Tag Archives: academies

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

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Did schools really save money in the five-year period up to 2019-2020? The DfE has published a study showing the aim of ‘saving’ at least one billion pounds during that period was achieved. Progress in schools savings and resource management – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The methodology of the study was to measure savings as the difference between actual non-staff expenditure in 2019-20 and what was estimated non-staff expenditure would have been in 2019-20 if schools had not changed their spending behaviour. This is expressed as the difference between the expenditure line and the counterfactual line as to where expenditure without saving would have been.

It is worth noting that the period covered was one where primary school rolls were generally on the increase, and for many secondary school rolls were either constant or falling. Academies and maintained schools also operate on different financial years, so that could be an additional complicating factor.

A significant proportion of the saving came in the final year 2019-2020. I am not sure whether that meant that the final third of that financial year for academies covered the first four months of the pandemic when, for instance, there would have been a significant drop in expenditure on school meals, as most children were forced to stay at home.

The target of £1 Billion pounds was set after the National Audit Office (NAO) report “Financial sustainability of schools” published in 2016 identified that schools would incur cost pressures of £3bn between then and 2019- 20. The DfE then produced analysis which compared schools with different levels of spending but similar pupil characteristics and levels of attainment.

According to the report,

 ‘the DfE estimated the impact of bringing the spending of the top 25% highest per-pupil non-staff spending schools down to the level of those at the 75th percentile. This analysis indicated that, schools could plausibly save around £1 bn on their non-staff spending and so this became the ambition of the SRM portfolio’ (Page 3)

It is not clear from the report whether that is what happened, or whether the schools better at managing their costs took more out of the system, thus widening the gap between those schools good at achieving savings and the rest of the sector. Since both primary and secondary schools were included, it would have been interesting to know how much of the saving was due to fixed costs that don’t alter with changing pupil numbers – it presumably cost a similar amount to heat and light a school even if pupil numbers fluctuate. The saving would be more impressive and longer-lasting if it was the variable costs that had been reduced. Primary schools often have higher fixed costs as a proportion of income, although many of these are staff costs.  

And, as the DfE note in the definitions on page 5 of the report.

‘“Saving” in this context does not mean a cash saving. We measure savings by comparing actual non-staff spend to where we expected non-staff spending to be had schools not changed spending behaviour – the counterfactual. We would calculate cash savings by taking away actual non-staff spend in 2019-20 from actual non-staff spending in 2015-16.’

And finally, it looks as if the special school sector was excluded if the study was only on primary and secondary schools. It would be interesting to know about cost pressures in that sector and whether similar saving was possible?

Depriving the deprived

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Levelling up is not just an issue for the north of England. Ahead of their Spring Conference, the Liberal Democrats obtained data about reading levels at Key Stage 2 and the percentage of pupils not achieving the expected standard at Key Stage 2 in 2019, the last set of data because of the pandemic. The most revealing data are that for the parliamentary constituencies in England – education is a devolved activity, so the data only covers constituencies in England – of which there are some 533.

My especial interest is, of course Oxford. The west of the city is in the Oxford West and Abingdon constituency that ranks 91st worst in the list at the same place in the table with Henley constituency. However, the Oxford East constituency is ranked 502nd worst out of the 533 constituencies in England. This is a really significant difference between the two parts of Oxford.

One issue that this brings into sharp focus is the problems associated with a national funding formula model for schools; a formula that is based upon the needs of a random collection of local authorities responsible for special education and although budgets go to schools not divorced from the way the overall formula is calculated. If you level up by authority, then you miss pockets of need, such as those parts of Oxford East contributing to the outcome for the Oxford East constituency as a whole.

To be fair to teachers in Oxford, way back in 2011, the City as a whole ranked as the worst local authority for Key Stage 1 outcomes, so this looks like an improvement, albeit on different data.

Nevertheless, children in East Oxford need to be able to access the required degree of resources to allow them to reach parity with their peers across the city and elsewhere in England.

