Education and The English question

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The Education & Adoption Bill has now passed its second reading in the House of Commons. This is the debate that takes places about principles rather than details; these come in the later Committee Stage. Realistically the Bill has but two key clauses, one about coasting schools and the other about adoptions. As the Secretary of State wasn’t able to furnish a definition of a coasting school in time for the second reading debate MPs were floundering around a bit. Indeed, since the original academy programme was devised by Labour to deal with under-performing schools, the opportunities for Labour to attack the Bill on its basic principle of improving schools were somewhat limited.

The debate did, however, offer the opportunity for many new backbench MPs to make their first or ‘maiden’ speech in the chamber. Most, but not I think all, followed convention and paid tribute to the former representative of their constituency. Many said what a great place they were representing and some went on to explain their interest in education.
What was more interesting, in a debate entirely about schools in England, were the contributions from two SNP MPs and the Labour Shadow Minister for School who sits for a constituency in Wales. Since education is a devolved activity one might have expected contributions only from MPs representing constituencies in England.

One SNP MP talked mainly about how wonderful her constituency was and didn’t really seem to mention education very much at all: something of a waste of parliamentary time when backbench members were being restricted to speeches of only six minutes duration. This was later extended to ten minutes, presumably because some potential speakers waived their previously expressed intention to speak.

Listening and reading in Hansard about contributions from MPs from Wales and Scotland speaking on devolved matters in these sort of debates does focus minds on the so-called English question at Westminster. I have no problem if their contribution adds to the store of knowledge on the question under discussion but frankly I see little point in contributions about how wonderful Glasgow is as a city. As a former teacher that SNP MP did finally say something about education at the end of her speech, but not enough on the subject under debate. As she completed her speech with a Gaelic phrase and an MP from a Welsh constituency started in that language, I also wondered how long it will be before simultaneous translation makes an appearance at Westminster?

The Bill now goes to its Committee Stage with the aim of completing this during July. As there are so few clauses this seems like a manageable timetable, assuming agreement can be reached on what is a coasting school? As I wrote earlier today, Sir Chris Woodhead initiated that debate around 20 years ago, so the DfE and Ofsted should have been able to provide some choices for Ministers to select from by the time of the debate.
Finally, I was disappointed not to see a contribution to the debate from one of the remaining Lib Dem MPs: a sign of how times have changes and the new world at Westminster where Scottish MPs can talk on matters that are of little or no concern to them, but the voice of Liberalism might now struggle to be heard.

End of an era

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Reflecting on the announcement of the death of Sir Chris Woodhead, announced earlier today, I was reminded of two aspects of his time as Chief inspector at ofsted. Firstly, he raised the spectre of 15,000 incompetent teachers by extrapolating from numbers found in early inspections. For some reason that number stuck as the figure everyone remembered, even if it was probably not completely accurate. In fact, 15,000 teachers out of a profession of approaching half a million teachers is only around 3-4% rated as incompetent and it would be surprising if there weren’t some teachers performing less than effectively in a profession of that size. The question was, and is, how to help such teachers improve once they have been identified.

The second aspect of his time as Chief Inspector that I recall was his attempt to start what we would now call the coasting school debate. I suppose in that respect it is slightly ironic that his death is announced only the day after the House of Commons debated the Second Reading of the Education & Adoption Bill that seeks to deal once and for all with such schools. As Chief inspector, Chris Woodhead had less success in the 1990s in starting a debate about such schools. But where he led, others now follow.

I first met Chris Woodhead in 1979 when I came to Oxford to pursue my academic studies in the governance of education. At that time he was a tutor in English spending some of his time instructing PGCE students. He later went into education administration and then to the National Curriculum Council before ending up in charge of Ofsted. It will be interesting to see how history deals with him. As baby boomer, like myself, he moved from teaching in a comprehensive school in the 1970s to become a firm favourite of the right and advocated policies that I could not agree with, even where we shared a view on the nature of the problem.

During the passage of his final debilitating illnesses Chris had rather passed from sight, even though he was still only in his 60s. But, in his prime he was as well known, if not well liked, as any figure on the education scene, even well after he relinquished his role at ofsted.

The approach Chris Woodhead took to improvement was to challenge in a forthright manner. I recall that the Lib Dem Education Association invited him to speak at a fringe during the Brighton Conference in, I think, 1997. The debate was interesting and robust but there was little or no meeting of minds. But, without a doubt Sir Chris Woodhead was one of the key figures in education in England during the 1990s even if he was too controversial for some.

