Christmas presents

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Last Friday afternoon the DfE published their evidence to the Teachers’ Pay Review Body: not many noticed. The Sunday Times published something, and indeed rang me last Friday morning to ask about numbers of unqualified teachers. Here’s what I told them:

An unqualified teacher is either a trainee working towards QTS; an overseas trained teacher who has not exceeded the four years they are allowed to teach without having QTS; or an instructor who has a particular skill who can be employed for so long as a qualified teacher is not available.  

As a result it may be that the increased number of School Direct trainees that started in September 2013 are being counted in the totals for the first time. However, as reports from ASCL of staffing pressures do seem to be emerging that may also contribute to the increase. The continued switch of schools from LA to converter academy makes year on year comparisons between types of school challenging. 

2012 Workforce Tables had following for unqualified teachers:
2010   2011   2012
LA Primary                                   4,100 4,200 3,700
Pri Academies                                          100    500
LA secondary                             8,100 5,400  3,400
Academies                                           3,800  4,700
Total non-academies            11,600 10,400 10,600
Academies                                2,200  3,900  5,300
Total publicly
funded education                 17,800 15,800 14,800

Also

Of the 2453 academies in the 2012 Workforce Census 

915 employed 100% QTS teachers

65 data NA

6 suppressed data – too small to disclose

1467 or 59% at least 1 unqualified teacher

Of those with highest %s 2 were special schools, and 1 a post-16 campus. Only 6 schools with below 50% qualified teachers

On free schools

Of the 88 in the census, 37 employed 100% QTS teachers; 12 data suppressed; and 8 NA.

So 31 of the 88 known to employ unqualified teachers. That’s 35%.

So, if the 2013 Workforce Survey conducted in November is showing something different it may well is down to School Direct. If that is the case, then it is time for a new category of ‘trainee teacher’ to distinguish trainees from those employed because a qualified teacher either isn’t wanted or cannot be found. Indeed, there might be two categories, one for intentional use of unqualified staff and the other due to absence of a qualified teacher. The term ‘teacher’ might even become a reserved occupational term reserved for those with QTS.

If the DfE’s evidence to the STRB passed almost without notice, then the Labour Party’s Christmas Eve press release warning of a shortage in trainee teachers under this government seems to have received even less recognition so far despite the DfE going to the trouble of issuing a rebuttal. You can read Labour’s research at http://www.labour.org.uk/news Regular readers of this blog will recognise most of the figures, although the number of trainees recruited for 2013/14 is less than in the DfE’s November census for some unexplained reason.

Now normally I wouldn’t quote from a Labour Press release, but as its Christmas, and what it says chimes with what I have been saying both here and with Chris Waterman elsewhere, I am happy to provide the link. I also notice that the release doesn’t offer any policy alternative to the problem: so no responsible alternative government here then.

Trainee teacher recruitment is likely to be a key issue in 2014 with both Michael Wilshaw and the head of NCTL, Mr Taylor, likely to be making speeches in January about teacher training. Both are Gove’s men, so expect School Direct to feature more positively than higher education. But look for the balance of comments between primary and secondary for, in my judgement, it is the former that needs more attention than the latter in terms of reviewing how we prepare teachers for the classroom.

I hope readers enjoy Christmas and the festivities of this time of year through to the start of 2014 and the first anniversary of this blog.

More financial pressures for DfE

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In the week that the Minister of State at the DfE announced the final figures for the Pupil Premium in 2013-14, with a £53 Christmas bonus for primary school pupils receiving the cash this year, and an increase to £1,300 for primary age pupils in 2014-15, the government also announced the latest thinking on school rolls until the early 2020s.

At the present time, there is still no end in sight to the growth in the primary school population that will increase from a low point in 2009 of 3.9 million pupils to a predicted 4.8 million by 2022. That is a rise of nearly 850,000 pupils, or an increase in the primary school population of more than a fifth in thirteen years. The secondary school population in years 7-11 is still on schedule to bottom out in 2015, at just over 2.7 million pupils, before recovering to just over 3.0 million by 2022, with more increases to come in the rest of that decade.

An extra million or so pupils by 2022 will place considerable strain on education finances that currently cost the nation £27 billion just for the remaining local authority maintained schools, with the costs of academies in addition. (Academies have a different financial year to local authority schools thus making comparisons almost impossible.) In 2012-13 the average cost of a primary school pupil in a maintained school was £4,193, up from £4,099 the previous year. On that basis, the additional 600,000 pupils expected in the primary sector by 2022 will cost £2.5 billion by 2022, even without the compounding effects of inflation during the intervening years. It is difficult to see how the government will be able to protect school budgets throughout the whole of that period since an economic recovery rarely lasts for a decade, and a more likely scenario is that the economy will have traversed through another whole economic cycle during that period. Hopefully, the downturn will not be of the same magnitude as was inflicted on the economy during the Labour government under Gordon Brown’s stewardship.

