Category Archives: politics

An accident of birth

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There is an interesting parliamentary procedure called a ‘Ten Minute Rule Bill’ that allows MPs to raise subjects they deem to be important, but that are not currently part of the legislative process. In some ways it is like a junior version of a Private Members’ Bill, but with even less chance of success.

Yesterday, a Bill was presented in the House of Commons with support from all three of the main political parties in England. This was the Criminal Records (Childhood Offences) Bill, presented by its sponsor, the Conservative MP, Theresa Villiers.

In her speech about the aims of the Bill, Teresa Villiers said,

‘A key problem is that we have no distinct criminal records system for children. Apart from some limited differences providing for slightly shorter rehabilitation periods and other timeframes, children are subject to the full rigours of the disclosure system that I have outlined. Records relating to under-18 offences are retained for life. I believe that the childhood criminal records system in England and Wales is anchoring children to their past and preventing them from moving on from their mistakes. It is acting as a barrier to employment, education and housing. It is therefore working against rehabilitation, undermining a core purpose of the youth justice system. The current rules also perpetuate inequality. The Government’s race disparity audit concluded that ​children from a black and minority ethnic background are sadly more likely to end up with a criminal record. A system that is unduly penal in its treatment of such records has a harder and more disproportionate effect on BME communities. Similar points can be made about children who have spent time in care.’ https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2018-10-10/debates/1205F56C-ECAF-4272-81F7-BA1E629CA816/CriminalRecords(ChildhoodOffences)

I entirely agree. In September 2009, almost a decade ago, I wrote a piece for the TES in my regular column at that time. It was headed 93,601 – the number of 10-17 year olds gaining their first criminal record. https://www.tes.com/news/93601-number-10-17-year-olds-gaining-first-criminal-record

In that TES piece, I pointed out that some 700,000 young people gained a criminal record between 2000 and early 2008; not including those handed a caution or other out of court disposal. Fortunately, attitudes to dealing with petty offending have moved on from the days of Labour’s target culture and in 2016-17 there were just 49,000 proceedings against young people either in a court or by way of cautions for an admitted offence. This is still way too high, but half the level of a decade ago. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/676072/youth_justice_statistics_2016-17.pdf

Those children from a decade ago are now adults, but as I said in 2009, and Theresa Villier’s Bill sought to highlight, they carry the stigma of being an offender with them into their adult life. Not only must they declare it on an enhanced disclosure for a job as say, a teacher, but it can also affect their ability to travel to some countries that require visas, such as the United States.

My solution was that any summary offence, and most either way offences, including theft, should be removed from the record after a period of say five years free of offending.

I hope that the government will find time to either insert a clause in an appropriate piece of legislation or take up this Ten Minute Rule Bill and provide parliamentary time for it to proceed. Carrying a criminal record for the rest of your life should not be a matter of when you were born, but of the severity of your criminal behaviour.

Commuting pupils: are most to be found in London?

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How much does the provision of free transport affect the choice of secondary school in London? What is clear from data published recently by the DfE is that pupils in London, and especially those living in Inner London, are among the most mobile in the country, especially at secondary school level when it comes to attending a state school outside the boundaries of the local authority where they live.  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2018

The percentage of pupils living and attending schools in a local authority, as a percentage of resident population, ranged from almost 100% in Cumbria to just 54.6% in Knowsley in Merseyside. However, along with Reading, at just less than 64% attending schools in the borough, these latter two authorities were very much outliers. Some 26 of the 30 mainland local authorities with the lowest percentage of their resident population attending schools in the authority at secondary school level were London boroughs. I don’t know how much of the explanation in Reading is a combination of the presence of two highly selective schools and a distribution of schools dictated during the twenty years when Reading was part of the County of Berkshire before it was broken up into different unitary authorities.

History, as well as free transport, may also play a part in the reasons why London figures so largely in the authorities with the most movement. For around a century, school building in Inner London was governed by a single agency; first the LCC and then the ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) that was abolished by Mrs Thatcher’s government. In outer London, although the creation of the boroughs dates back more than 50 years, many of the secondary schools in north and west London were built on sites created by the former Middlesex County Council.

