Better Maths for the Millions: well that’s the aim

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Schools have four weeks to express an interest in becoming a Mathematics Hub. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/288817/DRAFT_Maths_hubs_guidance_doc_v10.pdf The aim of providing professional development through some 30 hubs that in the first instance will both host the visiting teachers from Shanghai and identify those teachers from schools across England that will be offered a visit to China’s booming port city is a laudable idea. However, 30 hubs for even 20,000 schools means that, on average, each hub will have more than 600 schools that could associate with it. Put it another way, if there are 4 hubs in each of London, the North West, South East and Yorkshire & the Humber Regions, and three in all other regions except the North East, where there might be just two, you get an idea of how thinly spread the resources will be.

The long list of tasks the Hubs are eventually going to have to manage includes supporting wider partnerships on:

  • leading on national innovation projects such as the Shanghai Teacher Exchange Programme

•     recruitment of maths specialists into teaching;

•     initial training of maths teachers and supporting existing teachers of other subjects wanting

to change to maths teaching;

•     co-ordinating and delivering a wide range of maths continuing professional development

(CPD) and school-to-school support;

•     ensuring maths leadership is developed, for example by coordinating programmes for aspiring        and new heads of maths departments;

•     helping maths enrichment programmes to reach a large number of pupils from primary school onwards.

Interestingly, the development of Subject Knowledge Courses for would-be mathematics teachers is not specifically mentioned in the list, but would no doubt be just as important as helping existing teachers of other subjects convert to become competent maths teachers.

On the basis that you have to invest to achieve progress, the Hubs will no doubt initially take some of the scare maths teachers away from classrooms and department leadership to run the programmes. I worry that the initiative is too secondary orientated when what may be required is a national scheme for upgrading the maths capability of primary school teachers. If they can gain confidence is delivering the subject, then a higher proportion of pupils will achieve the expected level at Key Stage 2, and maths teaching in secondary schools will be more interesting for more teachers. It is not enrichment after primary school that is needed as much as the ability of pupils to achieve their full potential before they move on to secondary schools.

I hope that while the DfE has opened the scheme to ‘expressions of interest’ there will be attempts to ensure national coverage rather than leaving schools in some parts of England devoid of any support. Market-based schemes may have their place, but ensuring national coverage must take precedence over other factors. I am also not sure whether a programme developing maths leader solely alongside other maths teachers is a good idea. Personally, I think groups of teachers from different subjects undertaking leadership development together is a better model, and helps those eventually going forward to senior leadership to start to understand whole school issues as well as those relating to their own subject. No doubt the National College has a view on middle leadership development but, despite having been taken into the DfE, they don’t seem to rate a mention in this document. Hopefully, that is only a temporary oversight in the rush to produce a programme to coincide with the Minister’s visit to Shanghai.

Free Schools now account for around 1% of all schools

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The DfE has just published updated lists of existing and proposed Free Schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/free-schools-successful-applications-and-open-schools-2014 There are 296 schools in the two lists. Of these, 112, or some 38%, are located within one of the London boroughs. Once the Home Counties regions of the East of England and the South East are added to the London figure the percentage increases to 62% of the national total. By contrast, there are just seven schools in the North East and 12 in the East Midlands. Birmingham, with 13 schools, is the local authority where the largest numbers of schools are located, although Enfield, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Tower Hamlets, three much smaller authorities than Birmingham: each have seven schools located or to be located with their borough.

The majority of the schools, some 232, are mainstream schools, but there are 49 either SEN or alternative provision schools, with 15 schools (sic) listed as 16-19 establishments – 7 of these are in London. Traditional primary (109) and secondary (93) schools dominate the age groupings. However, there are some 43 all-through schools, a number of which are in the special school sector. Personally, I am not yet a fan of such schools in the mainstream sectors where grouping all primary schools that feed a secondary school seems a more enlightened proposition than giving some pupils the opportunity to be part of the school for the whole of their careers while adding others later. Avoiding newcomers being seen as second class citizens seems like a wasteful and unnecessary use of resources. But, no doubt there is some research that shows such schools perform well for all pupils.

