Category Archives: schools

In-year admissions matter

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Each year thousands of children move to a different school. In some cases, it is because either a parent has a new job or has been relocated by an employer to a new location. Information in many parts of the country about schools with places available is still as sketchy as when I first started advising relocation firms some forty years ago.

Finding a house is easy, plug in a price band and see what comes up on the search engines. But, what’s the point of buying a house where there are no school places? Children may face either a long period out of school or a long journey to the nearest school with an available place.

So, here’s an idea. A traffic light system to tell parents about the state of schools on local authority web sites and linked to a page on the DfE site.

Here’s how it might work.

Green – places available in-year for all or most year groups

Amber – some places in some year groups

Red – few places or even no places and not worth joining the ‘waiting list’ unless you live very near the school.

Of course, it leaves the system open to gaming – as if the present system was free of such tactics – by naming a full school and expecting transport to be paid for if the nearest school with a place is more than three miles away. But, the risk of that approach is that you get the school nobody else wants to go to.

The situation is especially acute for children with an EHCP and needing a place in a special school. Managing those moves for often severely challenged young people can be especially difficult mid-year. I would encourage employers to take that into account when arranging start dates for the parent.

The issue of in-year admissions is especially challenging in some areas at present because of the influx of children and their mothers from the Ukraine. Often host families live in areas of over-subscribed schools and that can put pressure for local authorities, especially where most of the secondary schools are academies. Hence my traffic light idea. After all, parents don’t understand that local authorities cannot just tell an academy to admit a child.

As the current Schools Bill is wending its way through parliament it might be worth the government either bringing forth the secondary legislation to return control of in-year admissions to local authorities that was mentioned in the last two White Papers or adding a clause to the Bill agreeing to do so within six months of the commencement date of the Act.

As regular readers of this blog know, another group that could benefit from this change are children taken into care and moved away from their local area, usually for very good reasons. This almost always means a change of school. If you want to know why I feel so strongly abut this, search for the post about Jacob on this blog.

Administrative changes need champions, and this is one that I hope many will champion.

May 2022 – a month to remember

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May 2022 was a record month for advertised teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the job board I helped create eight years ago reached the milestone of one million hits on its website in a single month for the first time. Overall, in the secondary sector, TeachVac recorded details of more than 14,000 classroom teacher vacancies, including those with TLRs attached during May 2022. There were also almost six and a half thousand primary vacancies during the month.

In the light of what will be a challenging period between now and early 2023, when the next influx of jobseekers enters the market, TeachVac launched its Premium Service of No match: No fee to put subscribing schools at the head of the daily match list. Take up of the service that costs only £1 per match, with a maximum annual charge per school of £1,000 for secondary schools and £250 for primary schools, has already exceeded expectations, and more schools and MATS are on the way.

Schools in the South East should be especially interested in accessing TeachVac’s pool of job seekers. In the South East region, TeachVac recorded more than 3,000 vacancies during May, nearly 1,000 more vacancies than last year. Finding candidates in many subjects for any late September vacancies, and especially for unplanned January 2023 vacancies, will be tough in many different subject areas.

Combining history with Religious Education; PE with science and art with design and technology and wording vacancies advertising appropriately might just be a cheaper strategy for schools than spending lots of money on advertising. Using no find no fee agencies can also pay dividends, but can be expensive

Schools shouldn’t forget teachers returning for service overseas. Southern Hemisphere schools end their school year in December, so staff can be available for a January start and certainly a spring half-term arrival after allowing for time to relocate.

The government’s announcements on a new graduate visa scheme may also prove useful to schools, especially if the Migration Advisory Committee were to accept that there were now teacher shortages in more subjects than at their last review of the market.

As I wrote in my previous post, the closure of the civil service Fast Track Scheme for 2023 might attract some of those aiming for the civil service into teaching instead. This could be good news for Teach First next year.

Pressures in the primary sector may be more regional than in the secondary sector, with parts of the north of England unlikely to experience significant shortages, except in some rural areas and in schools in challenging circumstances.

The present re-accreditation of ITT providers and the new overarching framework for ITT, a framework that reminds me of the Area Training Organisational structure of the post-war period, must not create parts of the country where too few teachers are being trained for the needs of the local schools.

