More post BREXIT confusion

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This week the DfE announced a new tender for someone to recruit, train and support overseas teachers in England for the next four years, presumably up to 2022. The information was contained in the teacher Recruitment Bulletin for August https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-recruitment-bulletin/teacher-recruitment-bulletin-august-2017 put out by the National College.

The tender states that the NCTL are seeking a framework of suppliers to assist schools and academies in recruiting, supporting, training and acclimatising international teachers in shortage, priority subjects such as maths, physics and modern foreign languages. The framework will be in place for up to 4 years and will be directly available to schools and academies. The subject list goes wider than that identified as Tier 2 subjects by the Migration Advisory Committee at the start of this year in their report, but does not specifically mention computer science or Mandarin, two subjects added to the list of shortage subjects by the MAC in January along with Science. Whether other language teachers will be able to obtain Tier 2 visas is not clear from the notice about the tender. Whether the use of ‘such as’ is meant to include other priority subjects not regarded as shortage subjects by the MAC also isn’t clear from the announcement.

The Recruitment Bulletin for August also gave further proof of how challenging this year’s recruitment round is into training, offering providers a reminder that:

“You can still request additional ITT allocations for a September 2017 start.

If you’ve already achieved 90% or above of your original allocation, you can request additional places up to 125%. Further requests beyond this increase will also be considered on a case-by-case basis.

This offer applies to higher education institutes (HEIs), school-centred initial teacher training providers (SCITTs) and School Direct partnerships in all category one subjects (drama, history and primary, excluding PE and undergraduate courses); it applies to HEIs and SCITTs in all category 2 subjects (art and design, biology, chemistry, English and music), with School Direct partnerships continuing under the same methodology as before.

Please note the 10% tolerance in each subject remains for all allocated subjects, including PE and undergraduate courses, and is in addition to the subjects listed.”

No doubt the relaxation of recruitment rules has already lead to the reported surge in offers in history and geography: the latter reaching new record highs for offers.

In an attempt to keep up the pressure on the government the Sun newspaper has reported that the Labour Party has looked at the time series data in the School Workforce Census and discovered that teacher numbers in secondary schools fell by around 11,000 between 2011 and 2016. Had they probed a bit deeper they would also have noticed that the pupil teacher ratio worsened from 15.6 to 16.4 in the same period, with most of the deterioration being since 2014. How much of the worsening is due to increased pupil numbers not being fully funded and how much by the worsening funding situation is still partly a matter of conjecture but the evidence is mounting of school budgets under pressure.

This will be the sixth year in succession that some training targets are likely to have been missed unless there is a late surge in applications to train as a teacher.

 

 

 

 

Buy British education

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At the end of July the DfE published a research report into ‘the UK revenue from education related exports and transnational education activity 2010-2014’ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-related-exports-and-transnational-education-activity The higher education sector is by far and away the largest contributor to revenue in this sector, increasing from 60% to 66% of the total income during this period.

Non-EU student income across the higher education sector increased by around 30% in current prices from £6.56 billion to £8.55 billion between 2010 and 2014. Income from research and other contracts rose by around 56% in current prices from £0.77 billion to £1.19 billion over the same period. Interestingly, income from both the further education sector and from English Language training fell during this period. The latter, it is said, because courses were shorter in length, thus providing lower fee income. The FE sector now accounts for just two per cent of overseas income. Some of the reduction may have as a result of the crackdown on private colleges and potential visa applications from those that after entry didn’t actually become students.

Independent schools witnessed a 28% growth in income from their UK based operations. They will also have benefitted from the return to the UK of any profits from their overseas campuses established in recent years. The transnational income for the schools sector increased by some 47%, based upon an estimate of the trend data. The local spending associated with this type of activity is excluded from the figures when calculating the transnational revenue figure.

Education publishing, the most mature of the product sectors selling education overseas, saw only an eight per cent growth during the period 2010 to 2014, whereas education related equipment sales increased in revenue terms by 20%, based on the estimate of trend data and education-related broadcasting by nearly a third at 31%. Publishing may find it hard to grown in the future, especially if students continue to switch from paper to on-line sources for information and learning materials. Books generally carry a much high profit margin than resources in new technologies in the same way that print advertising is more profitable than on-line for many publishers.

After BREXIT, the value of EU sales will be added to those generated in the rest of the world. This should pride a one-off change even if registrations from EU students and sales to schools and students in EU countries actually fall post 2019.