The creation of academies, free schools, UTCs and studio Schools will also have help encourage movement of pupils, but, I suspect, to a lesser degree than the historical location of schools.

Although there is cross authority movement at the primary school level, it tends to be at a lower level as most pupils will attend their nearest school except when different demographic pressures put pressure on specific schools in urban areas creating a movement across boundaries. By contrast, the movement across local boundaries for pupils in the special school sector is higher than in either the primary or secondary sectors in many local authority areas. This is not really a surprise, since creating specialist schools is often more cost effective if they can reach a certain size and not every authority wants to provide specialist provision for every type of need.

Outside of London, many of the pupils moving across boundaries will have to pay for their own travel costs, as authorities have modified their travel policies, in an effort to reduce expenditure. However, county council’s expenditure on travel is still a large burden to many authorities, especially for children living in rural areas where the local bus service has now disappeared and either a special bus must be run or a taxi provided at significant cost to the authority.

 

Governors warn of teacher recruitment crisis

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Tell us something we didn’t know, might be the first reaction to this headline from today’s Times newspaper. Indeed, October is a slightly odd time to publish such a survey, as it is well after the start of the school year and at a point where teacher recruitment is heading towards its autumn low point before picking up again in January.

However, I guess it took the TES some time to put together the answers from the National Governance Association members that completed the survey. Anyway, a survey of this type does help to keep the pressure on government, lest they try and bury concerns about teacher recruitment.

The figure for the extra number of teachers needed by the mid-2020s is also not really news, since the DfE has been publishing the forward planning associated with the Teacher Supply Model for the past couple of years. We have David Laws to thank for opening up this key planning tool to general visibility when he was Minister of State.  The next iteration of the Model is due to be published in a couple of weeks, towards the end of the month and will confirm future needs as the school population increases. No doubt this blog will comment on the DfE’s views at that time.

I was surprised that the NGA/TES Survey didn’t highlight the issues many schools have had this year trying to recruit a teacher of English. Indeed, TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk  where I am the chair of the board, surveys key subjects on a daily basis and across the whole of England and we would rate English as more of a problem subject in 2018 than mathematics. As I pointed out last week on this blog, that might not be the case in 2019.

The report in the Times article didn’t mention regional recruitment issues. At TeachVac, we believe that the recruitment situation is generally at its worst in and around London. That’s not to say school elsewhere don’t face problems for specific reasons, but that a higher proportion of school in London and the Home Counties may expect to find recruitment difficult.

The Times newspaper article also ignored the challenges in vocational subjects such as business studies and parts of the design and technology curriculum. That’s probably not surprising, as the DfE shows a complete lack of interest in these subjects, not even offering a bursary to business studies students despite the real challenges schools face in recruiting these teachers.

With the government’s school-based training scheme, School Direct, having stalled this year, the NGA ought to be asking what can be done to ensure teachers that train through higher education courses end up in the schools where they are needed. It is absolutely no use attracting more mature entrants on the back of the BBC Radio 4 series with Lucy Kellaway, if they are in the wrong place and wrong subjects. The Treasury ought to be asking why so many teachers of history are being trained at £9,250 a head. Wasting money training too many teachers is as much of an issue as not training enough, but receives fewer headlines.

 

Funding still not fair?

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Is opposition to the current National Funding Formula for schools growing? There are those that see it as neither national, because it has so many variations, nor a formula, because it carries so many restrictions carried over from what went before. Indeed, the F40 Group of local authorities that campaigns for fairer funding has issued a recent document outlining their concerns about the present state of play.

In one sense the idea of every child having a basic unit of funding tied to the provision of their education has been the Holy Grail of many educationalists ever since the autonomy of local authorities over education funding began to be curbed around the time that local management of schools or LMS began to be introduced in the early 1990s.

At that time there were wide disparities in the funding of schooling across the country. Local business rates meant that Inner London had access to vast resources of income generated from the City of London and the West End. At the other end of the scale were former manufacturing areas and many rural areas where income was insufficient and central government had to provide funds to support an education service. These areas were also joined by many of the shire counties where education competed with social services for a limited amount of resources.