Finally, someone should ensure that career changers unable to move to a job anywhere outside their local area are not ignored as too expensive by schools. We cannot afford to waste any talent.

Potential new teachers?

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Will the announcement of a pause in recruitment to the prestigious Civil Service Fast Track Scheme be good news for teaching? In an attempt to cut back on the number of civil servants, the government is considering not recruiting to the Fast Track Scheme for ayear, according to some newspaper reports. This is a dangerous move for long-term workforce planning, as some police forces discovered when recruitment was frozen for constables.

However, a large number of graduates looking for a career and not able to join the civil service might mean some will consider teaching as an alternative career. So, it might be a silver lining for teaching, although we probably don’t need more history graduates applying to become teachers.

Alternatively, universities might find more applications for one-year higher degrees increases as potential candidates wait out the recruitment freeze by acquiring a further qualification.

Much will depend upon whether the labour market for graduates remains competitive or whether the worsening economic situation once again makes teaching seem like a safe haven in a possible economic storm.

 Either way, the DfE should consider once again paying the fees for all graduate trainees as they did between 1997 and 2010. This is an easy to sell inducement into teaching and its cost is quantifiable.

This blog has pointed out before the inequality of two teachers in adjacent classrooms on very different packages: one with a salary, the other with a new round of student loan debt now at an interest rate in excess of 12%. Why teacher should be required to pay to train when the Fast Track civil servants aren’t – they could have kept the scheme open and charged the same fees as trainee teacher’s pay – but that would have been unfair to those not able to fund the costs. I have also noted before that as a society we pay trainee officers in the forces a salary, but not trainee teachers.

While schools have been using the pool of PE trainees to fill vacancies, especially for January appointments, it has been suggested to me that schools might also look at offering joint history/RE appointments, perhaps under the guise of humanities posts. There is a shortage of RE teachers and, as noted, lots of unemployed history trainees looking for teaching posts. In the same way, art trainees can work in the design part of design and technology departments, at least at Key Stage 3.

Today marks the normal final resignation day for serving teachers intending to leave their jobs this summer. 2022 has been a record year for vacancies, and TeachVac passed the million hits in a month for the first time in its history in May.

 Our new Premium Service for schools, based on a No Match: No fee basis, is also selling well into the market as schools increasingly realise that in a challenging labour market, they cannot afford to miss potential candidates registered with a job board now it its eight year of operation.  

Imperial Measures

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The announcement of a consultation into the use of imperial measures either alongside or in place of metric measures – too European – timed to commence during the Jubilee weekend remind me of the following post that appeared on this blog in August 2019 which discussed the possibility of such an announcement.

That 2019 post also discussed the curriculum, another live topic with the Schools Bill that is currently wending its way through parliament and was based upon the decision to spend more on increasing the size of the prison estate rather than on preventing re-offending.  

Rods, poles and perches

Posted on August 11, 2019

The announcement of 10,000 new prison places and increased use of stop and search by the Prime Minister made me think about what he might announce for our schools and colleges once he goes beyond the financial carrot necessary to shore up our under-financed education system.

With such an ardent Brexiter in charge, could he direct that the curriculum changes on 1st November to throw out any reference to the decimal system and witness a return to imperial weights and measures? Could the government mandate that temperature again be expressed in degrees Fahrenheit rather than Centigrade, and kilometres be banished from the language once again? Any other summer and these might seem silly season stories, but not in 2019.

I have no doubt that schools would rather that spend the £2 billion to build new prison places that this cash was spent on youth services, more cash for special schools and strategies to reduce exclusions and off-rolling by schools. This could include better provision of professional development courses to help teachers educate challenging pupils, rather than exclude them. Such measures might obviate the need for building new prisons.

I do not want to return to the dark days of the Labour government, just over a decade ago, when, at any one time, around 4,000 young people were being locked up: the number now is closer to 1,000 despite the issues with knife crime that like drugs issues is now seeping across the country at the very time when it seems to have plateaued in London.

More police and other public service staff are necessary for society to function effectively, but the aim must be focused on prevention and deterrents not on punitive action and punishment. Criminals that know they are likely to be caught may well think twice: those that know detection rates are abysmal will consider the opportunity worth the risk.

