Happy Birthday

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Today is the third birthday of this blog. When I signed up for a WordPress account and started writing in January 2013 I didn’t image in three years I would have created a blog that had seen more than 27,000 visitors and nearly 55,000 views of the posts. Thank you also to the band of commentators that read and comment on what I say: I appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Originally, the aim was to comment on statistics about education, but since mid-2014 the issue of teacher supply has come to dominate the blog and indeed much of my time. The launch of TeachVac www.teachvac.com as a free recruitment site that costs nothing to schools, teachers and trainees and offers a platform for vacancies in primary, secondary and special schools for teaching posts from the classroom to the head’s study has also taken off much faster than I expected. January 2016 has been a prenominal month and it isn’t over yet.

My thanks especially to the tutors that have encouraged trainees to sign up when looking for their first job and to the head teachers that have signed up their schools. I hope the data on the size of the ‘free pool’ that might apply for classroom posts is useful.

My thanks also to the support from the teacher associations, governors, business managers, subject associations and many others that have supported my view that in TeachVac there was room for a free recruitment site on the Twitter or Facebook model in the new technological age.

As far as the blog is concerned, the aim is for a post of about 500 words; some are longer, and a few are shorter, but 500 words is about the average. That’s somewhere around 175,000 words to date for anyone that has read the whole lot. I do try to remove the most obvious of the typos and language issues, but editing one’s own writing is, I find, a challenge. I rarely alter a post substantially once written unless there is a factual error on my part.

I hope you enjoy reading the posts, and I will continue writing as long as I feel I have something I want to say. I owe a debt of appreciation to those at the TES that allowed me to write a column for them between 1998 and 2011. It was those pieces that helped me develop my style and appreciate the importance of brevity in communication.

The education world in England is undergoing a period of transformation from a local service nationally administered to a national service that is trying to establish how it can best operate locally. The change is painful to many, myself included that grew up and spent our careers in a public service that was defined by the involvement of local government. What the world will look like if this blog reaches its fourth birthday next year is difficult to predict. However, teacher supply transcends school organisation; teachers matter.

Thank you for reading.

 

School Commissioners and the purpose of education

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How much democratic control over schools should there be? In the past week one academy chain has announced plans to do away with local governing bodies for its schools and the House of Commons Education Select Committee has produced a report into the role of Regional School Commissioners.

Historically, after the passing of the 1902 Education Act, local authorities took over control of schooling, although for quite a while some schools remained as direct-grants schools funded from Westminster. Between 1944 and the 1990s local government, albeit in some cases partly funded by central government funding through support for local rates and taxes, was responsible for schooling with some oversight through legislation by parliament at Westminster.

The Tories started the breakdown of this arrangement with the creation of grant maintained schools in the 1990s, to be followed by Labour’s academy model of centrally funded schools. And so the slippery slope towards a national school service began to be built. Even before grant maintained schools took hold, the further education sector and public higher education were removed from local control and effectively placed under national direction.

With the drive towards academisation seemingly having stalled, it surely cannot be long before all remaining schools are required to become an academy whether coasting, failing or successful. At that point the role of unelected regional School Commissioners and their supporting headteacher boards become vital the management and leadership of our school service.

It was therefore worrying to read in the Select Committee report last week that:

We welcome the Government’s plans to increase the amount of information provided in Headteacher Board minutes, but there is currently confusion about the role of the Board itself, and this must be addressed. Without attention to these issues, the RSC system will be seen as undemocratic and opaque, and the Government must ensure that such concerns are acted on.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmeduc/401/40103.htm#_idTextAnchor008

How much involvement should local people and their locally elected representatives have in the running of our school system in a twenty-first century democracy? No doubt this is one question the Select Committee will hopefully tackle in their next inquiry into the Purpose and quality of education in England. For it is difficult to discuss the purpose without understanding who is and should be in control.

The purpose of education must be more than just creating all schools as academies. The Select Committee also said of School Commissioners that:

The impact of RSCs should be measured in terms of improvements in outcomes for young people, rather than merely the volume of activity. We welcome the Government’s intention to review the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the RSCs. This should be done to ensure that potential conflicts of interest are eliminated, and to provide assurance that RSC decisions are made in the interests of school improvement rather than to fulfil specific targets for the number of academies.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmeduc/401/40103.htm#_idTextAnchor008

At the present time one purpose not being fully met is the provision of teachers able to meet the challenge of helping every child achieve their maximum performance at school. That must be a goal for government.