Free schools are still contentious with some groups, so it is interesting to see that 7 of the schools are ARK schools, already a large provider of academies in London, and 10 are under the Harris umbrella that has extended north of the river with its free schools, including into Tottenham, the most deprived part of Haringey. There are also three Oasis schools, and a number with E-Act in their name featured in the list.  The DfE don’t provide a faith analysis of the schools, but a number are clearly linked to faith groups of both the Christian denominations and other faiths.

This DfE report also doesn’t say anything about the size of the schools, both on opening and in terms of their future maximum numbers. There is no doubt the primary schools will help, especially in and around London, in providing places to cope with the boom in pupil numbers. The presence of some secondary schools in areas of falling rolls or adequate provisions seems rather more wasteful of scare resources. Once the Studio Schools and UTCs are added to this list, the shape of schooling will have changed more between 2010 and 2015 than at any time for a generation. Now might finally be the time to question the continued presence of selective secondary schools? How diverse a school system do we actually want and need? And is diversity and choice being put before the provision of a good school for all pupils?

Footnote

Since I wrote this piece last night Channel 4 News have carried a report of another school that has failed its Ofsted inspection. Unlike other free schools that have failed, where the promoters were new to education or offering a type of education not previously recognised within the state funded system, this is a school run by a group with extensive mainstream school experience, albeit overseas. Perhaps, this goes to show that running schools in England isn’t as easy as some might have thought and that some local authorities of all political persuasions should have been given more credit for their work.

Stick to the day job Vince

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Early in the 1990s I once spent three-days on a placement at what is now BMW’s Cowley works in Oxford, where the mini is produced. I was on a scheme was designed to help those of us in education, at all levels from the classroom to senior leaders in universities, understand more about how industry and commerce ticked. Indeed, there are still such schemes around today, most notably for school leaders.

It was, therefore interesting to read in today’s Independent newspaper that Business Secretary Vince Cable apparently had some unflattering remarks to say about secondary school teacher’s knowledge of life outside the schoolroom. During my Cowley visit what struck me forcibly was the lack of reciprocal knowledge on the part of those working in industry about what was happening in schools. For instance, many businesses have been caught out in recent years by the growth in the numbers of young people attending university, and have in some cases struggled to make better use of the extra knowledge and skills that graduates bring to the workplace compared with those that leave school after ‘A’ levels.

Still, where I do agree with the Business Secretary is that much more needs to be achieved on the careers education front. I suggested in a recent post that the large recruitment agencies might help with this task. I confess to chairing one of the education panels for the Recruitment Employers Confederation, so I am not a totally unbiased or objective observer. Nevertheless, far more than say the CBI or Institute of Directors, REC already has links with schools through the supply teacher market and could use its expertise in the wider employment scene to work with government on developing a new approach to careers education and work experience. The short section in ‘Tough Young Teachers’, shown recently on BBC3, was an interesting cameo of how a pupil benefitted from even an effectively developed placement in a high street opticians shop.

But, it is time to return to Mr Cable’s remarks. While it is true that the majority of graduates that apply for teaching are below 25 when they decide on a career in the classroom, there are a sizeable minority of career changes that have in most cases had experience of the workplace.

In 2012, the latest year data are available for, of the 55,000 or so graduate would-be teachers, and virtually all would-be secondary school teachers, nearly 20,000 were over the age of 25 when they applied for teacher training according to the figures produced by the GTTR arm of UCAS. In addition, there were around 5,000 direct entrants to teaching that year through the Graduate Training Programme that largely will have come from the wider workforce. This is before you consider any other teachers whose partners work outside education and can discuss the differences between the work of commerce and that of education over the dinner table.

Characterising teachers as ignorant of the world of commerce may have raised a laugh with Mr Cable’s audience, but it doesn’t really convey the whole picture of how schools and business interact. There is room for improvement, but it certainly won’t come about by creating mutual distrust and antipathy.

Be a teacher: earn £12-15 per hour?

