Too bright for the Pupil Premium?

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The government seems to be briefing about possible changes to the Pupil Premium. The suggestion seems to be that bright children need it less than other children (choose an adjective with care here – dim/thick/less able but not SEN – all have implicit value assumptions associated with them). If this mooted alteration to the Pupil Premium is true, then it is the first change since it was agreed that pupils in primary schools needed more help than their secondary brothers and sisters and rates were altered accordingly. At the same time, pupils in care also received even more funding; quite rightly so.

Surely even the Tories wouldn’t want to say that because you are a bright five year-old, according to baseline testing, you don’t qualify for the Pupil Premium even though you are in a single parent household on low income and there is another toddler for your mother to look after, so you don’t receive the sort of attention you need to stimulate your innate ability. But, perhaps that is exactly what they do want to say. Reward the hardworking poor, but punish the children of those that aren’t aspirational for their offspring sounds like a Tory mantra.

Indeed, perhaps this is a change that is aligned to the return to selective school campaign. After all, if the Pupil Premium helps produce more children in primary schools for less well-off households that can pass the entry tests for selective schools then they will displace children from higher income brackets some of whose parents might then have to resort to paying for private education rather than allow then to attend secondary modern schools.

Of course, the concept of equality behind the Pupil Premium is to provide help where it is needed to bring everyone up to the level expected of them by the point at which you take the measurement of attainment; either Key Stage 2 and the move to secondary school or Key Stage 4 and the former school leaving age.

Now, if what the government are saying is that the use of Free School Meals as a proxy for entitlement isn’t the best measure, then we need to know what they are considering replacing it with? No doubt it would be helpful if any debate about changes to the Pupil Premium could also be a part of the discussions on a national funding formula for all schools. The present disparities in school funding levels mean that pupils from low income households in rural areas often receive much less funding than those in similar income households in some urban areas; especially in London. So, could the change to the Pupil Premium help iron out this problem if the government isn’t willing to tackle it in other ways?

One problem is that any degree of extra complexity added in to the Pupil Premium scheme will almost certainly significantly increase the cost of its administration. Sometimes, a universal flat rate programme is the most cost-effective, even if it is something of a blunt instrument. However, until the government reveals its hand, we won’t really know whether this is just an attempt to save money from the education budget or another attack on the low paid by this Tory government.

Incentives Part 2

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On the 3rd October I posted a blog about the new bursary rates for 2016 headed ‘Incentives and ageism’. In that post I suggested the DfE would run an advert saying in large letters ‘£30,000 to train as a teacher tax free’. Well today in the Metro newspaper the advert ran with the words ‘Receive up to £30K tax-free to train as a teacher’. Apart from the added, but probably redundant, ‘receive’ I got pretty close with my wording. The DfE advert goes on to say ‘you can earn up to £65K as a great teacher’. The predicted ‘*’ appears at that point in the advert. The asterisk refers readers to the phrase ’conditions apply’ at the foot of the advert. To find out what they are requires a visit to education.gov.uk/teachconditions Presumably, this then tells you that unless you are a Physics graduate with a First Class degree or a PhD, you cannot received the £30K tax free sum.

I saw this advert on my way to speak at a Policy Exchange event on the future of the teaching workforce. Details of the event and a speaker list can be found at http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/modevents/item/the-future-of-the-teaching-workforce and I hope an account will be published in due course. As the TES were present, I assume it will also be reported by them.

It was interesting the number of those present that thought the fees of graduates training to be teachers should be paid by government. Fee abatement for graduates is a campaign this blog started way back in January and I am delighted to see it gaining traction. Some present though that we should once again offer to pay off the undergraduate fee debt for teachers that work in state schools for a number of years; perhaps at 20% per year. I suspect that schools could already do that if they so wished to offer it as an incentive to work in their school.

The House of Commons Education Select Committee are now taking evidence on the state of teacher supply following a letter they have received from the Secretary of State after her latest appearance in front of the Committee. It is interesting to try to define the difference between a ‘challenge’ and a crisis’ in both training and recruitment into the profession. It might be possible to have one without the other.