The State also needs to spend money on the education and training of prisoners as well as the rehabilitation of offenders after the end of their sentence; especially young offenders. The recent report from the Inspector of Prisons makes as depressing reading as the study highlighted in a previous post of the background of many young people that are incarcerated for committing crimes. If we cannot even work to prevent the smaller number of young people imprisoned these days from re-offending, what hope is there if society starts to lock up more young people again?

A recurrent theme of this blog has been about the design of the curriculum for the half of our young people not destined for higher education. Here the new government could do something sensible by recognising that schools have accepted that the EBacc offers too narrow a curriculum to offer to every pupil and to encourage a post-14 offering that provides for the needs of all pupils. This might be achieved by encouraging schools and further education to work together.

A start might be made by increasing the funding for the 16-18 sector and identifying what was good about the idea of University Technical Colleges and Studio Schools and why the experiment has not worked as its promoters had hoped.

Re-learning the role of Recruitment Strategy Managers

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The DfE has published some useful research papers about Education opportunity Areas. The one of immediate interest to me is on recruitment in the Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area. Inspire by Teaching Recruitment evaluation North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area Intervention Level Evaluation Report (publishing.service.gov.uk) At one point, although the report doesn’t mention it, TeachVac provided a report on vacancy trends at specific schools.

There is much re-learning in this report. More than 20 years ago, the DfEE the government Department at that time responsible for schools provided funding for local authority Recruitment Strategy Managers to help specific areas manage a recruitment problem in a period of teacher shortages. A report on their effectiveness was prepared in October 1999 and I have a copy before me as I write this blog.

Nearly a quarter of a century later and there is the evaluation of this project called the IBTR (Inspire by Teaching Recruitment (IBTR) project) that dealt with not only teaching vacancies, but also non-teaching roles.

Some 20% of the vacancies were filled from outside the local area. That raises interesting questions about the cost of national recruitment that this blog has discussed before – Teacher Vacancy Platforms; Pros and cons, 7th December 2020 – and the report does discuss this issue

‘Prior to the project, headteachers would typically take out an advert in the local or national press for their vacancies. A national advert might be in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and could cost up to £1500, while a local advert could be on a local authority site and cost up to £50. The DfE teacher vacancy website was being established in 2019 around the same time as this evaluation. No headteachers mentioned the DfE teacher vacancy website unprompted during any wave of the fieldwork7’.

Footnote 7 ‘Teaching Vacancies, the DfE’s free search and listing service for state funded schools in England, now plays a larger role than when this report was drafted. As it stands today, Teaching Vacancies is used widely across the region with 220 vacancies in the last year. The website actively directs users to Teaching Vacancies and schools in this region actively use Teaching Vacancies to advertise their vacancies.’  Page 27 and footnote.

Interestingly, TeachVac doesn’t rate a mention in the report even though we were asked to supply staff in the Opportunity Area with a custom-made report on vacancies. Taken together, TeachVac and the DfE site do make the case for a low-cost on-line job board. The issue with the DfE but not with TeachVac is that the DfE only handles jobs from state schools and requires schools to upload vacancies twice, to their site and the DfE site. Teachers want a site with a guarantee of almost universal coverage as a one-stop shop for vacancies, as do those seeking non-teaching posts.

However, back to the issue of what needs to be managed locally and what centrally? Paying £1,500 for national advertising seems these days wasteful of scare resources. If 80% of vacancies are filled either locally or from the region then locally managed projects do seem like good value for money and better value than every school doing their own thing.

TeachVac has now launched its premium service for vacancies based upon a no match: no fee model. We believe that offers a sensible way forward at a low cost of £1 per match and an annual maximum of £1,000 per school – less than the cost of one TES advert quoted in the report. Finally, it is worth noting that the costs of marketing promotion, advertising and web portal for this one Opportunity Area were more than the annual cost of running TeachVac for the whole of England for a year.

