Let’s call it good news

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Let’s start the day with some good news. The first UCAS data on the 2018/19 round of applications for postgraduate teacher preparation courses was published this morning. The data shows that there are the same overall number of applicants as at the same point in November last year.  I think that is good news, although of course, this number really only measures the extent of pent up demand for teaching as a career among those waiting to apply when UCAS open the process. It won’t be until January or February that a fuller picture emerges about interest in teaching as a career.

Nevertheless, after around a quarter of a century of looking at the monthly data I think that there are some runes to be read in relation to these numbers. As ever, the overall total disguises a difference between the position for primary age courses and those for the different secondary subjects. As ever, at this level, there is only data on applications and not applicants, so it is necessary to assume most applicants make use of most or all of the full range of choices available to them. This might not be the case with early applicants aiming for specific institutions, but the data doesn’t allow for that degree of analysis.

Anyway, applications for primary courses are down, but applications for secondary courses are up. For primary there are just 9,180 applications compared with 9,750 at this point last year. For secondary, the numbers are 9,810 applications this year compared with 9,150 last year. From these small beginnings we can only hope for a better year ahead as more graduates see the advantages of teaching as a career in this uncertain world.

Interestingly, higher education has seen fewer applicants for primary compared with last November, but the School Direct (non Salaried route) numbers are very similar to last year. Applications for primary School Direct Salaried at 2,230 are actually around 300 higher than at this point last year.

In secondary, higher education courses have seen a small increase in applications: long gone are the days when this route would be replaced by school-based courses. However, although applications for SCITTs are flat, applications for both School Direct routes in the secondary sector are higher that at this point last year.

I am sure that some of the increases can be put down to an earlier start to the marketing campaign by the DfE. The power of such advertising should not be underestimated. Applications are up in almost all secondary subjects, with significant increases in STEM subjects; but it only the first month’s data. The only decline is in history, down from 800 to 740 applications. Maybe history graduates have started to wonder whether there is a glut of history teachers? Certainly, this blog has warned that compared with the number of vacancies for history and humanities teachers there may have been too many being trained over the past couple of years.

Hopefully, everyone, including government, recognises the importance of high education providers for a vibrant teacher preparation sector, alongside their partnership with schools. After all, it is the person undergoing the courses that matters the most.

 

Memories

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The Secretary of State for Education has been sharing the idea of bucket lists for primary school children with a national newspaper. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6417919/Childrens-bucket-list-inspired-new-Education-Secretary.html

I found this a particularly poignant story to read today, as I have just returned from the annual presentation of the Safe Drive: Stay Alive campaign to local sixth formers and college students. I didn’t see understanding why road safety or indeed any type of safety is important and how to deal with an emergency in the bucket list, but it should be there, even for primary age children.

The presentation I witnessed this morning, even viewing it for the fourth year in a row as a county councillor, moves me to tears every time that I attend the event. Pupils are taken through a video sequence of a group of young people going to a party in two cars. There is a crash and what happens next is narrated through simple and compelling testimony by emergency staff from the ambulance; fire and the police services, plus an A&E doctor, a parent and a survivor. Finally, there is a video of a prisoner serving a prison sentence for causing death by careless driving.

The images in the video are nowhere near as powerful as the spoken words. Here, a thousand words really does convey more than a single picture, however horrific the image. Sadly, three young people have died on the roads of Oxfordshire so far in 2018, not always their fault. Speed, drink, drugs, a lack of road knowledge and poor weather can affect the driving of anyone and lead to a fatality.

Most young people understand the message about not drinking and driving, but distracting the driver can be just as dangerous. Bucket lists are a great idea for selecting the positive things we want to do in life, but they must not crowd out the time to reflect upon the fact that as human being we live in social groups and have responsibilities to ourselves and others.

This is not the post to discuss whether there is appropriate funding for road and other safety learning for children and young people, but thank the emergency and other services that pick up the pieces when these event happen. The line of helmets on the table at the front of the hall today was a reminder of the teamwork involved and that message is powerfully reinforced by a crutch from a survivor paralysed for life and the flowers for the young person that didn’t come home and never will again.

