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1,500 posts and counting
When I wrote my first post on this blog, on the 25th of January 2013, I little though that I would reach 1,500 posts. However, despite stopping posting for 18 months, between the autumn of 2023 and May this year, while I was otherwise occupied as a cabinet member on Oxfordshire County Council the blog has now reached the milestone of 1,500 posts, including 40 so far this year since I started the blog up again this May.
Since one of the features of the blog has been commenting on numbers, here is a bit of self-indulgence. The blog has had 175,983 views since its inception, from 93,875 visitors, and has attracted 1,459 comments. The average length of a post has been between 550-670 words, although there have been a few longer posts in response to consultations and Select Committee inquiries.
How much holiday do teacher have? is the post with the most views – more than 6,500 and rising. Some posts have had no views, but are still an important record of my thoughts. The United Kingdom has been responsible for the most visitors: not a surprise, as most posts are about education in England. However, the USA comes second, with more than 15,000 views. Apart from some former French speaking countries in West Africa, Greenland and Paraguay, almost all other countries have had someone that has viewed the blog at least once.
Later this year, I will be publishing a book of the 2013 posts from the blog, and at that point they will disappear from public view. If you want to register for the book, check on Amazon after August 2025 or email dataforeducation@gmail.com for publication information. Alternatively, ask your favourite bookshop or library to order a copy.
I am sometimes asked about my favourite post. With 1,500 to choose from, that’s difficult, as many haven’t seen the light of day for a decade or so. However, Am I a blob? From 2013, was fun to write, and the posts about Jacob’s Law finally brought about a change in the legislation over admissions in the current bill going through parliament.
Most posts have been written, as this one is, in one session from start to finish, with editing just to tidy up my thoughts. Some are more passionate than others, and many are about teacher supply issues, where I am also researching a book on the subject covering the past 60 years of ‘feast and famine’. Much of the recent history has been well chronicled in this blog.
Thanks for reading, and for the comments. Who would have thought that someone that failed ‘O’ level English six times would end up writing a blog! Funny old world.
A decade of blogs
Today, 25th January 2023 is the official 10th birthday of this blog. Earlier this month, I wrote a blog reviewing the past ten years. That was entitled ‘Don’t forget Jacob’ Don’t forget Jacob | John Howson (wordpress.com) as a salute to the, as yet, unsuccessful campaign to ensure all children taken into care or arriving new to an area can be placed on the roll of a school within three weeks, regardless of whether the schools is an academy, free school or a maintained school. Every child has a right to an education with their peers and not just at home supported by worksheets and the occasional visit from a tutor.
Supporting that campaign shows how this blog has evolved over the past decade. Started just to deal with stories around the numbers in education (mostly the school sector) it has taken on a wider role as a consequence of two events in my life. In May 2013, I was elected to Oxfordshire County Council for a North Oxford Division, and for eight years was the Lib Dem spokesperson on education on the county.
In 2015, I helped establish TeachVac, the job board for teachers that has flourished, if measured by the number of users and the data it has gathered, but for a variety of reasons has yet to be a commercial success: perhaps I have had too many other distractions, including this blog, to become a successful business owner.
After, ten years and 1,372 posts (including this one) that have been seen by more than 80,000 visitors from all around the world, I have to decide: what next? Two years ago, I nearly decided to close down the blog as readership had fallen dramatically from around 22,000 visitors a year to just 11,000, but I kept going. Once again, I face the same dilemma. For the past quarter of a century, I have written pieces every week, first for the TES, as it then was, and then for this blog.
Is it time to call a day? I think the unfinished business of inadequate recruitment into teaching need regular highlighting, but NfER and Jack Worth can do that as easily and with better graphics that I can do. Most of the other posts are opportunistic, and some garner very few views; In some cases none at all, as with the post about this blog highlighted above.
So, you may notice that rather than the average of some ten posts a month of the past, the number drops off from now onwards, and I concentrate on other matters.
Thank you to those that do read the blog. It has been a labour of love to write, and I have never regretted composing these posts, although there are a few that once written never saw the light of day. Finally, last December, someone downloaded every single post that I had written. I would love to know why and what they have done with them? Happy Birthday, and thanks, especially to Frank.
Don’t forget Jacob
At the end of January, this blog will celebrate its 10th birthday: a decade of writing. As of today, the blog has published 1,364 posts during those 10 years, with a total wordcount, according to WordPress analytics, of around 800,000 words, or around nine or 10 PhDs. Of course, blogs aren’t peer reviewed in the same way as academic articles are pre-publication, but, like journalism, they are subject to the gaze of readers from around the world. What I think are important posts are sometimes barely read, whereas other posts have been read much more frequently. The most read posts each year are listed below:
2022 Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?
2021 Half of secondary ITT applicants in just 3 subjects
2020 Poverty is not destiny – OECD PISA Report
2019 How do you teach politics today?
2018 Applications to train as a teacher still far too low for comfort
2017 Coasting schools
2016 1% pay rise for most teachers likely in 2016
2015 Grim news on teacher training
2014 More on made not born: how teachers are created
2013 Has Michael Gove failed to learn the lessons of history?
The most read of these was the September 2020 post entitled ‘Poverty is not destiny’ that was read 1,544 times during that October and was read more than 1,600 times in all during the autumn of 2020.
Older posts can collect more ‘reads’ overall as new readers browse the back catalogue. Just before Christmas 2022, someone browsed the whole of the back catalogue, resulting in the highest monthly figures recorded for any single month since the blog started.
The genesis for the blog was the columns that I wrote for the then TES between the late 1990s and my retirement in 2011. I am lucky to have many of those columns in a presentation book created for my retirement.
This column has looked at numbers to do with education, mostly statistics, but also management information. Some of the latter has been provided by TeachVac, the job matching site I helped create and run some eight years ago.