Education exporting is an area where both the Business Department and the DfE need to work closely together to encourage exports of educational goods and services and to support both education trade bodies and individual exporters. Fortunately, there is plenty of demand, as is shown on the government’s exporting web site.  However, the range of countries is quite narrow and excludes large sections of the world, especially in the Americas.

There are new potential sources of income such as those from on-line courses increasingly provided by both universities and private sector trainers. This could provide some companies with a lucrative new form of income that allows them to export without ever leaving the comfort of their home base.

 

 

Why are some pupils missing out on a free lunch?

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Why are families in the South East, along with some others from across the country, ignoring the chance to increase their spending power by not taking up the free infant lunch programme on offer in schools? Many of the authorities with the lowest take up in the latest DfE statistics of census day are located in the South East. They include unitary authorities, such as Brighton & Hove, Slough, Reading, Medway and Milton Keynes and counties such as East Sussex and Oxfordshire. All these authorities had a take-up of less than 81% of pupils eating lunch on census day.

At the other end of the scale, Inner London averaged a nearly 91% take-up and Solihull managed to achieve just over 96% take-up. Now, I guess there may be some parents that regard the food on offer as not acceptable for culinary, cultural or dietary reasons, but it is difficult to see why so many parents in some authorities not only forgo an extra £400 or spending money, but presumably also shell out hard cash on creating meals for their children to eat instead. If they don’t think that the food on offer is good enough then they should be lobbying the governing body or MAT trustees for an improvement.

Now, I am sure some of the difference could be a result of how important the local authority still sees its role in education and thus in encouraging schools to provide meals that are attractive and nutritional. This may be less of a concern in areas with lots of academies and free schools.

It could also be that some of these families have children in schools where more emphasis is placed on the breakfast club than on lunch to ensure a healthy start to the day. Of course, locally high incidences of sickness in specific schools may also have played a part in an authority’s position in the rankings. However, it does seem that the further north you travel in England, the higher the take-up was, with London, and specifically the inner London boroughs, being the main exception to this rule of thumb analysis.

The should be sufficient data now available to identify whether pupils in schools with low take-up fare any differently at the end of Key State 1 than pupils in schools where take-up is much higher once  researchers have standardised for all other possible variables; a tough ask.

I guess, with the present funding problems facing schools, there won’t be any real pressure from government for a scheme to extend the free lunch arrangements to Key Stage 2 pupils and, no doubt, some politicians may see the whole exercise as an ineffective use of money, forgetting the benefits to both parents and children achieved by the was the scheme is resourced. The initiative to roll out the scheme for Key Stage 1 pupils was a Coalition government action with some parts of the Labour strongly supporting and other being either lukewarm or downright hostile to the idea.

 

Celebrating Diversity

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Twenty years ago this autumn, the then Teacher Training Agency (TTA) launched an advertising campaign to attract new recruits to train as a teacher. There were two adverts. The talking heads one with the strap line, ‘no one forgets a good teacher’ remains memorable, but the other, although more innovative as an advertisement, doesn’t register in the collective memory to the same degree. In a sign of how far society has changed since 1997, when published, neither advert contained either a web site or email contact address; unthinkable these days.

At the same time the TTA was launching its advertising campaign it was also starting its first drive to recruit minority groups into teaching, starting with a focus on ethnic minority groups. There were a series of conferences to launch the policy, including one in East London addressed by the new Minister, Estelle Morris, newly launched on her career in government.

A decade later I conducted a detailed study for the then TDA into progress in recruitment of minorities into teaching and some years later I replicated the work just on the progress of recruiting ethnic minority candidates both into training and into teaching. As a result, it is interesting to see the data in the recently published ITT provider profiles about the change in percentages of minority groups recruited into training. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-performance-profiles-2015-to-2016

n many respects, 2015/16 as a good year for minority groups seeking to enter teaching. The percentage of male recruits broke through the 30% barrier for the first time since 2010/11; the percentage of students with a declared disability increased to its highest in the past decade, to reach nine per cent of postgraduate students; similarly, students from a minority ethnic background reached a new high for the decade of 14% of postgraduate entrants. There was even an increase among older trainees over the age of 25, although, at 54%, is still well below the record 62% of trainees over 25 that was reached 2010/11.

