Good news for English

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On Tuesday the National College published the allocation for teacher preparation courses starting in 2015 ahead of the opening of the recruitment round through UCAS next month. The good news is that after several years of concern that the allocation for English was below what might be expected the allocation for 2015 entry has increased by around 600 to 2,348 while the underlying estimate of need has increased by almost 1,000 to 2,253. This increase is as a result of changes to the Teacher Supply model highlighted in the previous post on this blog.

Overall, the allocations show a continued drift towards school-led provision although the direction of travel in the secondary sector wasn’t as great as it might have been because of an increase of more than 4,000 in the total of places allocated.  The Salaried Route on School Direct hasn’t seen a large expansion, with 4,589 of the 4,712 bids being accepted. The growth has mainly been in the tuition fee route where 8,437 secondary and 4,623 primary places have been allocated. SCITTs account for 3,663 places, and HEIs of all descriptions 22,244 or almost half of the 43,516 places allocated.

Schools have more places than HE in Art, Chemistry, computing, design & technology, drama, English, geography, history, mathematics, music when SCITT numbers are included, PE and Physics. HE has more places than schools in Biology, business studies, classics, other subjects and Religious Education. The last is despite the large number of faith-based secondary schools.

Of course, everyone has to recruit to these places and the concern must be with so many more places to fill some parts of the country will fill places all their places whereas others won’t. In those circumstances the mobility of future trainees will be of vital importance. Through the TeachVac system I am pioneering a means of collecting that information starting with the current secondary trainees. More information can be found at http://www.oxteachserv.com/teachvac/  and current trainees can already register job preferences for where they will be looking for jobs when recruitment starts in the New Year. More details in a future post, including our first view of the current job market using our new recording system.

Along with allocations to schools and higher education, the NCTL have also published figures for Teach First allocations for the 2015 to 2016 academic year. They have been allocated 2,000 places; three-quarter in the secondary sector with numbers ranging from 430 in English and 308 places in mathematics down to 15 in design and technology.

Primary allocations nationally total 20,072 for 2015, slightly less than the 21,870 that were the total allocations last year. With half the primary allocations in HE going to undergraduate places there will be around 14,000 trainees on one-year courses in schools and HE plus the 2012 entrants to undergraduate courses that will have amount to around another 6,000 trainees making around 20,000 new primary teachers in 2016.

The next key data will be the ITT census in November when we will know the full extent of recruitment for this year. By then we will have started to analyse the state of the job market and can begin to make forecasts for recruitment into schools in 2015.

Three cheers for Open Government

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Yesterday the DfE published the most detailed explanation of the Teacher Supply Model (TSM) that underpins decisions about how many new entrants to the teaching profession are needed each year. The new document is the most detailed any government has released to the general public in almost a quarter of a century. Unlike previous publications, this new one is interactive and allows interested parties to interrogate the assumptions used within the Model. It also provides forward assumptions into the 2020s for teacher supply needs. Anyone interested can find the manual and accompanying spreadsheets at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-supply-model

The publication came about as a result of an exchange between David Laws, the Minister of State, and the Education Select Committee during one of their hearings into the issue of teacher supply and training. The Minister agreed to make the Model public and has now made good on his promise. The document is not an easy read, but the general principles are relatively easy to grasp for anyone interested in how the DfE works out the number of teachers required to enter teacher preparation programmes each year. I am sure that there will now be an informed debate on the subject

I am delighted that the current version of the TSM has reverted to calculating separate numbers for all the main curriculum subjects in secondary schools rather than just the EBacc curriculum areas with other lumped together in a composite pool.

The new Model has been used to calculate the ITT allocations for 2015 that were also announced yesterday. (More about them in another post) The good news is that the allocation for English has increased substantially. I had been puzzled, as I think had been others, about why the previous allocation figure was so far adrift of that for mathematics when both took up approximately the same amount of curriculum time in schools. That issue has been rectified for 2015 and will no doubt be welcomed by head teachers that have struggled to recruit teachers of English.

