Tag Archives: deprived areas

Should the NHS pay more to support children with SEND?

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The new index of deprivation, published today by the government, contains an important message about affluent areas such as Oxfordshire.  English indices of deprivation 2025: statistical release – GOV.UK

Oxfordshire ranks highly on three of the four areas I looked at, and especially so on Health and Employment, where the lowest rankings are 65/296 in health and 36/296 in employment, and the highest 8/296 in health and 4/296 in employment.

District CouncilEducationHealthCrimeEmployment
South Oxfordshire258288287292
Vale of White Horse235284283275
West Oxfordshire233279285263
Cherwell155252231260
City of Oxford156231123262
District CouncilEducationHealthCrimeEmployment
South Oxfordshire38894
Vale of White Horse61121321
West Oxfordshire63171133
Cherwell141446536
City of Oxford1406517334

However, the ranking for both Cherwell and City of Oxford districts for education, at 141 and 140/296 compare badly with the ranking elsewhere in the county. Overall, the education ranks are still the lowest ranking scores for all districts, except for the City of Oxford, where the ranking for crime is 173/296, over a hundred places lower than any other district in the county.

The comparison between the education rankings and the health rankings raises an interesting question. Why is education doing so badly in Oxfordshire, especially in the urban areas of Oxford and Banbury? It is difficult to blame the local authority, as all but one of the secondary schools and many primary schools are academies and part of MATs.

Perhaps the formula for education funding is so linked to the county’s rank across all indices that the current funding formula for schools cannot compensate for the needs of Oxfordshire children living in its most deprived communities.

It is clear that there are issues nationally with the formula for the High Needs Block that funds SEND, but again does Oxfordshire lose out more than other areas? After all, it schools are generally highly regarded by ofsted; it has two world class universities, and leading science and technology companies driving the economy.

On the SEND issues, one question is whether the NHS is pulling its weight on supporting children with SEND? Assuming that the overall ranking for the county is not going to see any government be more generous to Oxfordshire with regard to funding, however the present county may be configured post local government reorganisation, then there must be a strong case to require the NHS to spend more resources on supporting children with special needs even if its overall ranking slips a few places as a result. This would reduce the need for the county, and the schools within the county, having to prop up spending on SEND that should really come from the health budget.  

There is no doubt Oxfordshire is not a county with a high degree of deprivation, but what deprivation there is can be concentrated in a few wards in the urban areas abut also spread out across the rural parts of the county. The former is easy to identify, the latter more of a challenge. Both need more funding for education.

6,500 extra teachers; myth or realistic aim?

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Hurrah for the Public Accounts Committee at Westminster (PAC). Today the Committee published a report into the government’s plans – or lack of them – to meet their target of 6,500 extra teachers – and lecturers. Increasing teacher numbers: Secondary and further education (HC 825)

The Committee is as sceptical as this bog has been about how the government intends to meet this target that was to be paid for by the addition of VAT on private school fees from January 2025.

One recommendation that the PAC doesn’t make is the creation of a Chief Professional Adviser on Teacher Supply. I held such a post between 1996 and 1997, but was never relaced when I left the then Teacher Training Agency. Such a designated post would draw together the work of civil servants who may change roles almost as frequently as ministers- What odds would one give on the present Secretary of State surviving a cabinet reshuffle before the party conference season? A central role with professional oversight might help the government achieve its aim.

