Tag Archives: DfE

Insufficient funding creates cost pressures

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Over the past week the DfE has been using statistics about school spending in the time period from 2002-03 to 2016-17 to try to rebut the challenges from the two head teacher associations about a decline in school funding. This culminated in headteachers walking to Downing Street last Friday.

At the end of August the DfE published a paper on trends in school spending during this period at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trends-in-school-spending-2002-to-2016 I confess that its publication had passed me by, but it was the Friday of bank holiday week when it first appeared.

The DfE acknowledge some issues with the times series, most notably the creation of a large number of academies in the secondary sector in 2011-12. Academies and maintained schools have different financial years, a complicating factor when compiling data of this type for all schools. The information also comes from two different sources.

However, the headline number was that total spending was 42% higher in 2016-17 compared with 2002-03. Spending on Non staff was 68% higher in 2016-17 than 2002-03. Staff spending was 33% higher.

Total spending per pupil has increased from £4,080 to £5,790 between 2002-03 and 2016-17 at 2016-17 price levels according to the DfE data.

Spending on Teaching Staff was 17% higher in 2016-17 than 2002- 03, whereas spending on Education Support Staff was 138% higher in 2016-17 than 2002-03. This partly reflect the large growth in this sector over the time period that included the introduction of non-contact time in the primary sector through the use of PPA time and the growth in support for pupils with SEN.

Part of the growth in Education Support Staff spending may be a reflection of the devolution of more and more back office functions to schools along with the decline in local authority support services, especially for academies. Whether or not the spending is always good value for money is for the National Audit office to decide. However much of those extra costs will have been absorbed in the extra spending on the back office was 105% higher in 2016-17 than 2002- 03, compared to a 42% increase in Total spending.

There is good news on both exam fees and energy costs. Both peaked at the end of the first decade and have bene reducing in cost since then. Even so, energy costs were some 75% higher in 2016-17 than at the start of the period.

Recent concerns over supply teacher costs are reflected in the fact that spending on agency supply teaching staff was 64% higher in 2016-17 than 2002-03, and no doubt explains why both main political parties have targeted this area of spending to work on reducing costs.

Missing is a breakdown of both recruitment costs across the sector and, a breakdown of leadership pay increases compared with the increase for classroom teachers. Now that might have been interesting to see last Friday. Also missing is a breakdown of transfer to either local authorities or MATs to show how central costs have changed over this period.

 

 

Teacher Analysis Compendium 4

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In my last blog post I drew attention to the Teacher Analysis Compendium 4 – subtitled Analysis of teacher supply, retention and mobility, and recently published by the DfE at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/teachers-analysis-compendium-4 in my last post I reviewed the application the DfE has also created for this work, although unlike most apps this is largely designed around on-line use and might be a challenge for mobile phone users if not for those with larger size tablets.

Anyway, the Compendium contains useful and often unique insights into the following areas of the teacher workforce:

Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses for potential trainees (SKE);

Teacher Subject Specialism Training (TSST);

Time series analysis of teachers in England using Teachers’ Pensions Scheme data;

Teachers returning to the profession;

The pool of qualified teachers who are not currently teaching in the state-funded sector;

Entrants and leavers to the teaching profession;

Retention of Newly Qualified Teachers;

Annex –missing teachers’ characteristics.

In times past, these type of statistics would have appeared in the annual Volume of Statistics on Teachers that were part of a series of education statistics put out by the Department each year. Whether either ad hoc compendiums of this nature or a regular series of volume of statistics is the best way for data of this type to be presented to the outside world is not for me to judge.

One area of debate that is likely to emerge from the consideration of the data in the Compendium is whether there ought now to be a more regional approach to the provision of teacher preparation places to meet the growing demand over the next few years, especially in and around the London area? This was something the National Audit Office raised in their Report of a couple of years ago.

The compendium might have usefully contained a table showing where completers obtained their first job in terms of whether it was within the same region or a different region from where they trained. Using the northings and eastings available it might also be possible to determine the relative distance from the training base the first job was obtained. Tracking the movements of these teachers might also be illustrative of how mobile the teaching force is and at what stages in their careers?

The work on Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses for potential trainees (SKE) is particularly interesting, as this is a growing area of the market for potential teachers. Such courses have the capacity to bridge the gap between an increasingly diversified higher education system, where degrees no longer match the needs of subjects taught in schools, if they ever really did, and the desire for specific subject knowledge from those that enter the teaching profession.