Although the data are somewhat daunting at first glance they do help those that take the time to work through them understand the potential implications of the growth in the school population over the next decade. Teaching is probably going to be a recession-proof occupation for at least the next 20 years in most parts of the country. However, that does mean that the Model shows the continuing need to recruit large numbers of new entrants to the profession. What the Model doesn’t do is identify what happens if recruitment to training falls short of target for a number of years. One solution would be to add in the shortfall to future targets, but that can inflate targets to unsustainable numbers. Such a process also doesn’t take into account of the fact that schools must cover lessons and do so be using various recruitment methods, including in the past hiring teachers from overseas.

In previous versions of the Model changes from year to year were subject to a smoothing process. That prevented too large a change from one year to the next for the benefit of providers of teacher training. That seems to have been removed. The solution still seems to be to over-allocate numbers, so that the risk at the end of the course still lies completely with the trainee that has to find a teaching post. Solving that concern is not something the TSM can do.

25,000 not out

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My thanks to everyone that helped this blog reach the total of 25,000 views in less than two years and with just over 200 posts. It took just one year eight months and eighteen days to be precise to reach the 25,000 figure if anyone other than me is interested. There has been at least one visitor from each of around 100 different countries during that time, although the bulk of visitors, over 22,000 views, have been from the United Kingdom. Still thank you to my local followers in Kazakhstan, Australia, Thailand, Canada, and across much of Europe as well as the rest of the world. I guess that the power of the State is the reason I am still waiting for my first viewing from the People’s Republic of China and from Tibet. Much of Francophile Africa is another area where there have been no views, but that may be less surprising given the language barrier and internet penetration in the region. My especial thanks to the more than 150 regular followers and to those that re-blog the most interesting posts to others.

Over the course of the last year the issue of teacher supply and the associated issue of training have together come to be a dominant theme in the posts on this blog. In view of the changes to training with the government in England preferring school-based preparation to higher education courses this is probably not a surprise. What started as a continuation of my column about facts and issues behind the numbers has progressed to consider some wider educational issues. No doubt that trend will continue as the UK general election looms ever larger. Indeed, the 2015 general election looks like joining those of 1906; 1945; 1979 and 1997 in the annuls of political history as one when seismic changes takes place at Westminster.

I originally started writing about education statistics in the Times Educational Supplement in 1998 in a column called ‘hot data’. In one form or another that run until 2011 when I retired from the TES. For a period it then ran in the on-line Education Journal, and many those columns can still be accessed on Amazon in the e-book ‘Please Miss- can pigs fly?’ For various reasons I eventually became attracted to the greater freedom that a blog can provide where editorial decisions and what to write are entirely within the compass of the author: hence this blog.

Do I have a favourite post? I am not sure that I do. As I only write what I want to, in one sense every post is a favourite. Certainly the post of early August 2013 on School Direct and teacher training recruitment generated the most consequences at the time. One of the most distressing to have to write was my tribute to Andrew Bridgwater after his untimely death; liberalism and special education lost a great friend that day. My submission to the Carter Review has been one of the most viewed of recent posts.

Most posts aim for around the 500 word mark, but as usual this one is slightly over-length as I am not good with the red pen. So, let me close by once again thanking everyone for reading and for the many comments I have received. The next challenges, 50,000 views and 500 posts.

All or nothing

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According to the press this morning David Cameron is set to announce the creation of a squad of high-quality teachers, to be employed centrally that will be sent out to assist poorly performing schools. The National Teaching Service (NTS) will be made up of up to 1,500 ‘super teachers funded by central government, and will be deployed to so-called failing schools.

