Category Archives: politics

Thank you Mr Taylor

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The Ministry of Justice published an important report on Youth Justice this week. It was written by Mr Taylor. Regular readers of this blog may recall this civil servant and former head teacher when he was in charge of teacher training and espoused the view that planning ITT numbers was not useful. His views at that time were the focus of a series of blog posts.

Youth Justice, and especially the manner in which children were dealt with by the criminal justice system, was a blot on the reputation of the last Labour government. As the Taylor Report makes clear https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-youth-justice-system offending by young people reached a peak in 2007 after ten years of Labour governments and during the time the police were being required to meet targets to reduce offending.

In 2007, 225,000 children in England and Wales received a caution or conviction for a notifiable offence. Of these children, 106,000 were first-time entrants to the system having never before received a caution or conviction. 126,000 were prosecuted at court, and 5,800 were sentenced to custody. The average monthly under-18 custodial population for 2007 was 2,909.

  1. Since that high watermark the number of children dealt with by the youth justice system has reduced spectacularly, with consistent year-on-year falls. The number of children cautioned or convicted in 2015 was 47,000 – down 79% since 2007. Over the same period the number of children entering the youth justice system for the first time has fallen by 82%, the number prosecuted at court has reduced by 69%, and there are now around only 900 under-18s in custody.

This blog has commented before on the reduction in the size of the youth prison population when it fell below 1,000 for the first time in recent history. Now 900, is still far too many, but averages just below three per local authority at any one time.

The risk in the new proposals is that the current diffuse system run from both Westminster and by local authorities becomes a devolved system with some local authorities not large enough to handle an effective system. My guess is that then the government would step in and creates the regional structures it is now seeking in the adoption world where provision was patchy. Indeed, the Taylor report hints at this approach.

I also find the section on education rather woolly in terms of who takes control? Academisation and years of under-mining local authorities means that they no longer have the power to intervene when schools are not living up to the high standards required to help keep young people away from the path of a life of crime.

However, the recommendation about making convictions and cautions spent when resulting from actions when a person was a child, chimes with what I have been saying for many years. Too many people have their careers blighted by a single act as a young person. In this age of ever tightening restrictions it can mean the difference between working in a profession or not and even where a person can go on holiday.

The idea of Youth Panels sitting in local buildings also chimes with my thinking when a magistrate. With reducing workload children attending court have had to travel ever further and this means not only defendants, but also witnesses and victims: not a good idea.

As ever, with this government, the issue comes down to money and whether any changes will be used to pass the buck and reduce not improve services. We certainly don’t want to see a quarter of a million children a year receive a caution or conviction. Those days must never return.

 

Scrooge or Santa: It depends upon where you live

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My favourite line from the DfE’s consultation document on the new funding formula for schools is:

5,500 schools will benefit from the minus 3% per pupil funding floor protection.

I think that this is a line that the late, great, author George Orwell might have penned in either 1984 or Animal Farm. The real outcome of the government’s deliberations is definitely buried in the small print. An analysis of Oxfordshire primary schools shows an almost equal split between those schools likely to benefit and those that will be worse off. The division is stark between urban schools, especially those serving communities with high degrees of under-performance that will see more money, although some may be capped by the use of floor and ceiling mechanisms, and the small, usually rural schools that are almost universally losers. Of course, I welcome the extra cash for the schools that benefit.

In the secondary sector, around two thirds of Oxfordshire schools see gains, whereas the other third, again mostly the more rural schools, will see their income drop unless they can recruit more pupils to compensate for the reduced formula funding. As secondary schools are close to the bottom of the demographic cycle in many parts of the country the loss will be to some extent mitigated by opportunities to expand as pupil numbers increase. However, rural secondary schools, and popular schools already bursting at the seams won’t be able to increase pupil numbers. The same is likely to be the case for selective schools in some of the less well funded shire counties, where they are facing reductions in the examples presented by the DfE. As these schools often have little room for expansion, cuts to already poor funding levels won’t seem like a great Christmas present.

