Tag Archives: disadvantage

Will the 6,500 new teachers be heading for schools in disadvantaged areas?

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Increasing teacher numbers in disadvantaged areas and core subjects. I was very happy when I read this heading in today’s Public Account’s Committee report on ‘Increasing Teacher Numbers’. Increasing teacher numbers: Secondary and further education (HC 825)

However, when I turned to paragraphs 25-29, this section just seemed like an afterthought. How depressing was it to read that

‘Schools and further education colleges are responsible for deciding the staff they need and recruiting their own workforces. Local authorities employ teachers in maintained schools.’ Para 25

There is nothing factually incorrect in the statement, but although local authorities are the de jure employers of teachers in maintained schools, ever since the devolution of budgets in the 1990s, local authorities have had little to do with the hiring policies for teachers in these schools, and nothing to do with the academy sector.

The Committee did acknowledge that

‘Those schools with higher proportions of disadvantaged pupils tend to have higher turnover rates and less experienced teachers. This impacts the government’s mission of breaking down the barriers to opportunity and means disadvantaged children are at risk of being locked out from particular careers.’

Teachers in schools with higher proportions of disadvantaged pupils are also less experienced

‘In 2023–24, 34% of teachers in the most disadvantaged schools had up to five years’ experience (20% in the least disadvantaged schools).’

They cited the examples of computer science and physics

‘In the most disadvantaged areas, 31% of schools do not offer Computer Science A-level, compared to 11% of schools in the least disadvantaged areas, due to a lack of trained teachers. For Physics A-level, this is 9% compared to 1%.’

This will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog. Here is the link to a post from the 21st July 2023, almost two years ago.

Free School Meals and teacher vacancies | John Howson

Thos who know my background will know that I started teaching in a school in a disadvantaged part of Tottenham in 1971, and this issue has been one that has concerned me throughout my career in education. I was, therefore, disappointed to read that

‘We asked the Department when we could expect there to be less variation between schools in the most and least disadvantaged areas, but it did not commit to a timeframe. Instead, it noted that its retention initiatives providing financial incentives were targeting schools and colleges with the highest proportion of disadvantaged students.’

This seems to me to be as close to a non-answer as one can expect. Indeed, looking in detail at the oral evidence session, this is an area where answers from the senior civil servants in my opinion suggested little hope, and not as much concern for the values implied in the questions that I would have liked to have heard. In reality, past experience tells me that it is falling rolls and fewer job opportunities that will propel teachers towards schools where they would otherwise not take a teaching post. Iti s the economy, not the DfE that will improve the life chances of children in those schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged children. This is at the same time as the lives of their parents may be worsened by unemployment and welfare cuts. It’s a funny old world.

New research on teacher supply

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The NfER has today published a detailed report on teacher supply and its implications for learning. Teacher supply and shortages: the implications of teacher supply challenges for schools and pupils – NFER Many of the conclusions in their report will not come as any surprise to regular readers of this blog. After all, there have been many posts discussing the issue – even as recently as the post on whether PE is now a shortage subject – during the lifetime of this blog.

Whilst I find most of the conclusions unsurprising, there are some that are interesting.  Figure 15 suggests that a higher percentage of responses from schools in the North East than in London fell in the ‘most difficult’ category, although to be fair, schools in the North East also topped the percentage in terms of response of ‘least difficult’. It may be that the starting salary in London is still high enough to attract teachers not yet interested in buying into the housing market and content to share rented properties.

I am surprised at the reported level of recruitment challenge faced by schools in the primary sector, where supply ought to be more than adequate across most of England.

The overall conclusion that schools are only able to provide some teaching by the use of non-specialist teaching must be of concern. The alternative is to stop teaching certain subjects either entirely or to limit the number of groups offered a subject. However, for key subjects, such as mathematics and English not teaching the subject is not possible in most schools.

The authors of the report also concluded that ‘challenges with teacher recruitment may also be having a disproportionate impact on schools with low Ofsted ratings, and school leaders’ efforts to improve outcomes. There is likely to be a complex relationship between a school’s Ofsted rating and recruitment challenges, rather than a simple effect of an Ofsted rating downgrade making it more challenging to recruit.’

 However, they further comment that ‘… our survey data suggests there seems to be an association between a low Ofsted rating and increased recruitment challenges. These recruitment challenges may exacerbate the challenges of improving the quality of education in the school, whether through leaders doing more teaching reducing leadership capacity, lower-quality teachers being employed, or other related factors.’ Whether recruitment challenges have resulted in the downgrading of outstanding schools also reported today is an interesting question that merits further study.

In a fortnight’s time the DfE should publish the 2022 ITT Census and that will provide schools with a picture of the recruitment round for September 2023 and January 2024. It seems likely that once again recruitment targets will be missed, thus providing schools with more of a dilemma over staffing.

Perhaps, NfER might next year look in more depth at the actions that the DfE might take to ensure a fair distribution of teachers between schools in what is in some subjects now becoming a scare resource. Should every school have access to at least one specialist in every curriculum area?

The NfER might also investigate the extent to which post-entry subject enhancing CPD makes any difference to the expertise of the teaching force.