So let’s encourage young people to climb trees, bake gingerbread and do the many other things Damian Hinds writes about, some of which I have never thought of doing, but let us also remember the purpose of life is not just self-fulfilment, important as that may be, but also because, as John Donne wrote, ‘no man is an island’, we need to learn to understand the consequences of our actions.

University is not for you?

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Why do more children that have been in care in London go on to higher education compared with those have been taken into care in the shire counties? Last week, the DfE published the latest data about such children and young people, for the year ending March 2018. I assume that this will cover higher education entry in the autumn of 2017. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2017-to-2018

Haringey, a London borough recorded 29 young people from care in higher education, whereas for Oxfordshire the number is shown as just three (Table LAT2a). So what might the reasons be? It could just simply be a lack of tracking of care leavers. Haringey had no information on 18 young people at that stage of their lives, whereas the number for Oxfordshire where their outcome was not known was 44, or a third of the group.

Another alternative is that children in Oxfordshire are taken into care at an older age than in Haringey and at a point where their education journey has already started on a downward spiral. The data doesn’t tell us this. No can it be determined the reasons why a child was taken into care.

In a small borough such as Haringey, a child may stay at the same school even if fostered within the borough. In a shire county there is a greater change of children having to change schools. I have written before of the challenges finding school places for children taken into care places on local authority officers. The DfE really ought to do something about putting a time limit in place for a school or college place to be made available after a child is taken into care or moves to a different placement.

Is there any difference in the innate ability levels between the children taken into care in the two authorities? I would be surprised if that was the case.

So, could we ask whether the funding of the Virtual School and indeed of all schools in the authority may partly account for the difference in outcomes in terms of those transferring into higher education? It is true that Oxfordshire is a member of the f40 Group of local authorities and feels especially keenly that its High Needs block is under-funded.  Haringey, is a London borough, usually seen as one of the group of Inner London boroughs, although it is a borough of extreme contrast from Highgate and Muswell Hill at one end to South Tottenham and Northumberland Park at the other.

Could funding account for at least a part of the difference in outcomes? Certainly London boroughs are more generally found at the end of the scale with high percentages of care leavers going on the higher education and several shire counties can be found at the other end of the list, so it is at least a plausible argument.

Raising education aspirations and attainments among those taken into care and building their self-confidence remains a key task for our Children’s Services around the country. After all, it was one reason why the two separate services were brought under one roof, so to speak, by the Labour government a decade or so ago.

Read and reflect

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The news this morning that Johnston Press might collapse, carried on the BBC web site, is a further sign of the changes being wrought by technological innovations on our world. Both the retailing and publishing industries have been badly affected by the arrival of the internet. Nobody cannot say that they didn’t see the changes coming, especially in publishing. I recall, about the time that Rupert Murdoch sold the Times educational supplements, seeking out a book he had mentioned in a speech to a gathering of the great and the good of the world’s press. In the book was a chart showing changes in the readership of newspapers by different age-groups after the arrival on the scene of first radio and then television. A third line suggested what the arrival of the internet might also do to print news readership.

Interestingly, a couple of years before that speech, in the autumn of 1997, just after I quit being the government’s Adviser on Teacher Supply, I had written a report for the management at the TES about the possible effects of the internet on teacher recruitment advertising in print publications. The reason I recall this was because it was the first commission that Education Data Surveys ever received. Even at that time, some school districts in the USA were already looking at on-line recruitment possibilities and the New Zealand Government was already featuring vacancies in the government’s Education Gazette, as it still does today.

So, twenty years ago, the writing was already on the wall for those that wanted to read about the future. The TES wisely set up an on-line site for teacher vacancies and ran it in parallel with the print edition of the paper for many years. When News International sold the supplements, it was probable that recruitment advertising could cover the debt created on the purchase of the company. The key question was, how long could print advertising service the debt?

So long as the government at Westminster stayed away from the market, the TES always had a sporting chance to create a strategy to move its monopoly position with schools for recruitment advertising into the new world by offering great service at a price that reflected the lower costs of the new technology. But, if it squandered that brand loyalty, then its future would always be more challenging.