Teacher recruitment and retention in the headlines again

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Yesterday, the adjournment debate in the House of Commons, proposed by Louise Haigh the Labour member for Sheffield Heeley, was on the issue of the recruitment and retention of teachers. Ms Haigh is already showing an interest in this important area for schools and has asked a number of PQs on the topic as well as initiating this debate. Today the Sutton Trust has published a research report called ‘Teaching by Degrees’ that seeks to consider the university backgrounds of state and independent school teachers.

I am grateful for a mention by Ms Haigh in the debate, as well as a mention of TeachVac by another Labour member who had attended the recent SATTAG seminar I spoke at in Portcullis House. The unusually large number of interventions during the adjournment debate last night – this is how other MPS show their strength of feeling on the issue – there were interventions 16 during the half hour debate at the end of business on a Thursday, including from MPs from the north of England that might normally already have been on their way back to their constituencies by then. Such a large number of interventions must have alerted the Minister, Mr Gibb, to the seriousness of the issue. Indeed, one wonders when it will feature as one of the opposition day debates. An earlier post on this blog recalls that last autumn a debate on teaching say the first appearance on the Order Paper of a difference in policy between the Lib Dems and the Tories over teacher qualifications.

In that respect, it is interesting to read the Sutton Trust research report that suggests more Oxbridge graduates are now teaching in state schools. Given the period covered by the research included the recession that probably isn’t a terribly surprising observation. Of more concern is the methodology used in reaching such a view. The main vehicle used was to collect data for the state funded sector was the NfER Voice Survey. Now, this is a survey stratified by types of school and various other variables such as grade of respondent, but I cannot see anything in either the Sutton Trust to NfER explanations of the methodology to suggest it is also stratified by the age of the teacher and their length of service in the profession. Without that data it is unclear to me whether the classroom teachers are a spread of recent entrants and those with longer service or some other distribution across the profession.

My view is that to detect changes in entrants to teaching it would have been better to have used the UCAS/GTTR records of applicants to teaching. This could have identified the degree awarding body of entrants and any changes over time could easily have been identified. The key question is surely, not what has changed over the past decade but what was the impact of the recession and is any impact now fading in terms of the source of new entrants to the profession. It is important to know, for instance, whether the decline in the past two years in applicants to become maths and Physics teachers reflects any change in the degree patterns away from Oxbridge graduates. Otherwise, the Sutton Trust research doesn’t help policy makers grappling with the issues raised in the adjournment debate yesterday.

Councils lose another education role

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The Conservative government has lost no time in taking another duty with regard to education away from local government. In his letter of the 15th June to the directors of children’s services, Lord Nash, the Minister, gave local authorities just 15 days’ notice that they would no longer has responsibility for choosing the sponsor for a new school. Many years ago the Blair government started the process that has led to this letter by mandating that all new secondary schools should be academies. This was later extended to all new schools. Local authorities retained the responsibility to run the beauty competition to decide the sponsor to suggest to the DfE. That appears now to have been handed to the unelected regional school commissioners. So much for localism.

As far as I can see there has been no explanation for this decision and no clarification as to whether it applies only to new competitions or also to those already under discussion and not finalised by the 1st July. It may be that the DfE was irritated at some of the choices made by local authorities: it certainly made Oxfordshire re-run the process for selecting the operator for a new primary school as it didn’t like the outcome, this despite the sponsor selected being on the DfE approved list. The fact that the re-run process produced the same outcome may have led to this draconian and precipitous change in the selection process.

For those councils that don’t like the academy process the letter can probably be ignored since they can seemingly continue to expand existing maintained primary schools by adding on extra classes. Whether it might now tempt some Conservative local authorities that care about their local schools, but have supported academies in the past, to do the same would be an interesting outcome.

Certainly, counties with lots of new house building, and I suppose there aren’t many of them given how few houses are being built nationally, now face the possibility of having to deal with academy chains located a long way from county hall and possibly with little local knowledge. Even worse, the academy can fix its size and if new houses are added to the development can refuse to expand: seemingly at present with neither the regional commissioner nor the DfE being able to do anything about such a situation. That it could increase council spend on home to school transport unnecessarily doesn’t seem to matter. After all, the local authority could always close another library or children’s centre to pay for the buses.