London boroughs are disproportionally represented in the list of constituencies with the lowest percentages of pupils failing to reach the expected standard, whereas both rural and urban areas outside of London are to be found among those constituencies with the worst outcomes.

Oxford as a university city – with two universities – has a proportion of children with English as their second languages, but it is not clear that these pupils are disproportionally located in the east of the city, since university accommodation can be found across the city as a whole.

The Conservatives adapted from Labour ideas by inventing Opportunity Areas to offer extra support to areas needing it, but I have not seen any analysis of the outcomes for such areas. Oxford East seemingly didn’t qualify.

It is worth comparing Oxford with Blackpool for reading outcomes, as both are areas with two different parliamentary constituencies. Blackpool’s constituencies are ranked 73rd and 340th while Oxford’s rank 91st and 502nd. Blackpool is, of course, an Opportunity Area: Oxford isn’t. One might well ask why Oxford is not an opportunity Area on the basis of these figures?

Perhaps it is a matter of perception rather than hard evidence. Blackpool isn’t a wealthy university town and has high levels of unemployment. Oxford is viewed as affluent and successful, and a great place to live. To live, but not, at least as far as the East of the City is concerned, to learn.

Bye-bye ESFA: Hello ESFA

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Yesterday, the DfE published the outcome of the review into the Education and Skills Funding Agency led by Sir David Bell plus its response to the review and the resulting changes from 1st April 2022.

Review of the Education and Skills Funding Agency – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are a lot of detailed proposals, but some that struck me of more general interest are these – with the government’s response below the recommendation.

We recommend that further work is done as part of school system reform to create a more strategic and shared understanding of responsibilities between DfE, ESFA, and Ofsted, and that the outcomes of this work are communicated widely

Agreed.

We recommend that the department should have a unified directing voice at a regional level. We have contributed to the current Future DfE project which is bringing together functions in the regional tier, and which will resolve the form and nature of that directing voice

Agreed. Assessing the functions and approach to post-16 regional work will be taken forward as part of developing the Further Education, Higher Education and Employers work set out above and be led by the Director General. We will benefit from learning from the experience of establishing the pre-16 regional tier.

We recommend that, in keeping with our finding that ESFA should focus on funding delivery, the functions in Academies and Maintained Schools Directorate not linked to the funding delivery role, and not required by ESFA’s Accounting Officer to provide assurance, should move to DfE. This means that the non-financial regulatory functions for academies and the functions related to school/trust governance should move to DfE’s pre-16 regional tier, as should new trust and free school activity, UTC engagement, and networking events.

Agreed.

We recommend DfE considers bringing the complaints functions for maintained schools and academies together in a fully centralised complaints system within the department

Agreed.

We recommend that ownership of the Academy Trust Handbook should move to DfE’s School Systems, Academies and Reform Directorate, unless the focus of the Handbook is narrowed back towards a tool for financial management only.

Agreed.

The ESFA had become rather unwieldy over time and these changes will move it back towards its original core function relating to the handling of the financing of the school system.

More interestingly is the re-alignment of the school system with the wider government regional framework. With the levelling up agenda being a cross-department exercise in government, this re-alignment makes sense. However, it doesn’t fit with the boundaries of Headteacher boards and Regional School Commissioners. Could the days of this unelected post be numbered? After all, might there be some cash savings to be made and, if all schools were academies of one sort or another, then one key function would have disappeared.

The DfE still has to work out the 16-18 phase where some students are in the school sector, but more are in the further education sector. There still seems to be room for overlap or avoidance of difficult issues unless the protocol of responsibilities between the directorates is made clear.

One interesting side effect of all schools becoming academies would be the shift in financial year for all schools back to a unified position. However, the financial year would be totally uncoupled from the municipal year, but aligned to the higher education funding rounds.

This review helps sort out the framework for the ‘top’ tier. Now it remains to work out the framework for the middle tier. That will probably be more of a challenge.