How far these percentages reflect either a genuine change in policy or just the outcome of falling overall application levels isn’t clear from the data. An analysis of the provider data for trainees from an ethnic minority background, where numbers are large enough to be reported, shows that London providers dominate the scene, with half the top twenty providers with the best ratio of ethnic minority trainees to overall numbers of postgraduates recruited being located in London. Of the other ten providers, five are located in the West Midlands; two in Yorkshire and The Humber and one in each of the South East, East Midlands and East of England. There were no providers north of the West Midlands or in the South West in the top 20 providers for graduate trainees where data is reported. Indeed, six of the next ten are also in London and the first identified provider in the South West is only in the 39th highest position.

In this context, the reduction in offers to new applicants for 2017 by London providers, reported in previous blogs, will be watched with interest to see what effect it has on recruitment profiles. However, it won’t be until the summer of 2019 that we will know the outcomes.

PE trainees find jobs: but what are they teaching?

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Last week the DfE published the ITT provider profiles for 2015/16.  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-performance-profiles-2015-to-2016  The data provides the final look at the cohort that were seeking work for September 2016 and January this year. One of the most interesting tables is the completion rate by subject.

  Percentage awarded QTS Percentage in a teaching post
All Primary and Secondary 91% 95%
Primary 91% 96%
Secondary 92% 94%
of which:    
Computing 84% 92%
Physics 85% 91%
Chemistry 87% 93%
Total Science 88% 93%
Mathematics 89% 92%
Biology 90% 95%
Religious Education 91% 96%
Design & Technology 92% 95%
Geography 92% 97%
Modern & Ancient Languages 93% 92%
English 93% 97%
Other 93% 92%
History 94% 95%
Music 95% 93%
Art & Design 95% 93%
Physical Education 96% 94%
Drama 96% 96%
Business Studies x 91%
Classics x 97%

There seems to be something of a link between subjects where recruitment was challenging and the percentage of entrants awarded QTS at the normal point of completion of the programme. For instance, only 85% of physics trainees were awarded QTS compared with 96% of Physical Education trainees. Now, physics is a subject with perennial recruitment problems, whereas Physical Education faces the opposite situation with many more applicants than places. Indeed, this was the first year where recruitment controls were in place, so that makes the data even more interesting.

The percentages of those in a teaching post must be treated with a degree of caution since a footnote records that: “When calculating the proportion “in a teaching post”, we exclude those with an unknown employment status from those awarded QTS.” SFR page 10. There is also the issue of what “in a teaching post” actually means? It does not mean only fully employed teaching the subject against which you are shown as having trained. Neither does it mean teaching in a maintained school nor even in a school. Once the DfE can link the identification number for a trainee with the School Workforce Census it should be possible to be much more specific in the presentation of the data. In the meantime, it appears as if 94% of Physical Education trainees are in a teaching post compared with only 91% of Business Studies trainees. This is the opposite of the situation shown in the TeachVac data www.teachvac.co.uk based upon an analysis of vacancies advertised by schools. So, either many of the Physical Education trainees aren’t teaching PE in state funded schools or there is a mis-match between vacancies and trainee numbers that needs exploring further if public money isn’t to be wasted on training teachers for non-state funded schools.

The other interesting subject is English. Here trainee numbers were much high than the previous year, but 97% are shown as in a teaching post. This suggests that the complaints of the previous year that the ITT allocations had been too low were fully justified. Looking ahead, the profiles for next year are likely to show similar percentages in employment, but lower numbers having obtained QTS in a range of different subjects.

The DfE are proposing to make changes to the profiles and the Statistical Bulleting invites comments about the new proposals. The proposals seem eminently sensible to me, but still don’t answer the question about where and what trainees are teaching. There also is nothing about Ofsted and their findings of the link between training and employment mooted some years ago as of great importance in measuring quality.

 

More evidence of funding pressures on schools

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At the start of the holiday season the DfE has issued a raft of both data in the form of a statistical bulletin and other publications. The most interesting concerns academies in general and specifically examples where threats of termination or other action against specific academies have been made public, possibly in some cases for the first time.

In terms of the income and expenditure of academies not in multi-academy trusts, but operating as single academies published as part of this information, it is only worth looking at the data in the round because of the changing nature of the sector as more schools, especially in the primary sector transfer from maintained to academy status and other move form single academy status to become part of a multi-academy trust.