Schooling is now firmly a national service, as I explained earlier today to someone taking the local authority to task because the school where they are a governor wasn’t funded as well as other local schools. I pointed out that the School Forum set the formula and no councillor had a vote unless they were elected as a governor. There is still a widespread belief local authorities run schools. They don’t, and it is now the DfE and their un-elected officials that take the decisions.

Food for thought

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Last Friday the DfE published its annual census data on schools. This deals with the number of schools and also provides details about the number of pupils. The headlines, larger classes and larger schools, were well covered by the media. The increases in pupil numbers were not unexpected, although the increase in average class size at KS2, while average class sizes at KS1 remained the same, might not have been predicted by everyone.

Average class sizes in the primary sector are now larger than a decade ago, but remain 1.4 pupils per teacher smaller than in 2006 across the secondary sector as a whole. Average class sizes in the primary sector are at their smallest in parts of the North East, where the growth in pupil numbers hasn’t really happened yet and largest in parts of outer London where they are approaching 30 pupils per teacher in both Sutton and Harrow at 29.6:1. Several other London boroughs have average class sizes of over 29 pupils per teacher.

However, one table that interested me and hasn’t been widely reported on was the take-up of school meals. This was the first year of the free school meals for infant pupils. At the census, the average take-up of school lunches by infant pupils was 85.6%. However, since pupils absent on the day are included in the overall total, the actual take up by pupils present in school was presumably somewhat higher than that in schools where some pupils were absent. Redcar in the North East had the highest take-up at 94.5% of it infant school population if you exclude the 100% in the City of London’s one primary school. Not far behind were a group of six London boroughs that included Kingston and Islington. At the other end of the table were Brighton and Hove, at just 70.5% take-up and Oxfordshire with the second lowest figure of 77.4% take-up. These authorities were followed closely by Thurrock, Medway and Hillingdon. The south east had the lowest take-up of any region at just over 81% whereas Inner London averaged over 90% take-up, closely followed by the North East region.

It is difficult to know what to read into these figures on take-up. Are families in affluent areas happy to ignore the free meals on offer or were these authorities where the meals service had collapsed after the assault on provision during the Thatcher years? The former clearly doesn’t work everywhere as a reason, otherwise places like Kingston upon Thames would not be so close to the top of the list. Perhaps, parents in these areas understand the value of the £400 of saving taking up the free meal deal can provide, especially when the alternative is spending income taxed at 40%.

It isn’t a rural urban divide either, so may be some other factor is at work. As a councillor in Oxfordshire I will be asking questions about why the take-up is so low locally? But, the Tory cabinet member was always opposed to the free school meals policy, so that may have had some effect.

Tell your Head

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The big story today is how the NHS can save money by better procurement. This provides me with an ideal hook on which to remind everyone about the success of TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the free to use recruitment service for schools and teachers.

It has always seemed to me something of an irony that as the ability to recruit teachers becomes more of a challenge so the cost of doing so goes up, transferring resources from teaching and learning into the coffers of the private sector.

As a result, I worked with others to establish TeachVac, a recruitment service with the aim that using it would be free to both schools and teachers. We went live in January serving just main scale vacancies in secondary schools but have now expanded into all secondary vacancies up to and including leadership. In the autumn we expect TeachVac to expand into the primary and special school sectors.

TeachVac has a simple registration service and for schools that have difficulty with their URN, the most common registration problem, there is both a helpful demonstration video and a helpline to talk admin staff through the registration process.

For teachers it’s even easier to register a series of job preferences. Matching takes place daily and a job posted before lunch can be attracting interest the same evening. For main scale vacancies TeachVac has access to the overwhelming majority of vacancies as they arise using the best of modern technology.

As a bonus, with main scale vacancies schools are told each time they register what the likely size of the pool of trainees left is like. This can help schools judge how challenging recruitment might be.

Next year, as we have the data, the TeachVac team will refine this data down to a more regional level. Not that such a refinement will matter in subjects such as business studies, design and technology and in the next few weeks English, as in these subjects the pool has either already run dry or is about to do so. Those school unlucky enough to need to make an appointment for January will really struggle to do so in some parts of the country, but at least by using TeachVac they will know that is the case and can consider alternative arrangements and how useful throwing money at advertising really is?

The message about TeachVac is spreading quickly, but to keep down costs we need to remind you that if you are a school seeking to post a vacancy or a teacher or trainee looking for a teaching post at any level bookmark www.teachvac.co.uk and register today. Every million pounds TeachVac helps schools save on recruitment can help improve teaching and learning.