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After an absence of a number of years, the DfE has once again conducted a diary survey of the workload of around 1,000 teachers. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285941/DFE-RR316.pdf  That’s about 0.2% of the workforce. On average, all the school teachers surveyed reported working over 50 hours during the survey week, primary classroom teachers averaged 59.3 hours per week, slightly longer than the 55.7 hours averaged by secondary classroom teachers, and the 55.2 hours worked by classroom teachers in academies: both primary and secondary school head teachers reporting working more than 60 hours per week.  Classroom teachers in most school types reported teaching 19 to 20 hours a week. The exception to this was teachers in special schools who reported teaching 16.8 hours.

Teachers of all types worked around 12 hours a week outside what might be regarded as their normal working week. Head teachers spent around half of this time on school and staff management while classroom teachers spent at least three quarters of it on planning, preparation and assessment (PPA). Time spent on PPA was as common for classroom teachers in primary, secondary and academy schools as teaching at around a third of their total workload. The fact that despite the introduction of non-contact time in the primary sector some years ago teachers still report having to send time outside of the normal working week on these activities shows how intense the job has become.

However, as the dairy recorded a term-time week it would be different in weeks outside of the 190 days when pupils are present. As I have said in the past, teachers are required to work a form of employer directed flexi-time, with part of their so-called long holidays really being compensation for the extra hours worked during term time.

Teachers and heads generally thought the amount of time they spent on unnecessary and unnecessarily bureaucratic tasks had increased over the last 12 months, with 35.8% of head teachers and 44.6% of deputy and classroom teachers surveyed expressing this opinion.

The fact that preparation for Ofsted took time out of the working week for some teachers should be no surprise to anyone. The other big issue was over the data collection necessary for individual pupil tracking. There is clearly some way to go in some schools where the survey group worked to stop this becoming a tiresome burden for classroom teachers. Several years ago I advocated a new grade of data technician for schools to both collect and analyse data on behalf of classroom teachers. Despite handing budgets to schools, there still seems to be a way to go before this type of assistance permeates the sector as a whole.

If a classroom teacher works 60 hours a week for the 40 weeks of term-time then they will clock up 2,400 hours a year before counting any time spent on school work during the rest of the year, such as secondary teachers being present when examination results are handed over, or the five INSET days that are compulsory for all teachers. By contrast, an admin assistant working for 46 weeks a year at 40 hours per week will only work 1,840 hours a year. This means that if a teacher does work 2,500 hours per year, and earns £30,000, then their hourly rate is just £12. Even at 2,000 hours the rate is just £15 per hour.

Expect some hard pay bargaining in schools where this is the case now that national scales have been abolished. Many teachers might well be better off doing regular supply work rather than working at the bottom of the current scale. Indeed, it might be time to reassess the way that teachers’ contracts are established.

Lotteries for teachers not pupils

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This blog has already registered the fact that tomorrow, the 3rd of March, is ‘national admissions day’ when parents in England will hear about whether their offspring have been offered a place at the secondary school of their choice. As has already been revealed by the media, more schools are using lotteries to select pupils where there is over-subscription, often as part of a ‘banding’ system, eroding the number of schools merely using distance as a criteria.

Now the whole issue of lotteries for school places was comprehensively discussed by Conall Boyle in his book ‘Lotteries for Education’, published in 2010 by Imprint Academic. In those days, most academies were parts of chains, and local authorities still had responsibility for admissions to the majority of other schools, so the issues raised in my earlier post about unsuccessful lottery entrants were largely dealt with in theory by Boyle.

One notion that he does discuss in the book is whether it might be cheaper and more efficient to assign teachers to schools by lottery, and place pupils at their local schools. He credits The Guardian article of the 1st April 1998, by Martin Wainwright, who picked up on Boyle’s mention of the idea by a blogger – an early exponent of the art – who had suggested it as a way of saving parents having to shop-around.

Now, where teachers are a scare resource, it might be an interesting way of ensuring some schools don’t hoard say Physics or Mathematics teachers in order to ensure good results throughout their schools. It might also sort out any price competition for these scare resources resulting from the abolition of national pay scales, and the introduction of a market derived free-for-all in wages.