There was an acknowledgement at the Policy Exchangeevent of the regional nature of the problem of recruiting teachers and that, as this blog has commented on several occasions, the solutions are also likely to be regional or even local. New entrants to the profession don’t often travel far, although according the NCTL Annual Report more than 6,000 have come from overseas: more about this in another post, I suspect, once I have chased up the data.

On the regional note, it looks as if the situation on parts of the East of England is now almost as bad as in London in terms of recruitment. TeachVac now has an average for 2015 of more than seven classroom teacher vacancies per school in both these regions.

Living next to the school

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Last week the TES invited me to write a guest blog  for them. I have reproduced it below for anyone that doesn’t read the TES on-line

When I went to school more than half a century ago, most schools had caretaker’s houses. Even earlier, in Victorian times, it was not unusual for elementary schools in some parts of the country to be built with a house for the headteacher and his family; the head was usually male in those days, as is still too often the case.

New schools were certainly still being built with caretaker’s houses attached until the late 1960s, even if houses for heads had stopped being built by then. However, with the advent of the property-owning democracy during the Thatcher era and the right to buy, the idea of “tied” homes fell out of fashion.

There is a case for saying that certain key workers need to be located near to schools. I don’t know whether a caretaker living on site (or “building facility management team leader”, as they are probably known today) helps to reduce cases of burglary and arson at schools, but I am sure that they can be a deterrent.

Perhaps all new schools might once again be built with such a house. Indeed, as a part of the drive to build new homes in high-cost areas, schools might consider adding a property to their site if there is room. This would help with the supply of affordable houses for rent in areas where buying at present prices is impossible for most people.

When the London Docklands Development Corporation was established, it built rented flats for young teachers who could not afford to live in the area. Not all local authorities in high-cost areas seem to understand that schooling, and especially primary and nursery provision, is not a service that can be moved out of the area. As a result, teachers and other staff need to be attracted to live locally, because not everyone wants a long commute at the start and end of the school day.

With the fragmentation of the school system into academy chains, voluntary and community schools and free schools, the development of policies to ensure staff can work in local schools and retain a sensible work-life balance no longer has an obvious champion. Indeed, in areas where the planning authority is not the same as that responsible for education, there may not be an understanding of the need for key-worker homes for teachers.

The position regarding housing for headteachers is obviously different. By that stage of their career, most school leaders are probably home-owners and might not want to live in school accommodation. The generous relocation allowances some schools have offered in the past are only useful if the headteacher can afford to move house while maintaining or improving their standard of living. Otherwise, governing bodies might like to think about how the life of weekly commuting heads can be made bearable.

The School Teachers’ Review Body has been asked by education secretary Nicky Morgan – in her recently issued remit letter – to consider “evidence of the national state of teacher and school leader supply, including rates of recruitment and retention, vacancy rates and the quality of candidates entering the profession”. They will also have to take into account the overall limit of 1 per cent on public sector pay, so finding innovative ways to help with housing costs that don’t upset the Treasury might perform a useful public service. After all, if the Department for Education can control funding, surely they can find a way to help schools in high-cost housing areas to recruit and retain sufficient staff in the present economic climate.

The DfE now sets school budgets and controls the growing number of academies and free schools: that must mean it has responsibility for ensuring sufficient staff to operate those schools. And that, of course, includes caretakers.

Big Brother

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The announcement earlier in the week of the Teacher Supply Model numbers and recruitment thresholds for teacher training in 2016/17 was rather overshadowed by the decision on a selective school expansion programme in Kent. That is an issue I have written about previously on this blog and may well return to again. However, others have already made the case eloquently about how backward a move this is in reality.

But, to return to teacher training because, despite Michael Gove’s assertion that teaching doesn’t need any preparation for the job, most of us think it isn’t as easy to walk into a classroom as in to a job in either of the Houses of Parliament.

The key message from this week’s announcement is; more maths training places; a similar number of places to this year’s training numbers in other EBacc subjects and fewer places in the non-EBacc subjects. In primary, the big growth period is now over unless there is a change in teacher numbers in employment, perhaps through more departures from the profession among young women that make up a sizable proportion of the primary school teaching force these days.

Why I have headed this blog ‘big brother’ is because, although there are no allocations this year, there are recruitment control thresholds that protect Teach First -included in the Teacher Supply Model number for the first time, at least publicly – and School Direct plus SCITT routes. As there are no published thresholds for higher education providers, they are at risk if the school routes recruit quickly above the minimum recruitment level. This is only likely to be a possibility in history, PE, primary and according to the government English – although I think that less likely.