Tell your head and chair of governors and anyone in the staffroom looking for a job now or in the future to register today. Both schools and teachers receive regular newsletters about the recruitment scene.

Fewer children in secure units

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Data from the DfE shows a fall in the number of children held in secure units at the end of March 2015 (SRF 15/2015). Now one must always be wary of figures for a single date because there may have been fluctuations during the year in the overall numbers. However, by comparing the same date over time it is clear that the number of children being held in secure units, especially as a result of an interaction with the criminal justice system, is on a downward trend. In 2010, 161 children were detailed after coming into contact with the criminal justice system in one way or another. By 2015 that number was down to 117 with a further 88 children placed in secure accommodation on welfare grounds. Of these 82 were children from England and six were children from Wales.

An encouraging sign is that the number of young children below the age of sixteen in secure accommodation at the census date has fallen over recent years. Although this number is still too high, it does seem to be going in the right direction. The number of 16 and 17 year olds in secure accommodation has increased. There needs to be some understanding of whether this is because of the actions of the courts, and the Youth Court in particular, or whether it is due to some local authorities resorting to a short period in secure accommodation for young people at risk of exploitation.

Indeed, the use of secure accommodation on welfare grounds may well be worth re-visiting. Is there any evidence that it can actually make a difference to lock up a teenager for say a month. Does it break their habits or do they return to the behaviour that caused concern as soon as they leave the secure accommodation?

Of course, these are figures for young people in secure accommodation as a result of the actions of the State. There are others that find themselves in confinement as a result of being trafficked by adults that have no concerns for their welfare, but merely see them as objects with a commercial value. Even after the recent series of trials in the courts it seems unlikely that the exploitation of young people, both girls and boys, for commercial gain through sexual activities has stopped.

Indeed, the prosecution of historic cases must not deny the resources of both the police and local authorities to following up current cases. In this respect schools have a vital part to play in identifying patterns of behaviour that may lead to a child becoming at risk of exploitation. Whatever academies and their sponsors may think of local authorities, they have a duty to cooperate in monitoring and reporting pupils at risk. There is a concern that some of these children are regarded as a nuisance by some schools and placed on an alternative education programme that may have far less hours of tuition than a normal school day. If that is the case then, out of sight must not mean out of mind.

Sword of Damocles

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I assume the government knows what a coasting school is, but it seemingly just doesn’t want to tell the rest of us until it has seen the new Education and Adoption Bill pass through parliament. The alternative view is that the government is keen not to reveal its hand even then and that the definition will be changeable depending upon circumstances.

My starting point for a discussion about a definition might be something like this:

a) Any school that is two or more quintiles below similar schools in reading, writing and mathematics if a primary school or English and mathematics if a secondary school, as measured by the ofsted dashboard or such similar measure as may be prescribed by the Secretary of State, shall be regarded as a coasting school once the school has been in such a position for a period covered by two sets of such measurements.

b) A school shall be able to challenge any classification of it as a coasting school, and the consequences for any such classification, if it can show that the staffing of any of the appropriate classes or subjects contributing to the measurement was hindered by a shortage of qualified staff. A school would need to demonstrate that it had been unable to recruit sufficient staff trained and qualified in the teaching of the relevant classes or subjects.

Trained and qualified staff means teachers both with Qualified Teacher Status as awarded by the DfE or such other awarding body as the DfE may licence to award such a qualification and with a subject or phase qualification appropriate to the teaching of the relevant pupils contributing to the assessment of performance or other measure on which the assessment of coasting is to be judged.

Any school that successfully challenges an assessment would have twelve months from the designation of it as a ‘coasting school’ to no longer be two or more quintiles below similar schools. If it failed to make such an improvement it would be confirmed as a ‘coasting school’. Any school whether community, voluntary or academy can be defined as a ‘coasting school’ if it meet the appropriate criteria cited above.

There might be a discussion as to whether or not a fund to help such schools improve could be established. This might, after all, be a more cost-effective way of improving standards than changing the administrative structure of the school when that has not proved to be at fault.

A more serious concern is whether such an ill-defined threat as the academisation of coasting schools may affect the labour market for teachers. Will teachers shun certain schools until the government makes clear what will happen to teachers in schools judged as coasting by the un-disclosed definition? Will it also affect recruitment into the profession?