White flag or shifting the blame

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There is a saying that one should beware of unexpected guests. For reasons obvious to those that know the saying, it is clear why I prefer to compare it with the other saying of ‘not looking a gift horse in the mouth’ – should that be looking an electric car in the battery these days – but without using the actual expression. No matter, what does matter is whether or not local authorities will be able to form and run Multi Academy Trusts/Committees?

Ever since Mr Gove raced the 2010 Academies Act through parliament in the period before the summer break that year, and less than three months after the 2010 General Election, the Conservatives have wanted all schools to become academies. At that time, local authorities were beyond the pale, and a model with no local democratic involvement, similar to that of the NHS, seemed on the cards for education. Peter Downes a former Cambridgeshire Lib Dem councillor and long time secondary head led the Lib Dem charge at their 2010 September Conference, an event where delegates made their support for local democratic involvement in education very clear to Nick Clegg and David Laws.

Over the ensuing decade, most secondary schools have either opted or been forced to become an academy. All new schools are required to become an academy. However, except in a few parts of the country, academisation of the primary sector schools has been slow and patchy. Many primary schools only became academies are a visit from ofsted resulted in compulsory academisation.

The picture that has emerged around the county is of an expensive mess that could make the reputation of a Secretary of State if change is handled properly with a view to the longer-term effectiveness of the school sector.

There are now noises in the press suggesting that the next White Paper from the DfE might allow local authorities to establish and run Multi Academy Trusts or Committees or some new structure such as a Multi Academy Board might be created. Such a suggestion would effectively be a change of direction on the part of central government. Is it either a white flag or preparing the ground to shift the blame for a period of challenge that will face the primary sector where most maintained schools are still to be found?

There is a third possibility. This is that civil servants have been so impressed by how some local authorities have handled the covid crisis that they now recognise their value as part of the middle tier, especially in handling the large number of small primary schools spread across rural England. Certainly, the work by the local authority team in Oxfordshire, where I am a county councillor, has resulted in an email from a headteacher of a private school expressing thanks for the work of local authority staff. Not something you receive every day.

Allowing or even forcing local authorities to take all schools not already academies into a LAB or Local Academy Board would allow the government to tell the public that all schools were now academies. It would allow local authorities to feel that they might be back in the game of education politics and it would allow for more coherent planning for the primary sector less hampered by the legislation on closing rural schools. This may be important should the National Funding Formula create the need to rationalise the school estate.

Attendance Group must address in-year admissions issue

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I recently caught up with news about the DfE’s Attendance Group, and the Minutes of its December meeting.  Attendance Action Alliance January meeting notes: 9 December 2021 (publishing.service.gov.uk)

I am delighted to discover the high-profile nature of membership the Group and that the Secretary of State has taken an interest, as owner of the work. However, although the Group discussed the question of a register for home educated children and the concerns over those children just missing school on a regular basis, I didn’t find any emphasis on ensuring that children taken into care are offered a school palace as swiftly as possible and within set time limits. The same standards also need to be put in place for children with special needs whose parents move to a new location during the school year and need a new school placement.

Taking a new job should not be conditional on whether there is a special school place available for your child.

In a previous post on this blog, calling for a ‘Jacob’s Law’, I laid out the case for in-year admissions to academies not to be held up by such schools not wanting to admit such children. The 2016 Education White Paper: Education Excellence Everywhere recognised there was an issue with in-year admissions to academies because local authorities had no powers to over-rule the decision of a school not to admit a pupil. This was why Jacob was out of school when he died. Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Sadly, nothing significant has changed since 2016. I hope that the Attendance Group will consider the issue of in-year admissions at a future meeting, and not just focus on the parents that don’t send their children to school. The system must work for the benefit of all and not just those that are easy to educate. The same is the case of children with SEND requiring in-year admission to a school.

These young people must not be ignored, and just offering tutoring is not the same as admission to a school. Home tutoring doesn’t provide the same social interaction that being in a school provides however good the ‘virtual school’ is at its job.