Catch Up a good idea, but where to find the staff?

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The DfE has released a research report into Year 2 of the National Tutoring Programme. National Tutoring Programme year 2: implementation and process evaluation – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) What struck me about the report by NfER was the issue of where tutors came from and the impact of the programme on the overall workforce available to teach our children.

The Report comments that:

“The availability and quality of external tutors and mentors is fundamental – not all schools have the capacity to use internal staff as tutors Evidently, some schools want and need to rely on external tutors. It is encouraging that two-thirds of senior leaders were confident that their school could access high-quality tutoring when needed. However, a fifth were uncertain and a notable minority were unconfident. Only two-fifths were more confident than before the pandemic, which is disappointing given the Government’s focus on tutoring as a response to Covid-19 recovery.”

The Report also concludes that:

“The clear message from the research summarised earlier in the report is that tutors should be knowledgeable in their subject area and trained in pedagogy for tutoring to be effective. The findings emphasise the importance of the roles of the NTP contractors in 2022-23, who will be responsible for recruitment of tutors and mentors, providing them with training, and quality assurance.”

Both of these factors will no doubt contribute to the finding that the programme added to the workload of senior staff in schools, as would any new programme, and that those extra burdens need to be financed to prevent staff having to cope with extra pressures. The Report comments that “It will be important to monitor and review whether this increase in workload continues as the NTP becomes more embedded and as schools are given more autonomy over the delivery of tutoring.”

From my perspective, it is also important to know more about where the staff involved in the programme came from, and if tutoring is going to become a long-term feature of the school scene what will be the effects on the ability of schools to staff their core offering of teaching and learning. How will the programme interface with any actions on the levelling up agenda the new Ministerial Team at the DfE might pursue.

Does the return of Mr Gibb to a ministerial role in the DfE mean more phonics and the EBacc and less concern with vocational subjects? Faced with the prospect of cuts to departmental spending, will the programme be judged sufficiently successful to survive or just allowed to be something schools might wish to pay for from their own budgets?

The National Tutoring Programme should fill an important gap in the provision by providing schools with the ability to help pupils that miss elements of schools catch-up with their peers and help put their own learning back on track. However, the relationship between the programme, and particularly the secondary school sector, where staffing issues are more critical, may need further investigation and may perceived regional issues in supply. In the primary sector, the impact on senior staff workload may be an important consideration for the future.

Poverty is not destiny – OECD PISA Report

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OECD published the latest of its PISA studies today. This is a long and complex report and I am grateful to those that have already pointed the way to some of the key points. Generally, the data is for the United Kingdom and not just England.

As in previous studies, the urban regions of China entered plus some other Asian economies provide outstanding outcomes among fifteen years olds taking the survey tests, especially in maths and reading. The report can be found at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm

What follows are some of the comments that caught my eye at a first glance. The most significant challenge, especially in the light of the Prime Minister’s comments on parity of esteem is whether selective secondary education is good for the economy? Such schools are certainly good for those that attend them. But, for the nation as a whole?

The OECD believes that “it remains necessary for many countries to promote equity with much greater urgency.” While students from well-off families will often find a path to success in life, those from disadvantaged families have generally only one single chance in life, and that is “a great teacher and a good school. If they miss that boat, subsequent education opportunities will tend to reinforce, rather than mitigate, initial differences in learning outcomes.

One in ten disadvantaged students was able to score in the top quarter of reading performance in their country/economy, indicating that poverty is not destiny. The data also show that the world is no longer divided between rich and well educated nations and poor and badly educated ones. The level of economic development explains just 28% of the variation in learning outcomes across countries if a linear relationship is assumed between the two.

In over half of the PISA participating countries and economies, principals of disadvantaged schools were significantly more likely than those of advantaged schools to report that their school’s capacity to provide instruction is hindered by either a lack of or inadequacy of educational material; and in 31 countries and economies, principals of disadvantaged schools were more likely than those of advantaged ones to report that a lack of teaching staff hinders instruction. In these systems, students face a double disadvantage: one that comes from their home background and another that is created by the school system. The report concludes: “There can be numerous reasons why some students perform better than others, but those performance differences should never be related to the social background of students and schools.”

Many students, especially disadvantaged students, hold lower ambitions than would be expected given their academic achievement. In the United Kingdom, about one in three high-achieving disadvantaged students – but fewer than one in ten high-achieving advantaged students – do not expect to complete tertiary education.

Some 81% of students in the United Kingdom (OECD average: 74%) agreed or strongly agreed that their teacher shows enjoyment in teaching. In most countries and economies, including in the United Kingdom, students scored higher in reading when they perceived their teacher as more enthusiastic, especially when students said their teachers are interested in the subject.