Some still do better than others

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The DfE has published an interesting report on outcomes by ethnicity and Free School Meals. It might have been even more useful with a section on gender added and also some regional breakdown to see if the additional funding in the London area makes any difference to outcomes. Outcomes by ethnicity in schools in England – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

For many, the inclusion of Traveller children and their performance will come as a shock as these groups don’t regularly appear in most tables. Funding for the education of traveller children hasn’t been high on anyone’s agenda for many years. Perhaps now it the time to reassess how we offer education to the children in the travelling community.

The Report makes clear the poor outcomes for certain sections of some communities, especially those pupils on Free school Meals.  

According to the DfE report there were over 8 million pupils recorded in the school census in 2021. Ethnicity responses in the report are grouped into 17 options or “Any other” as a catch-all category. I guess some South American children might fall into this group.

The DfE points out that it is important to consider variation within groups, especially when aggregated into larger groups such as “White” or “Asian”.  When aggregated 72% of pupils (5.9 million) described their ethnicity as White, 11% (900,000) Asian excluding Chinese, and around 6% each as Mixed (520,000) or Black (460,000). 2% of pupils described themselves as belonging to ethnic groups not captured in the census (170,000), and 0.5% of pupils identify as Chinese (37,000).

An important finding is that the proportion of White British pupils meeting the expected standard falls at each stage in their education.

Other groups also see fluctuations across stages, but the effect is most pronounced in the White British Group. As seen in figure 2, White British pupils fall from 5th of 18 groups in younger groups to 10th later in school. This is reflected in the average Progress 8 score of a White British GCSE entrant being negative (-0.14) where 0 represents average progress through secondary school. The DfE comment that since Progress 8 is a relative metric, we cannot say whether this trajectory represents “catch-up” of some non-White British groups or a “falling behind” effect.

However, some other groups also fare badly according to the report

‘Black Caribbean, Mixed White and Black Caribbean and Other Black pupils are all less likely to meet the expected standard at all stages than White British pupils, and the size of this gap doubles between 4- to 5-year-olds and GCSE pupils.

Comparing between a class of 30 White British pupils and a class of 30 pupils from these 3 groups, on average 1 or 2 more pupils in the Black and Mixed class would be below the expected standard at 4 to 5 years-old, whereas 3 to 5 fewer pupils would receive a strong pass in English and Maths GCSE. 11. The average progress 8 scores of Black Caribbean (-0.30) and Mixed White/Black Caribbean (-0.37) pupils are more negative than the White British group. Pupils selecting Black Other (+0.08) have slightly positive average progress 8 score.

Gypsy/Roma, and Irish Traveller pupils have the consistently lowest levels of attainment of any ethnic group, and the most negative progress 8 scores.’

The report notes that five groups made below average progress throughout secondary school. These groups are – White British, Black Caribbean, Mixed White/Black Caribbean, and Gypsy/Roma, Irish Traveller pupils. These groups start with lower attainment scores following primary school, so low progress scores represent a confounding effect where these groups are falling further behind their peers. Controlling for FSM, only White and Black Caribbean groups have below average progress among non-FSM recipients. White FSM recipients have the lowest progress among all aggregated groups, and Mixed and Black groups have below average progress.

This report is powerful evidence for the levelling up agenda discussion and also for the discussion on the hard National Funding Formula currently being discussed as part of the Schools Bill before parliament. Once again, it raises the question over the degree of hypothecation required in funding schools and how the money is both used and evaluated. Interestingly, there is nothing in this report about the use of Pupil Premium monies as a hypothecated grant.

Has DfE policy already affected ITT outcomes?

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The repercussions of the re-accreditation process for ITT are already reverberating around the teacher preparation world. The DfE may possibly be embarking on the most radical realignment of providers since the cull of institutions in the 1970s. As then, the end of a growth in pupil numbers meant the demand for new teachers will reduce going forward, especially if the traditional assumptions on the scale of demand remain true.

This is not the place to discuss both the effect of mass tutoring and the creation of teaching as a global profession on the demand for teachers by schools in England. Those issues have already been rehearsed previously on this blog.

This post looks at the monthly ITT data on applications published by the DfE yesterday, and containing data up to the 16th May. The headline news is that applications continue to be depressed. In some subjects they are well below the boost that the pandemic provided last year.