The goal of those seeking a National Funding Formula was to level up less well funded areas, so that all received the same basic level of funding as close to that of the best as possible. Of course, if it wasn’t at the level of the best then there would be losers. The first attempt at a Formula created too many losers. It is now becoming apparent that the current version also has problems associated with it.

As the F40 briefing note says;

One of the key principles set out in the early NFF consultations, supported by f40, was that pupils of similar characteristics should attract similar levels of funding wherever they are in the country (allowing for the area cost adjustment).  Therefore, NFF should be applied to all schools on a consistent basis.  However, the protections applied, such as the 0.5% funding floor, ‘lock in’ some of the historical differences for those schools which have been comparatively well funded for several decades.

Their solution:

The government must continue to develop the national formula so that it is fit for the future i.e. is fairer, more easily understood, transparent and adjustable. Transition to the new formula is sensible but locking in past inequalities is not.

The F40 Group is also seeking continued funding flexibility to support specific local issues or organisational requirements. They assert that no two schools in the country are exactly the same, but the current formula assumes all schools are almost identical.  The F40 say that are good local reasons why some schools have costs that others do not have, and an inflexible national system cannot support these schools equitably.  As a result, some local flexibility is essential in achieving a fair formula that works and stands the test of time.

Here is the nub of the argument, how to manage a national formula with a degree of local flexibility. The government’s solution for academy chains is to allow funds to be moved between schools as necessary, but that approach doesn’t help either stand-alone academies or maintained schools.

With increasing pupil numbers and an under-funded 16-19 sector, the government has limited room for movement in the short-term, even if austerity really does come to an end as a policy objective. Perhaps we might see a return to the separation of funding into two separate funding streams with pay as one funding stream and other costs funded through a different funding stream more open to local flexibility to reflect local circumstances. This might imply a return to rigid national pay scales and limits of promoted posts to control the pay stream.

What is clear is that without more thinking, the present arrangements for school funding are likely to be unfair for many pupils across the country.

 

 

Insufficient funding creates cost pressures

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Over the past week the DfE has been using statistics about school spending in the time period from 2002-03 to 2016-17 to try to rebut the challenges from the two head teacher associations about a decline in school funding. This culminated in headteachers walking to Downing Street last Friday.

At the end of August the DfE published a paper on trends in school spending during this period at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trends-in-school-spending-2002-to-2016 I confess that its publication had passed me by, but it was the Friday of bank holiday week when it first appeared.

The DfE acknowledge some issues with the times series, most notably the creation of a large number of academies in the secondary sector in 2011-12. Academies and maintained schools have different financial years, a complicating factor when compiling data of this type for all schools. The information also comes from two different sources.

However, the headline number was that total spending was 42% higher in 2016-17 compared with 2002-03. Spending on Non staff was 68% higher in 2016-17 than 2002-03. Staff spending was 33% higher.

Total spending per pupil has increased from £4,080 to £5,790 between 2002-03 and 2016-17 at 2016-17 price levels according to the DfE data.

Spending on Teaching Staff was 17% higher in 2016-17 than 2002- 03, whereas spending on Education Support Staff was 138% higher in 2016-17 than 2002-03. This partly reflect the large growth in this sector over the time period that included the introduction of non-contact time in the primary sector through the use of PPA time and the growth in support for pupils with SEN.

Part of the growth in Education Support Staff spending may be a reflection of the devolution of more and more back office functions to schools along with the decline in local authority support services, especially for academies. Whether or not the spending is always good value for money is for the National Audit office to decide. However much of those extra costs will have been absorbed in the extra spending on the back office was 105% higher in 2016-17 than 2002- 03, compared to a 42% increase in Total spending.

There is good news on both exam fees and energy costs. Both peaked at the end of the first decade and have bene reducing in cost since then. Even so, energy costs were some 75% higher in 2016-17 than at the start of the period.

Recent concerns over supply teacher costs are reflected in the fact that spending on agency supply teaching staff was 64% higher in 2016-17 than 2002-03, and no doubt explains why both main political parties have targeted this area of spending to work on reducing costs.