 

 

 

Don’t Panic?

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This has been a good week for TeachVac (www.teachvac.com) the free to use recruitment site that I helped establish. Not only did it receive a mention in The Guardian on Tuesday – in Fiona Millar’s piece about recruitment challenges – but it also featured on BBC Breakfast TV on Wednesday morning. As a result, I have been on a number of local radio stations at various times this week following their picking up on one or other of the pieces in the national media.

So, what is the situation for September 2016? A trend we at TeachVac noted in December and have seen continuing in January is a larger than expected number of advertisements in the three key EBacc subjects; English, mathematics and the sciences. One of the problems of pre-recording media interviews several days in advance is that percentages change and it is important not to over-estimate. Thus the 40% increase that is being used in some quarters was actually an under-representation of the change between this year and last during the first two weeks of January. Of course what we will not know for several months is whether the increase is a genuine increase in demand or just a change in behaviour on the part of some schools that have brought forward recruitment, perhaps on the basis of anticipated need rather than an actual vacancy in order to start the process early. Now that some academy chains have changed their dates for resignation to the start of term that may also be an influencing factor.

Whatever the reason, or reasons, we are still seeing more advertisements than in 2015. This makes the fact that TeachVac is free to schools, teachers and trainees ever more important. After all, TeachVac was established to help reduce the cost of recruitment. If the free to use model works for Twitter, why not for teacher recruitment?

The team at Teachvac regularly has schools phoning us and asking, ‘can the process of advertising a vacancy really be that simple and free as well?’ The answer, of course is yes. If you don’t believe it and haven’t  yetseen the demonstration video on the site, then I urge you to have a look and tell the remaining schools, teachers and trainees that still haven’t signed up to do so.

Schools that enter vacancies into TeachVac for secondary main scale teachers are told the current state of the ‘free pool’ of possible applicants. TeachVac issued its first alert of 2016 this week when the ‘free pool’ in English slipped below the two thirds level. If advertisements continue at this rate there won’t be enough new entrants to ensure all vacancies can be easily filled throughout the year. Not a problem yet, but it could become the autumn for schools looking at vacancies in January 2017.

At TeachVac, we believe this early warning can help when timetables are constructed as it provides early warning of potential challenges. The changing position is updated regularly in the TeachVac monthly newsletters and other Reviews we publish. Schools, local authorities and other interested parties, such as subject associations and teaching schools, can access more detailed information for a small fee.

My assessment of the 2016 recruitment round, at least for secondary main scale teachers, where the data is richest, is that the increasing school population is starting to affect demand and the under-recruitment into preparation last September will cause issues for some schools in some subjects. Perhaps that’s why the train to be a teacher advert made an appearance on Channel 4 last evening. But, more about recruitment for 2016 at the end of the month when new figures will appear from UCAS.

The end of the beginning

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Next week this blog celebrates its third birthday. I would like to be more upbeat at this time, but many of the values that brought me into public service are now being eroded, seemingly faster than ever.

Yesterday I heard Sir Andrew Carter tell a conference on teacher recruitment that ‘all schools will become academies’. Later in the afternoon I had the same view that schools will be forcibly taken away from local authorities at some point in this parliament confirmed from two different sources: both said it was an open secret at Westminster. Such may be the consequence for the electorate of electing a Conservative government last year. We now await a White Paper on the future of schools that will precede a Bill, probably pencilled in for the autumn.

Whether schools become academies or some new form of organisation doesn’t really matter. What will be a consequence will be the ending the link between local government and the running of schools that has existed since 1902. I have written in the past that I can just about accept that for the secondary sector, but need to be convinced that a credible governance and planning structure, and reasonable funding model, has been devised for the primary sector and especially many of our small rural schools.

I am not sure what the consequences for the Tory party would be of any wholesale merger of village schools to save money, especially if the transport costs associated with busing pupils to the next village were left with the local authorities as part of a botched arrangement over who does what in the brave new world devised by Michael Gove and now implemented by Nick Gibb. Who will handle admissions if local authorities cannot force schools to take extra pupils and what is the future for pupils with special educational needs or children that are vulnerable in other ways?