In a future Compendium, a look at the degrees of these that enter our primary schools might merit a section. Are primary schools still too heavily dominated by Arts and Humanities graduates that lack in-depth knowledge of science and mathematics and are the preparation course able to remedy any deficiencies to an acceptable level without sacrificing the knowledge and skills of trainees in other subject areas they may not have studies for several years?

 

 

Possible improvements in Key Stage 2 outcomes?

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The DfE has today published the provisional Key Stage 2 assessments. There are some in the Liberal Democrats that would do away with these measures. I think there is a need to make them less stressful for both pupils and teachers but equally there is a need to demonstrate an informed understanding of how our education system is performing. The data and DfE’s comments can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-curriculum-assessments-key-stage-2-2018-provisional The data are provisional at this stage. In December more finalised data will be published. However, I suspect the overall figures will remain broadly the same.

One interesting observation in the DfE’s comments on page 18 of their analysis is that local authorities with lower attainment levels tended to see the biggest changes in attainment since 2017. This is both good news and not unexpected. If 80% of children are reaching the expected standard, then the other 20% may require significant resources to help them achieve what is expected. Whereas, where it is less than 60% of pupils there are probably easier gains. It would be interesting when the final figures appear to see how pupils receiving the Pupil Premium have fared in term s of improvements.

Cartographers might question the selection of grade boundaries used in the DfE’s map as they provide a representational view that focuses on local authorities in the middle of the range. (Incidentally, the map is difficult to read as far as local authority names are concerned and could be improved). There isn’t anything wrong with this approach, but the range between the bottom of the light blue and the top of the darker blue is only six points, whereas the range in the outliers is much greater. Tough on a local authority with a score of 61 such as West Sussex that is the same colour as Peterborough with 52%. Incidentally, I am not clear why the scale starts at 42%? But, perhaps the DfE aren’t using the data from Table L1 for the map. They don’t provide a link to the data.

As in the past, girls generally outperform boys, except in mathematics, where in the scaled score, boys have a higher score than girls, as is also the case for those performing at the higher ability level. For detailed data about other characteristics we must wait until December. The data for middle schools can largely be regarded as being based upon so few schools as not to be really representative, unless you live in an area with these schools and might want to question their future.

The data won’t help the Humanists that want to see an end to faith schools as, the more specific the faith, the better the outcome in their schools with; Jewish, Muslim and Sikh schools all performing better than other schools and especially better than schools with no religious character.  This may well tell us more about parental choice and support by parents that make a positive choice of school than about anything else.

Finally, as the DfE helpfully points out, attainment in all of reading, writing and maths is not directly comparable to previous years because of changes to writing TA frameworks. That doesn’t stop the DfE producing some comparisons.

Am MIS system for teachers?

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Does the government need a Management Information System (MIS) for teachers? In the past the answer was obviously no, as teachers were employed by schools operated by local authorities, diocese or various charities, including some London livery company foundations. The government needed a register of Qualified Teachers, not least so it has something to bar miscreants from that prevented them working as teachers, but presumably not as always calling themselves teachers, since ‘teacher’ isn’t a reserved occupation term that can be only used by appropriately qualified professionals. However, a barred teacher might still be guilty of an offence, such as ‘obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception’, if they held themselves out to be a teacher when on the barred list.

But, I digress from the question of whether the government needs an MIS system? It clearly also need to know who are members of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme and their service record, but again, that isn’t an MIS system.

What the government does have, in place of an MIS system, is the School Workforce Census, taken annually in November that records teachers currently in service. Since the mistaken abolition of the General Teaching Council for England, in the bonfire of the QUANGOs that also saw several other useful bodies disappear for little good reason, it hasn’t had a registration scheme to track both current teachers and those that might possibly be available at some point in the future to the profession, although it knows the number of ‘out of service’ teachers not working in state-funded schools.

Now, as can be seen by the manner in which the DfE’s Teacher Supply Model uses the School Workforce Census data for planning purposes, what data there is can be helpful to government in managing the future shape of the workforce. However, it is always out of date and backward looking. As a result, unlike a good MIS system, it cannot spot changes that might be vital for future planning as they happen in real time, and certainly not as early as the end of the recruitment round for September of any year.