Even more alarming is the fact that in many secondary subjects ‘offers’ and recruited trainees for September are at their lowest May levels for more than a decade. For instance, physics has just 337 in the offer categories. However, a further 243 applications are under consideration. In computing the 244 offers is a record low for May, and there are only 219 applications awaiting a decision, and around two thirds of the total applications are shown as unsuccessful.

The ‘offer’ side of the equation seems lower than in past years for this point in the cycle. Have providers reacted to a combination of late targets – not announced until April, rather than at the start of the cycle – the uncertainty surrounding the re-accreditation process, and the return of Ofsted to be much more cautious about offers than in the past?

Take a subject such as music, where one would assume that a music degree and proficiency in at least one instrument were a likely ‘given’ for applicants. However, even here, 478 of the 773 applications are show as unsuccessful. Now, I assume this includes successful applicants that have opted for one provider and are no longer holding offers at other providers, but that would mean a maximum of 295 potential trainees.

Overall candidate numbers are down from 34,490 in May 2021 to 28,977 this May. That’s below the 30,610 of May 2020. As one might expect at this time of year, the decline in career changers has had more impact than the decline in this year’s graduates, although even the numbers of applicants under 23 that are mostly new graduates, are down on last year, although holding up well compared with 2020. How this group reacts once degrees are awarded will be very important for the outcome of this year’s recruitment round. Will they look to teaching as a safe haven in uncertain times or will they be lured by the tight labour market into ignoring teaching as an option?

The regional spread of candidates is worrying, with London seeing fewer than 5,000 candidates across both primary and secondary phases compared with around 5,500 even in 2020, and 6,800 in May last year. Even in the North East, candidate numbers are fewer than 1,100 compared with 1,500 in 2020 and 1,450 last May.  Apart from the teaching apprenticeship route, all other routes into teaching are suffering downturns.

Unless the economy collapses over the next couple of months, this year’s ITT targets will be widely missed, except in history and physical education. Even in these subjects the over-recruitment may well be less than in recent times, meaning an even tighter a labour market for September 2023 and January 2024, unless there is an influx or returners to make up the shortfall.

What remains certain is that without enough teachers the aims of the recent White Paper cannot be met. Perhaps that’s why teachers receive scant mention in the new Schools Bill currently before parliament.

Children in Care: the civil rights issue for our time

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An important independent report on children in care was published today Final Report – The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (independent-review.uk) Those of you that have read my blog post about the need for a Jacob’s Law will find much to be encouraged by in the suggestions for change contained within this new report. Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Sadly, there is also much to be concerned about as well. One outstanding section of the Executive Summary really resonated with me when I read it for the first time.

The disadvantage faced by the care experienced community should be the civil rights issue of our time. Children in care are powerless, are often invisible and they face some of the greatest inequalities that exist in England today. In spite of these injustices so many ‘care’ experienced people go on to run businesses, start families, earn doctorates, produce drama, write poetry, become government ministers and contribute to the world in countless ways

Five ambitious missions are needed so that care experienced people secure: loving relationships; quality education; a decent home; fulfilling work and good health as the foundations for a good life. Central government and local authorities, employers, the NHS, schools, colleges and universities must step up to secure these foundations for all care experienced people. This will require a wider range of organisations to act as corporate parents for looked after children, and the UK should be the first country in the world to recognise the care experience as a protected characteristic.

Executive-summary.pdf (independent-review.uk) Page 11

This afternoon, the House of Lords debates the Second Reading of the new Schools Bill, and I hope that a need for a Jacob’s Law, ensuring rapid admission to schools for children taken into care and required to move school, will receive at least a passing mention. Adding a Clause about in-year admissions and local authority requirements on academies to take such children would be a quick win for this group of what one might call ‘bin bag kids’. They earn that epithet because all too often they come home and find all their possessions in black bin bags in the bag of a social worker’s car. Just imagine how you would feel if that happened to you as a teenager?

Perhaps it is not surprising that a significant number of young people in our young Offenders Institutions have experienced a period in care. In the Inspection Report on Werrington YOI published recently 42 of the 91 young people survey had been in care at some point before receiving a custodial sentence or serving time on remand. Werrington-web-2020.pdf (justiceinspectorates.gov.uk)

Even though these are difficult economic times, some rebalancing of government priorities remains necessary, and both ensuring services are in place to prevent child neglect – often the most common reason for young children being taken into care – and creating better outcomes for those that are taken into care is a vital necessity as the report published today makes clear.