To achieve this end would require a radical ditching of the philosophy of parental choice, and the unfettered use of markets, and the introduction of the notion of a national teaching stock. Is this something already being considered by parts of the DfE since it is not a million miles away from David Laws idea of national leaders of education assignable to particular schools, although he is looking to place these leaders in failing schools rather than randomly.

Taking the concept further might be too radical a step at present, but there does need to be a discussion about the national requirement for higher quality education, and the current use of the market to allocate teaching resources, especially if the winners are teachers able to enhance their earnings because of their scarcity even though they were content to enter teaching and work for a national wage. Allocating teachers by lottery would also be against the philosophy behind the School Direct training route, where schools are encouraged to train and recruit staff. School Direct doesn’t overcome the issue of the allocation of new teachers unless all schools are involved. Even then it may just move the problem to the selection stage from the current end of training job market.

If the emphasis is switching from allowing parents to choose schools to a desire either to create a fairer system or better still to raise the standard of schooling across the country, there is certainly a need to discuss how teachers are distributed through the system. Might a lottery be the answer?

Schools still hoarding cash

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Figures released by the DfE yesterday at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/264737/SR54-2013Text.pdf suggest that the dwindling band of maintained schools are still not spending all their revenue income. With the revision of the national funding formula yet to see the light of day, these figures might suggest that the current method of funding schools isn’t achieving its key aim of improving teaching and learning as much as possible.

According to the DfE, in 2012-13, the total revenue balance across all Local Authority maintained schools was £2.2 billion, a decrease of £0.1 billion (5.0%) over the 2011-12 revenue balance figure of £2.3 billion. This equates to an average surplus in each maintained school of just over £113,000. However, according to the DfE the total revenue balance of £2.2 billion is 7.5% of the total revenue income across all LA maintained schools. Because of the schools becoming academies that have dropped out of the tables, this is an increase of 0.4 percentage points in revenue balances compared with the 2011-12percentage of 7.1%. So, not only are many maintained schools hording even more cash than last year, but roughly one pound in every £14 the average school receives isn’t spent in the year it is received.

With almost totally devolved budgets, it is legitimate for schools to maintain balances, and the DfE looks at 5% for secondary schools and 8% for other schools as being a reasonable level. There were apparently 464 schools that exceeded this level of reserves. Interestingly, 73 of these schools were in London. Together the London schools were holding in excess of £12 million pounds in reserves above the recommended limit. £2 million of that was apparently held by just four schools in Tower Hamlets: an excess of more than half a million pounds at each school.

By contrast, the average excess reserves in Newham, the next door borough, amounted to just £19,000. Because academies have a different financial year to maintained schools they are excluded from the figures, so comparisons between authorities may not always be helpful, but they do raise questions about what is happening to money lying idle for several years. One Tower Hamlets schools has apparently had over £1 million in uncommitted balances for the past five years since the 2008/09 financial year according to the DfE figures, and appears in the latest table with an uncommitted revenue balance of nearly £1.5 million.

Of course, there are also schools with deficit budgets, but the number has been reducing. According to the DfE, there were 1,111 maintained schools with a revenue balance deficit compared to more than 18,000 schools with a surplus. The total deficit across all LA maintained schools that had a deficit was £81.2 million, a decrease of £28.7 million (26.1%) over the 2011-12 total revenue balance deficit figure of £109.9 million. This equates to an average deficit in each school with a deficit of just over £73,000. The average figure for balances among primary schools in surplus was £93,000 and for secondary schools in surplus it was £405,000.

Last year, I suggested that some of the reserves should be used to create work experience for unemployed young people. In some of the London boroughs with high youth unemployment that might remain a good idea.

Good, but with some worrying features

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The February data relating to applications for teaching preparation courses looks, on the surface, like good news for the government. Applications rose between January and February, from just over 81,000 to more than 102,000; an increase of about 20%. Not bad in a month. There was a similar percentage increase in the number of applicants, from just less than 30,000 to 36,600, suggesting that many applicants used all three of their possible choices.