In order to monitor what is happening and prevent over-recruitment that might stop schools reaching their minimum threshold the National College can issue compulsory stop notices on further offers to providers. This effectively bans future offers being made, although presumably allowing replacements for anyone that drops out? The College will also monitor the UCAS system on a daily basis for the number of offers being made and may also step in if regional patterns are distorted in such a manner as to risk leaving parts of the country short of teachers in certain subjects.

Interestingly, there seems little concern for the applicants in this process. I would advise applicants against booking tickets to interviews until the day before in case the provider is suddenly capped, especially if it is a university PGCE course. Indeed, it might not be fanciful to suggest that even during an interview a candidate could be told by the provider that they no longer have any places left because it has been ‘capped’.

However, for this to happen, even in most of the non-EBacc subjects recruitment in 2016-17 is likely to have to improve on that expected to be recorded in the 2015 ITT census that is to be published next month, so it will only really worry those applying in the subjects listed above where providers are likely to find it easy to recruit to the TSM number.

Finally, I have concerns about whether we really need to train 999 PE teachers in 2016-17 and only 252 business studies teachers. This is based upon the TeachVac vacancy data http://www.teachvac.co.uk were have recorded this year, but that may well be something to discuss with the statisticians.

Tell it as is it – Part 2

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The Public Accounts Committee has just issued its latest report entitled the ‘The Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils’.  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmpubacc/327/32703.htm

In the summary it concludes that ‘… the Department for Education needs to be better at supporting schools to share and use best practice more consistently so that more schools use the Pupil Premium effectively. In addition, there remain inequalities in the core funding received by schools with very similar levels of disadvantage. As the impact of the Pupil Premium will take a long time to be fully realised, the Department needs to do more to demonstrate its emerging benefits in the meantime. We also urge the Department to carry out an early review of the effectiveness of the Early Years Pupil Premium.’

This seems to me to reinforce the point make in the study of the DfE by Dr Cappon, mentioned earlier this week by this blog in another post. Perhaps politicians have confused the concept of a market with the role of players within it. When I did Economics 101, or ‘O’ level as it was in the UK in those days, the first two lessons were on markets and effective demand. We were all told that we might like a sports car, but most of us would not be able to afford one. Our latent demand wasn’t the same as our effective demand for a second hand old banger as our first car. On markets, it was seen as the mechanism for determining the price of a good. Indeed, in areas such as the Stock Market, it still is. However, markets usually have winners and losers and losers react in different ways, such as by reducing supply or quitting the market.

Now the best thing to come out of the past twenty years in education is a recognition that there is more than one type of meaning to the term ‘equality’. It was a sharper focus on the recognition that spending on some pupils needs to be greater if they are to achieve a minimum standard of education that led to the Pupil Premium. I would argue that the Lib Dems were the first to articulate this concept under Phil Willis and Richard Grayson when he was at CentreForum as it then was. Indeed, Nick Clegg also brought an understanding of this notion of equality from his experience as an MEP to this debate.

The challenge, as the Public Accounts Committee and Dr Cappon make clear is, in a department of state where an idealistic notion of the market as a means of solving problems holds sway, how do you get consumers – the schools in this case – to use their resources to the end you seek: reducing the learning gap between the disadvantaged and others in society. Do you use a carrot – the equivalent of lowering prices – or a stick, send in Ofsted to create effective use of funds such as the Pupil Premium? The problem with the market model is that consumers -schools – have to want the same thing as the DfE, and that might not be their focus.

Is a ‘special offer this week – funds for disadvantaged pupils – buy here’ really the best way to eradicate the learning gap and increase social mobility? Clearly, the Public Accounts Committee don’t seem to think so. That they also think there are issues with the core funding of schools is another worry for another blog post.

Rural re-visited

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The DfE has published its annual list of primary schools designated as rural. This year, the total is 4,906, up by just over 200 on last year. The list includes four middle schools and 11 all-through schools. The majority of the schools are either community (1,779) or Voluntary Aided or Controlled (2,320) with many of the latter being church schools. There were 593 academies of various sorts and 206 Foundation Schools. Interestingly, there are only eight rural free schools serving the primary sector across the whole of England and two of these are all-age schools, both in Oxfordshire.

