Another nail in the coffin of 3-tier schooling

Posted on March 19, 2021 by John Howson

Somerset County Council is to reorganise some of its remaining three tier schools into a more usual pattern of primary and secondary sectors according to a BBC story.

Council approves changes to Somerset schools

Somerset County Council has approved changes to nine schools in the Crewkerne and Ilminster area – saying that while the majority of responses to a public consultation had opposed the plans, no viable alternatives had been put forward. Pupils in the schools will move from a three-tier system (infant or junior, middle and upper) to a two-tier system (primary and secondary), with the change prompted by financial instability resulting from low pupil numbers. The Cabinet member for education and transformation said the decision marked a “significant milestone” following a “long and difficult journey”. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-56430254

Three tier patterns of schooling, similar in nature to the private sector, pre-prep, prep and secondary school model were introduced into the state system in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Usually they were introduced in response to both the move towards non-selective secondary education and the most efficient use of school buildings following the requirement of the 1944 Education Act to remove the remaining all-age elementary schools. All-age schools became briefly fashionable again with the advent of academies, but I have yet to see any research evidence of whether they work any better than the dominant system with a break at eleven.

A few three tier systems still linger on, especially in Northumberland and a few other areas, but for the past two decades authorities have been unwinding most of the systems. There were two models at the height of the three tier approach. A switch to secondary at age 12, where the schools educating children up to twelve were regarded as primary schools and those with a break at 13. The 9-13 schools in those systems were regarded as secondary schools. This compromise affected the funding arrangements for pupils depending upon which system was in operation. Buckinghamshire used the former system whereas Bedfordshire chose the latter.

In Oxfordshire, the City of Oxford, in 1974, at the point where it lost its status as a County borough and became a district council with no further responsibility or schooling, opted for a three tier system of schooling, even though the rest of the county had opted for a two tier comprehensive system. In those days, the city was run by a Conservative administration, and there are those that think the choice of a different system to the county system reflected a view on the loss of perceived status by the city politicians. Certainly, it took until the end of the 1990s before the county achieved a single unified system of education. That lasted a mere decade before the arrival of academies once again fractured the landscape asunder.

Three tier systems had some impressive supporters including Sir Alec Clegg in the West Riding of Yorkshire. But, in the end, they were never destined to be more than a footnote in the history of state schooling in England.

Off to University

Posted on March 16, 2021 by John Howson

Here’s a hear warming story about a student from among the group of most disadvantaged pupils in our education system https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/19162077.traveller-milly-teaches-classics-going-oxford-university/

I would say in our schools, but most traveller and Romany children don’t go to school on a regular basis.

When I joined Oxfordshire’s Education Committee in the early 1990s – some readers may have to look up the term Education Committee in the history books – Oxfordshire had a fully fitted mobile classroom serving this community. Now, these children sometimes don’t even appear on the pupil outcomes data as a group as their outcomes are so far adrift from those of other groups in society.

Fairground children are a distinct group within the wider category, and in rural areas they spend part of the year traveling from market own to market town for the annual street fair. So, congratulations to Milly on winning a place at University, and to Joe for the work that his organisation does to promote Oxford University with state school pupils.

I wonder whether anyone has thought about traveller children during the lockdown and whether they have had access to on-line learning. I will be asking the question as this group could surely benefit from the learning about remote teaching and learning gained during the pandemic.

I recall visiting a secondary school a couple of years ago where they had children from a mobile home community site for travellers on their roll. They worked hard to ensure the children received an education even though it took up time and resources. The National Funding Formula and per pupil funding don’t provide for the needs of groups where special arrangements are required.

I won’t say ‘Good Luck’ Milly, because I don’t believe she needs good luck. But, I do hope that she enjoys her time at university.

Understanding Academy Finances

Posted on February 19, 2021 by John Howson

Recently, I came across a new study into the income and expenditure of academies by Xeinadin https://www.xeinadin-group.com/industries/academies/ When following up on that report, I also came across another and lengthier report from Kreston Reeves https://www.krestonreeves.com/news/academies-benchmark-report-2021/ published last month.

