Tag Archives: DfE

Still looking for teachers

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As of Sunday three-quarters of the undergraduate teacher training courses in England were still in ‘clearing’. That was just over 30 courses. What was interesting was the large number of church universities that weren’t in clearing. Indeed, even if you exclude the University of Durham from the list of church universities, despite the historical association between its teacher education college and the Church of England, more than half the list of institutions not in clearing were church universities, with Reading, Leeds and London Metropolitan Universities being the three exceptions.

From a quick look through the clearing courses, secondary design and technology and some of the sports Science courses related to teaching, as well as primary teacher training courses are looking to fill their remaining places. Of course, the clearing lists don’t tell anything about how many places are still available. Is it one at each institution, a tiny percentage of the overall total, or a more substantial number? Perhaps how many courses are still in clearing in a couple of weeks time will provide a better indication of what is happening?

With the skills tests to pass, and most courses starting around the 15th of September, although one or two start at the beginning of the month, there is little time to spare, especially  with the bank holiday to be taken account of as well.

How far the switch of numbers resulting from some providers returning places, and the National College having had to reallocate them in the early summer to different providers, has led to so many institutions offering at least one teacher training place in clearing cannot be ascertain from the raw figures. However, as I have constantly said in the past, we need to ensure the best possible candidates are recruited into teaching.

The DfE is undertaking a study into recruitment and retention, and it might be helpful if they evaluate as a part of that study whether there are differential retention rates from the different types of training. We do need to know the true costs of all training routes if some have a lower retention rate than others.

If we assume a training cost of £10,000 per student per year allowing for expenditure not currently recovered through fees, then a five per cent difference in retention rates might cost several million pounds extra in training. For this reason alone, it is worth monitoring the different routes. However, since one route is never likely to be able to supply all the need for new entrants, it may be necessary to accept some differential wastage rates; but work to reduce them.

Nevertheless, if the main reasons for leaving the profession are retirement and for family reasons, it is worth looking hard at those other cases where some malfunction in the system has caused a person to quit the profession that they trained for. Teachers are a precious resource; we cannot afford to discard them lightly.  

Minister hides his light under a Select Committee

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I needs must start this post with an apology, and a confession. Despite my interest in teacher supply and training, I missed the Minister for Schools announcement about the changes to the Teacher Supply Model. By way of mitigation, I would point out that the announcement appeared in a reply to the Education Select Committee following his appearance in front of the Committee in February to talk about underachievement by white working class children, and has seemingly been documented as DfE supplementary evidence to that inquiry. For those of you having difficulty finding what he said, the link is http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/education-committee/underachievement-in-education-of-white-working-class-children/written/7989.html

What is of interest is David Laws updating of the Committee about the Teacher Supply Model. After all the usual platitudes about how well the Department and NCTL are doing on teacher recruitment and retention, and that School Direct is proving popular on the basis that schools have been signing up for places, David Laws confirmed to the Committee that the Teacher Supply Model was being redeveloped, and that the replacement is expected to be ready by autumn 2014; presumably in time to run the numbers for teacher preparation courses starting in 2016. The Minister didn’t say whether the work on the Model was being done entirely in-house or whether the DfE had convened a group of experts to help with the necessary changes.

However, that may not matter because the Minster also told the Committee that the new Model would be available online, as previously recommended by the Committee, and advocated by myself since I first appeared in front of a Select Committee to discuss the modelling of teacher supply in 1996.

David Laws went further by stating that publication of the Model will enable public examination of the assumptions and working of the Model to help estimations of future teacher demand and projected ITT recruitment. Furthermore, he told the Committee, worked up examples will be included in the online model. This is good news, as it will help the current debate about why so few teachers of English are needed when fewer pupils are being taught by teachers qualified in the subject.