Overall, it looks as if the gains will largely be achieved by smoothing out the historical anomalies in authorities where the long-terml average has covered a wide range of different localities from those in the top decile of deprivation to those in the lowest decile. To achieve sufficient transfer of funds, there has also had to be internal transfers leading to the losses faced my many schools in the less well-funded authorities such as Oxfordshire. To some extent the use of floors will prevent the cuts affecting individual schools from being too great, but the use of ceilings may deprive some schools of the full amount indicated by the new Formula.

Of course, this isn’t a good time to be conducting this exercise. It would have been better for the Labour government to have undertaken the exercise a decade ago, when pupil numbers were in decline and funds were more generous. At that time all might have been winners and the government wouldn’t in some cases be looking like Ebenezer Scrooge..

Funding schools has always been a contentious issue, and this consultation may affect some Conservative County Council candidates next year if it looks as if a well-liked local school is losing funds and might even have to close. One can image the number of opposition candidates already looking out the ‘Save our Schools’ posters ready for the New Year.

A small tweak on the block grant might go a long way to protect many small primary schools where the expense of preserving them might be worth not having to pay the cost of providing transport to pupils required to relocate even before looking at the cost of building new school place sin the remaining hub schools in the market towns.

However, before the final step of either a local authority closing a school or a MAT throwing in the towel, there will be amalgamations and reductions in the number of head teachers, with one head probalby leading several schools in a cluster. That might work, but the NAO report earlier this week showed that it isn’t just the outcome of the funding formula that will determine the survival of lots of schools, it is also the many other cost pressures that they face. For a start, schools could be exempt from the apprenticeship Levy on the grounds that ITT costs already mean education is paying for the training of its professional workforce.

You cannot make bricks without straw

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The Chief Inspector’s final report contains many interesting comments and can be downloaded at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ofsted-annual-report-201516-education-early-years-and-skills

However, for the purpose of this post, the section that I will focus upon deals with teacher supply.  The two key paragraphs are 284 and 285 that are reproduced below.

  1. A lack of government data, both on recruitment and retention, hinders the national response to this issue. It is difficult to understand accurately the extent to which shortages exist at a local level, or the number of teachers moving abroad or between the independent and state sectors. The Department for Education’s teacher supply model is used to identify where new school-centred initial teacher training providers, or allocation of places to providers, may be needed. Currently, this model does not take important regional and local area considerations into account. As a result, there have been no significant changes in the geographical location of initial teacher education (ITE) providers.
  2. In September 2016, the government began piloting a ‘national teaching service’ scheme in the North. It aims to enlist up to 100 teachers to work in primary and secondary schools that are struggling to attract and retain teachers. If successful, and rolled out on a large enough scale, this may have some impact on teacher supply. Page 125

Now none of this comes as any great surprise, especially not to regular readers of this blog. It is worth recalling that the report deals with 2015/16, so doesn’t take into account the slight improvement in training numbers in some subjects recorded in the recent ITT census for 2016.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect me to pass up the opportunity to remind readers that in TeachVac there is a product designed by myself and my programmer and co-founder, Tim Ostley, to answer many of the questions about where the vacancies are. We have looked at adding in international school, but don’t yet have the funding to do so.

We have noted, along with the NAO in their report, the relative paucity of training provision in the East of England, and especially in Suffolk. The following table, prepared for a talk to Suffolk head teachers at the beginning of November shows the recorded vacancies compared with training numbers in Suffolk and across the East of England for the first ten months of 2016.

 

Vacancies ITT Census 2015
  2016 Suffolk ITT East of England
PE 6 9 121
Music 6 * 43
Mathematics 46 6 147
MFL 13 5 94
Humanities 6 NA NA
History 8 11 102
Geography 13 * 74
English 32 15 178
RE 10 0 80
Design & Technology 25 6 59
IT 13 * 42
Business studies 11 * 17
Science 59 * 243
Art 6 * 63
Drama NA * 31
254 98 1294

*Too low to record the actual number.

There is clearly a need for more training places in this part of the East of England. TeachVac can provide similar data for other areas, if anyone is interested, as we already do for schools facing an Ofsted inspection with Teachsted.