TeachVac was established as a free vacancy service more than four years ago to show how a low cost service could embrace the best of the new technology. Far cheaper to operate than either the TES or the government’s latest foray into vacancy advertising for teaching posts, TeachVac still demonstrates how existing paid for teacher vacancy platforms need to keep ahead of the curve.

I have no doubt that over the next few months we could see something happen at the TES. After all, it was put up for sale by its US owners in June, see https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/06/21/interesting-news/ after the 2017 annual results recorded a loss for possibly the first time in its history. There has been no public news of a sale almost six months on. Could the TES possibly go the way of the Johnston Press? I have no way of knowing. However, over the next few weeks as the owners evaluate both the 2018 draft accounts, plus the management reports from this term’s business, they will presumably be looking to what the future will hold. The Johnston Press restructuring came only a month after an attempt to find a buyer.

Even in this modern world, I firmly believe that there is a space for a successful and profitable on-line news, features and recruitment vehicle for the education world, operating in the private sector. How that will emerge may be as interesting and as uncomfortable a journey as British politics is today.  Top class journalism, a top class understanding of the on-line environment and where it is heading, plus a real awareness of the education scene and the labour market that creates so much of the potential revenue even today, will, I believe, be absolute necessities for success.

What’s the collective noun for a group of schools?

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How many angels can you gather on the head of a pin? How many words can you inscribe on the back of a postage stamp? Along with raffle prizes about either how many sweets there are in the bottle or undergraduates in a phone box – note for younger readers, phone boxes were largely red sites for fixed landline telephones. Unlike police boxes they have yet to be immortalised in a hit TV series, but appear regularly in period dramas and old films. The K1 design is an ionic British deign classic of the 1930s.

Anyway, enough of nostalgia and factoids, the purpose of this introduction is to lead into a consideration of how many secondary schools will be located in my County Council division in North Oxford by September 2019? This week, the temporary home for Oxford’s new secondary free school, the Swan School, was announced as being on the south side of the Marston Ferry Road, just inside my division and almost next door to the excising Cherwell School. In 2020, or more likely 2021, the Swan School will move eastwards to it permanent home at the other end of the road, assuming pupil number post-Brexit require an extra school in Oxford.

However, the potential arrival of the Swan School to join the Cherwell School, both part of the River Learning Trust MAT, even on a temporary basis, set me thinking about how many schools with pupils of secondary school age were congregated in the small patch of north Oxford that I represent on the County Council? At the last count, the total for September 2019 will be eight schools, with an ninth just outside the boundary of the division.

In total, according to DfE figures and including the 120 new Swan School pupils, this will mean about 4,000 pupils are educated at schools containing secondary age pupils and located in my Division. Add in the school just outside the boundary and the total is heading towards the 4,500 figure.

Of course, since two are preparatory schools and others of the six private schools have pupils younger than eleven on roll, so the actual number of secondary age pupils is lower than the overall total for pupil numbers on roll. At least four of the schools also have boarders, so the number arriving and leaving each day is also somewhat less than the overall total. Still it does create pressure on the road system. This is despite fact that some of the private schools arrange for coaches to pick up some pupils and The Cherwell School is feted as having the largest proportion of pupils of any secondary school that cycle to school each day.

Does eight secondary schools, all located in one county division, count as some sort of record? Would it justify an entry into the record books? I would be interested to hear of anyone that has more secondary schools in one electoral division for a Councillor. Some MPs will have more such schools, but few many have such a diverse range.

Finally, there are also two state primary schools within my division, and also nurseries, childminders and other provision for the under-fives, plus a couple of Oxford Universities colleges. Perhaps it is a good thing that I have such an interest in education.

 

100: well almost

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Congratulations to the DfE for reaching the 100 vacancies point on their web site for the first time. Sadly, once vacancies past their closing date and non-teaching posts are removed, the total slips just below the three figure mark, but it will make that level soon, I am sure. This on a day when TeachVac, the only other free site to both schools and teachers, has more than 50,000 vacancies for 2018. To be fair to the DfE, their site still doesn’t cover the whole of the country and has only really been in operation of three months, including the quiet month of August, so it has a way to go to catch up TeachVac, but it is running at about 5% of TeachVac’s total at present.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk will also hit another key milestone and new record today. However, those details will keep for another post. Still, the team of six in Newport on the Isle of Wight have much to be proud of in developing TeachVac without a single penny of government money. This is compared with the hundreds of thousands of pounds the DfE has spent on their site.