Missing is a breakdown of both recruitment costs across the sector and, a breakdown of leadership pay increases compared with the increase for classroom teachers. Now that might have been interesting to see last Friday. Also missing is a breakdown of transfer to either local authorities or MATs to show how central costs have changed over this period.

 

 

Participation in higher education

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The DfE recently reported on the time series regarding entry into higher education. The data was updated for 2016/17 starts and can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/participation-rates-in-higher-education-2006-to-2017 There are a number of useful tables that show the continued growth in participation by eighteen to twenty one year old either directly from another education establishment or after a gap. In the latest year that data are available for, 28% of the 652,000 eighteen year olds went straight into higher education. They were joined by 11.9% of nineteen year olds and 3.2% of those aged 20.

All the percentages up for all age groups and the percentage comes to 49.8% that is described as the initial participation rate (IPR). As might be expected, a greater percentage of eighteen year old women than men go directly into higher education; some 32.1% of women compared with 24.1% of men. As might be expected, the IPR for women is much higher overall at 56.1% compared with 43.1% for men. However, the gap tails off with age as numbers form the year group starting in 2016/17 tailed away. The IPR is still below that of many other G7 countries.

Sadly, the IPR for part-time students has yet to regain the percentages seen before the fee increase to more than £9,000. Some of this potential group of students may have transferred to degree level apprenticeships, but it is to be feared that part-time higher education at least at the undergraduate level, remains out of favour and is not being marketed by the higher education sector.

A small percentage of those entering higher education do so through the further education sector rather than at a university. The further Education sector accounts for just less than four percent of IPR for higher education and seems to be growing slowly. There is also no gender gap amongst those taking the FE route into higher education.

I couldn’t find a comment yet from HEPI, The Higher Education Policy Institute, about these data from the DfE. However, the concern for the higher education sector must be that they are facing a few years when the number of eighteen year olds in the cohort will be falling. If the IPR of the age group remains flat, then that actually means fewer students looking to enrol. This might partly account for the rash of unconditional offers as institutions seeks to plan their numbers, and hence their income, as far ahead as possible. The 17-19 age group in 2106/17 was around 20,000 smaller as a cohort than the previous year.

No doubt, if there is also a loss of interest from EU or other overseas students, then some courses and indeed faculties might find their cash position under pressure during the next few years. How legitimate is it to use tuition fee cash from popular subjects to support less financially viable departments? This is an interesting question that students as consumers might well ask. If you put a philosophy and ethics of business course in the business studies degree it may well be necessary to support the continuation of the philosophy department. If you don’t why should a future business mogul pay to support the department if it has no impact on his course?

One answer is, you are buying a university experience and not that of your course alone.

Teacher Preparation data – Part 2

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Normally, that is for most of the past twenty years, I would have commented on the data provided by UCAS about applications and acceptances to the different subjects and between primary and secondary phases on the day it has appeared.

This month I refrained from doing so that I could look further into the data provided over the past three months. For some reason there appears to have been a glitch in the data I was looking at for Report B Table 10 of the data in August. I assume this was my mistake, and the data has now been corrected in my spreadsheets to conform to the published data currently on the UCAS web site.

The mistake slightly over-estimated the number of ‘offers’ to applicants, by using the end of cycle data for 2017 rather than the actual August data. Inputting the September data revealed the discrepancy and has allowed the changes to be made retrospectively. I can now say how I think the outcome will look compared with both last year and the DfE’s estimate of need, as calculated through the Teacher Supply Model.

So, on the evidence of the total ‘Placed’, Conditional Place’ and ‘holding offer’ numbers from the UCAS data, the 2018 round for secondary subjects should be slightly better overall than 2017, with biology, English, PE, art and languages exceeding the TSM number and IT/Computer Studies and history being at the required level. This leaves Chemistry, design and technology, mathematics, music, Physics and Religious Education unlikely to meet their TSM number unless Teach First can made up the shortfall.

As hinted yesterday, it may be that potential trainees on Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses (SKE Courses) don’t become ‘Placed’ until the end of these courses, and some may be added to the ‘Placed’ totals over the summer, creating the increases seem this year.

Interestingly, in April, before the growth in applications, I prepared a table for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Teaching with a prediction for the outcome of the recruitment round in terms of meeting the TSM number. How good were my predictions?