Both are interesting in their own ways. However, neither accounts clearly for the fact that there are different pay areas within the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document and the annual recommendations from the School Teachers Review Body. Now, these differences do not matter when percentages are used, but comparing on cash figures may introduce some distortion in the outcomes if the difference between MATs in Inner London and those outside the London and Home Counties pay band areas are ignored, although the Kreston Reeves report does have some regional benchmarking data for six areas of England. Whether lumping together London and the South East and seemingly totally ignoring the East of England is helpful is a matter for the reader to decide.

Neither report considers the labour market for teachers nor the costs associated with it in detail, although there are discussions about both staff and supply teacher costs. Future reports might like to focus on both the costs of retention over recruitment, and the most cost effective ways of recruiting new staff.

I was interested to read in the Kreston Reeves report that:

“The full financial impact of the pandemic will not be known for a while yet. As schools went back in to another lockdown in January 2021, then the savings made in the first lockdown can perhaps be expected to recur, although as there are much higher numbers of key worker children in schools post Christmas, these savings are likely to be more modest. Where this leaves the Academy sector finances for the current academic year is anyone’s guess. The length and frequency of lockdowns, the criteria for allowing children into schools, and the education provided will all have an impact.” (Page 10)

Both reports discuss the matter of how much of a school’s budget is used for central costs of a MAT. They both seem to coalesce around a figure of 5%, although some MATs do seem to operate with either a much higher or lower percentage.

The fact that academies are on a different financial year to local authority schools isn’t an issue for these reports, but is something that makes comparisons between the different types of schools more difficult, especially over a short-period of time.

How schools receive and spend their income is a matter for public interest, and these reports are helpful, in as far as they go, in understanding the academy sector, and especially the behaviours of MATs.

As most readers of this blog will know, I personally, prefer schools to be under the democratic oversight of locally elected councillors, albeit with a significant degree of autonomy. The fact that some schools have access to considerable letting income while other schools struggle to educate challenging groups of pupils on far less financial support is but one reason to ask for a system designed to benefit all pupils and not just some.

£3 a vacancy

Posted on November 17, 2020 by John Howson

Finding, matching and linking teacher vacancies to interested applicants for just £3. This seems unbelievable, especially if you add in all the benefits of the data collected to help with expanding our knowledge of the teacher labour market.

But, less than £3 a vacancy is the cost TeachVac’s accountants are telling me as Chair that we spent in the school year 2019-2020 handling more than 50,000 vacancies during that time. Adding teacher capacity comes at negligible cost to the system, and with well over 90% coverage of schools across England, in both state and private sectors, and a five year track record of success, the brand is now well established in the market and offers great value for money.

However, to some extent, TeachVac has been a victim of its own success, the DfE now has a site that carries a fraction of the jobs TeachVac finds. The DfE site also requires schools to do far more work to upload jobs to the site than Teachvac requires.

So it is free to the DfE, free to teachers, but not as free to schools as Teachvac. Indeed, assuming there are development and hosting costs it isn’t free to the DfE. Does it cost the taxpayer more than £3 per vacancy?

School leaders are still happy to see schools spend millions of pounds on recruitment, while complaining that education is under-funded. I don’t subscribe to the argument that education funding must help prop up private sector profits, and I wonder why others with more authority than I will ever have are happy to turn a ‘Nelsonic’ eye to such expenditure.

TeachVac’s latest accounts will soon be visible to all on the Companies House website. They are filed by Oxford Teacher Services Ltd, the holding company. If you would like a sight of the latest accounts before they appear there, do make contact and I will be happy to send you a set.

We have come a long way since the days of hot metal and the moves, firstly from column inches to display advertising, and then to the introduction of colour into vacancy advertising. Shifting recruitment advertising to the web has offered opportunities, not fully exploited by the profession, to cut costs and innovate.

TeachVac has been happy to show the way, and is now looking to expand its expertise gained with teacher vacancies into non-teaching roles. Who knows, we might be able to offer all jobs in schools across England for less than a quarter of a million pounds: now there’s a thought.