As to the future of the National Teaching Service, we aren’t holding our breath as we wonder whether it will ever progress beyond the trial stage to a full rollout. If it does, TeachVac is handily placed to offer support for such a service.

Finally, as the Chief Inspector’s say, it is the schools with more challenging pupils that suffer most when there is a shortage of teachers, especially if those with three to five years of teaching experience are leaving such schools in much higher numbers that in the recent past. Perhaps, next year, the new Chief Inspector will tell us why this is happening.

Pay differentials matter in the public sector as well

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The previous posts read by those who visit my blog are always interesting to monitor. On the day when the government is expressing its interest about the pay of bosses in private sector companies, I am not surprised to see a number of visitors to the post from this March when I discussed CEO’s pay in education. That post was written following a letter from The Chief Inspector to the then Secretary of State. At the end of the March post, I wrote:

Personally, I thought we were in an age of austerity and I set up TeachVac to offer a low cost option for recruitment to allow more money to be spent on teaching and learning. Frankly, this Report is disappointing news and I hope that there is an urgent review of salaries in education outside of those set by the STRB for teachers and school leaders. We need some clarity of purpose in the use of public funds.

Since then, the gap between the best paid directors in the private sector, but not employees – think footballers and entertainers – has exercised the mind of the new Prime Minister, but little has been said about the public sector. Mrs May will no doubt recall the attempt to limit the pay of head teachers and other public sector workers to no more than the Prime Minister’s salary, helpfully ignoring his use of a flat in central London and a mansion in the Buckinghamshire countryside for use at weekends as well as an especially generous pension scheme, when deciding pay rates rather than overall remuneration levels.

On the day the latest TIMMS data has appeared, (more of that in a later post), there is certainly a discussion to be had about the effect of salaries on the supply of talent. One outstanding figure from TIMMS for me is that the gap between Year 5 and Year 9 pupil outcomes is wider in England than in many other countries in the Survey (Figure 15). Could this be down to the challenge of recruiting specialist maths teachers to teach at key Stage 3?

If you push up salaries for classroom teachers, should you also increase the salaries for those in leadership roles? That’s the dilemma the government faces in trying to decide whether, in a free market, the government has a social responsibility to limit anyone’s pay and to decide how companies use their resources? Of course, governments could tax high earners more, but there is then the fear of driving them away. But, such a fear doesn’t seem to be there in this discussion over pay differentials being curbed.

On the other hand, the government has to recognise that free movement of labour can mean those that feel underpaid can opt to go elsewhere: hence the concerns over retention rates in teaching for those with 3-5 years of classroom experience.

The issue of compensation is a complex area that exercised parliamentarians in the 1990s when they were trying to benchmark their own salaries. The issue may now be whether the gap between the haves and have nots in society is too wide? Having decided it is, it is interesting to see a Conservative government taking the stance they are.

Still a recruitment challenge in 2017, for some if not all

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At the end of September, I posted a blog with my predictions about recruitment against target for ITT graduate courses that started this September, excluding Teach First. I had expected Teach First to meet its targets, but seemingly it didn’t and that hasn’t helped the overall percentages. Nevertheless, how did I do?

You can check the original post at https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/small-fall-in-applicant-numbers-for-graduate-teacher-preparation-courses/ or use the sidebar to navigate to September 2016.

My original predictions and the outcomes appear below. I wrote in September that:

As far as individual secondary subjects are concerned, this has been a better year for applications in many subjects than 2015, although the increase has not be universal. The actual outcome won’t be known until the ITT census in November, but on the basis of this UCAS data it appears that the following might be the outcome in relation to the government’s Teacher Supply Model number (minus the Teach First allocation, where applications are not handled by UCAS).

Art & Design – acceptances above 2015, but not likely to be enough to meet the TSM number. Only 82% of target was met – worse than I expected, but should still be enough to satisfy demand in 2017 from schools.

Biology – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. Very strong recruitment reaching 115% of target, the second highest percentage of any subject this year. Some trainees may struggle to find jobs in 2017.