Subject Meet 2018 TSM Meets 2018 TSM CHANGE From April prediction?
April view Sept view on meeting TSM
RE NO BELOW no
PE YES ABOVE no
Music NO BELOW no
Mathematics NO BELOW no
History ? AT  
Geography ? BELOW  
English NO ABOVE Yes
D&T NO BELOW no
Computer Studies + IT NO AT Yes
Business Studies NO BELOW no
Art NO ABOVE Yes
Languages NO ABOVE Yes
Biology YES ABOVE no
Chemistry NO BELOW no
Physics NO BELOW no

In four subjects, English, IT/Computer Studies, Art and languages, the prediction has changed for the better. In April, the situation on the humanities was unclear, but it now seems as if history might just miss the TSM number and geography certainly will, partly because the number was so high.

Physics remains the real worry, although the better situation in Biology means recruiting science teachers in 2019 may be no more of a challenge overall than it was this year. After a good year this year, mathematics teachers may be harder to find in 2019, whereas recruiting teachers of English in 2019 might be an easier proposition than it was in 2018.

However, we won’t be able to assess the full position until the ITT Census in late November when the Teach First numbers are added to the totals and it is revealed how many of those that were placed through UCAS actually made it on to courses.

 

 

 

 

Vision and not just rhetoric needed

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As you might expect, Angela Rayner’s speech to the Labour Party Conference was strong on rhetoric, but short on real substance.

Take the following extract:

Our National Education Service will not only reverse the cuts but tackle the inefficiency of the Tories’ school system and take power from corporations and hand it to communities.

Might there be just the hint of an ambiguity there? What will be national and what will be returned to communities?

A promise of a national supply agency to extend the Conservative’s National Vacancy Service that is already competing with the market.

For local authorities, … we will allow them to build schools, create new places and take back control of admissions from academy trusts. But, nothing there about funds for local inspection and advice services and local coordination of teacher training places to ensure sufficient supply. Presumably, that will remain a national function not delegated to local authorities.

Then there is a bit of a muddle

So we’ll allow academies to return to local authority control. We’ll end the scandal of individuals and companies profiting from schools they are involved in, stopping fat cat pay for bosses and restoring fair pay for staff.

And we will use our time in government to bring all publicly funded schools back into the mainstream public sector, with a common rulebook and under local democratic control.

Will Labour create a fully locally governed system of schooling and at what level of government? Why create new cooperative schools, except that it sounds good, when a reshaping of the system with just two classes of state funded schools; maintained and voluntary. The latter being able to form groups of schools, along the model of diocesan schools. What happens to control of post-16 further education. Will colleges remain under national control or be integrated into a more local framework?

Missing was anything about the future of selective schools. Will Labour plan to reform them if it came to power?

Curiously, given the fact that Labour want to offer seats on the board to workers, there was no pledge to ensure staff could sit on governing bodies and no suggestion of how local policy development would need to involve governors, teachers and voluntary school operators. Is the old Education Committee model the way forward, or does Labour have any fresh ideas for local governance of education? Not yet clear, at least from this speech. Presumably, a work in progress?

Where does Labour stand on the curriculum, on testing and on inspection? Or aren’t these important enough matters to highlight in a speech aimed at applause rather than a blueprint for the future.

Missing also was any reference to how education will need to help young people face a world that will be very different from that of today. I know how important structures are, but I want an Education Secretary that can deal with those issues in a paragraph at the start of a speech and then provide a vision for the future that is more than a return to a ‘national service locally administered’ that is what yesterday’s speech seemed to promise.

(For readers that don’t know, it is right that I declare an interest as a Liberal Democrat Councillor on Oxfordshire County Council with the spokesperson role for education.)

Schools for the future?

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In the first segment of the BBC’s Today programme this morning, sometime in the run up to the seven o’clock news, I heard a representative from a Free School in the North West saying that control over the money was one reason the school had been established. Regular readers of this blog will probably know what comes next. True, if you are a standalone academy of free school or a local authority maintained school you have total control over your funds, but not if you are a school in a group of academies. There your Trustees can shift money between schools with impunity: so much for the free to control your finances.