Anyway, the PAC Recommendations included

  1. The Department should set out how it plans to deliver the pledge for 6,500 additional teachers to provide assurance that this will f ill the most critical teacher gaps. This should set out: • how the pledge will be split across schools and colleges; • the baseline and milestones so Parliament can track progress; and • how it will stay focused on teacher retention alongside recruitment.
  2. The Department should develop a whole-system strategy to help frame how it will recruit and retain school and college teachers. This should be based on a fuller evidence base, establish the preferred balance between recruitment and retention initiatives; set appropriate targets for those joining teaching through different routes; and include value for money analysis of different initiatives.
  3. The Department should work with schools and colleges to understand the reasons behind variations [in recruitment and retention], particularly within deprived areas and core subjects, setting this out in published information to help identify and share good practice and ideas on what works best.
  4. The Department should work to better understand why teachers leave and then better support schools and colleges in addressing these factors. This includes looking at changes to contractual and working conditions, such as flexible working, and at how teacher workload can be reduced. It should also collect data on the effectiveness of the newly-announced behaviour hubs, rolling them out further if they prove to be successful.
  5. The Department should assess the effectiveness and relative value-for-money of pay against other recruitment and retention initiatives, to make an explicit decision on whether it needs to do more to ensure teachers are paid the right amount.

The final recommendation will not be welcomed in HM Treasury if it means finding more cash for teachers’ pay, especially coming the day after resident hospital doctors threatened strike action over pay benchmarking. In paragraph 22 the Committee stated that

‘However, teacher pay has lagged behind others – in 2024, those working in the education sector were paid around 10% less in real terms than in 2010, with the wider public sector being paid on average 2.6% less than in 2010.’

Will a return to the 2010 benchmark now be the goal of the teacher professional associations?

In the next blog, I will discuss the committee’s idea for dealing with the thorny issue of providing teachers for deprived areas.

Music in schools

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The DfE carries out regular ‘wave’ surveys of teachers and school leaders in order to discover answers to specific questions about what is happening in schools. The most recent (June 2022) survey can be found at School and college panel: omnibus surveys for 2021 to 2022 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are lots of interesting questions in the latest survey, but the one that caught my eye was about music provision in schools. The data from the responses are separated into primary and secondary schools, as well as an overall figure for all schools.

Despite the frequent attacks on funding for music in schools, it is still an activity that takes place in most schools. This may be because Music is a statutory subject in the national curriculum for all children in primary school and for the first years of secondary (from key stage 1 to 3). Although academies don’t have to follow the National curriculum.

Most schools responding to the survey offered musical instrument lessons (89%), singing lessons (85%), and the opportunity to watch a live performance at school (71%). However, it is not clear whether this is to all children or just some.

Other activities that were less commonly offered included providing a space for rehearsals and individual practice (65%), the opportunity to watch a live performance off-site (58%), and a termly school performance (54%). For all activities, schools that were not offering them this academic year were unlikely to have plans to offer them in the future. These were more likely to be provided by secondary schools than primary schools.

Schools with the lowest proportion of Free School Meals (FSM)-eligible pupils were more likely than those with the highest proportion to offer a termly school performance (67% vs. 49%), to provide a space for rehearsals and individual practice (75% vs. 59%), to provide musical instrument lessons (97% vs. 84%), or to provide singing lessons.

This difference is also true for other activities as schools with the lowest proportion of FSM-eligible pupils were more likely than those with the highest proportion to offer singing lessons on a one-to-one basis (28% vs 9%) and small group basis (68% vs. 48%). Meanwhile schools with the highest proportion of FSM-eligible pupils were more likely than those with the lowest proportion to provide them on a whole class basis (81% vs. 68%).

Furthermore, Schools with the lowest proportion of FSM-eligible pupils were more likely than those with the highest proportion to provide musical instrument lessons on a one-to-one basis (77% vs. 39%). While those with the highest proportion of FSM-eligible pupils were more likely than those with the lowest proportion to provide them on a whole class basis (69% vs. 53%).

Schools with higher proportion of FSM-eligible pupils also seemed less likely to offer pupils a chance to play in an orchestra. The survey doesn’t ask whether this is due to such schools having fewer music specialists on the staff than schools with a smaller proportion of FSM-eligible pupils.

Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any questions about the type of music schools teach and how it might relate to different cultures from around the world? Perhaps that is a series of questions for another survey.

The differences between schools with different levels of FSM eligibility is a disappointing finding and might be worth looking at in relation to the levelling up agenda.