Just to provide one example; how is the battle between tighter resources for schools and the growth in secondary school pupil numbers at Key Stage 3 while they are still falling or level at Key Stage 5 playing out in the labour market for teachers in 2018? And, is the fall in pupil numbers at Key Stage 1 already affecting the demand for teachers?

If a curious MP asks a question in September of the DfE about the recruitment round for 2018 they will be referred to the 2017 School Workforce Census that provides the most recent data available to the DfE. Is that good enough in this day and age?

The School Workforce Census has been amended and is likely to be further amended in 2019 to ask questions both about recruitment and why vacancies have arisen, thus making it more like a MIS system.

Schools already have complex databases about their staff and TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk already tracks the majority of vacancies in state-funded schools across England as they arise. To create a MIS system would be to create a dynamic system that recorded changes in the workforce as they happen.

For instance, how many NQTs will leave their first jobs in the autumn term and is there anything similar about the characteristics of the schools, the new teachers, or the type of school in which they were working?

In 1991, I visited Pakistan to help with some CPD for school leaders. At that time the government’s MIS system for teachers, provided by an aid package could have answered that question. Ministers here, still won’t be able to answer it until spring 2020, and the results of the 2019 School Workforce Census are published. Not good enough?

 

 

CEOs pay: what’s happening?

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A recent Chartered Institute of Personnel Development survey found that median pay for bosses of the UK’s biggest companies hit almost £4m last year – up from about £3.5m in 2016. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45183881

That set me thinking about the work the DfE undertook earlier this year in relation to the pay of CEOs of Multi Academy Trusts and whether or not the findings had been published anywhere?

Readers will recall that Eileen Milner, the chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency, wrote in February to the chairs of 87 MATs employing individuals earning more than £150,000, asking them to explain their rationale for doing so by early March and to justify paying these salaries.

The intervention comes two days after the Department for Education minister, Lord Agnew, said that no MAT boss should receive a larger pay increase than their teaching staff and that CEOs should have their pay cut if there is a downturn in the performance of their schools. It follows a similar letter sent in December 2016 to single-academy trusts paying leaders more than £150,000. Lord Agnew’s February letter can be accessed at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/683075/Lord_Theodore_Agnew_letter_to_chairs_of_academy_trusts.pdf

Further letters appear to have been written to some MATs in April and July seeking more information. These can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/letters-to-academy-trusts-about-levels-of-executive-pay 28 letters were sent in December 2017; 88 in February 2018 and a further 96 letters in either April or July 2018. With a final return date of 20th July, the EFSC should now have sufficient information to publish a report on the state of the most highly paid staff in the public education service.

There may be an issue relating to pensions should those not undertaking any teaching or direct site leadership of a school remain in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. In the past, when becoming local authority staff most would have moved out of the TPS into the relevant LGPS for their authority. I don’t’ know how LGPS scheme managers and trustees, of which I am one for Oxfordshire’s scheme, would approach the arrival of such highly paid staff so near pensionable age, but the DfE does need to make clear the boundary for who can belong to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme even if they aren’t actually in a school?

The level of salaries paid to senior staff in the school system is clearly a matter that won’t go away. After all, perhaps 100 MATs paying more than most local authorities pay their Director of Children’s Services must be of concern in term of expenditure, especially once pension and other on-costs are added to the basic salary.

The problem really dates back to the Labour government and the development of Executive Headteacher roles without the government making it clear how such professionals should be paid. However, the seeds of that confusion date even further back into the early 1990s and the refusal to police the upper end of the Leadership Pay Scale for large schools facing recruitment difficulties. Failure to deal with a problem doesn’t always make it go away; sometimes it allows it to grow into a serious issue that is much harder to tackle as is now the case with the pay of CEOs of MATs.

 

 

 

Welcome -U- turn on EdTech

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Readers with long memories, or at least those who were around in 2010, will recall the Tories famous bonfire of the QUANGOs. Michael Gove was an enthusiastic supporter of the movement, axing the GTCE and BECTA and starting the process that lead to the disappearance of the NCTL and all the good work it had undertaken in both leadership and initial teacher education. There were other less visible casualties of which some survived in the private sector whilst others disappeared.

Axing rather than reforming BECTA, the long-standing QUANGO (Quasi Autonomous Non-Government Organisation) on EdTech was a short-sighted move that has back fired on the government. As a result, I welcome today’s announcement that the government has once again recognised the importance of technology in education.