The Church of England and, to a lesser extent, the Roman Catholic Church and other faiths responsible for schools will be under intense pressure if schooling is nationalised under the control of un-elected Regional Commissioners with no remit to support the historical pattern of primary education in England. There are no ‘voluntary’ academies as there are voluntary aided and controlled schools. Will the government allow single-faith multi-academy trusts in the new order along diocesan boundaries or compel different arrangements so that the faith schools will have to fight to retain their ethos?

I will be a real irony that the nationalisation of schools will take place under a Tory government in the name of, presumably, freedom.  But, such is the world in which we live these days. I also wonder whether the days of governing bodies are numbered after an academy chain announced it was going to dispense with such local governance. This from a Tory government whose predecessors were once exercised about the fact that infant and junior schools were served by a single governing body.

I suppose one outcome will be that there won’t be any need for a national teaching force because all teachers, like schools, will be part of the national service.

 

 

1% pay rise for most teachers likely in 2016

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The main teacher associations have now submitted their joint evidence to the School Teachers Review Body (STRB). This follows the publication of the DfE’s evidence to the STRB just before Christmas, although it is dated November 2015. The date is significant, since it presumably allows the DfE to ignore the evidence from the 2015 ITT census and instead rely upon the School Workforce Census taken in 2014 along with the 2014 ITT census as the most up to date information they have on the workforce in schools and in training.

I assume that the STRB could ask for supplementary evidence or commission their own secretariat to update the DfE’s data if it isn’t in the associations’ evidence. The STRB can also look further at the vacancy figures, as they have done in the past.

Nevertheless, the trends and pressures in the system are visible from the evidence that is available and have largely also been rehearsed in front of the Select Committee over the past couple of months.

One chart that struck me in the DfE’s evidence was Figure 10 on page 43. It may be no accident that the East of England and the South East were the two regions with the largest mean and median negative salary differences between classroom teacher salaries and private sector graduate professional salaries. As TeachVac www.teachvac.com has revealed, along with London, these are the two regions where teacher recruitment is at its most challenging.

If the net effect of high pay overall for graduates is to drive up the cost of services in these areas then a one per cent pay rise for teachers will have the most effect on recruitment in these areas. One solution would be to review the boundaries of the extra-national pay areas to extend them out beyond London. It is worth noting that the mean difference was negative across all regions in 2014/15 and it was only the median that was positive for teachers, and in just four regions, the North East, North West, Yorkshire & the Humber and the West Midlands. In the other five regions both the mean and median were negative for teachers’ salaried when compared with the private sector. Apparently, this is due to some graduates earning very high salaries, although this seems less likely in the Home Counties than in Inner London.

It is also not clear why the DfE had to resort to using resignation and early retirement data from the whole of the public sector in Figure 4 rather than using data from the School Workforce Census just for the teaching profession? Could it be that the resignations data looks more favourable across the whole of the public sector than just for the teaching profession? However, with so many young women in teaching – Figure 6 suggest around 30% of the classroom teacher workforce was below 30 in November 2013 (sic) and 74% of these were women – resignations as a result of starting a family are likely to be above the long-term average.

What is also clear from the DfE evidence is the concentration on the EBacc subjects, in some cases to the complete exclusion of data on other subjects. The STRB might like to ask the DfE to remedy this short-comings since they are responsible for the pay of all teachers and not just those in the EBacc subjects.

One relatively new idea from the DfE is to allow schools to extend the concept of a season ticket loan to also cover a loan to teachers for a deposit on rental properties through what is known as a salary sacrifice scheme. This might help attract new teachers into some areas providing the cost of repayments plus the monthly rent wasn’t so high as to still be off-putting at current salary levels. Indeed, the government might put pressure on landlords to reduce the level of deposits required.

The DfE on behalf of the government make much of the need for public sector pay restraint all the way through the remainder of this parliament and their view that overall pay increases should be capped at 1% until 2020.

The associations may well be worried by Figures 8 & 9 in the DfE evidence that show academies with lower median salaries than maintained schools. This is headed average salaries although the DfE haven’t used the mean as the measure of central tendency. Could it be that academies use more unqualified teachers and Teach first trainees and this is bringing down their median salary or is their retention rate worse than I maintained schools? This evidence is contained in the School Workforce Census and the STRB might like to ask more about what the evidence reveals.