What’s the purpose behind school funding?

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The National Audit Office (NAO) has issued a report into school funding. https://www.nao.org.uk/report/school-funding-in-england/?slide=1

The present, and relatively new, National Funding Formula has exercised this blog on a number of different occasions. As recently as early May, I wrote that

The current National Funding Formula is fine as far as it goes. However, as I have written before on this blog, it is based upon a notion of equality that resembles the ‘equal slices of the cake’ model of funding distribution. That’s fine if that’s what you want out of the Formula, and the f40 Group of Local authorities have tirelessly campaigned for fair – more- funding for their areas. Again, they are right to do so.

However, if the new agenda has leveling up at its heart, then it is necessary to ask whether the present method of distributing cash to schools and other education establishments will achieve that aim? Leveling Up will need a new Funding Formula (posted 9th May 2021)

The NAO’s view as summarised in their conclusions is that:

‘With the introduction of the national funding formula, the Department has met its objective of making its allocations more predictable and transparent. However, it is difficult to conclude definitively on whether the Department has met its objective of allocating funding fairly with resources matched to need. There has been a shift in the balance of funding from more deprived to less deprived local areas. This shift has resulted mainly from changes in relative need and the introduction of minimum per-pupil funding levels. Although more deprived local authorities and schools continue on average to receive more per pupil than those that are less deprived, the difference in funding has narrowed. The Department must evaluate the impact of the national funding formula and minimum funding levels over time and use that information to inform whether further action is needed to meet its objectives.’

They also say of school funding in general that:

‘After real-terms reductions in school funding in the two years to 2018-19, the Department has since increased funding and plans further rises. Because of growing pupil numbers, average per-pupil funding was virtually unchanged in real terms between 2014-15 and 2020-21. The increases in cash funding did not cover estimated cost pressures between 2015-16 and 2019-20 but were projected to exceed them in 2020-21, although the Department has not factored in the potential impact of COVID-19 in this assessment.’

The message on deprivation is not good news, especially for the urban areas where large areas of deprivation are more closely linked to local government boundaries. The NAO make it clear that the DfE has allocated the largest funding increases to previously less well funded areas, which tend to be less deprived. (para 14)

Realistically, in my view, there needs to be a funding formula that is aligned with policy objectives. For instance, there should now be enough data about Opportunity Areas to see whether they have been any more successful that previous attempts at area based schemes to improve outcomes or whether national schemes such as the Pupil Premium offer better value for money?

This is an important report for anyone that needs to understand the niceties of school funding and there, as expected, some useful diagrams and charts to help explain how school funding works.

Can a mean be mean?

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When I first moved from teaching in a Tottenham secondary school to higher education in Oxford I brought with me an interest in the disparity of funding for schools. Partly this was because working in Haringey, and having been brought up right on the border with the London County Council – by then the Inner London Education Authority – I was aware of the disparity of funding for schools in Haringey compared with those just across the border in Hackney.

One of the early books I read on the subject was by John Pratt and his co-authors and was entitled ‘Depriving the Deprived’. Published in 1979 by what was then, Kogan Page. The book was based upon research that looked at school funding in one London borough over the course of a single year.

I was reminded of this when looking at the latest Free School Meals data for England, published by the DfE last Thursday. As a measure of potential deprivation it as good as it goes. If you consider Oxfordshire, generally rightly regarded as an affluent part of South East England, by the data on Free School Meals taken on census day for the six parliamentary constituencies, you find the following

% of children on Free School Meals on Census day Oxfordshire’s constituencies ranks

Oxford West

& Abingdon                           8th lowest out of 534 

Henley                                   28th lowest

Witney                                  35th lowest

Wantage                               55th lowest

Banbury                                94th lowest

Oxford East                        237th lowest -.i.e. about halfway 

Within Oxford East, some wards will be even worse ranked than others. Now this shouldn’t matter with a National Funding Formula for schools. But it does, because not all the funding calculations take into account differences between schools, rather than between local authorities. Indeed, if each district council area was a unitary council with education responsibility their funding might be different. But, none of the districts are large enough to ‘go it alone’ in the present funding regime.