Throughout my career, this is an area I have championed, from the early use of video cameras to record both PE lessons for skills development and rehearsals of plays to improve the schools’ entry into one-act play festivals in the 1970s, through both my time at a teachers’ centre – sadly missed professional development hubs much more engaging that the teaching schools of today – to my time in a School of Education in the 1980s where student were required to create a tape-slide presentation for one of their assignments.

Even during my brief stay at the TTA in the 1990s, I helped commission the famous internet café stand at careers’ fairs that replaced the coffee table and a couple of armchairs plus a few posters that was the staple fare before then as the main means of selling teaching to graduates..

Sadly, as the whiteboard programme showed, there has often been a tendency to put the phone before the mast (to update the cart before the horse metaphor) when it came to new technology in education. How many boring presentations on OHPs in the old days and PowerPoint these days have you say through by educators that ought to know they needed a bit of training to make best use of the technology. Still, this was the profession that axed voice coaching as not academic enough for education degree courses, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of understanding of technology in teaching and learning by policy makers.

I would start with requiring all those that work with teachers in training to have a qualification in the use and development of education technology. As a geographer, I would have interactive earthquake and volcano sites open on a whiteboard in my classroom and challenge pupils to indicate anything unusual. Do that with Key Stage 2 pupils, and I guess many would soon know more about earthquakes and volcanoes than their teachers.

I think that Caroline Wright, Director General at the British Educational Suppliers Association summed my view up perfectly when she said:

I am delighted that the Department for Education’s plans place teacher training and support at the heart and soul of their future approach to EdTech and recognises that EdTech, when introduced as part of a whole school strategy, has the power to help improve pupil outcomes, save teacher time and reduce workload burdens.

As TeachVac has demonstrated in the field of teacher vacancies, technology can be very disruptive to existing orthodoxies, but that is not an excuse to do nothing and cling on to the past. –U- turns are never easy, but this one is both necessary and long overdue.

 

 

Early Years are important for later life.

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The Early Years Foundation Stage profiles (EYFSP) for 2016-17 were published earlier this week by the DfE. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/early-years-foundation-stage-profile-results-2016-to-2017 interestingly, they show continued improvement in many areas.

The DfE noted that at a national level, 70.7% of children achieved a good level of development, an increase of 1.4 percentage points (ppts) on 2016. The same trend was seen in the percentage achieving at least the expected level across all early learning goals. This has increased by 1.7ppts from 2016. However, the average total point score has remained the same as 2016 at 34.5.

Girls continue to perform better in the profiles. However, the gender gap for the percentage of children achieving a good level of development has reduced from 14.7 ppts in 2016 to 13.7 ppts in 2017. Similarly, the gap for the percentage achieving at least the expected level in all early learning goals decreased from 15.7ppts in 2016 to 14.7 ppts in 2017. Both girls and boys have improved but boys have improved at a faster rate. The gap in the average total point score has decreased from 2.5 to 2.4 points. Nevertheless, there still remains a long way to go.

The Secretary of State has always been interested in social mobility. Indeed he helped found the All Party Parliamentary Group on the subject (APPG). In a speech this week he highlighted the importance of the home in both the pre-school years and the help and encouragement families can provide during the school years. He said the following, echoing a speech Nick Clegg made when he was deputy Prime Minister during the coalition;

On average, disadvantaged children are four months behind at age five. That grows by an additional six months by the age of 11, and a further nine months by the age of 16.

So, by the time they take their GCSEs they are, on average, 19 months behind their peers.

Then what? Well as I’ve said, your education stays with you.

Children with poor vocabulary at age five are more than twice as likely to be unemployed when they are aged 34.

It’s command of language, being able to express ourselves effectively, that is the gateway to success in school – and later on into later life.

As I said earlier, more than a quarter – 28% – of children finish their reception year still without the early communication and reading skills they need to thrive. It’s not acceptable and tackling it must be our shared priority. My ambition is to cut that number in half over the next ten years.  https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/education-secretary-sets-vision-for-boosting-social-mobility

Now money and Opportunity Areas may help, but how about inviting the script writers from Eastenders, Coronation Street, Emmerdate and the other soaps to a roundtable at Sanctuary Buildings to ask for some key plot lines. When did a school parent’s evening last feature in a soap? Indeed, how often do schools appear in soaps? More often they are relegated to their own genre. A national campaign using soft media such as the soaps to encourage families to support their children’s early and continued learning might help to shift attitudes to closing the gap the Secretary of State was highlighting in his speech.