If, after his conference speech, the Prime Minister really wants every school to be an academy by 2020, rural primary schools are one of the groups he will have to work upon. Many of these schools are in Tory controlled county councils across the rural heartland of England. Although Oxfordshire is keen to convert all community and voluntary schools to academy status, there may not yet be the same enthusiasm elsewhere in some parts of the country.

There is a question over whether the government should still be funding people to go around persuading schools and authorities to convert schools to academy status after the cuts to be announced in the comprehensive spending review. Could that money not be better spent elsewhere? After all, the government could, almost at a stroke, add a clause to the current Bill about to enter the House of Lords, mandating a change of status for all schools making them converter academies and sort out the issues of trusts and other arrangements later. This would leave local authorities with the duty to champion education and monitor performance. But, this may be too radical a proposal for a Conservative government.

As I remarked last year there are a small number of schools designated as rural within the London boroughs. Interestingly, the total has increased by one this year. By contrast, there are only 107 rural designated sponsored primary academies across the country, with only Cornwall and Norfolk having total numbers of such schools in double figures. The South West, Devon and Cornwall have large numbers of converter rural primary academies, whereas there are virtually none in some of the northern rural areas. Academies as a concept does seem in the primary sector to be something of a north south split.

Some years ago in the Gove regime there was a proposal that would have severely limited the funding for rural primary schools by removing the grant each school receive independent of pupil numbers. Now, it seems as if there is a recognition that such schools serve a valuable purpose. The issue is how will they be organised in the future and what role will democratically elected local government play in their future?

National Poetry Day

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Today is National Poetry Day. Two years ago I celebrated the day with a poem on this blog about World War One and The Somme and a link to teaching history. This year, I thought I would use a poem on a different subject entirely, although it has the same underlying theme of parting.

Written some years ago, it may have little literary merit, but surely the message of National Poetry Day is to encourage us all to write more poetry as well as to read more. for in doing so, we learn from others and about ourselves.

So, for what it is worth here is:

HEATHROW VIEWS

Departure

The revolving door sweeps us smartly

Into the chaos of that hideous, happy, hall.

‘Don’t leave unattended baggage’

Mother with babies, businessmen with phones,

Families’ katundu laden trolleys,

Merge together into a snake-like queue

A line of order, inching towards,

The ministering welcome of the check-in desk.

‘Unattended vehicles will be towed away’.

Stoically, the shuffling mass moves forward.

At the desk, the first interrogation waits.

Your passport, luggage, ticket,

Disappear for processing. Did you, didn’t

You, have you’. Do you really want to fly’

 

Terror and fear stalk the airport,

Shadowing the police clutching

Guns to padded chests.

We fear flying, they fear us.

I fear losing you into the

Slow snake that leads you to Security.

Shall we seek currency, eat

Unnecessary meals, or just go home?

I can, you can’t. Would that we together could.

 

A brief respite.

We sit across the table,

Wishing you won’t go, knowing

You will go, saying you must go.

Eyes meet, hands touch, minds remember

Other meetings, partings.

Between us cup and plate,

Detritus of a Last Supper.

Brown batter of a Ramsden’s cod,

Mushy peas and thick cut chips.

Yorkshire suspended like us,

In unreality.

While down below the endless procession

dribbles through Security to

Aberdeen, Paris cdg and Tel Aviv.

 

Together we contemplate

Departures, one home

Where no heart is,

The other to the

Mysterious misery of flight.

Too soon, stay one minute more.

We clasp together putting off

Not departure, but separation.

 

Too soon the TV monitors flash

Their urgent message, boarding

Gate twelve.

No lingering goodbye now, but haste

To disappear into that finality

Of departure.

