Tag Archives: DfT

Who have schools been kept open for?

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) attendance in education and early years settings – summary of returns. The DfE has today published a summary of four weeks’ of the educational establishment data up to 4pm on Friday 17 April 2020. This includes the Easter Bank holiday days when, of course, very few children used the school facilities available. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-attendance-in-education-and-early-years-settings

Picking the headlines form the returns the DfE state that

  • The attendance rate among pupils in educational establishments was around 1% during the week commencing 13 April 2020, which would have usually been part of the Easter holidays for most schools. Attendance was initially above 3% in the week commencing 23 March 2020.
  • The number of teachers in attendance has also fallen since then, suggesting that establishments are adapting to lower numbers of pupils and the latest advice on social distancing.
  • It was estimated on 16 April that 65,000 children were attending early years childcare – about 4% of the number of children who usually attend childcare in term time.

12,800 establishments provided a response to the DfE survey on Friday 17 April. This represents 52% of all establishments. The key findings were adjusted by the DfE for non-response (the report includes a note on the methodology for dealing with non-response and scaling up):

  • 61% of establishments were open – around 15,100 establishments. This has been stable during the most recent two weeks, having decreased since the first week of partial closures (when around 19,000 were open).
  • The most recent data suggests around 84,000 children attended an educational establishment on Friday 17 April, representing 0.9% of pupils who normally attend. Our analysis suggests that attendance on Monday 23 March was over 3% and that the attendance rate gradually fell – reaching 1.3% on Monday 30 March then 0.9% on Monday 6 April. Attendance during the following two weeks remained stable. This two week period of lower attendance corresponds with the Easter break, although for some parts of the country this would have started on 30 March and so attendance may increase from 20 April. In general, attendance has been higher mid-week.

24,000 of the children in attendance on Friday 17 April were classed by schools as vulnerable, down from 29,000 on Friday 3 April. We estimate this represents around 5% of all children and young people classified as ‘Children in Need’ or who have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

  • 62,000 of the children in attendance on Friday 17 April were classed by schools as children of critical workers, down from 85,000 on Friday 3 April. We estimate that this represents around 2% of all children of critical workers, down from around 3% on 3 April.
  • These were cared for by 59,000 teaching staff and 43,000 non-teaching staff. The number of teachers in attendance continues to fall having been around five times this figure at the start of the first week of partial closures, suggesting that establishments are adapting to lower numbers of pupils and the latest advice on social distancing.

This is an impressive report to be produced so quickly. Sadly, we cannot tell from this report whether certain parts of the country are doing better than others at managing the education scene in these different and difficult times as the data is solely for England as a whole at this stage.

No doubt, the DfE that is calling local authorities on a regular basis, and presumably the larger MATs and diocese as well, now has a handle on what is going well in some parts of the country, and where there are still issues.

Officers, CEOs of MATs and headteachers will now be thinking about how the structure of a return to a post-modern world in the real sense of the term will be handled. The last thing we want or need is schools becoming transfer sites for the virus, and a spike in patients working in education settings because of a poorly thought through return to school.

One question also now emerging is; show Year 10 and Year 12 pupils be required or offered a chance to repeat the year that they will have missed nearly half of? If so, how can it be handled?

Who cares about school leadership and governance?

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What’s happening to both the Teaching Schools programme and the idea of National Leaders of Education and of Governance? The DfE faithfully reports the numbers in each of these categories https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teaching-schools-and-system-leadership-monthly-report with reports from September 2019 back to June 2018 on the DfE Website. Earlier reports seems to be archived and are not easy to find.

The DfE notes that Designation rounds for National Leaders of Education and teaching schools closed in May 2018 and designation rounds for National Leaders of Governance closed in May 2017.

The DfE is currently reviewing the current structure of system leadership to ensure the quality of system leadership remains as high as possible. The teaching school hubs test and learn phase, launched in May 2019, builds on the success of the teaching schools programme and is the first part of the department’s plans to review system leadership.