Every councillor with responsibility as a corporate parent should ask themselves the question: can my Council do more for these young people?

How much holiday do teachers have?

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According to the DfE’s Teacher recruitment website

Holidays

You’ll get more days holiday than people in many other professions. In school, full-time teachers work 195 days per year.

For comparison, you’d work 227 days per year (on average) if you worked full time in an office.

Teaching salaries and benefits | Get Into Teaching (education.gov.uk)

So, it is permissible according to the government, to never be in school when the pupils are not present except for the five compulsory days required. Those days were originally known as ‘Baker Days’ after the Secretary of State that mandated their requirement.

Of course, the DfE site doesn’t say anything about the length of the school day, and the marking and preparation time spent in the evenings, at weekends, and during the alleged holiday period that make up a teacher’s typical working day.

A more useful analyses of the working year might add the following days – assuming the five days pupils are not present account for all the days immediately pre and post the three terms of the year – to the 195 total.

Two hours a day during term-time on marking and preparation and meetings outside a working day of a period between eight am until four pm would add more than a day a week to the total taking it from 195 days (DfE number) by adding an extra 38 days a year meaning the working year would then be 233 days a year compared with the DfE calculation of 227 as an average for an office worker of an unspecified grade. Now, make that an average of three hours a day – probably not unreasonable for most weeks – and the total moves to around 250 days a year.

The length of the working day and the compensation for the length of the working day isn’t something mentioned on the DfE recruitment site. Find a teaching job with no planning – all done for you – and no marking needed outside of the school day – and there are still parents’ evening to attend that can add four days to the total – one half days for each year group plus one for the new intake, plus perhaps a couple of marketing evenings to showcase the school to potential pupils and their parents. Then there are after-school activities ranging from supervising the buses in the car park to accompanying teams to sports fixture, music and drama events and science competitions.

It is difficult to see how a teacher that wants to do their job properly can manage less than 227 days a year.

On top of this, most other workers have been gaining bank holidays over the years, whereas most additional days have fallen within existing school holidays, except for the Bank Holiday at the beginning of May each year. In 2017, the Labour Party suggested the need for four extra bank holidays Bank holidays for teachers? | John Howson (wordpress.com) that suggestion would not have benefitted teachers at all.

So, if told teachers have long holiday, and remember that the DfE says so, remind people that teachers work a form of employer-driven flexitime that means most teachers work longer on average than many other employees, although they do still have job security in most cases and there is the pension to consider.

Uphill struggle for an all academy system

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The DfE has now published the data on governance of schools in England as part of the background to both the recent White Paper and the Schools bill currently before the House of Lords. Opportunity for all: strong schools with great teachers for your child – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) and Excel spreadsheet the fourth item on the page.

While academisation, whether Stand Alone academies (SAT) or schools in multi-academy trusts or committee (MATs) has taken hold in the secondary sector, the majority of primary schools are still not academies.

GovernancePrimarySecondary
Primary schools% of primary schoolsSecondary schools% of secondary schools
All schools (state-funded)LA maintained10,61563%74722%
MAT5,67534%2,05059%
SAT5013%66119%
Of which faith schoolsLA maintained4,21568%21835%
MAT1,77729%29347%
SAT1923%11719%
Source: DfE

According to the DfE figures, 63% of primary schools are still LA maintained schools and that increases to 68% of faith schools despite some diocese having created local MAT/MACs. However, the vast majority of secondary schools are now academies of one sort or another.

However, a third of faith schools in the secondary sector are not yet academies. It would seem that it is the diocese rather than the local authorities that the DfE should be talking to about how to reach an all-academy school system.

There are also clearly regional differences, with primary schools in the North West still largely LA Maintained schools whereas only eight per cent of secondary schools in the East of England are not academies.

These differences are important in relation to issue such as in-year admissions, a topic this blog has pursued for several years now. I hope the difference arrangements between maintained and academies will be addressed in the Bill before parliament.