With around half of primary school expenditure going on teaching staff, and recruitment pressures already emerging, according to the teacher associations, sorting out the wages bill may become even more important in the future if expenditure is not to spiral out of control. However, after so many years of pay restraint that may be easier said than done. The imposition of any national funding formula for schools in 2015 that doesn’t take account of differing labour market pressures is probably doomed to failure, with some potentially dramatic repercussions if the government miscalculates. It will not be enough to say that the decision can be left to schools, as they are too diverse a group to be able to manage any substantial pressures on what amounts to half their budgets.

Mr Gove has not shown himself very good with numbers, but he will surely not want his legacy to be a school system not prepared for the financial challenges that lie ahead.

Should the State fund more schools?

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Last week wasn’t a very good one for Free Schools that are effectively independent schools funded from general taxation. Firstly, there was the closure of the Discovery School in Crawley after an Osfted Inspection, then there was the National Audit Office Report that gave the whole Free School project something of a mixed blessing and led me to ask why, when governments local and national are busy cutting services because of a lack of funding, some Free Schools have been allowed to open in areas where there is no shortage of places for pupils at present. Finally, in a largely un-noticed Table in the Statistical Bulletin on Phonics testing published last week by the DfE it appeared that the 423 pupils tested in the 15 Free Schools did less well than pupils in any other type of school except for pupils in sponsored mainstream academies. The latter are probably in many cases schools in special measures that have been forced to become an academy with a sponsor. Interestingly, there was no difference in outcomes between pupils educated in infant and primary schools, with in both types of school 85% of pupils meeting the standard by the end of Year 2 compared with 82% in the Free Schools.

The Free School movement is entirely the opposite of the Gladstonian approach to State Education espoused by the Liberals in the Nineteenth Century. To Gladstone, the State was the default position and as a result if you wanted a different type of education, you had to pay for it. The only exception was that the revenue costs of existing schools that joined the state system were paid, but apart from on religious matters they then followed what the state demanded. To modern day Conservatives, including the Centre for Market Reform of Education and the Adam Smith Institute that jointly published a paper last week entitled School Vouchers: for greater equality and quality in English education it appears that the State should pay for any type of education parents want. As I have mentioned in a previous post, this is economic madness when the State is trying to cut back on expenditure. Those with even a limited knowledge of the history of education only have to consider the financial consequences if those former Direct Grant schools that left the state system in the 1970s over comprehensive schooling all applied to return to the state sector and ceased being private fee-paying schools.

There is a real debate to be had here about what the State should provide by way of education, and whether it should be encouraging more parents to move away from a private sector that is also busy becoming a significant export industry in its own right. If technology is about to play an important part in re-defining schooling, as some now claim, it may be worth considering both the purpose of schooling, and the role that the modern state should play in delivering a service. After nearly 150 years of one model, it might be time for a change. Whether that reform means extending the offer of free schooling to more pupils or restricting it to only those that cannot pay is an interesting issue we might need to debate as a society.

Another nail in the coffin

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The first Friday in December is a strange time to advertise eight top jobs in education. At this time of year either the employer is in a tearing hurry to make the appointments or the likely candidates have already been handpicked and by advertising when few candidates are job hunting the field can be appropriately small. I assume the DfE’s adverts for eight School Commissioners, each responsible for a region of the country, falls into the former category of advert.

The creation of these School Commissioner posts, and that of the overall national school commissioner, is the next step on the road to the full ‘nationalisation’ of the school system in England. Although these Commissioners are initially only to have oversight of academies and free schools, and presumably UTCS and Studio Schools as forms of academy, it would be an easy step for parliament to add maintained schools to their brief, thus finally depriving local authorities of any oversight of the school system after more than a century in some form of control.

I wrote earlier this year that I could understand such a system for the secondary school sector, but am apprehensive once central government control is extended to the primary sector. Most primary schools are essentially local in nature serving their local communities, and remote decision-making is not a good idea. The region that contains all the primary schools in Oxfordshire also stretches to include primary schools in Hackney and Haringey. The needs of schools such as Bruce Grove Primary in Tottenham and Buckland Primary in Oxfordshire would test any organisation, as we have seen when Oxfordshire managed to apparently overlook the poor performance of Oxford City’s primary schools a few years ago.