Business Studies – acceptances above 2015, close to TSM, but the TSM isn’t large enough to meet demand from schools for these teachers. Only 85% of places filled. I was slightly over-optimistic. On basis of last two years of data schools will find this is not enough trainees to meet demand. DfE must explain why the subject doesn’t rate more support?

Chemistry – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. As indeed it almost did with 99% of target met. Schools should find recruitment easier in 2017 than in previous two years.

IT/computing – acceptances below last year and not enough to meet TSM. Only 68% of places met, so the latter part of 2017 might challenging for schools looking for an IT teacher for January 2018, but it depends upon overall level of demand that has fluctuated from year to year more so than in some other subjects.

Design & Technology – the position is unclear from the UCAS data, but TSM may not be met. In fact outcome was a disaster, with only 41% of target places filled. The UCAS data system must allow this fact to be tracked and the DfE must consider whether financial support is sufficient. If not, it must be questionable whether the subject or at least some aspects of it will survive in schools much longer.

English – acceptances similar to last year and should meet TSM number. Here recruitment controls seem to have worked better than in some subjects, with 98% of target met. Those schools without School Direct or Teach First trainees may struggle to fill vacancies later in the year in 2017, since only 25% of trainees are in higher education courses and 15% are on Teach First, with a further 20% on the School Direct salaried route. This is more than double the number in any other School Direct salaried subject.

Geography – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. In fact target was passed, with 116% recruitment, higher than in any other subject. This should mean schools have little difficulty recruiting in 2017.

History – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. Target exceeded and 112% recruited. No real excuse for this overshoot, especially as only 30% are in higher education courses. Some trainees will struggle to find teaching post in 2017 unless there is a surge in demand.

Mathematics – acceptances above last year, but probably still not enough to meet the TSM number. And that was the outcome. A good year all round and had the target not been increased there would have been an overshoot on the target of 2015. Do bursaries work here and will there be an issue about extent of subject knowledge of some trainees? This outcome poses problems for the Migration Advisory Committee in reference to whether the subject should still qualify for tier 2 visa status?

Music – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. Sadly, it didn’t and the target was missed by 10%, although that is only 40 trainees. Higher education courses account for half of trainees and there are too few School Direct Salaried trainees to count. Some schools may struggle to recruit in 2017, especially for January 2018 appointments.

Physics – acceptances above 2015, but probably still not enough to meet the TSM number. And that was the outcome, with only 81% of places being filled. Higher education accounted for more than half of the 2016 cohort of trainees. Schools will still struggle to recruit the 444 trainees not in school-based courses. The independent sector may absorb a large proportion of these trainees.

Physical Education – acceptances below last year due to the effects of the recruitment controls, but should be enough to meet TSM. There was still over-recruitment, despite the controls, and perhaps 500 trainees will struggle to find a teaching post in their subject tin 2017.

Religious Education – acceptances below last year and not enough to meet TSM. Only 80% of places were filled with higher education recruiting a very high percentage of the trainees (60%) and Teach First and School Direct Salaried routes  contributing realtively rew to the trainee count Schools will find recruitment more of a challenge as the year progresses.

Languages – difficult to determine exact position from the UCAS data, but should easily meet TSM number on the basis of acceptances. In fact, 95% of places were filled although 59% of these were in higher education institutions. On the basis of 2015 and 2016, the number of trainees overall will be sufficient, but whether they have the languages needed is another matter and I am not sure anyone actually knows.

So, the predictions weren’t too far out. That’s a relief. The outcome shows some schools will face recruitment challenges in 2017 and for January 2018 unless their financial situation deteriorates, so as to reduce demand.

What happens to retention will also be another significant factor in determining recruitment. However, pupil numbers at key Stage 3 are on the increase, so unless class sizes also increase that may create further demand. From that point of view, any weakening in the demand from the independent sector because of fewer overseas students would be helpful. However, the sinking pound makes UK schooling cheaper to buy for many that want it for their children.

In all, 2017 will be, not a disaster, but a challenge, more so for some schools than others and the government is by no means off the hook in terms of solving the recruitment issue.