Of course, there are risks where the school community is hostile to incomers and many schools could well look to improve the transfer experience for in-year admissions that can be even worse than that experienced by pupils transferring at the start of the school-year.

Being taken into care as a school-age child is a traumatic experience, and we owe it to these children to make sure that their education is affected as little as possible. So, it is my hope that the Attendance Group will as a minimum endorse the 2016 White Paper suggestions and, if possible, go further and set time limits for school places to be offered to children taken into care and requiring a new school placement. For most, it wasn’t their fault that they have ended up in the care of the local authority where all the secondary schools are academies.

Academies increase cash balances

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Hard on the heels of the Treasury Select Committee’s Report, with its comments on government funding of education – see previous post on this bog – comes the 10th Annual Academy Benchmark Report from Kreston Global Kreston-Academies-Benchmark-Report-2022-Web.pdf (krestonreeves.com) This detailed report raises a set of interesting questions, and also offers pointers as to why the labour market for teachers in the secondary sector may have been so buoyant during January 2022.

The Kreston Report comments that

“Once again, we are seeing record breaking in-year surpluses for MATs, whilst secondaries are showing a small increase and Primaries have fallen to 2019 levels. But this top level statistic hides the complex mix of variables giving rise to the surpluses. This result is likely to be a by-product of Covid-19 factors rather than an intentional result. The good news is that fewer Trusts are now in a cumulative deficit position and only 19% had an in-year deficit (2020: 25%).”

And

“The size of the in-year surpluses has gone up to record levels; there are less Trusts making in-year deficits, there are less Trusts with cumulative deficits, free reserves are up, and cash balances are up.” (page 12).

The Kreston Report adds that: “From conversations we have had with our Academy clients many were budgeting for in-year deficits or to break even, and were on track for this to happen. “(page 11).

Now, does this mean that a lot of the cash for catch-up programmes is already sitting in secondary school bank accounts? Why wasn’t the saving on supply teachers and other budget heading immediately transferred into support for pupils?

To allow reserves to increase during the pandemic raises questions abut either a lack of congruence between values and budgets or a less than perfect understanding of financial affairs by school leaders? Surely, neither is the case. However, the increase in balances, even if unexpected, does raise some interesting questions about the relationship between decision-making and educational values.

Way back in the 1990s, when I first worked on Assessment Centres for would-be headteachers, this was an issue of concern. Those in education are good at talking, but do they always possess the skills to put their values into actions? What is the relationship between the values of school business managers and education leaders, especially when faced with challenges for which there is no rulebook?

One reason for high cash balances cited by Kreston in the report is my old bugbear, saving for future capital spending. The Kreston Report says this “Some MATs do have a strategy of accumulating funds within the central fund to meet the costs of future capital projects, so this could explain why there are sizeable balances carried forward in some cases.” (page 20) My view has always been that revenue spending should be for today’s pupils, not those of tomorrow, especially when the non-physical environment is so challenged as it has been during the pandemic.

The Kreston report concludes with some interesting benchmark data, but not, as far as I can see, anything on staff recruitment costs. In view of the amount schools can spend in this area, that seems like a curious admission not to extrapolate it from the measure where it is no doubt currently buried.

Taken together, both the Select Committee Report on future spending and the Kreston Report on past trends make for interesting reading for anyone concerned with the education of the nation’s young people.

Start Recruiting now

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This is the stark warning to schools across much of Southern England that may need staff this September and especially to secondary schools. TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk data has shown that the first three weeks of January have witnessed a continuation of the trend at the end of 2021 with a considerable increase in vacancies recorded.

TeachVac hasn’t changed its vacancy collection methods since 2020 but it has seen vacancies listed in the first 19 days of the month in 2022 increase by 14% over the recorded numbers recorded in early January 2020 pre-pandemic, and by a whopping 135% over the depressed level of last January.