Of course if you want to sponsor the site, TeachVac is happy to engage in discussions with you. Imagine, 50,000 vacancies brought to say 60,000 job seekers across the year and around the world as teaching has become a global profession. You can do the arithmetic.

I am proud of what the small team on the Isle of Wight have created over the past five years. Please tell us how we can do even better.

Taxing our schools

Posted on November 4, 2020 by John Howson

What started out as a ‘good idea’ has now become a tax on schools, and especially primary schools: at least in Oxfordshire. The apprenticeship Levy doesn’t seem to work as intended, as the following information provided by the Council to a Lib Dem question clearly shows.

The Apprenticeship Levy started in May 2017.

The levy is funded via a monthly charge against our payroll bill of 0.5%. This equates to approximately £100k a month. The money charged to our payroll is put into an OCC digital apprenticeship account and is drawn down by apprenticeship training providers on a monthly basis. For example, if 1 apprenticeship costs £4,800 and has a duration of 2 years, the provider will draw down £200 a month for 24 months.

Each month’s levy is treated as a separate pot of money with the oldest pot of funding being used first. The first allocation of £100k (May 2017) was used to pay providers until it was exhausted. For example, if our total training bill was £10k a month, it would take 10 months to use the first month’s levy. In the meantime, we would have accrued a further £900k over the following months which would not have been spent as there was sufficient in the first month’s pot to cover the costs. Once the first month’s levy was spent, future expenditure was taken from month 2 until this was exhausted and so on.

Since May 2017, Oxfordshire has accrued a total of £4,047,490 to spend on apprenticeships.

However, Oxfordshire can only keep the accrued levy for 24 months. So, we had until May 2019 to spend May 2017 allocation, June 2019 to spend June 2017 allocation etc.

Any money remaining in a pot that is more than 2 years’ old is returned to the treasury (i.e.The Government at Westminster – my addition). This means that any funding added to our levy pot before October 2018 and not spent was returned.

Our first repayment was September 2019. To date £611,788 has expired and has been repaid to The Treasury. This equates to approximately 37% of the levy we accrued between May 2017 and October 2018.

Levy accrued between November 2018 and October 2020 has not yet reached an expiry date so we have approx. £2,326,543 available to spend.

Spend on apprenticeships is increasing every year which indicates that the level of levy we will need to repay should reduce over the coming months and years.

Levy Spend per calendar year was:

	2017	£18,225.54
	2018	£144,403.85
	2019	£435,201.48
Jan – Sept	2020	£511,227.38

It is anticipated that 2020 final spend will be approx. £700k as we have recently started a number of degree level apprenticeships that will draw down large monthly amounts.

For information, school contribution and spend for 2019 is:

Contribution to the levy: £405,596
Spend: £232,858

The county team continues to promote apprenticeships (both employed and CPD) where ever possible throughout the organisation whilst recognising further work needs to be done.

If this lack of spending the cash raised by the levy from schools, and MATs have the same problem, is common across the country then it is time to seek reform.

We need more apprenticeships, so making use of the cash to train teachers would be one possible change. Creating two non-teaching posts with substantial training elements might be another low cost approach that might also help reduce unemployment if linked to other programmes.

Whatever approach is taken, schools should not see any of their hard fought for cash being returned unspent to government. Just as they should not now be wasting cash on expensive recruitment advertising.

To ask for more funds must run alongside making the best use of the cash already in the system.

Action for local government: Apprenticeship funding needs radical change. If the Government increased Levy flexibilities, including allowing public pooling of funds, Treasury pausing its expiry policy, and devolving non-levy funding, local government could support local businesses in a much more targeted and coherent way, including by allowing them to target sectors, address local supply / demand side issues, widen participation to disadvantaged groups and specific cohorts. A proportion could be spent on pre-apprenticeship training / administration of programmes. This could support the development of the Opportunity Guarantee. Alongside these measures, we call for a levy payment holiday (up to 6 months) for businesses struggling with cashflow problems and allow employers to collaborate on transferring / pooling. DfE should also pause the switch-off of frameworks until March 2021.