Overall, there isn’t much new data since the DfE has used mostly data already in the public domain. However, I would be surprised if the STRB did more than warn about teacher supply on this evidence unless the associations have made a much stronger case. Expect the one per cent overall to be announced for 2016, even if it is nuanced in favour of some groups.

 

Time to listen

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Why do children with hearing loss, but no other impediment to their learning, fare so much worse than children of a similar ability but with normal hearing patterns? You could ask the same question of children with other disabilities. Later this month the DfE should publish outcome figures for the 2015 GCSE results for these pupils.

Last year, the National Deaf Children’s Society a key campaigner in the field of education for children with hearing impairment, published a chilling report on the state of their education http://www.ndcs.org.uk/for_the_media/press_releases/deaf_children_slip.html only 36% of these children achieved the %A-Cs at GCSE compared with more than 60% of their hearing classmates. Even more concerning was the decline in specialist teachers of hearing impaired children.

It is this latter point that concerns me at this time. Does our fractured governance system which fails to rate professional development of teachers properly now allow for a system to ensure the training of sufficient teachers of hearing impaired pupils or indeed or other pupils that need specialist training. Is there any obligation on multi-academy trusts or single converter academies to ever consider this type of issue? Local authorities certainly won’t these days and, I guess, it hasn’t featured on the agenda of many of the School Forums responsible for setting policy on funding distribution across school in an area. Funding is ever more weighted towards pupils and their immediate needs and rarely takes into account the longer-term strategic needs of the school system.

One implication of more pupils overall is that the number with impaired hearing is also likely to rise in proportion. This means that more teachers should be trained. How will this happen? Could such teachers be incorporated into the National Teaching Service or will we expect enthusiastic teachers to take out one of the new career loans for higher degrees on top of their existing student debt to provide out cadre of qualified teachers of hearing impaired pupils in the future, let alone the leaders in the special schools where some of these children are located. Who is going to employ the advisers to help classroom teachers with a child with mild hearing loss in their class to perform to the best of their ability and help close the performance gap?

These pupils and their compatriots with other special needs deserve a high quality schooling system not to be pushed to the margins of policy-making. I am sure that they aren’t seen as a nuisance, but perhaps they aren’t seen enough or even at all by those that consider these issues. There are only around 20,000 pupils with recognised hearing impairment in our school system, but each and every one deserves the best possible education. As, indeed, do all other pupils with special needs.

 

 

Do we want to bring back the Sheriff?

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This is the pantomime season and the tale of Robin Hood is a well-known part of that of that cannon. Indeed, the Sheriff of Nottingham is well-established in folklore as an authoritarian baddy on the side of the State against the common people of England.

In the period after King John and the signing of Magna Carta local democracy came slowly to England, probably reaching a high point in the 1960s when the voting age was lowered to eighteen from twenty-one. Since then the State has rowed back on local democracy with more and more services being taken over by Westminster. Utilities and the health service departed local government in the post-war Labour nationalisation spree, even though public health found its way back in recent years. Police and the lower tiers of the court service largely disappeared although councils were handed power over alcohol licensing, if not licensing hours. Since Labour started the academies programme, based on the Tory Grant Maintained School model, schools have also been also been coming under direct control from Westminster.

Children’s Services seem to be the latest function of local government likely to be removed from local democratic control. The Prime Minister’s announcement just before Christmas presages what might be a two stage process, where firstly, poorly performing children’s services are taken away from democratic control and then, no doubt in the name of effectiveness, the remaining effective services are nationalised and boundaries rationalised to meet some new criteria of efficiency. The plans for adoption services seem to suggest the way forward.

Does it matter whether services are the responsibility of local councils? In a piece on this blog in March 2013, I argued that it did in relation to schools.  I think it does even more in respect of children’s services. These services deal with some of our most challenging and challenged young people that need the help of others. Do those services need democratic oversight? I believe that they do. Part of the problem is that local government now lacks a coherent rationale. There are cities with elected mayors; areas with one principle tier of government; other areas with two tiers and sometimes a third locality tier as well in the form of parish or town councils.