What is more alarming is that there has been little or no discussion about the change in control of schools with those most involved. At present, Oxfordshire is deep into a consultation, its second this year, on changes to home to school transport policy. But, the DfE doesn’t seem to have consulted before creating these new posts. Indeed, it doesn’t even seem to have bothered to tell MPs at Westminster.

There is also an assumption in the adverts that heads, assisted by a board of six other heads elected by their peers, will create the best management tier. Now there are many other capable people in and around the education scene that might want to apply, and I hope that they won’t be excluded if these posts do go ahead. Fortunately, being past current pensionable age, I can rule out self-interest in making that comment.

I don’t know what the churches will make of this change since many faith schools are now academies. Will they want one of the six person board to be from a faith-based schools. And what of the governors: how will they relate to the activities? Governors are key players on School Forums – will the power of that body now be diminished in favour of dictats from the Commissioner’s Office. The Daily Mail reported today that Bob Russell, a Lib Dem MP, held a surgery that lasted twelve hours: a record. Add in responsibility for schools, and who knows how long it might last?

Winds of change in Manchester

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The last two days I have been in Manchester for the SSAT Annual Conference. This is a celebration of many of the good things in school leadership. The delegates here are anything but average in their approach to education. The conference started with Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves talking about their new book: Professional Capital. In this increasingly secular age, where many head teachers are probably agnostics, it was interesting to hear Andy Hargreaves take the example of the parable of the master that leaves his servants a sum of money to use wisely in his absence and finds that two have invested while the third had just kept the money safe by burying the cash in the ground. The message of invest for progress was an interesting one.

At the same conference I participated in a panel debate about preparing teachers, and led a workshop on professional development. The following ten phrases are the ones that provided me with a framework for discussion in the workshop.

Hire exceptional people: add value.

Seek heroines and heroes: not villains and scapegoats.

Dump portmanteau careers: welcome career changers

Look for leaders of every age.

Education is a business not a market.

Sell the brand

Engage the family

Cash balances don’t educate children.

Quality assurance before quality control.

know the facts: tell the truth.

I had a good example of the last one of these while I was composing this post. I received an email that a Minister had confirmed the over allocation of ITT places was 9% this year. The fact is true, but disguises the more important information that the over allocation was in the order of 18% for secondary places, but only 6% in the primary sector.

Many of the other statements can generate discussion and some have already been aired in posts on this site. Hopefully, the remained will feature at some time in the future.

Happy and successful: Education’s holy grail

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There has been a great deal written about the PISA results, so there is a temptation on my part not to add to the discussion. However, the dataset does represent one of the few international time series views of education performance around the world. The most elusive combination, and perhaps the holy grail of education systems, is performance and happiness. Children in Peru are happy, but don’t yet have a universally high quality education system. In some of the South East Asian entrants to PISA, performance seems to be bought at the price of a reduction in happiness among the young people, and higher levels of anxiety, especially among girls and the study of mathematics.

It is worth noting that the gap between boys and girls in narrower in England than in some other countries. Whether this is because our education system is finally starting to crack the problem of motivating boys or because girls don’t reach their full potential or a combination of both is not clear.

Using the quality assurance model, discussed in earlier posts, policymakers will want to drill down into the data to see where attention needs to be paid if performance is to improve. It seems sad that Blair’s children, those born in 1996/97 that sat the tests in 2012, still faced issues related to deprivation and achievement. The Pupil Premium will only help if head teachers and chairs of governing bodies recognise their responsibility to educate all children using all available resources open to them.

Personally, I would take a serious look at how primary teachers are trained in England. Can we really convert a lawyer in their 30s that hasn’t done any maths for 16 or more years into a fully qualified teacher in 39 weeks, and then offer them a job with a completely different school setup to where they trained, and minimal support during this first few years, and still expect all our pupils to achieve to the best of their abilities? Good teachers can achieve this, but it will be interesting to see as the economy improves, and graduate recruitment becomes more challenging, whether we can still attract these people into teaching.

Finally, as the Prime Minister makes his way home from China he might reflect on why, if our education system is only average, British schools have become a key export industry in their own right. How do we as a nation ensure that educating foreign children isn’t at the expense of not properly educating children in England? And how do we ensure that companies relocating to London don’t recruit too many of our maths and science graduates thus depriving schools of the necessary high quality teachers? Striking that balance won’t be easy, especially with a ban of recruiting teachers from overseas.

As a footnote, it was worth reflecting that across the OECD the class of 2012 seemed less disruptive than their predecessors. Recession’s silver lining for teachers?