More thoughts on school funding

Posted on October 25, 2020 by John Howson

Earlier this week I listened to the head of a leading group representing private schools tell us how much they saved the State, Their assessment of the amount was based upon the fees they received from parents.

Now, of course, the figure quoted was probably an exaggeration as even if it didn’t include income from overseas students, and the sector is a significant export earner in normal times, then the fees received for pupils resident in this country are higher than the State would be prepared to pay to educate these young people, except in the case of SEND places in specialist schools.

Even allowing for these caveats, if the unemployment associated with the pandemic really does slow down the economy, then, inevitably, some parents may decide that private schooling is something they can no longer afford. There will be bursaries and scholarship and grandparents will offer help, but every child that switches from the private sector to the State sector creates winners and losers and is an additional cost to the State.

Schools that gain pupils will receive extra funding in the fullness of time. However, unless the overall pot of cash increases, there will be less for everyone. With school rolls overall still increasing, especially in the more expensive to fund secondary sector, this possible demand for extra cash could not come at a worse point in the demographic cycles. Any switch to funding for vocational skills, and especially for the Further Education sector, will also make finding additional funding for schools more of a challenge for the Secretary of State in his talks with The Treasury. With pressure to pay the least well-off in society more, increasing teachers’ pay rather than that of support staff may well be a real challenge unless class sizes increase and teacher numbers are reduced.

So, how might schools react? Finding saving won’t be easy, but here are a couple of suggestions. Firstly, and not surprisingly, cut back on recruitment costs. The DfE vacancy site isn’t doing the job it was set up to do. As a result, the profession should create a working party to attack the recruitment costs with the aim of saving schools perhaps £20 million a year. A really effective scheme could save even more.

Secondly, take the profit element out of supply teacher costs. Thirty years ago, local authorities were inefficient and uncoordinated in carrying out this function for schools. Costs have been driven down, but market economics has created a business with a profit element. Removing this element by either taking it back in house or creating a fixed price model could again help save cash for schools.

The third, and most radical suggestion, is around the funding of teachers’ salaries. In the education governance revolution of thirty years ago, decisions about salary bills were delegated to individual schools, with each schools funding being based upon a notional average salary bill. Previously, schools had their salary bill paid for by local authorities based around a framework of school Group Sizes that generated numbers of promoted and leadership posts for each school.

These days. MATs can set salary policies for all their schools, but local authorities cannot for maintained schools. Such policies can affect wage bills, and especially the cost of promoted posts and leadership positions. Young teachers are cheap; older more experienced teachers cost more. Do we want our more experienced teachers leading our more challenging schools? Could a more logical system that took the wage bill for teachers away from schools save money? I don’t know the answer. But, the wage bill is the largest cost in education and it is worth asking the question: how can we protect the income of teachers and other school staff in a time when pressure on the public purse is immense and are their efficiencies that can be made? A notional staffing model that school could test themselves against might be a start. Now is surely time for some radical thinking around the goals we want education to achieve for Society. Depriving the deprived is not one of them.

The author is Chair of TeachVac, the job board for teachers http://www.teachvac.co.uk

Men and teaching: only a career in a recession?

Posted on October 19, 2020 by John Howson

EPI, the Education Policy Institute, has today published a short report entitled ‘Trends in the Diversity of Teachers in England’ that is largely about gender diversity in teaching. The report brings up to date some of the data that can be found in my post on this blog from April this year https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/are-new-graduate-entrants-to-teaching-still-predominantly-young-white-and-female/

Interestingly, although the report does put the issue into the wider context of the attractiveness of teaching as a career, and the lack of women taking degrees in some subjects such as physics, it doesn’t really consider the fact that some of the change may be down to teaching also becoming relatively less attractive to women, especially primary school teaching.

The EPI paper, while revealing the genuine concern about the issue, doesn’t point out that at the end of the 1990s when the economy was also doing well, the percentage of male graduates accepted into teaching through the UCAS graduate entry system (then administered by the GTTR) was as low as it is now, and possibly even lower in the primary sector.