The lack of understanding of the need to manage and develop services locally is also hampered by a government that doesn’t understand about funding. Business Rates and Council Tax supported by government redistribution grants to deal with areas of low income has always been a challenge to get right. However, capping income without allowing local areas to manage local services is a recipe for the death of effective local government, especially when placed alongside the creeping centralisation of services.

Local councils had one big advantage, the discipline of the ballot box made for regular rethinks in all but those authorities where the present electoral system has created single-party states. Whether you call them commissioners, commissars or sheriffs, they are un-elected officials whose responsibility to the services sometimes risks coming before responsibility to the locality. I would change the electoral system to retain democracy rather than create services where decisions are taken far from the point of operation; but maybe I am just old-fashioned and a relic of a former age.

 

Geopolitics and macroeconomics

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Whether the world is a more dangerous place this January isn’t for me to say. However, to balance my short-term views about teacher supply problems I thought it worth thinking about what the combined effects of a downturn in China; tensions in the Middle East; falling oil prices and the possibility of rising interest rates might do to the longer-term teacher supply position.

An analysis of data over the past fifty years suggests teacher supply problems ease when the economy is subdued or in recession. Whether there is a direct link between these two facts may be arguable, but while there is a need to educate children there will be a need for teachers. Again, over the past fifty years, there have been massive strides in technology since the famous BBC programme of the late 1970s ‘The chips are down’ about the microprocessor revolution. Classrooms have adapted to make use of the new technology, but there has been no seismic shift away from traditional patterns of pupil teacher numbers. Indeed, in secondary schools over the past decade, pupil-teacher ratios have even improved, according to DfE data.

The recently reported growth in home schooling may be the first signs of a coming revolution, driven by parents no longer satisfied with the current model of schooling. Tablets, TVs and computers can provide more learning power than any school library of a couple of decades ago. What is needed is the means of instruction and the method of motivation to keep youngsters on task. How much more likely is that in a home environment than when youngsters are faced with the distractions caused by 25 or 30 other children: could learning me more focused and take less time in the home than the classroom?

No doubt, parents would still want children to socialise in order to learn team games, sing together and undertake risky science experiments under the control of a qualified person. However, that might mean only sending your child to school for a couple of days a week. Such a shift might also boost the market for tutors as parents just buy in specific skills where their offspring are facing issues with learning.

As the BBC recently highlighted, the spirit of enterprise is abroad in Britain at the present time. I am sure that there are many developers in both large companies and small start-ups eying what could be a lucrative market that has world-wide potential; some of which will be on display at BETT.

Such a shift in technology from a labour intensive to a technology driven learning process could have a profound effect on both the need for teachers and the spending by the State on education. However, in the short-term, the geopolitical and macroeconomic signals might suggest that if a downturn is coming then teaching might benefit from renewed interest as a career choice.

As I have said at several conferences recently, I am one of the only people that might see benefits from a slowdown in China, even if it only reduces the inflow to that country of UK teachers to work in the growing international school market.

However, with the allocations for 2016 entry into teacher preparation courses set and fewer places available on non-EBacc subjects than in 2015, none of this will matter before 2017 unless, as in 2009, any downturn in the world’s economy bring back greater numbers of returners into teaching: such an effect could dramatically alter the picture of teacher supply, even for 2016, were it to come about.

Fig leaf look a bit threadbare

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It didn’t take long for the national press to take up the issue of teacher supply in 2016. The Observer, a paper that has carried several stories about teacher supply over the past few months, including covering my evidence to the Select Committee in last Sunday’s edition, has highlighted the concerns of Sir Michael Wilshaw about recruitment in coastal and deprived areas expressed in his annual report. The reporters also highlight Labour’s issues with the DfE statistics, including both the inclusion of Teach First numbers being included in the annual census of trainees and the presentation of vacancy numbers based on data collected in November. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/02/ofsted-row-ministers-extent-teacher-shortages-michael-wilshaw

As Sir Michael Wilshaw demonstrated in his last annual report, even the DfE figures, collected at the most favourable time of the year, have been going in the wrong direction over the past few years. It is not the fault of civil servants that the only data they collect comes from a census taken in November, but the fig leaf that this provides Ministers with now looks ever more threadbare.