Tell it as it is

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Earlier this year the DfE employed an eminent Canadian educator, Dr Paul Cappon as a Research Fellow. He looked at the manner in which the education system in England operates and wrote a very interesting report called ‘Preparing English Young People for Work and Life: An International Perspective’. You can use the following link to access it.

http://www.skope.ox.ac.uk/a-new-skope-policy-paper-by-dr-paul-cappon-on-preparing-english-young-people-for-work-is-now-available/

Although the origin of the research was probably associated with the skills agenda and the role of schools in academic and vocational education the really interesting part of the paper deals with Dr Cappon’s views of what works in education systems. He are a selection of four extracts from the Executive Summary;

English educational successes appear to occur despite, rather than because of current systems and structures. The rigid pathways that confine students from a young age and throughout their education and training is a notable example. Since fragmentation characterises delivery of education in England, stronger networks must become an intrinsic part of a more coherent and successful delivery.

With regard to primary and secondary education, we find that recent adjustments to national curriculum have generally been sound, and that good GSCEs for all students in any educational/training track must be the goal. We find that careers advice, an acknowledged weakness of English education, requires considerable amendment and accountability.

Chief impediments to evidence-informed policy deliberation have been: few moderating influences on [sic] the political nature of educational policy; insufficient development of partnerships between civil society and policy makers; little structured external advice to government; insufficient deployment of academic researchers in support of research and analysis; and a propensity to set goals for individual schools but not for the system as a whole.

In a successful education system, the desirable attributes of the central authority would be the converse of those that we would hope to find at local level.

It is locally that we would expect and wish to find innovation, experimentation, risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, empiricist methods of trial and error. The principle of subsidiarity applies. Each district or region would be attempting to find creative means of attaining measurable common goals or targets – but do so in keeping with their own specific and particular contexts and challenges. When these attributes are present, experimentation and trial of diverse approaches in pursuit of similar goals may lead to fruitful collaboration and to regional sharing of promising practices and approaches. System-wide improvement occurs.

Conversely, the central authority would impart stability, consistency and a long term perspective. When it engages in changes of policy direction, it would do so carefully and in consultation with a broad array of partners from both the education sector and from other segments of civil society. Its intention would be to work as closely as possible from a convergence of viewpoints of its partners, so that its initiatives would have optimal chances of success. To that purpose, it would construct a sustainable framework of partners that would assist it in considering priorities, goals and means. (In doing so, however, it would refrain from delegating or abandoning its authority to independent bodies or commissions).

In such a system, decisions regarding practice and complementary funding allocations would frequently be made regionally or locally, but in accord with nationally prescribed goals.

What if, in England, just the opposite of this pattern obtained? What if is central government that is empiricist, entrepreneurial, with sudden mutability and frequent changes of direction, trying one approach and then another – often with only short periods allowed for practitioners to adjust and adapt?

In schools, districts and regions, on the other hand emulation, conservatism, rigidity, compliance, harmonisation and risk aversion appear to be the pattern.

In such a dynamic, would it not become difficult to foresee the kinds of creativity and innovation that, when scaled up, may lift a system to enhanced outcomes and to continuous improvement?

The last of these extracts is the one that for me clearly sums up what has been so wrong with the school system in England ever since central government lost faith in local government and started taking power to the centre. The legacy of this decision, taken originally in the 1970s, but never fully worked through, remains with us today with haphazard academisation and un-elected commissioners. Although there is innovation at the level of some schools and inspiring leadership teams, even there the hand of Ofsted looms large.

The message for me from Dr Cappon’s study is that it is time for everyone concerned with education in England to agree a new framework. There is still a willingness to create a workable system for the country as a whole, but time is running out, especially if the political landscape becomes one of polarised views and a breakdown of understanding.

There is not the space for a full essay on policy-making here but, one might look at the functions of policy formation as;

Problem solving;

Planning;

Priority Fixing and

Consultation

Perhaps one might add dissemination and implementation as further functions since the agreed system-wide agreement on the latter is a notably lacking feature of the present system. How do we create system-wide improvement in a coherent and constructive manner?

Tergiversate

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The Lord Adonis is one of the few politicians in recent British history to have tergiversated twice in his career. He started life as an SDP councillor on Oxford City Council and then joined the newly formed Liberal Democrats, I believe even going so far as to win the Party’s nomination as prospective parliamentary candidate for Westbury in the mid-1990s. However, before the 1997 election, he had left the Party and eventually became a Labour supporter and took the Labour Whip when appointed a peer. Now he has it has been reported resigned from that Party to take up an appointment under the Conservative government.