As reported in a previous post, design and technology staff will be especially hard to recruit in 2022. Already in 2022, vacancies recorded are 48% up on the same period in 2020. Vacancies for teachers of music are up by an eyewatering 73% on 2020 vacancies in early January.

All these vacancies mean that the pool of new entrants will be reducing at a faster rate than in previous years. High quality trainees will be offered vacancies by schools that understand these trends and are aware of the state of the pool of trainees, either because they run school-based programmes or because their mentors have told them what higher education providers are saying.

TeachVac’s low-cost service can keep school up to date with trends for as little as £100 and a maximum of £1,000 per year that includes listing and matching all the school’s teaching vacancies with TeachVac’s growing pool of register users.

Registration also provides access to far better data than on the DfE site and also intelligence on the state of the recruitment round for trainees for September 2022 and hence the labour market in 2023.

Signing up today at www.teachvac.co.uk and the tab matching service will also bring a free copy of TeachVac report.  Message me if you want more information or use the comment box.

Few signals from Manchester

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An extract from the Secretary of State’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference

‘Every child deserves a great teacher. And every teacher deserves great training.

” I will bring forward a schools white paper in the new year outlining plans to tackle innumeracy and illiteracy “

So as the foundation of the next decade of reform during this parliament we will deliver 500,000 teacher training opportunities. We are carrying out a fundamental overhaul that will make this country the best in the world to train and learn as a teacher.’

50,000 training places a year will be hard to achieve under any regime, especially if some universities decide to pull out of ITT or ITE because of the government changes to the curriculum for preparing teahcers

.Interestingly, the Gatsby Foundation has published a pamphlet of essays on the topic of reforming teacher education in response to the government’s market review. itt-reform-expert-perspectives-2021.pdf (gatsby.org.uk) I was especially taken by the essay by Ben Rogers of the Paradigm Trust about the distribution of ITT places, something that featured in the previous post on this blog

With a government now seemingly committed to a high wage; high skill level economy, education will be an important player in driving forward the success of that policy. Now, of course, the government having seen the outcome of the tutoring programme, might want to turn over the skills agenda to the private sector and leave schools with the basic curriculum centred around literacy and numeracy to teach. May be that will be the focus of the White Paper that seems to hark back to the Blair government’s education play book.

However, there are other problems facing the Secretary of State. This blog has recently reminded readers that the lorry driver shortage is as nothing compared to the shortage of design and technology teachers, not to mention business studies and physics teachers.

It is no use telling the private sector to ‘get its house in order’ when the public sector, where the Conservative Party has been in control of government for the past decade, has failed to deal with teacher shortages. The DfE site for teaching now explicitly shows whether a course provider will handle visa applications.

Ahead of the Spending Review, a Review that is unlikely to be kind to education, the Secretary of State would have been hard put to announce costly new policies, especially since he has little control over how schools actually spend their cash. There are saving to be made still in the school sector. These range from cutting recruitment costs that might save £40 million or so to a major rethink about the diseconomies of scale of the academy programme.

Now the Conservative Party has created a Labour style NHS model of central control for the school system, shorn of local democracy, it is surely time to look seriously at what the system now costs to administer. Local Authorities may have had their faults, but a high cost structure wasn’t generally one of them. Time for a savings task force?

Prudent measure or wasted opportunity?

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The DfE has recently published details of the revenue balances held by academies and Trusts. Academy trust revenue reserves 2019 to 2020 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Unlike maintained schools that follow the local government financial year, the academies financial year follows a September to August pattern, broadly in line with the annual cycle of school life. The different financial years would make comparisons between the two sectors difficult, but doesn’t prevent comment and analysis about the state of finances in either sector.

The DfE document contains this useful summary

Summary

At the end of the academic year 2019/20

• 95.9% of trusts had a cumulative surplus or a zero balance.

• 4.1% of trusts had a cumulative deficit.

• The average revenue reserve across all academy trusts was £1.15 million.

• The average surplus balance, of trusts with a surplus, was £1.22 million.