Across the UK, acceptances increased from over 7,000 to more than 17,000, although the bulk of these are conditional offers – presumably awaiting the outcome of the skills tests. More worrying is the 12% of applications withdrawn although some may affect only one application since the number of applicants withdrawing from the scheme is only 390, or barely 1%. More worrying might be the 5,100 applicants where no offer was made. This is 14% of applicants. A further 25% of applicants are waiting an offer from a provider, and there are more than 5,000 interviews pending.

Applications are broadly in line with the share of places on the different routes, with HE receiving 58%, down from a 60% share in January, and School Direct 37% up from 36%. SCITT have attracted 5% of applications. (HE has 56% of places, SCITTs 7%, and School Direct 37%). So, what matters is that acceptances in future are in line with applications on all three routes. As there is considerable over-allocation of places in many secondary subjects, there is still the possibility of over-recruitment in some popular subjects, or subjects where the bursary proves especially popular. However, it is too early to tell exactly what is going on in relation to acceptances by subject, not least because the figures are not presented in a very helpful manner.

As might be expected at this time of year, applications grew at a faster rate from the older age groups of career switchers, with the 29+ groups showing the largest percentage increases in applicants, and the under-21s the smallest percentage increase; presumably as they focused on the final examinations rather than worried about course applications.

By next month there should be a much clearer picture about acceptances, since many of the 25,000 or so applicants to courses in England noted in January should have been processed by then. At that point, and certainly by the May 1st data, it should be possible to see what is happening across the different subjects sufficiently clearly to make some predictions. Hopefully, it will be good news for the government, and eventually for schools looking to employ these would-be teachers in September 2015.

Working for success: planning for failure

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The news that an academy chain has lost responsibility for 10 schools raises a number of interesting questions. The most obvious is who has the responsibility to find these children an appropriate education? In the present instance, the DfE seems to be doing that by looking for a replacement sponsor or sponsors. How long should they be allowed if it is a question of teaching and learning standards?

No doubt the Laws’ Leaders, as David Laws’ new national leaders are likely to be dubbed, could be sent in to lead individual schools during any interim while new sponsors are brought on board, but what about the ownership of the assets? The situation becomes even more interesting if it were, say, a church group of academies. Would the solution be to change diocese, but who would own the assets if the schools had previously been voluntary aided? Suppose the Trustees decided that they didn’t want anyone else running the school, and just effectively closed it down. Who finds the pupils new schools? Generally, when a private school goes bust, which is often at short notice, and frequently just before a term starts or ends, and the local authority steps in to help find places for the pupils that need them. However, where it is no longer the admissions authority for most schools in a locality, how will it do this if the other academies refuse to cooperate because the in-coming pupils might affect their examination results or their balanced admissions policy?

As with the problem highlighted in my previous post, what happens if any closure affects the transport budget for the local authority? Will the DfE pick up the extra costs or establish some form of insurance scheme?

Presumably, when a new sponsor takes over the running of part of an existing chain there will have to be a financial reckoning as well, especially as academy budgets run to a different cycle than that of local authorities and central government. Will any existing service contracts with the academy chain be automatically continued or regarded as up for renewal as a result of the loss of responsibility?

Hopefully, these issues will be rare occurrences, but new developments in any field often come with associated failures, so they must not have been unexpected. When a whole local authority is judged unacceptable, it is clear what happens, as it is when a single school fails. However, the failure of a group or part of a group of schools brings these fresh challenges, especially, potentially, in relation to the assets.

All these questions highlight the desperate need for an effective middle tier for state education in England operating within an overall framework that clearly delineates areas of responsibility. The relative functions of the national government at Westminster, local authorities, the churches and other faith groups, and the non-aligned academy chains, plus the large number of independent sponsor academies, all need to be able to operate within some form of secure and understandable framework. At present, especially for the primary sector, the fastest growing area for academy development at present, the rules are still unclear. Approaching four years since the 2010 Academy Act became law this is not an acceptable position of schooling across England to find itself in.

Playing the school place lottery

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In the 1970s, when I started teaching, the issue of banding was seen as contentious by many educationalists as it felt like social engineering. Nowadays, some academies, and other schools, have not only adopted the practice but have also, in some cases, gone further and turned admission into a straightforward lottery. In a few cases they have combined the two approaches and created lotteries for each group. For parents in those rural areas where there is in reality only one school their children can attend this must seem like some form of fantasy world.