One figure stands out in the data for the year 2015/16. This is fact that across all classes of academy expenditure exceeded income for the first time: a sign of the growing cost pressures on schools.

Sector                   Income/                               Media expenditure         Number of schools                                       Expenditure                       Per pupil

Primary                 I                                                 £4,791                                 787

E                                                £4,824

Secondary            I                                                 £5,714                                 984

E                                                £5,968

Special                   I                                               £22,321                   77

E                                              £22,409

All Through          I                                                 £6,104                                   56

E                                                £6,285

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/633153/SFR32_2017_Main_Text.pdf  SFR 32/2017

Now, even allowing for the fact that schools in Multi-Academy Trusts are excluded from the table, because of the issue of handling their central overheads: those costs previous governments always vilified local authorities for charging – there are enough schools to illustrate the cost pressures facing the sector that will almost certainly only have only worsened in the 2016/17 financial year now ending.

A more detailed look at the median income and expenditure for this group of single academy trusts between 2014/15 and 2015/16 reveals a slight fall in grant income per pupil even before the effects of inflation are taken into account. Primary schools seem to have been able to offset this fall by increasing self-generated income.

On the expenditure side, staffing costs generally increased, with expenditure of teaching staff increasing by around £70 per pupil across the 1,700 or so mainstream schools. Interestingly, supply teacher expenditure fell in these schools between 2014/15 and 2015/16, although not by a significant amount. The most noticeable reductions in expenditure were on back office costs; unidentified ‘other’ costs; non-ICT learning resources and energy costs. This distribution of reductions reflects that witnessed during the reduction in funding for schools early in the 1980s discussed in a previous post on this blog.

The concern must be that the longer funding per pupil comes under pressure the harder it will be for schools to maintain their upward direction of travel in expenditure on staff. It would not surprise me to see non-teaching staff costs either stagnate or even reduce when the figures for 2016/17 are published this time next year. Schools are likely to try to protect expenditure on teaching staff at all costs, but it is difficult to see how they can do so even after only one per cent pay increases to all staff without an injection of funds that at least matches the increase in the staffing costs of schools.

The next question to address, is whether schools in MATs spend more or less than single academy trust schools on the different categories of expenditure and specifically how their median expenditure of teaching staff per pupil compares with the median for single academy trusts? But, that’s for another post.

New Evidence on recruitment crisis

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An analysis of TeachVac’s www.teachvac.co.uk data on recorded vacancies announced by secondary schools in the first seven months of 2017 sreveals how much schools in London and the Home Counties dominate the list of the top 100 schools regularly advertising vacancies.

Government Region PERCENTAGE OF TOP 100 SCHOOLS BY RECORDED VACANCIES
LONDON 37%
SOUTH EAST 29%
EAST of ENGLAND 12%
WEST MIDLANDS 6%
EAST MIDLANDS 5%
NORTH WEST 3%
SOUTH WEST 3%
YORKSHIRE & THE HUMBER 3%
NORTH EAST 2%

TeachVac records the vacancies from the vast majority of secondary schools, both state funded and independent and links those vacancies with teachers and trainees seeking employment. This free service to schools and trainees, teachers and returners to the profession also provides an interesting amount of data for analysis. TeachVac’s Summer Review for 2017, looking at some data around the labour market for teachers, is published today and copies can be obtained by contacting enquiries@teachvac.com The price is £15 plus postage and packing.

Returning to the percentages in the table above, even allowing for schools that regularly advertise to create a talent pool; for schools where TeachVac may have picked up advertisements for School Direct teacher preparation courses; for re-advertisements and other advertisements that have could have been double counted, the data is so stark as to make clear the likely regional extent of recruitment issues in the labour market for main scale classroom teachers in secondary schools.

Some 80% of the 100 recorded schools with the most advertised vacancies are in or around the London area, compared with just eight per cent for schools across the north of England and 11% across the Midlands. Of course, this also doesn’t take into account the different sizes of schools; their differential funding patterns and turnover rates. However, the difference between the top three regions and the rest of England is so stark as to suggest that even when these factors are taken into account there will still be a significant difference between London and most of the rest of England.

In my previous post, helpfully given extra publicity by the TES, I recorded the fact that for many subjects 2018 is already shaping up to be a challenging labour market. But, for many schools that is also going to be the case for unexpected vacancies that arise for January 2018. The Review identifies the TeachVac analysis of vacancies compared to the size of the ITT supply side as recorded by the November 2017 ITT census.