As a result of the general affluence of Oxfordshire, the nine most deprived council wards in the county; five of which are in Oxford East constituency; three in Banbury and the other one in Oxford West and Abingdon constituency, probably lose out on funding compared to if they were part of a urban area. Such funding arrangements do not help close the achievement gap between high performing areas and the lowest performing schools in the county.

Now, of course, if all secondary schools in the county were in a single Multi-Academy Trust, the Trust could move funds around to mean the extra need of schools in deprived area, albeit by reducing the amount some schools received. However, with many different Trusts, and one remaining maintained secondary school, this option isn’t possible.

Another option of creating an ‘Opportunity Area’, used by Conservative governments in some other parts of the country, mostly in the North of England, doesn’t seem to be open to East Oxford, even though it has been suggested as an option.

So, taking the mean as a measure of funding may really mean depriving those living in some areas 40 years after the issue was exposed in one London borough.

Fines for parents: not main story on absences

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Yesterday, both politicians and the media were quick to latch onto the significant increase in the number of parents being fined for taking their offspring out of school during term-time to go on holiday in the data about absences published by the DfE.

Now, I won’t argue that this makes for good headlines, and is an interesting issue to discuss, and I will say more at a later point in this blog, if space allows. However, I don’t think it is the main story to emerge from the DfE’s data https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pupil-absence-in-schools-in-england-2017-to-2018

For me, the story that should feature in the headlines is that almost one in six pupils living in the most deprived IDACI areas were classified last year as persistent absentees. (The Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) measures the proportion of all children aged 0 to 15 living in income deprived families. IDACI bands are based on 2015 IDACI scores. Further information on IDACI scores may be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/english-indices-of-deprivation) that’s some 150,000 pupils out of 936,975 pupils. The percentage has been worsening each year since the new definition was introduced for persistent absentees some three years ago.

 

Pupil absence by Income Deprivation –percentages of persistent absentees (number of persistent absentees expressed as a percentage of the total number of enrolments.
2015/16 2016/17 2017/18 Change 2015/2016 to 2017/18 % change
0-10% Most deprived 15.3 15.7 16.0 0.7 5%
10-20% 13.6 13.9 14.3 0.7 5%
20-30% 12.4 12.8 13.1 0.7 6%
30-40% 11.4 11.7 12.0 0.6 5%
40-50% 10.4 10.6 11.0 0.6 6%
50-60% 9.1 9.4 9.8 0.7 8%
60-70% 8.2 8.5 8.8 0.6 7%
70-80% 7.2 7.4 7.9 0.7 10%
80-90% 6.4 6.6 7.1 0.7 11%
90-100% Least deprived 5.3 5.5 5.8 0.5 9%
Data uses IDACI decile of pupil residence

 

Now, it is true that the percentage of persistent absentees has increased in all IDACI deciles over the three years, but the relationship between the percentages of persistent absentees to IDACI band has remained constant.

The least deprived communities have always had the lowest percentage of persistent absentees, and the most deprived communities the highest figures. Now, it would be interesting to see these figures by year group, especially with the discussions about knife crime and its relationship to both exclusions and truancy. If that one in six overall in our most deprived communities is say, one in four in years 10 and 11, the government really ought to rethink the secondary school curriculum and its effects on the 50% of pupils not destined for higher education at age eighteen. Do we really want to alienate so many young people from our education system?

On the issue of term-time holidays, and the response to the Supreme Court judgement that altered the terms of the contract between the State and parents, there is a political decision to be made as to whether to accept the Court’s ruling or change the law?

In the table above it is obvious that although still small percentages, the percentages have been rising fasted among the least deprived groups, presumably as a result, at least in part, of more term-time holidays.