The number of system leaders who are currently designated is actively managed and the department keeps these matters under review.

As a result, it is perhaps not surprising to find that numbers in the different categories have reduced across the board between June 2018 and September 2019 as presumably few new additions have been made to replace those lost for various reasons.

June 2018            September 2019               Change                                 Percentage Change

Teaching

Schools                 668                         618                                         -50                            -7%

Alliance

Teaching

Schools                 835                         734                                         81                           -10%

National

Leaders of           1319                       1087                                  -232                            -17%

Education

National

Leaders of           442                          363                                       -79                         -18%

Governance

Source DfE publications for relevant months

Probably most worrying is the reduction in National Leaders of Governance. With an education system where governance is a muddle and different schools operate under vastly different rules depending upon whether they are Maintained, Voluntary and Maintained, Stand Alone academies or Free Schools or members of Multi-Academy Trusts, there is a need for leadership that NLG can help provide.

Without the backing of the National College, now fading into little more than a memory, there is a need to provide support and development for leadership and career development the system. It is not clear where the impetus is now coming from. Perhaps the Secretary of State might care to make a keynote speech about this? However, I suspect nothing will happen this side of a general election and it will be anyone’s guess who might be occupying the Minister’s Office in Sanctuary Buildings then.

When I started in teaching in the early 1970s, there was little support for leadership, but it became an issue as the decade progressed, so much so that in 1978 I ran my first leadership course for middle leaders in schools. Sometimes it now feels as if the whole of the work undertaken since then has been discarded, and we are back to a free for all with no clear direction of travel for leadership training, development and support.

No doubt the review of the present structure will make suggestions: they cannot come soon enough in my opinion.

 

Don’t forget rural areas

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When Chris Grayling was the Secretary of State for Transport he announced a new rail saver card for 16-17 year olds. From September, this group will now have access to some of the cheapest peak time rail fares, not only to travel to and from college and school, but also for leisure use.

The DfT, now under new leadership, recently issued a press notice about the new card https://www.gov.uk/government/news/over-one-million-people-to-save-hundreds-as-new-16-17-saver-launches-cutting-cost-of-rail-travel-for-teenagers There must be questions about the claim of the number of young people that will benefit, especially in the absence of any indication that you don’t need to buy the card if you live in London and just travel to and from school or college. This is thanks to TfL arrangements that have increasingly taken many suburban rail lines into the overground network. The annual saving of an estimated £186 is good news for those that use the train, but not for all young people.

My concern has always been that this initiative does nothing for young people living in rural areas some distance away from rail lines and that cannot use them to access school or college places. In Oxfordshire, Witney, Burford, Wantage, Farringdon, Chipping Norton, Watlington and Wheatley, along with a host of other towns and villages, don’t have direct access to a railway station. Why hasn’t the government done a similar deal with the privatised bus companies to help these young people?

Alternatively, having raised the learning leaving age to 18, why hasn’t the DfE responded to this initiative by looking to change the home to school transport regulations so the upper age limit for free travel is 18 and not 16. This would come at a price to public finances, and would be more expensive to the public purse than a deal with bus operators, but to do nothing is a slap in the face for young people living in rural areas, especially if the Department for Transport is also interested in making it more difficult for them to use their own transport to reach schools and colleges, and has done nothing to make cycling safer.

This anti-rural area bias is just the sort of issue that might tip the balance in a few rural constituencies, were there to be a general election in the autumn. My Lib Dem colleagues could well mount campaigns along the lines of ‘Tories Take Rural Family vote for Granted’ and see what happens.

I haven’t seen any response from the National Union of Students or any of the teacher associations with members in rural areas. Neither have I seem the Local Government Association take up the cause of young people in rural areas. There is little time to change the situation for September, but I hope schools and colleges, where some pupils can benefit from the new card, will take action to ensure other students don’t drop out of education because of the cost of travel to school and college on top of all the other costs of studying faced by that age group.