As he said, the DfE has looked at the progress of children on free school meals early in the century and found that

Children eligible for Free School Meals when they are at school are 23% less likely to be in sustained employment at the age of 27, compared to their peers.

Now many of these adults are no doubt are in areas of high unemployment, but the more you make use of the education system, the greater it seems is your chance of employment as an adult. As Jack Tizard and his fellow researchers found in their study in Haringey in the 1970s, even parents that couldn’t read themselves could sit and help a child with their reading with better results than other more education related programmes. Their study showed a highly significant improvement by children who received extra practice at home in comparison with control groups, but no comparable improvement by children who received extra help at school. The gains were made consistently by children of all ability levels.*

*COLLABORATION BETWEEN TEACHERS AND PARENTS IN ASSISTING CHILDREN’S READING  J TIZARD, W. N. SCHOFIELD, JENNY HEWISON First published: February 1982 British Journal of Educational Psychology Volume 51 Issue 1.

 

 

 

QTS numbers: no room for complacency

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If you look at tables 6a and 6b of the ITT profiles published by the DfE this week, you can perhaps understand why some Ministers are sometimes dubious about a teacher recruitment crisis. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-performance-profiles-2016-to-2017

In a whole range of subjects, the percentage of trainees in 2016/17 in employment within six months of gaining QTS was lower than in the previous year. A simple reading of those percentages might make one think that there were more unemployed teachers looking for work than the previous year, so that was alright wasn’t it. Not so. Although the number of secondary phase trainees awarded QTS in 201/17 was the highest since 2011/12, a whisker up on the previous year, there were still a range of subjects where the number of trainees awarded QTS was down on the previous year. However, it is worth acknowledging that 2015/16 and 2016/17 were better years for the award of secondary QTS than the two previous year. Sadly, 2017/18 isn’t like to continue the improvement; 2018/19 also looks like being another challenging year.

The DfE data on those with QTS in employment looks at both employment in state-funded and non-state funded schools, because of how the data has been collected. It is to be hoped that tying in QTS to the School Workforce Census will eventually revel better data about how many of those gaining QTS start teaching in locations other than state-funded schools.

In Physics, where 88% of those with known destinations from the 2016/17 were in teaching by six months from gaining QTS, the percentage a falls to no more than 70% of those that started a teacher preparation course. That’s a lot of bursary cash not producing a teacher in a state-funded school.

On the other hand, 88% of physical education trainees that started a course were teaching somewhere by six months after the end of their course. This is despite not having access to any bursary during their training and accruing fee debts of around £9,000 on top of their undergraduate debts. But, I suspect that the option for these graduates are less than for Physics graduates.

There are still worrying trends in some subjects, when comparing the differences in the percentage of trainees awarded QTS. The difference includes both failures as well as those that left the course after 90 days and those that failed to pass the Skills Tests for teachers.  The percentage of final year secondary trainees awarded QTS fell by a percentage point between 2015/16 and 2016/17 from 92% to 91%. However, the overall figure contains a range from 96% of PE final year trainees at one end of the scale to 83% of those on Physics courses. Even that percentage is better than the 79% of Physics final year trainees awarded QTS in 2012/13. Mathematics seems to have been stuck at just less than 90% for the past few years, whereas art and design and music recorded percentages awarded QTS in the mid-90% range most years. It may be that in these subjects technical subject knowledge is less of an issue with trainees and so more time can be spent on the application of the subject knowledge to classroom practice.

After two relatively good years, when the DfE recognised that there was a potential for a serious crisis in new entrants to teaching and upped the marketing on teaching as a career, the next two years are likely to see fewer new entrants with QTS. This is just at the time when pupil numbers in secondary schools are once again on the increase. Whether that will matter in 2019 will depend upon how many teaching staff schools will be able to afford to employ: it certainly mattered in 2018.

 

 

Idle cash is not not useful cash?

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Is holding some £2.4 billion pounds of public money in reserves a good use of our money? The DfE revealed that in August 2017 academies and their Trusts were holding this sum in reserves against committed and potential future needs. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/728768/Academy_revenue_reserves_2016_to_2017.pdf.