However, the fact that David Laws then went on to offer the Committee data from as far back as 2009-10 about teacher stocks and flows as if this is the latest available to the DfE raises considerable concern in my mind about his understanding of the function of planning. And there may be revealed one of the serious issues in the debate about whether we should be planning teacher training or leaving it to the market as Mr Taylor of the NCTL would seem to prefer. As I have pointed out in the past, information gleaned at one stage of an economic cycle may not be helpful in planning for another stage, so using information about teacher flows during a recession, and the deepest post-war recession there has been, may not be helpful in projecting training numbers needed in 2016, when the economy is still hopefully motoring forward, unless that is teacher supply is entirely disconnected from the wider economy.

Finally, it will be interesting to see how the teacher supply model copes with shortfalls in recruitment to training. Exposing this issue, and making sure it is debated, is a key feature that will make the current discussion about creating sufficient teacher numbers different from past periods of teacher shortage. This letter to the Select Committee has placed one more brick in the wall.

 

Pay rise for Maths teachers?

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Rather late in the life of this government the DfE seems to be learning some basic economic truths. Mostly notably they have discovered that when there is a shortage, the price goes up. However you dress up the announcement (made on a bank holiday Monday) that the DfE has done a deal with big business to deprive them of maths PhDs and to divert these scare resources into teaching at a price of perhaps £40,000 plus on-costs per year it must be a reaction to a shortage somewhere.

Indeed, just last week the DfE published an interesting paper on Indicator 19 of the School Workforce Survey showing the percentage of teachers with a relevant qualification teaching in English, mathematics, and the sciences across secondary schools had declined in all three subjects between the first School Workforce survey of 2010 and the latest conducted in 2013. This is despite improved coverage of the curriculum indicator across schools meaning that teacher coverage has increased from 66% to 81%, although the effective coverage rate has remained static at just under 75%.

The decline in the percentage of maths and science lessons taught by teachers with a relevant qualification – at least an ‘A’ level in the subject – is not a surprise. In view of the reductions in training numbers for teachers of English the fall from 88.4% to 84.8% in the percentage of English lessons taught by those with a relevant qualification must be a wake-up call, and vindicates some of the comments made on this blog over the past year. This is not a case of needing to pay more, but of increasing the training numbers to meet demand.

If I were a current maths teacher, or one in training, I would be paying special attention to the details of the DfE announcement when they appear and deciding what line I would take tomorrow with my head teacher. Now that schools have been removed from the shackles of a rigid pay scale, and left to fight out salaries with their staff many maths teachers may now find it worthwhile asking for a pay rise on the back of today’s announcement. This is especially if they teach Years 11-13. Their colleagues in the FE sector might also look to see whether the announcement is enough to seek a transfer into the school sector.

A helpful HEFCE publication http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/2011/201133/11_33.pdf shows that there were just 255 UK domiciled starters of full-time PhDs in the mathematical sciences in 2009-10, plus a small number of starters on part-time courses. Allowing for non-completion, this might generate around 200 possible new maths teachers, if all new UK domiciled PhDs in the mathematical sciences were diverted into teaching. As a morale booster, it certainly sounds good, but those sorts of numbers are only half the figure the DfE calculated in its evidence to the STRB that would be needed to extend maths teaching to all post-16 year-old pupils just in schools. This number would do nothing to alleviate the growing shortage of qualified maths teachers for years 7-11 in secondary schools.

Although worth a try, especially as it probably isn’t costing the government much in hard cash, this scheme seems more of a gimmick than a solution to a problem the government seemingly now acknowledges needs solving.

This blog has been based upon press reports and will be updated after the DfE publishes the details of the Scheme.

Academies: the DfE charm offensive starts here

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Now it may be entirely coincidental, but over the past couple of weeks there has been discussion on the internet about the powers of academies, and specifically about their control of the assets in the Trust deed, and then yesterday the DfE have published a paper entitled Academies; a myth buster. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/academies-a-myth-buster Hopefully, this document will survive in the public domain longer than the last DfE publication reviewed on this blog.

The DfE document addresses the land point as follows:

When a community school becomes an academy, the new academy trust takes on the legal title to the land from the council, doesn’t it?

Wrong. When a community school becomes an academy, legal title is not transferred from the council to the academy trust. The freehold is retained by the council and a lease is granted to the trust.