If true, this development poses a number of issues for trainee teachers, schools, and indeed parents. Historically, apart for the ill-fated and short-lived Fast Track Scheme introduced by Labour over a decade ago to recruit and place the best new teachers, recruitment has been a discussion between an individual teacher and a school or in a few cases a group of schools. Even in the latter case, except in the primary sector, posts advertised have usually been associated with working in a particular school. In the primary sector, pooling arrangements for the first stage of recruitment were popular when local authorities managed schools even though they sometimes might have discriminated against ‘returners’ in favour of newly qualified teachers.

Any announcement of an NTS has implications for current trainees if it is to start in 2015. More likely it will not commence before September 2016. However, savvy trainees on PGCE or School Direct courses, especially in shortage subjects, may decide to avoid working in schools likely to be targeted by NTS flying squads on the basis that they might need to be replaced by the in-coming teachers. Teachers already working in these schools now have an extra incentive to find another job just in case the alternative is redundancy or dismissal on other grounds when the NTS arrive.

Announcing the NTS in October is probably the most stupid move in the teacher labour market made by a government since the 1996 announcement of changes to the pension scheme drove an unprecedented number of head teachers to quit by the following summer. Even though 1,500 NTS staff, and it is not clear whether they will encompass all grades of teacher or just say, middle leaders, need to be recruited it is not clear how many schools will be targetted. That issue alone will be interesting as presumably there will need to be incentives to secure the NTS staff away from their present posts.

Now, as someone who working for seven years in a school likely these days to be a top target for an NTS squad to replace existing staff, I fully accept that there are under-performing schools. I also accept that some staff drafted in may make a difference. The famous arrival of Mike Tomlinson at The Ridings School in Yorkshire in the late 1990s had an immediate impact but longer-term change proved more elusive.

At the heart of this announcement is the issue raised before in this blog of whether schooling has now been nationalised in England. The very term NTS suggests the answer, but in a typically British manner it may be being handled in a cack-handed manner. However, it probably explains Labour’s announcement of the idea of a teacher’s oath yesterday. As usual, I am left wondering what is the position of my own Party, the Lib Dems on the idea of who is responsible for teachers and their employment

An oath for teachers?

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Labour’s suggestion of teachers taking an oath on entering profession is an interesting idea. One reason to embrace it is that it would mean the word teacher would became a reserved term that could only be used by those prepared to take the oath unlike at present when anyone can call themselves a teacher regardless of their qualification, or even their lack of them. However, taking an oath guarantees nothing as the history of medical and legal malpractice cases testifies. While it may be useful to help those that haven’t thought of the professionalism and associated values of being a teacher it can be ignored by anyone with predetermined intentions to misbehave. But, I cannot be too negative. I took an oath on becoming a magistrate and it was a solemn occasion.  Similarly, I have witnessed the oath taking of police officers at attestation ceremonies and explained to them why it was so important.

If there is to be an oath who is to administer it? Police, army, even medics all work for organisations with a national structure and with other professional bodies there are organisations, whether Inns of court, the Law Society or other professional bodies, but the General Teaching Council for England was abolished by this government in a short-sighted move allegedly linked to a supposed bonfire of Quangos. Without a professional body it seems unlikely that teachers would be prepared to swear an oath of professional virtue to the State, especially if they were working in the private sector.

The situation may well be different in Singapore where the oath-taking procedure was apparently spotted by Labour. Realistically, if it is about enhancing the status of teachers and making them more professional then returning power to the profession in return for enhanced status may not be enough. Professions don’t generally go on strike, so is Labour also signalling that teachers should sign away any rights to industrial action with no corresponding control over their earnings that would still be set either by the government of the management of individual schools?

I think most teachers already have a strong sense of public duty and a wish to serve the young people that they teach. After all, there may well be easier ways of earning a living for many graduates than the long hours and relentless term-time working life where the pace of teaching doesn’t differ from day to day as patterns of working do in most other professions.

On balance, I think the oath idea probably won’t fly unless Labour’s friends in the trade unions are prepared to endorse it. I am sure that they won’t do so without testing the strength of feeling among their members. Now a Queen’s Medal and long-service awards might be another matter. And while we are at it, perhaps the creation of some Regis Professors of Education might enhance the status of the profession in higher education.