The position seems to have worsened over the most recent period, as the DfE note states that: ‘This is a decrease of 0.6 percentage points from 94.5% of trusts in 2015/16. 95.7% of academies (6,715) were in trusts that were in surplus or breaking even at the end of 2016/17’. Despite noting that figures could not be provided at an individual school level, the DfE does state that:’ Smaller trusts are more likely to have a deficit. This means that only 4.3% of academies (300) were in trusts that were in deficit at the end of 2016/17.’ Of course it is possible for some schools in a Trust to have positive balances and others to have a deficit. Following Lord Agnew’s recent letter to auditors of academies and Trusts, it is perfectly possible to transfer funds between schools in this situation, something not possible in the maintained sector.

The note doesn’t seem to consider whether benchmarks for levels of reserves are appropriate for academies and MATs? In the past 5% of turnover was considered sufficient for secondary schools and 8% for primary schools to hold as reserves. Even allowing for central costs, MATs should not be holding significant amount sin reserves.

Earlier this week, I raised concerns with Oxfordshire’s the accounting for positive balances held by maintained schools and schools with deficits. I have the same concern about the use of a table showing ‘net’ reserves in the DfE’s note. Any lay person looking at the table and associated text might think that the net position was because deficits could be offset against surpluses. As noted, that is possible at the level of the schools within an individual Trust, but not between schools in different Trust as far as I am aware. For MATs the table really needs to be split into two sections; deficits that can be covered within a MAT and MATs where all schools are in deficit or stand-alone academies where there is no current provision for covering the deficit other than by reducing expenditure within the academy to a point where the deficit is eliminated.

The STRB might be helped to be made aware of any regional trends in schools with deficits that might relate to pay decisions. The alternative is that schools and MATs with deficits are randomly spread around the country and are the result of poor leadership rather than the consequence of any policy decision.

Although the Command Paper on Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU (Cm 9674) contains a section on rights to residence of EU citizens, the DfE could usefully publish a paper on how school budgets, including those of academies might be affected, should a percentage of EU citizens decide to return home, possibly because of their jobs transferring to another EU country, after March 2019 and Brexit.

Some five per cent of pupils in Oxfordshire’s schools have EU citizenship of a member state of than the UK. Some 14 schools, mostly in and around Oxford has more than 10% of such pupils at the last count. Any significant withdrawal might put their finance sunder some strain.

More pay: fewer teachers: worse PTRs?

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The 28th Report of the School Teachers Pay Review Body, published earlier today, provides a great summary of many of the points made on this blog over the past year. There are some good tables and graphs that summarise the situation regarding pay, recruitment and retention very well overall. However, the STRB might have looked at the primary sector in more detail, rather than just regarding it as a sector with a uniform set of issues. Data on leadership trends is also a bit on the thin side, which is surprising given that both associations representing school leaders are consultees and commented on concerns about recruitment.

The big issue arising from the Report is the extent to which schools will be able to afford the pay rise both for teachers and that to support and ancillary staff as well. As I suggested in my earlier post, before the report appeared, the settlement is going to cost schools real money. A secondary school with 60 teachers can expect an increase of perhaps between £70,000- £100,000 on its pay bill once on-costs have been taken into account. That’s a couple of classroom teachers or a review of the senior management team and perhaps one fewer deputy head and more reliance on assistant heads and teachers with TLRs?

I note that the STRB made the point, as I did earlier today, about the timing of their reports and the budgetary cycle in schools. How much did business managers put in the budget for this pay increase? Judging by the number of vacancies in the secondary sector so far this year, probably not as much as has been awarded in at least some schools.

How will the independent sector respond to this increase? This year saw the first reported decline in enrolments in their schools in the published DfE data on schools and pupils. Will it be possible to raise fees to cover the increases or might those schools be constrained in the increases on offer?

As I suggested in the earlier post, changes in recruitment on to teacher preparation courses as a result of the pay increase won’t be apparent until the 2020 recruitment round for new teachers. By then, secondary schools will be well into their growth cycle.

There is a very interesting chart on page 47 of the STRB Report showing the proportion of postgraduate entrants by different routes into teaching for 2016/17 and 2017/18. The DfE in their evidence stated that  2017/18 was the third successive year in which over half of recruitment to postgraduate ITT was to school-led routes, with such routes accounting for 53% of ITT recruitment in that year. (Para 2.13) The chart shows that although true, there was a decline in 2017/18 compared with the previous year in the percentage of trainees on school-led routes.

Finally, it is always difficult to proof read documents prepared at the last minute, as some of the posts on this blog bear testimony. However, the footnote 3 on page 12 suggests a degree of wishful thinking.