Note, that the DfE only mentions community schools. My understanding is that if a school is a Foundation School the situation over the title to the land may be different. Indeed, there have been suggestions that some schools have looked into a two stage process of becoming a Foundation School, and then becoming an academy specifically because of the land issue. If there is a loophole with regard to ownership of the land and buildings that must remain public assets, then it should be closed forthwith.

There is another part of the document that reads rather clumsily in the present world of Commissioners and the central control of all schools from Westminster.

There isn’t much financial accountability around academies though, is there?

Wrong: the financial accountability systems in place for academies are more rigorous than those for local authority-run schools and they mean that not only do any problems get uncovered but also that there can be swift resolution of any issues. The spotlight of this accountability system demonstrates that academies cannot hide from their responsibilities and are held to account for their actions. There have been almost 200 detected cases of fraud in council-run schools.

By locally-authority run schools the DfE author presumably means community and voluntary schools. But, to describe then as locally-authority run is an insult to reality. Perhaps that’s why they are later called council-run schools, a quaintly archaic term. Interestingly, although in 200 of these schools, that set and control their own budgets, there have been cases of fraud over an undefined period of time the document doesn’t say how many cases of fraud, if any, there have been in academies during the same period, thus perhaps creating a new myth that academies don’t have any cases of detected fraud.

Finally, the DfE is categorical about profit answering that:

Oh right – but academy trusts are private companies and can make a profit.

That’s not true either: all academy trusts are charitable trusts and they cannot make a profit.

But, the DfE doesn’t say anything about either academies accumulating surpluses or the need for arm’s length contracting, especially where the academy is part of a chain that may encourage individual schools towards particular contractors.

One myth that isn’t addressed in the DfE document is that councils cannot force academies to help when pupil numbers in an area increase and the academy has spare places. Perhaps because academies can behave in that way, so it isn’t a myth, even if it could cost the council thousands of pounds in extra transport charges finding other schools for the pupils further away from the academy with spare places.

Normal service has been resumed

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The technical difficulties replying to comments made to me have been resolved. The issue was with my internet browser. I was using Chrome but have switched to Firefox through which I can access all parts of my blog again, including updating posts and replying to comments. My apologies for the down time. The rest of this post still remains relevant

However, I am not the only one to have had difficulties. The DfE seem to have pulled the research and priorities document from their web site that featured in my post of earlier this week. If anyone downloaded a copy before it was removed, I would welcome a copy. You can email me via the comments page, and once WordPress is fully functional again I will be able to access it.

The suite of DfE documents that emerged, and in some cases disappeared, today did seem to lack coordination, and it is tempting to wonder which Minister gave approval for their release?

The whole saga might merit a footnote in Private Eye.

Schools still hoarding cash

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Figures released by the DfE yesterday at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/264737/SR54-2013Text.pdf suggest that the dwindling band of maintained schools are still not spending all their revenue income. With the revision of the national funding formula yet to see the light of day, these figures might suggest that the current method of funding schools isn’t achieving its key aim of improving teaching and learning as much as possible.

According to the DfE, in 2012-13, the total revenue balance across all Local Authority maintained schools was £2.2 billion, a decrease of £0.1 billion (5.0%) over the 2011-12 revenue balance figure of £2.3 billion. This equates to an average surplus in each maintained school of just over £113,000. However, according to the DfE the total revenue balance of £2.2 billion is 7.5% of the total revenue income across all LA maintained schools. Because of the schools becoming academies that have dropped out of the tables, this is an increase of 0.4 percentage points in revenue balances compared with the 2011-12percentage of 7.1%. So, not only are many maintained schools hording even more cash than last year, but roughly one pound in every £14 the average school receives isn’t spent in the year it is received.

With almost totally devolved budgets, it is legitimate for schools to maintain balances, and the DfE looks at 5% for secondary schools and 8% for other schools as being a reasonable level. There were apparently 464 schools that exceeded this level of reserves. Interestingly, 73 of these schools were in London. Together the London schools were holding in excess of £12 million pounds in reserves above the recommended limit. £2 million of that was apparently held by just four schools in Tower Hamlets: an excess of more than half a million pounds at each school.