How many rural primary schools are there in England?

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This is the sort of pub quiz question that can only be answered by those that follow the DfE website and the many detailed updates to our knowledge about the education system that appear from time to time. According to the DfE’s latest announcement, there are 4,673 primary schools that qualify for the designation ‘rural’ under the annual order published as a Statutory Instrument this year on the 29th September and that came into force on the 1st October. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rural-primary-schools-designation Unlike most SIs this one is signed not by a Minister but by a DfE official.

For those of you that thought London was an entirely urban area, there are six primary schools in London boroughs designated as ‘rural’ schools. One of these is the Forty Hill Church of England Primary School in the north of the Borough of Enfield. Located within the M25 it sits in an area of green belt adjacent to its parish church on a very restricted site just nine miles from the centre of London.  Originally built as an all-age elementary school in 1851, some 20 years before the advent of formal state education, it now has 238 primary age pupils wanting a church school education.

According to the DfE Forty Hill School is classified as  being located in a category defined as ‘Hamlet and Isolated Dwelling – less sparse’ as opposed to one of the other categories such as ‘Town and Village – less sparse’ and ‘Village – sparse’ as well as the really rural ‘Hamlet and Isolated Dwelling – sparse’.

Of course, compared with Kielder First School in Northumberland, Forty Hill might be considered quite an urban school. According to the DfE, Kielder has but 13 pupils aged between 5-9 with three teachers and two classes and a unit cost of over £14,000 per pupil. Earlier this year Ofsted reported that it was ‘outstanding’ having improved since its previous inspection. Schools like this one exist because, especially in winter, it would be challenging or even impossible to transport the pupils from the adjacent area to the next nearest school.

For many rural schools this isn’t the case, and from time to time local authorities have had various degrees of success in amalgamating rural schools into larger units. However, such is the love of all schools threatened with closure that apart from amalgamating separate infant and junior schools into a single  primary school there have been relatively few  large-scale schemes of amalgamation except where authorities have removed a three tier system and reverted to the ‘normal’ two-tier system with a transfer age at eleven.

Now that the smallest school can convert to an academy the geography of primary schools in rural England is likely to remain much as it currently is until a policy change forces a re-think. However, with ever younger children in schools, and a growing school population, this isn’t likely to be an issue high up anyone’s agenda for the next decade. As a result, perhaps the DfE can stop this annual exercise and save some more cash.

 

 

 

Food for thought

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Breakfast, lunch and dinner all now seem to be on the school menu. Following the Lib Dems support for universal free school meals for infant pupils, and a desire to extend the free meals to all in primary schools, some Labour activists are championing the importance of breakfast clubs. Not to left out of the act the Tory Secretary of State said at a fringe in Birmingham something to the effect that:

schools should provide three meals a day to children at school, “You can really expand a child’s horizons by the extra-curricular activities they can do, … and maybe some tea in the afternoon. (Daily Telegraph)

So, even for Tories the emphasis is no longer on the family that eats together but on the school as the place where communal eating is learnt and the importance of regular meals is instilled in future generations.

Whether the Tory idea is a realistic one, or just an attempt to get a toe-hold on the food agenda that ever since the Thatcher government decided the issue of children eating well wasn’t a responsibility of the State and closed many school kitchens in an extension of the policy about food and schools that started with the abolition of free milk by the iron lady in the early 1970s isn’t clear, but it wasn’t one that I could have seen Michael Gove ever announcing.

The new Tory family and teacher friendly education policy stance adopted in Birmingham is possibly an interesting move away from the policies of Michael Gove during his period as Education Secretary. This is also apparent in the current Secretary of State’s concerns over workload and teacher preparation policies. Presenting an olive branch, or possibly to protect herself from possible defectors to UKIP a holly or similar native UK species branch, is probably a good idea in the run up to the general election, although whether or not it will have any effect, only time will tell. The Surveys do show teachers’ work hard during term-time and that increasingly the holidays don’t match up as a form of flexi-time compensation as I have pointed out in the past.