 

Overseas teachers help take the strain

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Unemployment in Europe may have been been driving teachers to work in England. Figures released today by the DfE as part of the ITT statistics for 2015/16  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-trainee-number-census-2016-to-2017 show that record numbers of teachers from Spain (1,977), Greece (572) and Romania (431) were awarded QTS. There were also 545 teachers from Poland, although that was a small drop on the record number (580) of teachers from Poland recorded as being awarded QTS in 2014/15. Interestingly, only 274 teachers were recorded as being awarded QTS from the Republic of Ireland despite this group of teachers often being cited as helping solve the recruitment crisis.

Of course, being granted QTS doesn’t mean a person is actually teaching in a state-funded school or even a school and no figures have been published for those that originally trained in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland where school systems are increasingly different to those in England.

Although numbers from the Commonwealth countries, with a right to convert a teaching qualification into QTS, were higher in 2015/16 than the previous year, they only totalled 1,652 plus a further 379 that had qualified in the USA and gained QTS under the Gove changes. There may, however, be others teaching on a temporary basis that haven’t bothered to obtain QTS. Overall, 5,032 teachers from overseas were shown as being granted QTS in 2015/16. There isn’t a breakdown by either primary or secondary, or by subject, or where in the country they were teaching. All potentially useful facts to help understand the use of overseas teachers.

Many of these teachers will be subject to visa restrictions once the UK leaves the EU, if free movement of people is restricted. It would have been interesting to have seen the data on tier 2 visas issues by the Home Office as a part of this statistical bulletin. As far as I am aware, the Migration Advisory Committee has yet to rule on the future of teaching and tier 2 visas.

The data issued today in the ITT census will make it more of a challenge to retain either biology or chemistry in the list of eligible subjects, as biology exceeded recruitment targets by 15% and chemistry recruited to 99% of their target. Physics, although more trainees were recruited than last year, remains a challenge with 19% under-recruitment. In mathematics, the target was increased by 500, so although more trainees were recruited there was still a 16% shortfall against target. Whether this is enough to keep the subject as a Tier 2 visa subject depends upon whether the evidence on vacancies and trainee numbers indicate a shortfall in numbers. I guess everyone agrees there are issues to do with quality and there are clearly regional shortfalls. However, the MAC usually only considers the national picture.

As recruitment for 2017 has already started a decision on any changes to visa regulations is really needed quite soon if there is not to be confusion for September 2017. The influx of teachers from overseas is the other side of the coin of teachers from England going to teach elsewhere in the world. On these figures the outflow is likely to be larger than the numbers recruited from overseas.

More money for grammar schools

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What’s the point of a consultation if you know the outcome before you start? Opponents of grammar schools, myself included, must be asking themselves this question after yesterday’s Autumn Statement. The Chancellor announced:

5.13 Grammar schools capital – As part of the government’s ambitious plans to ensure every child has access to a good school place, the Prime Minister has announced plans to allow the expansion of selective education in England. The government will provide £50 million of new capital funding to support the expansion of existing grammar schools in each year from 2017-18, and has set out proposals for further reforms in the consultation document ‘Schools that Work for Everyone’

So, even if the response to the consultation was unanimous, the government has made provision to spend actually not £50 million a year as in the text, but £60 million a year over 4 years if you take the figures in the data tables. But, what’s £10 million pounds a year in a government budget of trillions.

Spend 0 -60 -60 -60 -60 –

Source: policy decisions document HM Treasury 2016.

Even that figure could be revised upwards. Now £60 million a year won’t buy you very many new grammar schools. Perhaps 5 a year for each of the four years funded, assuming the sites already exist and it costs £10,000 per pupil place for a 1200 pupil school. As most selective schools are in the South East, costs might be higher. It would be cheaper for a MAT to close an existing school and re-open it as a selective school, presumably something some MATs will already be thinking about. However, the statement specifically mentions support to expand existing grammar schools. Is this a smokescreen or won’t the money be enough to do more than add places to cope with the growth in pupil numbers and keep the percentage of the local population attending grammar schools stable rather than declining as pupil numbers increase? The answer isn’t clear.

The EFA already has a budget for new buildings, so presumably some of that could be diverted into building more selective schools instead of UTCs and Studio Schools that frequently don’t seem find themselves seen as successful schools on some performance criteria and aren’t always very popular with parents.