By contrast, the average excess reserves in Newham, the next door borough, amounted to just £19,000. Because academies have a different financial year to maintained schools they are excluded from the figures, so comparisons between authorities may not always be helpful, but they do raise questions about what is happening to money lying idle for several years. One Tower Hamlets schools has apparently had over £1 million in uncommitted balances for the past five years since the 2008/09 financial year according to the DfE figures, and appears in the latest table with an uncommitted revenue balance of nearly £1.5 million.

Of course, there are also schools with deficit budgets, but the number has been reducing. According to the DfE, there were 1,111 maintained schools with a revenue balance deficit compared to more than 18,000 schools with a surplus. The total deficit across all LA maintained schools that had a deficit was £81.2 million, a decrease of £28.7 million (26.1%) over the 2011-12 total revenue balance deficit figure of £109.9 million. This equates to an average deficit in each school with a deficit of just over £73,000. The average figure for balances among primary schools in surplus was £93,000 and for secondary schools in surplus it was £405,000.

Last year, I suggested that some of the reserves should be used to create work experience for unemployed young people. In some of the London boroughs with high youth unemployment that might remain a good idea.

Christmas presents

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Last Friday afternoon the DfE published their evidence to the Teachers’ Pay Review Body: not many noticed. The Sunday Times published something, and indeed rang me last Friday morning to ask about numbers of unqualified teachers. Here’s what I told them:

An unqualified teacher is either a trainee working towards QTS; an overseas trained teacher who has not exceeded the four years they are allowed to teach without having QTS; or an instructor who has a particular skill who can be employed for so long as a qualified teacher is not available.  

As a result it may be that the increased number of School Direct trainees that started in September 2013 are being counted in the totals for the first time. However, as reports from ASCL of staffing pressures do seem to be emerging that may also contribute to the increase. The continued switch of schools from LA to converter academy makes year on year comparisons between types of school challenging. 

2012 Workforce Tables had following for unqualified teachers:
2010   2011   2012
LA Primary                                   4,100 4,200 3,700
Pri Academies                                          100    500
LA secondary                             8,100 5,400  3,400
Academies                                           3,800  4,700
Total non-academies            11,600 10,400 10,600
Academies                                2,200  3,900  5,300
Total publicly
funded education                 17,800 15,800 14,800

Also

Of the 2453 academies in the 2012 Workforce Census 

915 employed 100% QTS teachers

65 data NA

6 suppressed data – too small to disclose

1467 or 59% at least 1 unqualified teacher

Of those with highest %s 2 were special schools, and 1 a post-16 campus. Only 6 schools with below 50% qualified teachers

On free schools

Of the 88 in the census, 37 employed 100% QTS teachers; 12 data suppressed; and 8 NA.

So 31 of the 88 known to employ unqualified teachers. That’s 35%.

So, if the 2013 Workforce Survey conducted in November is showing something different it may well is down to School Direct. If that is the case, then it is time for a new category of ‘trainee teacher’ to distinguish trainees from those employed because a qualified teacher either isn’t wanted or cannot be found. Indeed, there might be two categories, one for intentional use of unqualified staff and the other due to absence of a qualified teacher. The term ‘teacher’ might even become a reserved occupational term reserved for those with QTS.

If the DfE’s evidence to the STRB passed almost without notice, then the Labour Party’s Christmas Eve press release warning of a shortage in trainee teachers under this government seems to have received even less recognition so far despite the DfE going to the trouble of issuing a rebuttal. You can read Labour’s research at http://www.labour.org.uk/news Regular readers of this blog will recognise most of the figures, although the number of trainees recruited for 2013/14 is less than in the DfE’s November census for some unexplained reason.

Now normally I wouldn’t quote from a Labour Press release, but as its Christmas, and what it says chimes with what I have been saying both here and with Chris Waterman elsewhere, I am happy to provide the link. I also notice that the release doesn’t offer any policy alternative to the problem: so no responsible alternative government here then.