The Review also looks at head teacher turnover in the primary sector. Recording data on the labour market for teachers is important in helping shape the future needs of the profession. The fall in acceptances for 2017 training provision the London area, reported in this blog yesterday, is also of concern for 2018. Should there be some help for trainees living in London above the normal bursary arrangements, as there is with teachers’ salaries for those working in the Capital?

Where is school-based teacher training going?

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Is there going to be a late bounce in acceptances into teacher preparation programmes for September 2017. The UCAS data for numbers accepted onto graduate progammes by mid July 2017, published today, shows a fall of 900 in placed applicants but an increase over last year of 890 in conditionally placed applications and 340 more applications holding offers than at mid-July last year. Assuming these are not applicants holding multiple offers and that conditional and firm offers being held translate eventually into applicants that turn up at the start of the course, then overall numbers might not look very different to last year. That’s good news for the DfE as it generally likes to talk in overall terms, but delve below the surface a bit and the picture is a somewhat murkier.

In the secondary sector, history and geography provide, between them, 510 of the 1,200 growth in offers to set against the 900 few placed applicants. Mathematics and English are also holding up well compared with last year, as is computing/IT. But, elsewhere the news is grimmer. Music is facing a decline, with the lowest July offers total since 2013/14. Business Studies, already a subject where schools face recruitment challenges, has only 160 offer in total, of which just 30 are shown as ‘placed’. Most other subjects have profiles below last year in terms of offers and similar profiles to the previous recruitment round. All this does not bode well for providing teachers for a growing secondary school population in September 2018.

Previous blog posts have commented on the situation in London and it now looks to be of great concern. There are only 4,750 applications with offers in London compared with more than 5,000 at this point last year. Assuming most primary courses are full, this means the majority of the shortfall will be in secondary subjects. Considering London receives by far and away the most applications, at over 23,000 this year (down from 25,000+ last year) it is important to know more about the distribution of the many unsuccessful applications as the offer ratio seems to have remained the same at around 20%: in the north West there is a closer to 25% offer to applications ratio.

As remarked in previous months, it is the younger applicants that are deserting teaching. There are 800 fewer applicants from those age 22 or under this year compared with 2016 and nearly 1,000 fewer than two years ago at this point in the cycle. Some 300 of the reduction compared with two years ago are due to a reduction in the number of young male graduates applying for teaching.

There remains a startling decline in offers for secondary School Direct Salaried places, down from 1,420 last July to just 1,040 this July of which just 220 are confirmed placed applicants. Higher education courses have attracted more applications than last year for both primary and secondary courses. The same is true for SCITTs, whereas only primary School Direct Salaried courses have attracted more applications than last year among the school-based courses not in SCITTs.

Next month should see many of the conditionally placed applicants become fully confirmed as the reasons for their being conditionally placed are removed. By now, it seems as if the secondary numbers are going to be more challenging than last year and that means a more difficult recruitment round for September 2018.

TeachVac, http://www.teachvac.co.uk the free job portal for schools, trainees and teachers will continue to provide a service to all interested in the labour market for schools.

 

 

Unqualified ‘teachers’

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Let me start by stating my position on this important issue raised today by the opposition. In my view, the term teacher should be a reserved occupation term only allowed to be used by those appropriately qualified. Those on an approved training programme aimed at achieving licensed status could be designated as trainee teachers. Everyone else should use terms such as instructor; tutor; lecturer or any other similar term, but not be able to call themselves a teacher.

The data on unqualified teachers that has fuelled today’s discussions comes from the school level information collected through the School Workforce Census (SWC) by the DfE. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/school-workforce-in-england-november-2016 There are two sets of tables in the regional dataset of the SWC for 2016 that are of interest; the percentage of teachers with Qualified Teacher Status and the percentage of unqualified teachers on a route to QTS: presumably either Teach First or School Direct Salaried route, plus a small number of overseas trained teachers or those on other accreditation only routes to QTS.

