them, even if it didn’t look like the established regime of the traditional school day. However, there would be an expectation of regular contact between the virtual school and the pupil, with individual timetables of learning controlled through the school.

With a pupil being on a school roll at all times, parents would know that their children were part of a framework that includes inspection and has the child at its centre, and also removes the sense of isolation many children not in school can experience. The provision of a virtual school should also reduce the need for the use of section 61 of The Children and Families Act 2014.

The ‘virtual school’ would be able to commission ‘alternative provision’ from registered providers and in some cases be able to transfer the pupil to the roll of the alternative provider, where that was appropriate.

Many pupils in the care of the new virtual school would have special educational needs, as do many children that are the responsibility of the current virtual schools for young people in care. I believe that the notion of a ‘school’ is the best way to educate such children. The virtual school would work with both the SEND sector and the NHS, but be clear what is education and what is therapy, and the responsibility of the NHS.

The present funding model for SEND doesn’t work, and leaves many local authorities underfunded, and a small number of pupils costing significant amounts, while not being on the roll of any school. A virtual school should bring in-house many of the costs currently charged by the private sector for tutoring and other learning and allow some economies of scale to be developed. But, better education for every pupil must be the main aim: no child should be left out of schooling for a single day.