Trainee teacher recruitment is likely to be a key issue in 2014 with both Michael Wilshaw and the head of NCTL, Mr Taylor, likely to be making speeches in January about teacher training. Both are Gove’s men, so expect School Direct to feature more positively than higher education. But look for the balance of comments between primary and secondary for, in my judgement, it is the former that needs more attention than the latter in terms of reviewing how we prepare teachers for the classroom.

I hope readers enjoy Christmas and the festivities of this time of year through to the start of 2014 and the first anniversary of this blog.

Funding for new school places: who has the ultimate responsibility?

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The Public Accounts Committee has just published a short report into the Department for Education and the capital funding for new school places* following anxiety about the supply of places to meet the growth in the school population. It is worth highlighting the following paragraph from the summary of the Committee’s Report:

The Department does not have a good enough understanding of what value for money would look like in the delivery of school places, and whether it is being achieved. In response to fluctuations in local demand local authorities can direct maintained schools to expand or close but do not have this power over academies or free schools. Local authorities need to have mature discussions with all parties, including the academies and free schools, to resolve any mismatch between demand and supply for their communities as a whole. We hope that discussions at local level always prove successful, but the Department needs to be clear about how it will achieve the best value for money solutions in the event that local discussions fail to achieve a resolution. This has to be in the context that Free Schools and Academies are directly accountable to central Government, but the Government has no mechanism to force them to expand to meet the demand for school places. In addition, the Department does not sufficiently understand the risks to children’s learning and development that may arise as authorities strain the sinews of the school estate to deliver enough places. The imperative to increase the quantity of school places should not be achieved at the expense of quality.

This debate was further articulated in paragraph 14 of the report. The Committee asked the Department how it would resolve matters if, for example, it would be better for an academy or free school to expand or to close in accordance with changing demand in an area, but the particular school(s) did not wish to do so. The Department told The Committee that such situations are best settled by sensible discussions between professionals in the area concerned. The DFE said that such situations are intensely local and that, as opposed to a central direction from government, it would rather see local authorities and schools working collectively to meet such challenges. The Department assured us that it monitored these matters closely and that all cases so far had been resolved properly by discussion. The Department stated that, were it not to find a solution through discussion, it would look at the individual circumstances and make decisions accordingly. The parties involved need to be confident that a process to resolve these matters exists.

The Committee’s Report commented it hoped that discussions at local level always prove successful; it added, however, we would like to receive greater reassurance about the actions the DfE will take in order to help resolve matters to achieve the best value for money solutions in the event that local discussions break down.

Now in response to what is happening in Oxfordshire, I find the DfE’s comments curious since they have side-stepped the question of what happens if the DfE sanctions a new school where there is clearly an over-supply of places in the short-term. Both the UTC in Didcot and the Studio School in Banbury are in areas where the local supply for school places in the 14-18 age range is clear sufficient for the next few years, unless there is a dramatic upturn in house building. That hasn’t stopped the DfE introducing these two new schools that will make the position in terms of overall places even worse in the short-term, as I indicated in an earlier column. Whether the capital resources would have been better applied providing additional primary school places in schools where parents want their children to attend is a moot point. Indeed, the Committee recognised that the present system might force local authorities to expand poorly performing schools, because they had no choice of an alternative.

It does seem odd that more than 140 years after the creation of State Education such a basic issue as the provision of places for every child should have caused so much confusion and anxiety. It may be fun to create new types of school, reform the curriculum, or even take on the teachers, but a Secretary of State also has a Department to run, and successive holders of that office under both the present coalition and the previous government don’t always seem to have realised their duty of care to provide a service fit for everyone who uses it, and not some of them. The next crisis in Minister’s in-trays is probably around the matter of teacher supply. Let us hope that they don’t make the same mistakes as has happened with the supply of school places. The provision of teachers is, after all, just as basic an issue as the supply of places. After 140 years we ought to be getting both right not risking serious shortcomings in both. That’s not the way to a world-class education system.

* http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmpubacc/359/35904.htm