Last Tuesday, at Oxfordshire’s Cabinet meeting, I raised this issue with the Cabinet member in the Conservative led administration whose portfolio includes schools. I asked for a commitment to fight for cash allocated to Oxfordshire schools to be spent at that school and not, when the school is part of a group of academies that cross the county boundary, used to secure the education of children in another part of the country. After all, Oxfordshire is a member of the F40 group of local authorities that see themselves as under-funded. It would be grossly unfair to transfer cash from an Oxfordshire school to another school in a better funded area. The minutes have yet to be published, but I expect them to show she wasn’t happy with this possibility.

Of course, under the Common Funding Formula, all schools should be funded at a similar basic level, but the principle of devolved budgets remains. Over the past two decades, once a budget was handed to a school it was sacrosanct and could not be touched by anyone else. Now, that principle has been broken for some schools, why should it apply to any?

The answer to this question is important, especially as the Labour Party continues its journey away from competition as a panacea of all evils in education and back towards the possible municipal control of schooling model.

Both my own Party, the Liberal Democrats and Labour have the courage to see that reforms started under Ed Balls and enthusiastically taken up by Michael Gove haven’t produced the solution that they wanted. Improvements in outcomes there have been, but the system is now too weighted against the disadvantaged in society. If your child is taken into care and moved away, there is a high risk that their education will be severely damaged. The growth in home education starting at the end of Key Stage 3 isn’t always a good sign and pupil place planning during a period of rising school rolls has been a nightmare in many areas and cost the country money wasted on travel costs that were not really necessary.

There really isn’t the need for a new form of cooperative school proposed by the Labour Party this week. Updating the voluntary school sector rules for the twenty first century would be quicker and simpler to achieve as a way forward.

Good schools for all remains the aim: can it be achieved without a degree of overall local control and planning for the future?

 

TeachVac or the DfE site?  

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Which free site offers the best approach to finding a teaching job?

There are the only 2 sites for teaching vacancies in England with national coverage that are free to both schools and teachers. One is offered by TeachVac the other is the developing DfE site.

I would add that I have been chair of the group operating TeachVac since its inception over four years ago. TeachVac like the new DfE site came about because of the high cost to schools of recruitment advertising.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk uses a defined request approach. Users register and can specify their preferences for phase, location and other key criteria. As vacancies enter the system they are matched and each day details of new matches are sent to registered users to decide whether to take time in finding out more about the school and the vacancy.

This method does not require users to do any searching of the site and preferences can be changed if not enough matches are found in a particular area. The system is simple to use and in periods of the year when there are many jobs on offer – specifically from March to June for classroom teacher posts – applicants do not need to waste time searching through lots of unsuitable vacancies.

The DfE offering is at https://teaching-jobs.service.gov.uk/ and is based around a more traditional open search system that requires teachers to specify filters. A click through on a vacancy also doesn’t take you directly to the school site, but to a more detailed analysis of the vacancy with a link in a sidebar to the vacancy page.

At present, the coverage of the DfE’s site is limited and applicants will have to keep checking to see if the area that they are interested in now live on the DfE site. TeachVac has coverage of the whole of England.

TeachVac includes both independent and all types of state funded primary and secondary schools in its coverage, whereas the DfE only handles state funded schools.

Let’s leave aside the concept of the State taking over from the market in providing a service; something odd to see from a Conservative government.

The DfE, like TeachVac, is trying to save schools money in these straightened financial times, but costs more to operate than TeachVac.

So, register with TeachVac. If it doesn’t meet your requirements, you can easily deregister and be forgotten by the site, then visit the DfE site and see how they compare?

If you like the TeachVac approach – no nonsense, no marketing and daily alerts if new jobs arise, then let me know and tell your friends and colleagues. Please also make suggestions for improvements and possible marketing routes.

TeachVac also tells schools that register with the site about the state of the market when they post a vacancy and has special arrangements for both diocese and multi-academy trusts wanting to list vacancies at several different schools.

To finish with a reminder. TeachVac is free to use for both teachers, returners and schools. It is offered as a service to the education community.