Hard work ahead on teacher supply

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This has been a busy week for statistics about teacher preparation courses in England. Along with the full details of allocations made for 2014, published last Friday afternoon with little or no notice, always an interesting sign when that happens, there has been the census of recruitment to 2013 courses that was published on Tuesday.

The headlines from 2014 allocations are that higher education is still massively involved in teacher preparation, either directly or through validating the offerings of schools places offered via the School Direct scheme. However, many universities find themselves with allocations that are not economic in terms of viable courses, and there may still be other higher education institutions that follow Bath and the OU and either exit teacher preparation completely or withdraw from particular subjects. As the DfE has ensured some 30% more secondary places than might have been allocated if the Teacher Supply Model was followed more closely the risk has been transferred to students should all places be filled. In reality, there will be a tussle between the School Direct route and higher education in many subjects as to which places will be filled if the government cannot attract enough potential applications into teaching.

This is where the evidence from the 2013 ITT Census becomes important. Taken in association with the figures from the previous two years it shows some reduction in places filled. But, this was partly due to the 13% over-allocation the government has now owned up to. However, that does not explain either the massive decline in applications to train as design and technology teachers or the further declines in computer science and physics trainees accepted on to courses. The lack of awareness on the part of ministers as to how important the study of design and technology in schools is to the British economy is extremely worrying. Whether this lack of concern is part of the class system that says since you cannot study the subject at Oxford or Cambridge it cannot be important, or comes from a ministerial team with limited experience manufacturing industry I cannot tell. However, I might have expected the RSA along with other bodies with an interest in the future of design to be alarmed by the figures. The same is true for computing. I doubt whether the government will easily fulfil its desire to improve the skills in programming across the nation unless something is done to overcome a lack of trainees.

On May 8th I posted on this blog my concerns about recruitment for 2013, and that helped spark a debate about both where we train teachers and how many to train. My prediction for 2014 is that the challenge to recruitment may well be even tougher than last year, and the failure of the head of the NCTL to address the issue of teacher supply in his speech yesterday at the Academies Show, at least in the version I have seen, was a missed opportunity. In almost every subject the School Direct scheme under-performed higher education in recruitment, apparently leading one Vice Chancellor to reflect that universities rose to the government’s rescue. I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but how schools handle the significant increase in places allocated to them needs close monitoring. After all, in 2013, School Direct barely recruited more trainees than the former employment-based programmes achieved at the height of their popularity. That’s a long way off the total domination of teacher preparation ministers were championing only a year ago. This will be an interesting twelve months.

100 not out

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When I used to write a weekly column for the TES it would have taken me about two and a half years to write 100 columns as a result of holidays and other interruptions. By contrast, I only started this blog in January of 2013, and have reached a century of posts before the year is out, even though I originally aimed at only one post a week. I reckon that’s now about 50,000 words, give or take a few.

Although I started with the intention of just continuing to write about education data, the topics I have covered have broadened somewhat during the past 10 months to encompass other education issues. So, I thought that I would think about my personal top three posts in this the 100th post.

My personal top three posts are:

Sunshine, but political and personal sadness  – posted on 17th July

National Poetry Day  – posted on 3rd October

STEM subjects lead retreat from teaching – posted on 7th August

The first, and one of the most viewed, tells of my sorrow at the death of a leading Liberal Democrat education activist and the departure from the Party for other reasons of another former activist. The National Poetry Day poem is one that tried to link together school history and the First World War by starting with the notion of a school trip to the killing grounds of France. Unlike many poems it starts in the third person but switches to the first person as a pupil reflects on what might have happened had he been born a century earlier. The third post was the part of a sequence about initial teacher education that charted the debate about recruitment and the new routes for training teachers. This particular post found me in hot water with some people who didn’t agree with what I wrote.

So, where does the blog go from here? After a period when there has been little data to write about, suddenly it seems much more data is becoming available once again. That should provide me with plenty to write about over the next couple of months providing I can find the time to do so.

I would also like to thank the many readers from this country and around the world that have sent me comments about particular posts. To date, there have been nearly 6,000 views from people on all continents, although South America and Africa are less well presented than Europe and Asia. Perhaps that to be expected because of language and internet issues. As might be expected with a blog of this type, the bulk of the views have come from within the United Kingdom, and I am grateful to those who regularly re-blog my thoughts to others.

I now look forward to the next 100 posts or perhaps the milestone will be 250 rather than 200, with a target date of the end of 2014. But, as government over time have found, targets can be a double-edged sword: so we shall see.