The OECD findings also reveal how the foundations for education success are laid early. Students who had attended pre-primary education for longer scored better in PISA than students who had not attended pre-primary education. Between 2015 and 2018, the share of 15-year-old students who had attended pre-primary school for three years increased in 28 countries. Despite this advantage, in 68 out of 78 education systems with comparable data, students who had not attended pre-primary education were much more likely to be socio-economically disadvantaged and enrolled in more disadvantaged schools at the age of 15. This highlights how access to pre-primary education often reinforces educational disparities

Bad news on closing the gap

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The Education Policy Institute’s 2019 Report on Education (EPI Report) has largely been noticed for the comments about social mobility and the stalling of attempts to close the gaps between disadvantaged and other pupils as this is a key feature of its findings  https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/epi-annual-report-2019-the-education-disadvantage-gap-in-your-area/ Reasons for this ending of the reduction in the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and other pupils as noted by EPI are the decline in funding for schools and the challenges some schools face in both recruiting and retaining teachers.

This latter explanation is one that has been regularly championed by this blog as likely to have an adverse effect on outcomes. So, it would seem that money matters, and the idea of just providing cash to under-funded local authorities, as seemingly suggested by the new Prime Minister, might not necessarily be the way forward.

However, I do have some concerns about parts of the methodology used by EPI as it relates to the presentation of the data. A focus on local authorities as the key determinant does tend to ignore areas, whether urban or rural that have wide variations in levels of disadvantage within the same local authority boundary. For the two tier shire and district council areas, it would have been better to use the data at a district council level, but that doesn’t help in cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and boroughs where there may be wide variations between different parts of the authority. To some extent the data for an authority doesn’t reveal the whole picture and can provide results that might mis-lead the casual reader.

EPI avoids this issue to some extent by producing tables using parliamentary constituencies as the basis for the data. Thus the gap in months at the secondary level relative to non-disadvantaged pupils nationally can differ widely within one authority by looking at data at the level of the parliamentary constituency. For Birmingham, it is 13.6 in Selly Oak, but 19.6 in Ladywood; in Kent it differs between 27.0 for the Dover constituency and 13.8 in Tunbridge Wells.

This is not to say that drawing attention to the gap between where pupils start their education journeys and where they complete them isn’t vitally important at a local authority level. But, providing everyone with equal shares of the cake is not an answer for anyone that wants anything other than administrative simplicity, important though it is to ensure that base funding levels are sufficient for the task in hand.

EPI do make the point in their report that despite no progress in narrowing the disadvantage gap, overall pupil attainment has continued to rise. This suggests that an overall rise in standards does not guarantee a reduction in the disadvantage gap. (Their emphasis).

The Report also highlights the fact that the post-16 education routes taken by young people are becoming increasingly segregated by socio-economic status, with disadvantaged pupils disproportionately represented in certain routes. In particular, the increased segregation is driven by an over-representation of disadvantaged students in further education. These trends may damage the government’s ambition of rectifying imbalances between further and higher education. (Their emphasis).

 

 

Breakfast Clubs good: but not for all?

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A coterie of key research organisations have collaborated in a small scale study of the effects of breakfast clubs in schools. The results of their research have been published today. https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8714

The headline on the IFS press release is ‘Breakfast clubs work their magic in disadvantaged English schools’. However, embedded in the text of the press summary is the observation that: “while relatively disadvantaged students (those eligible for free school meals) were more likely to attend the breakfast clubs, the intervention was more effective at raising the attainment of pupils from less disadvantaged backgrounds (those not eligible for free school meals). This suggests that support for school breakfast clubs might not reduce socio-economic gaps in pupil attainment.” For many this will be a disappointing outcome as it is always hoped that the breakfast will have benefits on learning: perhaps the results take time to trickle down or the sample of these pupils in the study produced this finding.

However, this finding raises the issue of cost effectiveness of this type of intervention. The report states that “gains in pupil achievement were delivered at relatively low cost. Dividing the costs by all pupils in the school, the intervention cost just £11.86 per eligible pupil over the course of the academic year. It also required 2.6 hours of staff time per eligible pupil per year. It should be noted, however, that the breakfast club take-up rates were relatively low – the average school’s take-up rate was between 13% and 52%. An increase in take-up would lead to higher costs, but also potentially higher impact on attainment.” There are, of course, other benefits, two of which are detailed below.

There did seem to be a positive gain in terms of attendance with “absence rates falling by almost one half-day per year. The effect was particularly strong for authorised absences, which are primarily due to ill health. This suggests that the breakfast club might have improved pupil health, although we did not find strong evidence to support this when looking at the average Body Mass Index of students in Year 6.” Sadly, late arrivals were not significantly encouraged by the offer of a before-school breakfast club to seemingly improve their arrival times. This is a disappointment, as it might have been hoped that the breakfast club would have helped encourage both attendance and an improvement in time-keeping. Perhaps the research didn’t cover a long enough period or the marketing to parents didn’t reach the groups that might benefit the most.

The other finding that teachers will welcome and that might be enough to encourage more schools down the road of breakfast clubs was that “Behaviour and concentration in the classroom improved substantially as a result of the breakfast club provision, suggesting that a better classroom learning environment is an important mechanism through which the intervention might improve attainment. The improvement in teachers’ assessments of their classroom learning environment was equivalent to moving a classroom from average ratings of behaviour and concentration to ratings in the top quarter of the schools in our sample.” Food aids learning, improves concentration and reduces bad behaviour. Great news for teachers.