Those schools in poor quality buildings will rightly say that the £60 million could have been used to help far more pupils achieve a good standard of education through repairs than by spending it on encouraging switching from the private sector to a free grammar school place, as may well be the outcome of creating new grammar school places.

Despite the public statements about the economy, there seemed to be little new spending on education to help economic development in the FE sector in the Autumn Statement. Presumably, this will be left to un-elected LEPs (Local Enterprise partnerships) to bid for funds based upon the outcomes of the reviews held earlier this year.

 

 

TeachVac offers a helping hand

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The Social Mobility Commission Report published earlier today is quite hard hitting on education. Gilliam Shephard, a former Conservative Secretary of State for Education is the Commission’s deputy chair, so this cannot be seen as just a rant from left-wing pro-local authority supporters. The full report can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/569410/Social_Mobility_Commission_2016_REPORT_WEB__1__.pdf

A key recommendation in the section on schools relates to teachers.

Recommendation 2: The Government should fundamentally reform the process which recruits and distributes new teachers across the country.

The school-led approach to teacher training is not working to get the quality and numbers of teachers into the schools that need them most. The Government should introduce a new national system which acts as a front end for school led initial teacher training programmes and which provides central marketing, applications, screening and first stage recruitment processes (initial interviews). A system along these lines would provide economies of scale and would mean that teaching could better compete with other top professions in presenting a high quality marketing offer. The provider of this service could work with school partners to develop a process matching schools to candidates, heavily involving the schools themselves and ensuring a fair distribution of quality candidates.

This is the first serious criticism of the school-led approach to teacher preparation, and it is based not upon the quality of the training, but on how it works in practice. As the Commission say in the recommendation quoted above, it doesn’t get (sic) the quality and numbers of teachers in the schools that need them most.

The Commission didn’t mention the large sums spent on recruitment of teachers – £200 million on leadership recruitment was mentioned in the research published last Friday – and the lack of a coherent regional policy in preference for teacher preparation places being allocated in either schools or providers rated as of high quality even where they don’t deliver recruits into the schools that need them.

Regular readers will know that at this point I will mention TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk that has for the past two years been offering a free recruitment site to the teaching profession. The aims of TeachVac were to provide high quality data about how the labour market works in real time and also to help schools reduce the cost of recruitment in order to allow more money to be spent on teaching and learning. TeachVac is effectively already offering part of the Commission’s vision and are happy to work with others to provide the whole process.

The Commission has other recommendations, including re-inventing the Schools of Exceptional difficulty Allowance of the 1970s whereby teachers were paid more to work in specific schools. The Commission should note that it has to be schools and not local authority areas else teachers at Kendrick School and Reading School would benefit from an area based scheme. Neither school has difficulty attracting staff for the reasons the Commission consider affect the outcome of children from deprived backgrounds in Reading.

Overall, this is an important report that reinforces many of the messages about what has happened to education. The over-emphasis by governments on structures and not outcomes together with competition not cooperation has stalled and even reversed the drive towards social mobility. As the Commission says bluntly. Selective schools in greater numbers are not the answer, if they are at all.

Managing the pounds and pence

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For aficionados of government spending the past few days have brought two interesting announcements. Firstly, there is the revised arrangements for handling the accounts of academies and MATs by the DfE in England. The failure to get to grips with this information has led to some embarrassment for the DfE over the presentation of the full departmental accounts in recent years. Hopefully, this new arrangement will mean unqualified departmental accounts in the future. It may also help everyone to understand the spending patterns of this now significant part of the education landscape. The details of the new arrangements can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/academies-sector-annual-report-and-accounts

According to the government announcement:

The new report will:

  • provide a more holistic report of the academies sector by aligning reporting of financial results with educational performance
  • separate academies spending from that of the DfE and clearly show for the first time the resources academies receive and how they use them
  • make it easier for Parliament, parents and taxpayers to scrutinise and test information about academies funding and spending

At the same time, DfE expects new arrangements to speed up validation checks by up to 2 months and enable accounts production much earlier than in previous years.

