Tag Archives: 1870 Education Act

Reflections from a round table presentation

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Foundation for Education Development Round Table

Part of 150th Anniversary of the 1870 Elementary Education Act

A synopsis of my presentation

Education workforce

Teacher supply over the past 150 years, and certainly since World War Two, has been a perpetual cycle or more accurately a sine wave, moving from shortage to surplus to shortage, mostly governed by the coincidence of the economic and demographic cycles.

 All schools are often only fully staffed when pupil numbers are low and the economy is in recession. A buoyant economy; rising birth rates and increases in length of education have created shortages that have most affected schools serving our more deprived communities.

The current situation

What are some possible issues within the workforce? Here are three dichotomies to consider:

Career Development

Personal Goals v System Needs

At every stage there can be tensions between the career goals of teachers and the needs of the system to fill vacancies at every point in the system from classroom teachers to head teachers in schools and the many roles beyond schools that need expertise in teaching. For example, the tension over seen in supporting candidates for headship when a school may lose a highly able deputy.

However, schools with a good track record of staff development attract staff that want to work in such environments and the turnover is more than compensated for by the staff attracted.

Teachers need support at every stage of their careers and currently CPD is not treated with the attention it deserves.

Where to work

Market v Direction

England has a very market-based approach to teaching jobs. A teacher is in charge of their own career and there is still little advice available. When should you seek more responsibility? Is it ever too late to look for a new post? Is there hidden discrimination in appointments?

In some countries, teachers are civil servants, and are directed where to teach. New teachers may serve early stages of their careers in challenging locations that contain posts that are otherwise hard to fill.  Governments in England have dabbled with the idea of ‘direction’ from Fast Track to the coalition government’s desire to parachute heads and middle leaders into certain schools and the discussion of ‘super-heads’, but the market system has so far triumphed. That triumph has been at a significant financial cost to schools and teachers. 

Both approaches have advantages and challenges. As noted, one approach is expensive, with schools spending millions of pounds on recruitment advertising for a process that should cost less than £3 per vacancy. (TeachVac data) The other takes away freedom from individuals – that freedom was a reason I became a teacher not a civil servant. But, as teaching is becoming a global career, can we afford to lose large numbers of teachers overseas?

Making teaching an Attractive Career

Intrinsic v Extrinsic Factors

Teachers don’t usually join just for the pay, but there are few other ‘perks’. Teachers work an ‘employer-directed form of flexitime and on balance have seen other workers catch up on the holiday front, This year has revealed how important teachers are as key workers and how well regarded they are by sections of society. Their workload needs to be constantly monitored and the implications of the changes in technology on re-training are not insignificant.

Finally, the importance of both

Morale and Accountability

These are not alternatives, but essential considerations for an effective teaching profession. Overload accountability and create low morale and there is a problem. At present we need to ensure teachers and leaders feeling drained by their efforts don’t leave the profession because they feel under-valued, especially by government.

To end with a personal plea: To celebrate the 150th anniversary of State Funded Schooling

Make ‘TEACHER’ a reserved occupation term

And as a bonus, create some Regis Professorship of Education as well, to demonstrate the status of the profession.

Anniversaries

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There haven’t been any recent posts on this blog because I have been away on a two week tour of parts of Europe, travelling by Rail. During the trip, I managed to visit both Gdansk, the city where the Second World War really started – the exact location is at Westerplatte just outside the city – although the Germans had crossed the border elsewhere in the Country at the same time.

There is now a stunning new museum on the Gdansk waterfront chronicling the Second World War and reflecting both on its causes and what came afterwards.  The museum is part of a waterfront regeneration that is similar to the transformation taking place in other port cities and towns as container ships become ever larger and berths move closer to the open sea. What Gdansk is dong reminded me of Liverpool waterfront, and the changes that have taken place in that city.