Rather tongue in cheek, I suggested to officials that the DfE buy the vacancies from TeachVac for a fraction of the cost it would cost the same number of schools to input the vacancies to the DfE site, especially using the DfE’s outdated methodology. The DfE could then work with TeachVac to ensure applicants were attracted to the one site. This is because, without spending on making sure teachers, trainees and returners use any vacancy site, it is valueless. TeachVac also has the added benefit of attracting teachers working overseas to teaching posts in England through its TeachVac Global site for international schools. www.teachvacglobal.com

Unlike the DfE, TeachVac also uses it data to provide schools with information on the local vacancy market and has established a new vacancy index for both primary and secondary classroom teachers that will track how recruitment is changing in a world where funding is a concern to schools, but so is the wastage of teachers with several years of experience in the profession.  The next crisis may well be trying to find sufficient middle leaders with experience and appropriate professional development to take on this demanding role.

The free sites, such as TeachVac and the DfE work alongside paid for advertising sites for teaching posts. As more and more teachers use the free sites, it will be interesting to chart the fate of the ‘paid for’ recruitment advertising market. TeachVac offers a service to the independent sector, although the DfE site doesn’t. At present it seems that Sixth Form Colleges are excluded for the DfE site, presumably as they aren’t technically schools. TeachVac is happy to accommodate such institutions as it also provides special arrangements for MATs, diocese and local authorities to handle both individual schools recruitment needs as well as those for all schools in the group.

Ideally, a jointly managed and badged recruitment site supported by the government, teacher associations, employers and teacher educators would be the best solution, provided that is, it offered the lowest cost solution using the best of modern technology.

 

Isolation poor use of funding?

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Regular readers of this blog will notice there has been something of an absence of posts during the first part of this month. This means that there has been no discussion of interesting reports such as the one by the Institute of Fiscal studies into how the distribution of funding has changed over time. https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/BN242.pdf That report makes for an interesting read, especially when compared with books about education funding written forty years ago, such as ‘depriving the deprived’ in which Prof Tony Travers took part as one of the team investigating education spending over the course of a year in Newham, in the context of the then government financing of education.

However, the education story that most moved me to return to this blog was the one from the BBC about how children can spend long periods in isolation  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-46044394  There are a group of children that a decade ago would have been locked up under Labour’s draconian policy of the period. This was a policy whether it was articulated or not that took several thousand young people off the streets and out of education and into Young Offenders Institutions.

With fewer young people coming into the criminal justice system these days, despite the increase in knife crime, it stands to reason that schools will retain more of these young people and will find their behaviour challenging. Behaviour management has always been the top concern of many schools and the teachers that work within them, despite the shift in funding. As schools were forced to focus on outputs and achievements and less on their social responsibilities, it seems obvious that some schools will look to the greatest good for the greatest number and methods that will allow teachers to teach as many pupils as possible by removing disruptive influences on the learning process.

What was missing for the BBC article was whether isolation was really a room on the road to exclusion or whether pupils were either rehabilitated back into mainstream education or moved to more appropriate settings.  If I were a youngster forced to face the wall – albeit without the dunce’s cap of Victorian times – I might see rebelling further as a way to liberation and exclusion: anything might be better than such isolation.

With secondary schools often belonging to many different academy trusts or acting alone, it is difficult to see what body can manage the local solution to this problem. Next week at Oxfordshire’s Cabinet, I have a question – put before the BBC story – about how many pupils each secondary school has brought to the local Fair Access Panel over the past few years. This is to see how the balance of permanent exclusions is playing out across the county. I doubt that the measures announced recently by the DfE in relation to under-performing schools https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-sets-out-plans-to-support-underperforming-schools will help tackle this problem: what is needed is concerted local action managed by a body with the long-term interests of all young people in an area. Now, I wonder what they might be.

Cut tuition fees?