I like the Secretary of State’s ideas for the use of mobile phones for parents to communicate with schools and can suggest some developers if anyone wants to contact me, especially as security will be a big issue. The ‘school app’ with all interactions on it might be a good step forward, but not if left to usual government procurement methods.  I suggest a cheap trial that can be then rolled out when successful. The number of families involved eventually should have nothing to do with the price of developing the app.

Whether the idea was to make the Secretary of State seem tech savvy compared with her predecessors announcements in that field I don’t know, but it might start an interesting debate among school leaders. It might also make for some interesting exchanges in classrooms between pupils and their teachers.

Funding of academies and free schools

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I was intending to keep the 200th post on this blog for a reflective piece looking back over the first 199 posts. As a result of a Statistical Release issued today by the DfE that blog can wait. The DfE published data about academies and free school and their expenditure during 2012-13 at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/360139/SFR24_2014_Main_Text.pdf

There is a major anomaly on the front page where some headline statistics are presented. Nowhere does it say that the figures used are derived only from those relating Single Academy Trust information and thus seemingly don’t include data from schools in Multi Academy Trusts. Yet that is the message in a footnote on the un-numbered table in the spreadsheet of detailed tables associated with the release where on the index page it says of the National Median data ‘National median income and expenditure for academies with certain characteristics’. If it is the case that the data only applies to schools in SATs then the headline page should be revised to make clear that the data does not cover all schools with the title academy or free school but only those not part of MATs as it indeed does on page 2: but who will read the small print?

I haven’t had time to work out whether or not the addition of MATs would alter the figures and I haven’t yet considered in detail whether the median figure is the best of the available measures of central tendency to use with this data. Representing the data in graph form using candlestick graphs that allowed the number and range of outliers – both low and high – might have provided a more interesting picture of the range of expenditure.

Comparing two years of data when the sector is growing probably isn’t helpful either as if the balance between schools in and around London and the rest of the country was changing that would skew the income side of the picture and might account for some or the entire decline in income between the two years.

One point that did stand out was the relatively high figures studio schools and University Technical Colleges spent in teaching staff costs. As these schools were mostly in their first year of existence, teaching costs in excess of £6,000 per pupil may be acceptable. Should they fail to recruit sufficient pupils in the future, and a previous post has expressed some anxiety about their numbers and attendance patterns, then whether this is money well spent may be a subject for discussion in the future. Certainly in comparison with the three City Technology Colleges their staffing costs look very high.

It is also interesting to note that although the median figure for primary academies expenditure in 2012-13 was above their income, presumably meaning that they had to draw on reserves, the secondary academies in the median group didn’t spend all their income and put away £48 per pupil into reserves. At this stage of their existence it is too early to tell whether that is both sufficient for depreciation and other unforeseen expenditure or too much. It would have been helpful to see this figure against the school reserves to identify what has happened since these schools changed status.

Finally, as academies and free schools use a different financial year to other state-funded schools it is difficult to make any comparisons between these and other schools.

Hawks, doves and the art of leadership

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Watching the TV programme ‘Educating the East End’ on the day that Ofsted published its well trailed views on discipline in schools was illuminating, not so much for what happened on camera as for what was happening around the framed shots. If you put together that evidence with other programmes such as ‘tough young teachers’ and both ‘Educating Essex’ and Educating Yorkshire’ a pattern begins to emerge of what it is like teaching in these schools, especially for some teachers.