I suppose that the churches will be content as long as any change of status for a voluntary church school allows it to remain within a mutli-academy trust led by the church. But, what if the bill fails to provide for such a guarantee and Regional Commissioners are granted a free hand as to where to assign control of schools judged to be coasting? The same question will no doubt be asked by governors of other voluntary schools, some established several hundred years ago, that could be taken over when the Bill become law.

I think the lack of a definition at the discussion stage is too serious an omission to be allowed to pass unchallenged because the consequences for the control of schools could be immense and needs to be properly thought through. That cannot happen if the parameters of what is a coasting school are not enshrined in primary legislation. .

Alice in Wonderland

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The Education and Adoption Bill has been published today. Its outcome, when passed, seems to be to further reduce the role of local authorities in both education and adoption. At least in the education part the bill seeks to honour a manifesto pledge about failing or even coasting schools.

As I have made clear in previous posts, the devil will be in the detail. But, a Bill that tackles only such schools not already academies of one description or another will be a deeply flawed Bill. It will in effect be the Queen of Hearts announcing ‘off with their heads’ or to be more accurate ‘take them away from local authorities and the churches’, for some of these schools will not be community schools but voluntary aided or controlled schools. In that respect it will be interesting to see the reaction of the Church of England and other faith groups. It would be ironic to say the least if  a failing church school could join a multi-academy trust run by the church, but a failing community school passed completely out of local control to an academic sponsor with no local affiliation at all. But, if faith schools are to retain their ethos it is difficult to see how they can do so if they are operated by a secular academy chain.

Of even more interest is how the Bill will deal with Tweedledum, the failing academy. After all, it really will be Wonderland if the government is prepared to create a whole section of the Bill to reform Tweedledee, the maintained sector, but not to acknowledge that  some academies may behave in the same manner that the government finds objectionable.

Since I suppose for many of us the education scene has increasingly come to look like the mad hatter’s tea party we should not be surprised if a political Bill speeds up academy conversions but ignores other ills such as failing academies and the increasing lack of local accountability or even consultation over how such schools are run.

In the end, the Bill begs the question of whether or not local politicians should try to hang onto the last vestiges of authority over schools in their locality or try to create a new order where all schools are academies of one form or another? Two years ago I advocated that all secondary schools should be academies, but that the primary sector should remain under local political control because of the strong links between such schools and their local communities. Personally, I still think that is the best way out of the current mess. After all, a failing local authority can be taken over by the government at Westminster and there is a clear span of control between central government and the individual school that is rooted in each local community.

However, what is really needed is a politician with the courage to craft a school system that everyone can understand in terms of governance and operation. Otherwise, it looks to me as if the Regional Commissioners are being cast in the role of the White Rabbit, forever running around on errands to prop up a system nobody understand and where lines of control are neither clear nor effective as we have seen over the question of academy closures.  Clearly a Wonderland.

A decent, honorable and likeable man

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The news yesterday of the death of Charles Kennedy, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, at the early age of only 55 came as a bolt from out of the blue. Charles was leader of the Lib Dems when I stood for parliament as the Lib Dem candidate in the 2005  general election in the Reading East constituency .

Charles was everything I am not. He was gregarious, knew instinctively how to work a crowd, lit up any room he entered and was the perfect  person to take on a walkabout. He was the heart and soul of the Party. Charles came into politics with the rise of the SDP, whereas although I was already a member of the Liberal Party long before the early 1980s and the days of the alliance and then the merger, on many issues we had similar views.

However, education in England was not always top of Charles’ agenda, probably because he was a product of the Scottish school and higher education systems. However, he was steadfast during his period as leader about supporting the abolition of tuition fees across the United kingdom.

The news is especially saddening since on Monday evening I had chaired a meeting of the Liberal Democrat Education Association. It was an extremely positive affair, already looking forward to the part the Association can play in helping develop policies for this parliament and beyond, hopefully of the very sort that Charles would have approved. After all, education is the key to progress and to deny education to any young person is to limit their opportunities. One challenge is still to reinforce this message to those in society that either don’t want to or don’t care to hear it.

One thing that being in politics helps you face up to is that life must go forward. After a period of mourning and reflection there are new challenges to face and political battles to fight. So, on the day the Liberal Democrats again passed the 60,000 member mark I celebrate the work of those that helped us shape the past, recognise the challenges of today and step out on the journey into the future taking with me the lessons learnt from those such as Charles Kennedy who had achieved so much, but still left those remaining with yet more to strive for.