• The average deficit balance, of trusts with a deficit, was £376,000.

• The total cumulative surplus across all academy trusts was £3.17 billion.

• The total cumulative deficit across all academy trusts was £42.1 million.

• The total net financial position of all academy trusts was a cumulative surplus of £3.13 billion.

Trusts average reserves – In 2019/20 average revenue reserves across academy trusts were £1.15 million, compared to £0.96 million in 2018/19, an increase of 20%.

In 2019/20 the average surplus balance was £1.22 million, compared to £1.05 million in 2018/19, an increase of 16%.

The average deficit balance in 2019/20 was at £376,000, compared to £381,000 in 2018/19, a decrease of 1.3%.

Trusts average reserves as a percentage of income – average academy trust reserves as a percentage of a trust’s income stood at 11.4% in 2019/20, compared to 10.8% in 2018/19.

This last fact will no doubt raise some eyebrows, as putting more than one pound in every ten received into reserves doesn’t suggest a system in the financial crisis that is the regular message from the frontline in education. Of course, putting cash aside to pay auditors bills and other future expenditure is a prudent idea. However, saving across a Trust for a specific project benefiting only one school is somewhat against the spirit of budgets being devolved to schools, and one of the criticism that used to be levelled at local authorities when they were responsible for schools.

Removing local democratic accountability for schooling should not have allowed unelected bodies to either build up large reserves or to favour certain schools over others. I have always maintained that the concept of revenue funding is to provide the funds to educate the pupils of today and not to save for the future education of others. Perhaps it is time that the National Audit Office had another look at the nature and purpose of these reserves held by academies and the Trusts to which they belong?

Schooling also needs a shake up

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The news, in a leaked document, stating that the government is considering the way that the NHS operates, prompts me to remind readers that I have long felt that the arrangements devised under Labour for schools that were enthusiastically espoused by Michael Gove in 2010, in terms of how schooling is arranged, also need urgent review.

Some, including myself, have always maintained the importance of ‘place’ in our education system, and especially the school system. A sense of location is often weakest in relation to higher education and the university sector. However, even there, a place name, such as Oxford, has always worked well, grounding a university in a particular location. For schools, the link to a locality is generally much stronger than for higher education, and parents normally want their children to attend a good local school.

The academy programme dealt a severe blow to the locality based school system that was already under threat as local government fell out of favour at Westminster and institution level decision-making became the favoured approach. The 1988 Education Reform Act, with the move to local financial management and placing power in the hands of head teachers and governors, wrecked any chance of creating a locally managed system across England.

The arrival of multi-academy trusts in 2010, sometimes with headquarters many miles away for the location of the school for which it had responsibility failed to build upon the experience of the diocesan school model, where large diocese, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, often had responsibility for schools in several different local authority areas. Sometimes this worked well, but not always.

Crippling the funding for local authorities wrecked features such as staff development across a local area and the ability to talent spot future leaders, especially middle leaders, where most teachers don’t want to move house for promotion. It may be no coincidence that wastage rates for teachers of five to seven years of experience have increased as local frameworks for teacher support have been eroded.

You only have to read the recent post on this blog about Jacob’s Law, to see the important role local authorities play in the admission and management of pupils across a local area. To allow individual schools to frustrate the ability to find a place for a pupil is poor government, as anyone reading that Serious Case Review can easily understand.

The recent problems with the supply of laptops and internet access to those without, would have been better handled locally, with strategic support from government. Managing it from Westminster showed how this central model for operation rather than strategy just didn’t really work.

One question remains, should schooling, like the NHS, be largely run by professionals, with little local democratic involvement or should schooling have a strong local democratic element in the way it operates, in view of both the number of families involved and its role in the local economy. I have made my view known on this blog over the past eight years.

When I started in education, two phrases were in regular use: ‘a local service nationally administered’ or a ‘partnership’. Is it now time to work out what type of school system we want for the rest of the twenty first century?