How can you operate a National Teaching Service if you do not know the annual demand from schools for teachers? I am interested to know if anyone has yet seen the parameters for the working of this service. As schools are already recruiting for September 2016, if the government doesn’t enable the service soon it will have an even more challenging first year of operation than might be necessary.

Who does the government have that is capable of running such a service anyway? How much will they pay the teachers; will they only recruit existing teachers, perhaps from Teach First; will it just be secondary schools offered such teachers or will primary and special schools be included; will such teachers be offered only to academies or will all schools be able to bid for such teachers? Who knows, if you do please let me know where I can find out the details.

If the Observer didn’t actually talk to Sir Michael before writing their story, but just based it on comments in his annual report, they might want to ask him about progress at GCSE in areas where recruitment is challenging. TeachVac’s preliminary investigation of 2015 GCSE 5A*-Cs results including English and mathematics, compared with 2014, suggest that in London more schools performed less well in 2015 than 2014 than did better. Now, nationally, there was an overall decline of half a per cent in this figures, so some schools doing worse than last year was to be expected. The fact that overall more schools did in London worse raises questions about whether teacher supply problems might have contributed to the outcomes, even if schools have tried to protect examination classes.

Of course, since the DfE don’t believe there is a crisis in teacher supply anywhere in the country they will have to come up with a different explanation if it is true school performance in London has faltered compared with some other parts of England.

Teacher recruitment in 2016

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How will schools looking for teachers in 2016 fare? Teacher supply was a common theme of discussions in the autumn term of 2016, so I thought I would share some preliminary analysis regarding the start of the 2016 recruitment round. Schools signed up to TeachVac, our free recruitment site that costs schools nothing to post vacancies, receive more detailed information thorough our monthly newsletter. To find out more visit http://www.teachvac.co.uk

In addition, secondary schools receive the unique update on the size of the remaining ‘free pool’ of trainees every time they upload details of a main scale vacancy. At present, this is the national picture since the NCTL seem reluctant to reveal regional data in any meaningful form, despite in 2014 telling me that they had hoped to do so in 2015. The data on regional provision in the priority subjects that they have produced is challenging to map against the actual census numbers in some subjects. As the key census table also has gaps that appear to be filled in another table, I have a word of caution about the data in the public domain. No doubt some enterprising MP will ask questions or the Select Committee will elicit the actual data from the DfE as part of their inquiry. If so, we will update the information in TeachVac.

Anyway, using the data that is available we can assume that Teach First trainees will be in classrooms and unavailable to fill vacancies, other than as qualified teachers at the end of their programme, and that School Direct Salaried trainees are also likely to be hired either by the school where they are training or another local school without an advert appearing.  As a result, these trainees can be discarded from the pool of trainees available to schools unable to access these programmes. In addition, it is worth reducing the remaining number by five per cent to allow for those that don’t complete their training programme on the higher education, SCITT and School direct fee routes.

Taking all these variables into account, the picture is broadly similar to this point in 2015. There are unlikely to be enough trainees in the ‘free pool’ to satisfy demand in business studies; design and technology – despite slightly better recruitment than last year; English – where we have concerns that the distortion produced by both Teach First and the School Direct Salaried numbers may make it difficult for schools in some parts of the country to recruit a teacher –this is a subject where the regional breakdown of recruitment into training would be especially helpful. Although the mix of science teachers may not be what schools need, the total of trainees may be sufficient across the country, even if not regionally. The same is true in mathematics.

In PE, art and probably languages, there should be sufficient trainees to meet demand. In other subjects, we need to see how schools will schools respond to curriculum changes and funding pressures before making a judgement. However, geography, music, IT and RE schools seeking teachers may struggle towards the end of the year, if 2016 follows the pattern of 2016.

Regionally, despite the presence of Teach First together with the School Direct Salaried places, we expect schools outside these programmes to struggle in London and the Home Counties when it comes to recruitment of main scale teachers. As these are the parts of the country with the greatest concentration of independent schools, the demand for teachers from these schools is an additional pressure in the marketplace.

Teachvac has a new service this year that allows us to provide advice on salary levels offered in the marketplace. This is not yet a free service, but the team are happy to discuss details with anyone interested. 2016 looks like being another interesting and challenging year for teacher recruitment.