When lotteries were first mooted local authorities still managed the admissions process for almost all schools. Now over half of secondary schools are their own admissions authorities. That probably doesn’t pose a problem at present as we are close to the bottom of the demographic cycle and pressure on secondary school places is not yet intense across mush of England. However, in five years time things will be different. Imagine a world where all secondary schools are their own admissions authorities, and use a banded lottery system. You are a parent of a child in the middle band – an average kind of Jo(e) – What happens if your first choice school is over-subscribed and you lose the lottery? Suppose the same is true of your second and third schools. No problem, the local authority must find you a school for Jo(e), and if it is more than the statutory walking distance they must pick up the travel bill as well under present arrangements.

So, the middle class parent that once might have bid up the price of houses in the catchment area of a local school they wanted their child to attend could now become a burden on the taxpayer as the taxi arrives every morning for the school-run to a distant school. Now that won’t happen in London because there is free travel across the Capital for secondary school pupils, so parents wouldn’t have to pay as they would elsewhere.

Indeed, the concern over the freedom schools have to impose financial burdens on local authorities through their admissions policies is no doubt behind the rapid move to a ‘nearest school’ transport policy by many local authorities. In Oxfordshire that has not gone down well with some parents whose school will be altered as a result of the new policy.

In the end the question for the Treasury may well be whether it is cheaper to let schools picks pupils on a basis or ‘fairness’ or for parents to exercise parental choice regardless of their child’s ability. What may not be acceptable will be each individual school creating a burden on local authorities through admissions policies that push up transport bills paid for from Council Tax just so that they can say they have a fair spread of pupils.

Shanghaied but not qualified: the fate of too many maths teachers?

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In their recent evidence to the School Teachers’ Review body (STRB) the government admitted that it would need an extra 5,000 or so qualified mathematics teachers for every child in a secondary school to be taught be a ‘specialist’ mathematics teacher as defined by the Department for Education. It will, therefore, be interesting to see whether the ministerial led delegation going to Shanghai to study maths teaching asks the question how many of the teachers in Shanghai are fully qualified?

With nearly one in six teachers not fully qualified in England, what gain in the OECD’s PISA tests could be achieved just by improving the quality of the teaching even to the standard where the percentage of pupils achieving the expected progress between Key Stages 2 and 4 reached the same level as for English as a subject. Of course, if the government delegation comes back clambering for more hours of mathematics teaching to match the 138 hours of teaching common across much of South East Asia, then each class will need an extra 20-22 hours of teaching per week; and that will need yet more mathematics teachers. Add in an increase required for post-16 maths teaching if all students had to study maths to eighteen and the number of extra teachers required rises still further.

On the back of this demand, the 30 schools funded to act as mathematics hubs looks like small beer given the size of the problem. The ratio is something like 100 secondary schools and 600 primary schools per hub. At that rate any individual teacher might have as much chance of attending a hub as a flood victim had of seeing the army arriving bearing a supply of sandbags. In the 1970s, almost all of the 150 or so local authorities had a dedicated professional development centre with trained maths staff, including advisers and advisory teachers. The dismantling of this infrastructure by successive governments no doubt ensured the quality of maths teaching would suffer, as it probably did in other subjects as well. If not, why are the hubs being established?

If the delegation returns from Shanghai with the message that improving maths teaching is more important that establishing free schools and wasting money on brokers trying to persuade primary schools to become an academy it will have been taxpayers money well spent.

Tackling the primary sector teaching of maths to children of all abilities is an even more challenging task than dealing with the teaching of maths in secondary schools, and I doubt whether the hub secondary schools will have the necessary expertise to tackle the challenge. However, the teaching of maths in the primary sector is part of a much larger issue in relation to how teachers for that sector are prepared.

Overall, it would help parents to know who was teaching their offspring if Qualified Teacher Status was not a universal qualification, but was limited to those subjects and phases where a teacher had been appropriately prepared. But, since the Secretary of State doesn’t believe preparation is necessary for teaching there is little chance of that happening this side of the general election.