 

Too late by five: the challenge facing educators

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Summer born pupils have a lower outcome score on the early learning goals according to new DfE statistics released last week. Boys also do less well than girls and pupils on free school meals less well than other pupils. Pupils from some ethnic groups performed less well than others and the largest attainment gaps was between pupils with special needs already identified at that age and those with no identified special needs. The evidence can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/eyfsp-attainment-by-pupil-characteristics-2013

Many years ago I worked with a sociologist who was of the view that boys did better at nursery school because they were more demanding. They may still be both more demanding and boisterous, but they don’t do better according to this data. According to the DfE, 49% of all pupils achieve at least the expected level in all early learning goals, but that masks the gap between girls achieving 58% as a group, and boys at 41%. The widest gaps between boys and girls are in writing and exploring and using media where the gap is 16% point. The narrowest gap is in technology, at just one percentage point in favour of girls. In reading the gap is 11 percentage points.

The data are interesting on the term in which a pupil was born.  Some 60% of autumn born children achieved at least the expected level in all early learning goals. This compared with just 38% of summer born children.   Resolving this issue is essential if summer born children are not to be left behind throughout their schooling. How it can be resolved is a matter of judgement. In the first instance it might be interesting to see the outcome of these goals if administered after the same degree of exposure to schooling by children born at different times of year. If a middle class child girl in the autumn significantly outperforms boys on free school meals born in the summer then there is clearly a quality assurance issue that cannot be resolved by holding back the children that perform better. This is especially an issue in school-based activities, since the difference in attainment in writing is a 22% gap, and in numbers the attainment gap between autumn and summer born children overall was 20%. If these figures become widely known they might have an impact on maternity services if families chose to have more autumn born babies and less summer born children.

Perhaps not surprisingly, children where English was not their first language performed less well than native speakers of English, with the widest attainment gap being in speaking at 19% points, and the narrowest in moving and handling where it was just 2%, perhaps because this requires little language knowledge, except presumably to understand the task.

There is much debate about testing children too early in life, but some form of teacher assessment as a baseline seems a sensible approach if we are ever to make progress at removing the inequalities between different groups in society. These figures show the depth of inequality that is already in place by the time children enter formal schooling.

Did the PM see this one coming?

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Ofsted put a secondary school in the Prime Minister’s constituency into special measures this week. This was the second secondary school in Oxfordshire to go into special measures in less than a year. Between the two schools they garnered a score of seven out of eight possible Grade 4s, with a clean sweep only being prevented by the Grade 2 in the pupil behaviour and safety category awarded to the latest school to enter special measures . The fact that the latest school to be put into special measures was graded ‘outstanding’ last time Ofsted came to call in 2010 must also be matter for some concern.

In the same week Tory MP Nick Boles said he wanted more freedom for head teachers to employ who they want, and not be told by the State who can teach, so presumably he would not agree with the ban imposed by Ofsted on both these schools employing newly qualified teachers. But that is a sideline to the big question of who is responsible for allowing these two schools in middle England to deteriorate to a point where they are judged inadequate? As I know from personal experience, the lack of a middle tier overseeing schools has proved a problem. Last year, a Report suggested the creation of Education Commissioners along the lines of the Police and Crime Commissioners elected last November across most of England. Rumours in the press now suggest that Michael Gove’s officials are considering going further with the idea of unelected officials to oversee the running, and presumably the improvement, of schools. Apparently, this would be a job for former head teachers. On the basis that each ‘controller’ was responsible for 100 schools, that might require around 200 new appointments, with no doubt nine seniors across the regions, and a chief ‘controller’ of schools.

For such a scheme to work, local authorities would need to lose their remaining powers over education, as it would be nonsensical to have two competing bodies trying to achieve the same end. As I have said in the past, such a move would effectively be the completion of the process of the nationalisation of schools started by Mrs Thatcher’s government with grant maintained schools that would bring schooling in line with health as a Westminster function. I don’t see why local councillors should have to wrestle with thorny issues such as paying for school transport and policing absence among pupils, as well as deciding how schools admit pupils, if they have no effective powers to manage the system to best effect when balancing education and costs.

Local authorities could, under such a national system, act more effectively in their role as parents, and challenge school ‘controllers when they felt that schools were not being successful. How ‘controllers’ would respond to challenges from either councils or parents if they were unelected appointees is an interesting question. But, it is not one that has ever seemed to bother the health service, or indeed further education in the twenty years since it was divested from local authority oversight. How much freedom would be allowed to the faith groups and others that now operate schools would be an interesting question that no doubt officials are considering at the present time.

For the Prime Minister, the issue is more parochial, will a school going into special measures cost more votes if it is a national school or will it be better if he can still blame the local authority for the shortcomings?