Overall one has to say that edited highlights of hours of filming that are needed to fill a brief to entertain, inform and educate in that order may not be entirely reflective of the norms of a school. Nevertheless, the lack of graffiti, clean, mostly litter free corridors, and open spaces and classroom where displays can exist without being totally trashed suggest that there is an overall sense of order in these schools, with leaders having a clear sense of direction and teachers and pupils having an understanding what is expected of them. These are not ‘blackboard jungles’ in the fictional sense of the term or as depicted in the 1960s and 1970s by TV series and films such as ‘Please Sir’ and the St Trinians films. But, they are places with large numbers of adolescents starting the change from childhood to adulthood in a society where respect for authority is rarely a feature of everyday life outside of school.

Each lesson witnesses the battle of the soap opera that exists in many classrooms and this is evident in the TV programmes. The average pupil still too often tunes in at the start, tunes out once they know the plot of the lesson that continues to run in the background and only tunes back in at the end, especially if homework is being set. In the meantime whether they participate effectively or do their own thing depends upon how well the teacher handles the most disaffected elements in the class.

What I hope the Chief Inspector is saying is that time on task, and hence learning, is closely related to the classroom environment and that in turn is set by the level of control over the lesson that the teacher exercises. In a school, the tone is set from the top. This is especially important in those parts of the country where we now have large numbers of relatively inexperienced teachers. The number of such teachers will grow over the next few years as pupil numbers expand and assuming funding remains stable.

Creating learning environments for all pupils took me five years to achieve as an untrained teacher in the 1970s. These days we should expect better results from the preparation courses as we know so much more about learning and society than in the 1970s when teachers were coping with the new world of non-selective secondary schools. My field these days is not teacher preparation, so I don’t feel qualified to say how we should prepare our teachers or even really how we would run schools on a daily basis, but I suspect the moving line between authority and anarchy still exists in many schools. Creating learning for all while not stifling individualism is a tough ask and I respect those leaders that achieve it whether by being hawks or doves.

What’s a trainee teacher worth?

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Earlier today the DfE and NCTL announced the bursary arrangements for 2015/16 graduate entrants to teacher training. These arrangements apply to almost all graduate entry routes except Teach First. Interestingly, gone is the uplift in amounts for trainees working in schools with high percentages of free school meals that existed in previous years. On the other hand new subjects are now eligible for bursaries, including religious education. There is still, however, a pecking order with some subjects attracting higher amount than others regardless of where the trainee obtained their degrees. Physics, chemistry, maths and IT/computing graduates with doctorates or first class honours degrees will be paid £25,000, whereas geographers and design and technology trainees with the same level of degree will be paid only £12,000 despite probably being in scarcer supply than either chemists or mathematicians at the present time.

Even worse off will be RE graduates with a 2:2 degree as, despite the shortage of trainees, they won’t receive anything. The same goes for the many primary, history and English trainees with similar degrees. There are some shortage subjects, such as business studies, that once again seem to have been overlooked, whereas it is at least arguable whether there is a shortage of classics teachers in state-funded schools but they qualify under the languages heading. As a result such trainees will receive £15-£25,000 depending upon their degree class.

Once again there is no recognition for trainees on bursaries of the differential cost of living in and around London although those training in adjacent classrooms on the School Direct salaried route do receive such differentials to mark the fact that there are different salary bands for teachers.

One of the risks of this market-based approach, an approach not favoured by the army when deciding whether to pay gunners at Sandhurst more than future armoured regiment officers or those destined for the infantry, is that some candidates may hold off applying in the hope that the amounts paid in future years will be even better. However, hopefully, this is balanced by those for whom the cash makes a difference when deciding whether or not to train as a teacher.

Personally, I would favour paying the fees for all trainees with degrees as to expect those who take a subject degree and train as a primary teacher to pay up to £9,000 more in fees than those that opt to train as part of their first degree seems a bit unfair.

As the period between now and February is vital in setting the basis for the success of recruitment to training in 2015 it is to be hoped that the announcement about funding taken together with the recently announced recruitment campaign are successful in attracting more applicants of a suitable quality into teaching than in recent years since the prospect of a third year of under-recruitment at a time when pupil numbers are rising is not a prospect that anyone wants to contemplate.