I first met Lord Adonis in the 1980s when I was chairman of the Costwold Line Promotion Group that was campaigning initially to save and then to improve the line between Oxford and Worcester – he was already interested in railways at that time. Incidentally, that was ten years after I met Jeremy Corbyn in Hornsey during the two 1974 general elections where I was the agent for the Liberal candidate and he was part of Labour’s election team in Hornsey.

After Oxford, Lord Adonis went on to be the Education correspondent at the Financial Times for several years and I recall feeding him stories about data on education issues such as pupil teacher ratios and the cuts to music services under the Thatcher government.

Lord Adonis is a very able man with concerns about issues such as transport and education that he is able to articulate effectively. He has a concern for those the system doesn’t protect; hence his early support for academies after he spent a period while in Oxford as a governor of a secondary school in Blackbird Leys, the estate in south Oxford located in a part of the city where there is significant deprivation.

As someone who has remained a Liberal for more than 50 years, despite two periods of political neutrality during my career, once as a civil servant and the other as vice-chairman of a national charity, I would never have surrendered my basic beliefs and, despite differences with my Party at times, would never have wanted to leave it.

No doubt some journalist or other will ask Lord Adonis how he has been able to reconcile a political life with adherence to three different political ideologies, assuming he now accepts the basic direction of travel of the Conservative government in taking on his new job. If he doesn’t, then he should make clear the grounds on which he has accepted the post.

I cannot also help but wonder if there are some Conservative Party members that will feel just a tiny bit put out at the appointment of Lord Adonis. The message to them being, even if you work hard for the Party, we will take the best person even if traditionally they have been part of the opposition to our values.

One wonders if this act of tergiversation will be the first of many in a re-alignment of political opinion in England or just a rare footnote in British political history and the career of one individual?

Incentives and ageism

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This week the DfE announced the new bursary rates for trainees starting teacher preparation courses in the autumn of 2016. The headline grabbing rate is the £30,000 tax free bursary or scholarship available to a small number of Physics graduates with either a first class degree or a doctorate in the subject.

A bursary at this level amounts to a starting salary before tax and other deductions of around £40,000 after training, unless the teacher is expected to take a pay cut after training: a bizarre suggestion. Whether schools will be willing to pay such a salary in 2017 to these trainees is an interesting question. Fortunately, there probably won’t be very many of them and the extra £5,000 each it will cost the government compared with the rates this year. In the unlikely event that even 100 of the 800 or so Physics trainees would qualify, that number only means an extra half a million pounds of government expenditure. Such an amount can easily be found from the under-spend on the total amount due to under-recruitment against the Teacher Supply Model number of trainees required and the cash set aside if it was met.

The headline figure looks very much like a marketing ploy. The adverts can now say in large letters ‘£30,000 to train as a teacher tax free’ followed by an ‘*’ and in small letters ‘terms and conditions apply – read the small print’. This seems a legitimate marketing strategy, whatever you think of its dubious moral value by offering something not obtainable to the majority of those attracted by the advertising. No doubt the Advertising Standards Authority has a code of practice for this sort of activity.

One group that should be especially wary of such adverts to become a teacher are the career switchers. An analysis of the percentage of applicants offered places shows that older applicants are far less likely to be offered a place on a teacher preparation course than younger +-graduates.

Age Group Placed
21 under 58%
22 59%
23 57%
24 55%
25-29 50%
30-39 42%
40+ 39%
all ages 51%

On average half of all applicants were placed by mid-September, but this reduces from 59% of those aged 22 on application to just 39% of those in their forties or older. The older applicants are more likely to be holding conditional offers in September than younger applicants, perhaps because of issues with the skills tests?

I haven’t been able to look at the data by the different routes into teaching as it isn’t published by UCAS. As there are no details of ethnicity published by UCAS in the monthly statistics, it isn’t possible to see whether there are still differential rates of places being offered to different ethnic groups as has been the case at some points in the past.

In the new slimmed down civil service, I do still hope that someone somewhere is paying attention to these figures and asking questions that probe what may lie behind the numbers: are older graduates just not up to being teachers or is their knowledge, despite boosted by time in the real world, not up to modern degree standards. Surely that cannot be the case since degrees are supposed to be easier than they were a generation ago. Certainly there are more First Class degrees awarded that in the past. A fact that will cost the government more in bursary payments.