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Should University Tuition Fees either be reduced to £6,500 as some think a Tory working group might suggest or even abolished at Jeremy Corbyn hinted at during the last election campaign? Whatever happen, it is true that ever since Labour introduced fees in 1997 they have been a source of debate and controversy.

The hike to £9,000 by the Coalition didn’t stop the number of eighteen year olds flocking to higher education and the removal of maintenance grants also didn’t seem to make much of a different in numbers applying.  Even punitive interest rates of more than six per cent haven’t proved a deterrent to would-be graduates.

Now it appears the government might be re-thinking their policy on fees and recognising the fact that arts and humanities students are paying more for their degree courses than universities are spending on their education.

When the hike in fees to £9,000 was proposed, I suggested a fee of around £6,500 might be more appropriate, with the government topping up the cost of STEM courses to encourage students to study those subjects, if there were going to be fees at all. I am less certain that is the direction to go now. Reintroducing a cap on numbers that would inevitably follow government intervention in the fee market would risk disadvantaging those with the least social capital to game the system. When the number of university places were limited, fewer teenagers for disadvantaged backgrounds went to university than at present.

I recall the late Prof. Halsey once saying that the gap in higher education entry rates between different groups would only be reduced once all middle class children that wanted to go to university were able to do so and there were still places available. Reintroducing a cap on places might seriously affect the opportunities for higher education in some communities.

However, there is evidence that attending a university and studying some subjects in the arts and humanities categories doesn’t bring significant financial benefits and many graduates don’t work in occupations that either pay well or use their graduate skills. Nevertheless, the alternative for the government might be having to pay out similar levels of cash, if youth unemployment rates increased and present undergraduate frozen out of higher education swelled the ranks of the unemployed. That would have a direct effect on government expenditure, unlike tuition fees that both have the possibility of clawing some of the expenditure back and also having a less direct effect upon government accounts.

Now that might be a risk worth taking in a tight labour market, and where some would-be undergraduates could be channeled into apprenticeships at a lower cost to the government. But, it would undoubtedly come at a price with regard to social mobility. Such a price might not be worth paying, especially if there is a downturn in the economy.

Better, to try to make degrees more beneficial for society while recognising that some courses may be high quality, but will lack high earning capacity. Such is the nature of higher education.

Teaching as a global career

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Should the DfE set up a specific Unit to help teachers trained in England return from working overseas? They might want to work on this with the British Council. Recent data from research organisation ISC suggests that UK private schools are leading the charge into overseas markets, with several new schools established overseas this year alone by schools with headquarters in England. Many of these new schools will have a high percentage of UK trained teachers working in them.

In the past, the international school market was mainly a market serving expat communities, by providing a home country style education that allowed executives to take their families with them on overseas posting. This meant that they were secure both in the knowledge that their children’s education would be protected, and that their children would also benefit from a new set of cultural experiences, together with the opportunity to mix with others from a range of cultures in an increasingly global world.

However, in our increasingly global and digital world, the use of so-called international schools has changed. The pupils in such schools are now predominantly not the children of expats, according to ISC research, but mostly local children of parents than can afford to pay the fees in what are increasingly ‘for-profit’ schools. This raises the question, why should the UK, and England in particular, be supporting the staffing of these schools if we cannot provide enough teachers for our own schools? Making teaching in England more attractive as a career is an obvious way forward, but the DfE should also be examining how difficult it is for teachers that want to return from working overseas to find a job back home. Can more be done to assist these teachers in their quest to return and can more of them be helped and encouraged to return?

This is not an idle question, if the ISC research is correct. Such schools around the world are growing at a rate that will see the number of teachers working in them possibly approach the million mark before the end of the next decade. That’s double current numbers. I have long worried audiences at conferences by pointing out that an entrepreneur wanting to start a chain of new international schools could recruit the whole cohort of NQTs for a particular year. With India now expanding faster than China, and UK Education being highly valued in the sub-continent, the warning signs are there for all to see.

Maybe the DfE should now sponsor a return to teaching in England event in Dubai, a location where there are more than 300 English medium schools, many employing teachers from England. They might do the same event in China and even Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in India and Hong Kong.