To support new reporting arrangements, the Education Funding Agency (EFA) has developed a new online accounts return for 2015 to 2016. EFA will write to all academy trusts in November with information about how to submit the accounts return.

Academy trusts must submit their accounts return by 31 January 2017. 

The second announcement came with the publication of the Education and Training Statistics for the United Kingdom 2016 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/education-and-training-statistics-for-the-uk-2016

This statistical release is a pale shadow of its former self and is mostly interesting for the tables it contains about qualifications across the system. However, tacked on to the end are two tables about expenditure on education across the UK.

The first years of the coalition reflect the austerity agenda instituted by the Labour government following the economic upheaval of 2008. Indeed, on one reading of the numbers, total spending on education fell throughout the period 2011-12 to 2015-16. However, this may due to the way student loan accounting changed between the Labour and coalition governments as the majority of the reduction was in the tertiary sector. As a result, education spending as a percentage of GDP fell from 5.3% to 4.4% during this period.

In cash terms, spending on both primary and secondary education was higher in 2015-16 than in 2011-12, by £1.6 billion in the primary sector and £2.7 billion in the secondary sector. The latter is surprising to the extent that pupil numbers were falling, but may be explained by the raising of the learning leaving age from 16 to 18 during this period and the resulting increase in participation feeding through to increased spending. Although these increases look large in cash terms they are not in reality so, spread as they are over a number of years. Indeed, they show spending probably flat or even declining in real terms per pupil. Interestingly, that isn’t a figure included in the data and there is no breakdown across the four home nations. This is despite education being a devolved activity.

 

 

 

Teacher Supply: my current thoughts

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This week the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Teaching Profession and SATTAG (The Supply & Training of Teachers Advisory Group) both hold their autumn meetings. The 2016 ITT census appears next week, so teacher supply is likely to be on the agenda one way or another for much of the rest of the month. At some point in the future the Migration Advisory Committee will presumably publish its findings on visas and shortage subjects.

This time last year I told the Select Committee there were three possible sources for a crisis in teacher supply; geographical, numerical and quality. Now, while the numbers crisis may have eased in some subjects, and could be seen to ease further when the 2016 census appears, the other two reasons for a crisis may not have altered very much. To these can be added a fourth, whether more teachers are leaving state-funded schools after a couple of years in the profession? The evidence, although a lagging indicator, certainly seems to point in that direction.

So, will the situation in teacher supply worsen or continue to improve over the next few years? The jury is out at this point in time as the different factors are finely balanced. On the one hand, the global economy could slow down reducing job opportunities for graduates. There is also the issue of tightening school budgets, coupled with actual losers in any new funding formula that together might reduce demand for teachers. Should teachers finally be offered a pay rise of more than one per cent in 2017, then that might further reduce demand.

On the other side of the equation, pupil numbers are rising and the increase will start to be felt by secondary schools, especially in and around London for the next few years. The Capital and the surrounding Home Counties are already the areas most affected by teacher turnover and possible supply issues.

The effects of School Direct and the expansion of Teach First have been patchy to date. Schools in those programmes may benefit from their involvement and can also use the ‘free pool’ of higher education trained teachers where they cannot recruit trainees through these routes, whereas schools that don’t benefit from these programmes must, perforce, use the ‘free pool’ to recruit. I am not sure the effects of this approach have been fully researched yet, but the government must ensure all can have teachers if it is to do its job properly.

On balance, it seems the teacher supply situation could go in either direction: worsen for the seventh year in some subjects in 2017 and affect recruitment until 2018, or ease further in some subjects, but worsen in others. The world economic situation is likely to be the key determinant of what happens and the world may be overdue for a slowdown.

A final point to consider is that the number of eighteen year olds going to university isn’t going to increase over the next few years as the cohort size is affected by the demographic decline now coming to an end in our secondary schools among the younger age groups. Add in a loss of teachers from the EU, post the UK’s departure, and, whatever the world situation, we may create our own national teacher supply problems. To that extent it will be interesting to read the Select Committee Report when it appears as well as the deliberation of the Migration Advisory Committee.