There are a few other posts of which my, so far unsuccessful, campaign for a Jacob’s Law is the most important. This Law would ensure no child was left without a school place for longer than three weeks and is especially important for the many children taken into care. If we want to stop them becoming NEETs, we need to keep them in education not cast them aside because they might be a ‘bit of challenge’. Who would be a challenge if taken from home without any warning as a young person and moved to a different location away from friends and familiar locations and your school. (Search for Jacob for the various posts about this issue)
Please campaign to ensure a place for every child in a school. These young people are the education equivalent of the patients in A&E waiting on trolleys, but their wait can be six months, and just as life changing! Lt’s make 2023 the year the DfE tackled this issue.
150,000 views
Yesterday, this blog recorded the 150,000th view over the course of its lifetime. Not a huge number, especially when compared with those that bloggers that measure their followers in terms of such numbers and their views in the millions, but a pleasing response to the effort required to write the nearly 1,300 posts over the lifetime of the blog to date.
The blog has widened its scope since its inception in January 2013, when it first appeared. At that time, I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms from no longer facing the discipline required in writing a weekly column for the TES, as I had done for more than ten years. Over time, this blog has become a means of recording my thoughts on what has mattered to me about the changing face of education than just a replaced for that long-departed column.
As regular readers know, I am not a neutral commentator, but an active politician serving the Liberal Democrats as a councillor in Oxfordshire. My political beliefs undoubtedly colour my views on the many topics this blog has covered that have values associated with them. After all, education is not a value free activity, as the challenges of the past two years have so clearly demonstrated to us all.
There is, perhaps, less about the curriculum and assessment in this blog than some might wish and for a few perhaps too much about teachers and the labour market for teachers. However, counting heads and teachers has been something of a lifetime’s work for me. I first started counting headteachers in the early 1980s and apart for the period between 2011 and 2013 have never stopped doing so since then.
My aim has been posts of around 500 words, although a few substantially longer ones, such as my submission to the Carter Review, and transcripts of various talks that I have given, have appeared from time to time. There have also been some shorter posts, although WordPress informs me that the average length has been nearer to 600 than 500 words. Perhaps some of that is down to the manner in which tables and statistics are counted.
So, if you have read this far into this post, my challenge to you, either as a regular reader or someone that has dipped in and out from time to time, is to ask you to put in the comment section the post would most want to highlight.
And above all thank you for both taking the time to read my posts and to communicate via comments and emails your views to me. I have much appreciated the dialogue.
There have been times when I thought about stopping this blog, but I would now like to see out a decade of writing and then reassess where the blog goes from there. Podcasts and even videos are now more fashionable that just the written word, but both are technologies I have yet to conquer. Should I bother? There is time to ponder that question.
Happy Birthday
Today is the ninth birthday of this blog! A birthday is a good time to look back at what was written in the past on the blog. One of the interesting posts came early in the life of the blog, in July 2013, when I called for action by the government and suggested that “ministers must take urgent action if we are not to see a re-run of the crisis in teacher recruitment that occurred in the early days of the Blair government.” The full quote is reproduced below and can be seen on the blog by searching the July 2013 posts.
“Coming, as this outcome does, after several years when recruitment to teacher training has largely not been an issue, the present situation is a wake-up call for all concerned, and ministers must take urgent action if we are not to see a re-run of the crisis in teacher recruitment that occurred in the early days of the Blair government. There are two months left before the training courses start, so all is not yet lost. However, if my predictions prove accurate, some schools are going to struggle to recruit teachers next summer: good news for recruitment agencies, but probably not for some pupils. And, as I have said before, this is no way to create a world-class education system.”
Extract from
Has Michael Gove failed to learn the lessons of history?
Posted on July 2, 2013
There was a fairly swift response from Sanctuary Buildings that sparked something of a spat and the first Statistical Bulletin on the Teacher Supply Model for a while. Regular readers can make their own minds up about the extent to which I was “scaremongering” or a prophet ‘crying in the wilderness’. I wrote in August 2013 the following:
“So now I know I am officially a scaremonger. A DfE spokesperson, helpfully anonymous, is quoted by the Daily Mail today as saying of my delving into the current teacher training position that there was no teacher shortage, adding: ‘This is scaremongering and based on incomplete evidence.’
Well, the first thing to note is that I haven’t said that there is a teacher shortage, just that training places are not being filled: not the same thing. Indeed, I have said a teacher shortage is less likely than in the past in the near future because Mr Gove has mandated that qualified teachers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the whole of the USA can teach here as qualified teachers with no need to retrain. With an oversupply of teachers in parts of both Canada and Australia that should prevent any short-term problem developing even though another part of the government isn’t very keen on importing workers from abroad, presumably including from within the Commonwealth and a onetime colony.”
Extract from
Posted on August 14, 2013
I suspect anyone interested in the supply of teachers of physics, design and technology and business studies may have a different view about these quotes from those interested in the supply of PE and history teachers.
The DfE now controls the whole teacher supply pipeline from applications to train as a teacher to offering a job board as somewhere for schools in the state sector to place vacancies. To talk or write of a local education service these days would be as much of a misnomer as the write of a local health service rather than of the NHS.
Understanding and controlling teacher supply is important in the national interest and it is worth speculating what the landscape of teacher supply might look like in another nine years if the DfE became seriously involved in the ‘levelling up’ agenda?
Directing new teachers where to work and directing the management of promotions by specifying how MATs ought to deploy their staff might just be two of the ‘innovations’ to look forward to in the next decade if market forces are abandoned in favour of a more interventionist approach.
I am not sure that this blog will be there to chronicle those changes, but I hope to make it to its tenth birthday next year, if that isn’t tempting fate too much.
John Howson 