REGION Teachers with Qualified Teacher Status (%) Unqualified Teachers on a QTS Route as a Proportion of the Total Number of Unqualified Teachers (%)
 
North East 97.6 15.3
North West 97.4 10.3
South West 96.9 10.3
Yorkshire and the Humber 96.0 9.3
West Midlands 96.0 10.1
East Midlands 95.0 4.4
South East 94.8 14.1
East of England 93.9 9.9
Outer London 92.5 19.0
Inner London 92.4 18.1
 
ENGLAND 95.3 12.6

The SWC data show as strong correlation between the percentages of unqualified teachers employed by a schools in a region and the difficulty of recruiting teachers in that region. There is a 5.2% difference between schools in Inner London and schools in the North East in terms of the percentage of unqualified teachers employed. If one buys the argument that such staff are employed because of their special skills, then presumably their distribution would be similar across the country rather than showing this marked difference between regions. In London around 6-7% of teachers, and presumably more in terms of classroom teachers, don’t have QTS.

Part of the difference can be explained by the percentage of trainee teachers employed in schools. The range is between 4.4% of unqualified teachers on a QTS route in the East Midlands and 19% in the Outer London boroughs. This goes some way to explain why, in the SWC, 66 secondary schools in London revealed a measurable percentage of unqualified teachers on routes to QTS compared with just 98 in the rest of England. However, these figures obviously underestimate the number of schools involved in QTS preparation. This is due to the suppression of the data in many schools where such trainees were present, but not in sufficient numbers to be reported publically. There are also a number of secondary schools where the data was not reported.

Clearly, with recruitment being an issue, it is always going to be a challenge to recruit enough qualified teachers to staff schools, especially where the school population is growing fast. I am sure that parents expect pupils to be taught by those who understand the job at hand and have been prepared for it by achieving QTS.

There is, of course, a much larger issue that isn’t being addressed by the discussion about qualified teachers and that relates to the degree of subject knowledge required to teach any particular subject. This blog has raised that issue as matter for concern on several occasions. In some subjects, such as mathematics, steps are now being taken by the DfE to ensure post-entry subject knowledge enhancement for those teaching the subject. This may offer a better way forward than just trying to achieve sufficient subject knowledge from all entrants. However, ensuring all entrants are properly trained in the skills associated with teaching and learning should not be negotiable whatever their role in the process might be.

 

 

Making education greener not Greening

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The government’s change of heart on renewable energy production, one might call it a –U- turn in some respects, is obviously welcome news. But, what part can schools play in this new order of local power generation and the regulation of consumption at source?

I have long argued that many outside spaces in schools are the least used public asset in the country. Playgrounds are barely used in term-time in most schools and in most cases lie entirely dormant during the holiday periods. A national scheme to use these for ground source heating and other power and heating sources would surely be cost effective. Such a scheme, allied to battery storage and other possible renewable technologies, where applicable, could be funded through a community bond scheme where the returns were shared between the investors and the school on a sliding scale agreed in advance.

Brokering a national scheme with set costs and the most effective construction methods taking the least amount of time is a responsible role for the DfE, although they could offer it out to tender for all academies and free schools as a start. It could also include retrofitting rainwater collection and even green roofs, where they were possible.

I always thought this type of initiative would have been a vote winner for the Lib Dems in the coalition. They should have pushed small scale public works during the aftermath of the recession rather than big schemes such as Swansea Bay tidal power project, where finding the money was always going to be a challenge. But, the Ministers didn’t seem to agree with my view.

An even more radical scheme would be to encourage teachers and other employees in schools to purchase electric cars or cycles and to offer free re-charging at the school site, powered by the renewable energy wherever possible. Perhaps we could start with a scheme for school minibuses?

An audit of school freezer electricity consumption would be an interesting starting point to assess how much money could be saved by fitting an in-line interruptible electricity supply that turned off during peak power demand periods. If filled in-line, the freezers themselves wouldn’t need to be changed until the time came for them to be updated.

All these ideas require Ministers with a degree of vision beyond the normal scope of such officeholders. That’s why local authorities are so important for education. They offer a more manageable geographical area where ideas can be tried and tested and then expanded to cover the country as a whole. Centralising innovation, as has been the principle method of operation for the past forty years may work, as with the national strategies, but can also lead to disasters, such as making the teaching profession feel undervalued, with all the inevitable consequences for recruitment and retention.

The Secretary of State should embrace the announcement from the Business Secretary and use it as means to show she has the best intentions for the education service at heart. It would certainly be more popular than the decision this time last year to focus on selective education as the way forward.