Inevitably, it is the big exhibits in the museum that catch the eye: the freight car used to transport people to concentration camps; the wall created from their suitcases and the street scene of a Russian tank in a rubble filled roadway surrounded by damaged and bullet ridden buildings. However, there are many and varied smaller exhibits and visitors from the UK will learn a lot about the fate of Poland and its population between 1939 and 1945. Personally, I would have liked to see some mention of the work of Polish forces with the allies other than in the Battle of Britain and of the Poles that stayed behind in Britain after 1945 rather than return to a Community run State, but these are personal prejudices.

Coincidentally, I also visited the Anhalter Bahnhof site in Berlin that lies close to where the Second World War in Europe came to an end. Just a symbolic remnant of this former important railway terminus now remains. It suffered the fate that although located in West Berlin, the lines using the terminus had mostly served the east of the country, areas that after the war became East Germany, until reunification almost 30 years ago. By then new routes had been established and, apart from the section of façade remaining and an S Bahn station using the name, there is little to reflect the former status of the station. The demise of Broad Street Station in London is one of the few examples of a complete obliteration of a terminus that springs to mind.

Completing the Second World War anniversaries encountered on the tour was a visit to the recently refurbished museum on the heights overlooking Toulon. This museum commemorates Operation Dragoon. This was the 1944 invasion by Allied forces of the South of France. Although smaller in scale than the much better known Normandy Landings of D-Day, some months earlier, these landing played an important part in diverting German forces away from supporting the fight in the north of France. This is an exhibition of mainly small artefacts, but none the less well worth a visit.

Happily, in 2020, we in education will have something better to remember, the 150th anniversary of the 1870 Education Act. Recalling the horrors of war is important, but let us also find ways to celebrate the advances in society that education for all has brought to the world.

Register your child’s education

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As we approach the 150th anniversary of the State requiring parents to educate their children new proposals are emerging for consultation that would potentially alter the nature of the contract between individuals and the State over the education of children between the ages of five and sixteen (and possibly eighteen).

As I noted in a post in June 2016

Parents are not required to send children to school to be educated, but if they do so it must be ‘regularly’. There seems to be no similar legal penalty that appears to be enforced for those that decide to home school or educate their children in some other way than sending them to school.

So, the requirement on parents has been to ‘educate’ their children, and the state school was always the default option if no other action has been taken by parents. I suspect that parliament either thought schooling generally a ‘good thing’, so most would take up the option or that it didn’t want to interfere in family life any more than necessary. As stated, the law also allowed private schools to continue with minimal state interference.

Fast forward 150 years and we live in a different set of circumstances, where family rights can be challenged by the rights of individual members of the family. In these circumstances, the right of the child to a ‘good’, ‘satisfactory’ and even’ appropriate’ education may top the right of a family to educate their children as they see fit. At some point the courts will have to rule on this issue.

In order to reach a decision on the education a child is receiving the state needs to know about that education and that the child is indeed being educated. This latter point is, I think, the reasoning behind the current move by the DfE to consult on a register of all children’s education.

Is this a sledgehammer to crack a nut? Realistically, the State wants to know children at risk either because parents are deliberately hiding them from the State or because state providers have made attendance at a school so challenging parents have withdrawn their offspring with no other adequate education in place.

A compromise might be that if a child is entered into a school, and receives a unique pupil number, it becomes eligible for tracking until the end of compulsory schooling. This would allow parents of genuine home schooling that never interact with the State to continue unhindered in their way of life. But, pupils excluded, off-rolled or otherwise removed, perhaps because of bullying or poor SEND provision, would remain open to checking on their education.

Apart from anything else, this might help local authorities recognise where provision has broken down for some children and argue for better resources. The risk is that, at least in the short-term, some schools might exclude more pupils since they would no longer disappear from the system. However, that risk is part of the debate society must have about schools and their place in communities: exam factories or education for whole communities?

This proposal doesn’t deal with those that want a different form of education. But, rules about what is a ‘school’ and the inspection of all schools with severe penalties for unregistered schools might deal with that issue.