I confess to an interest in this issue as TeachVac Global provides a recruitment service to these schools at www.teachvacglobal.com The TeachVac team has seen this growth in demand in the period that the service has been operating. At present TeachVac, www.teachvac.co.uk the free recruitment site for teachers and schools in England, is separate from the international site, but here is pressure from schools to be able to interact with the large number of teachers in England looking for jobs.

 

Improve teacher retention, but that’s not the whole solution

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The NfER has produced its final comprehensive report into teacher supply and retention entitled, ‘Teacher Workforce Dynamics in England’. http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/news/government-mustnt-lose-focus-tackling-teacher-supply-shortage

I have to confess that, as noted in the acknowledgements, I acted as a consultant to the team working on this project at NfER. During the various stages of the project the team issued research reports and the final documents brings all these together and amplifies them in a number of different ways not possible in the shorter documents. The Nuffield Foundation must be recognised for their help in funding the project.

At the launch last evening there were some interesting issues raised that may merit further analysis should funds be available. Firstly, the data on retention is presented in terms of the percentage of staff leaving the profession. This raises two issues: what is meant in terms of leaving the teaching profession is leaving maintained state funded schools as teachers – they may still be working in state funded Sixth Form Colleges or further education or as a teacher in the private sector. When comparing leaving rates with nursing it isn’t clear whether registration of nurses includes those working in non-NHS settings such as the private sector and as school nurse and thus affects how leaving rates are calculated. Additionally, for the police, there was a period where most police forces stopped recruitment, so departure rates may be depressed when there were no new entrants to create a pool of early leavers during part of the survey period.

However, the other issue with the data are the use of percentages of staff leaving. This can be problematic. Thus, in 2015, 20,700 leavers from the secondary sector were detected by the School Workforce Census – a rate of 9.2% for secondary teachers; in 2017 the rate increased to 10.4%, but the actual number decreased to 20,170.  There is no suggestion that the data used by NfER experienced this situation, but it highlights why I often prefer to use real numbers.

Leavers do so at different times in their careers in teaching. Much has been made by the National Audit Office in their study and in this NfER report on the advantages of retaining more teachers in state funded schools. To that end, there is an interesting chart on page 24 of the NfER Report showing where leavers typically may be going. Again, percentages are used, so let’s assume a hypothetical example based upon 40,000 leavers and how many might be persuaded to return at any point.

Since 30% are retiring, the pool can be reduced to 28,000 straightaway, assuming there aren’t a large pool of teacher taking early retirement. The 400 taking maternity leave, a somewhat low figure given the age profile of the profession, takes another 400 out of the total. Another 800 are removed because they are studying as students. I assume this will include future Educational Psychologists and those seeking extra qualifications, such as to teach children with special education needs. However, the biggest category of leavers are those teaching in the private sector; some 33% or another 13,200 off the total.

So, how many of the remaining 13,600 might be persuaded to return?  4,000 are employed in schools as teaching assistants or other non-teaching roles. Some of these might have decided teaching is not for them, but others may have left for other reasons and might be persuadable back into the classroom as a teacher: let’s say 50% or 2,000 could fit into that category, perhaps if better part-time teaching opportunities were available.

Of the remaining 9,600, the 1,200 unemployed might offer some possibilities if teaching didn’t run on a market based recruitment system. After all, if there are teacher shortages, and these teachers wanted to work, there must be an assumption that they are in areas where teaching posts are not available for those with their skills. The other big group worth exploring further are the 4,400 in our example listed as self-employed. Are they working as tutors or using their skills as musicians, artists, historians or scientists for positive reasons or because they gave up on teaching?

Let’s assume half might tempted back, at last part-time if offered better terms. We now have possibly 4,000 that might be enticed back. Add another 1,000 for all the other smaller categories NfER identified, and the total is some 12.5% of leavers. However, many might only be interested in part-time work, so that might only be half that in terms of full-time equivalent teachers, say 2.500. Worth trying to recruit returners, but this is still not the absolute answer to the teacher shortage issue. Certainly, it is worth exploring whether some of these leavers might have been persuaded to remain in the profession.