Percentage of men accepted onto graduate teacher preparation courses

1998 31%

1999 30%

2000 29%

Source GTTR annual Report for 2000

The EPI paper is also correct to draw attention to the fact that men generally decide to apply later in the recruitment round than women, suggesting possibly that the attraction of teaching as a career is less strong for some male applicants. This is possibly also borne out by the higher departure rates from teaching for men, although some may remain in teaching, just outside of state-funded schools.

Linking the evidence to wage rates, where public sector workers have not fared well compared to other graduates in the South East, is interesting but doesn’t explain why Inner London schools have the second highest percentage of male teachers. Perhaps, this is the Teach First effect?

I also wrote about this issue during my period as a TES commentator. There was a Hot Data column in April 1999 entitled ‘Male primary teachers still elusive’ and in one of my final On the Map pieces for the TES, headed ‘Female Teachers, schools remain a woman’s domain’, published in July 2010, I looked at some international evidence. (Incidentally, at the TES, I never wrote the headlines for my pieces).

In September this year, I again headlined the issue of gender in a wider post considering the evidence from the recent OECD Education Indicators at a Glance publication https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/oecd-education-indicators-at-a-glance-2020-edition/

So what might be done? EPI have some good suggestions. In taking over the admissions to teacher preparation courses, the DfE might want to look at how the process across the year might be more neutral in terms of encouraging diversity among both applicants and those placed.

However, one issue has always been that some course providers attract a disproportionately high percentage of applicants from certain groups. Male Black African applicants at one time largely only applied for places on four courses, and some early years courses rarely if ever saw a male applicant.

Finally, the media has a role to play in stereotyping certain careers. The anguish of those that suffered child abuse, mostly at the hands of men, may have deterred some men from choosing careers such as teaching.

But, that’s not something just looking at statistics, as both EPI and my blog does, can tell you. As the EPI paper concludes, ‘it is important to understand the root cause of why more male graduates don’t choose teaching.’

Primary sector: smaller in future

Posted on July 22, 2020 by John Howson

This is the time of year when the DfE updates its pupil projections. These are the numbers that identify the trends in the size of the school population. Changes in migration and in the birth rate are the two most important national drivers of the total school population.

Obviously, migration can have a more immediate effect on pupil numbers than changes in the number of live births. As a result, planning for changes in the birth rate is much easier than changes in migration. Let’s assume, for instance, that there is an influx of families from Hong Kong as a result of the changed political situation there. This might bring a sudden and unexpected influx of pupils. At the national level, such an influx might not be noticeable, but since migrants tend to cluster in communities, some areas might see a sudden increase in pupil numbers.

The government tries to plan for such eventualities by creating high and low variants of the different variables making up the pupil numbers.

Here are the headlines from the DfE analysis

Headline facts and figures from the 2020 national pupil projections

The nursery and primary school population has been rising since 2009 but has now plateaued, as the drop in births in 2013 feeds into the main school population, and is projected to drop for the whole projection period to 2030. The drop is steeper than previously projected due to lower births recorded since the end of 2016.
The secondary school population began rising in 2016 and is projected to continue increasing until 2024 before gradually dropping until the end of the projection period. The peak and then fall is primarily due to the lower births seen in 2013 and beyond, which start to reach secondary school age in around 2025.
The population in special schools has been increasing for a number of years, at least partly driven by the increase in the overall population, and this is projected to continue until 2024, before also very gradually dropping.

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/national-pupil-projections

How steep will the drop in the primary school population be?

The low migration and low fertility variant produces a primary school population of 4,383,000, some 88,000 pupil less than the Principal projection. That could mean the need for between 4-5,000 fewer teachers across the primary sector unless funding was not tightly tied to pupil numbers.

Population of primary and secondary age in 2026

under the variant projections, England
	population in 2026	difference to principal
Projection	nursery & primary age	secondary age	nursery & primary age	secondary age
principal	4,471	3,218
low fertility	4,404	3,218	-67	0
high fertility	4,519	3,218	48	0
low migration	4,450	3,210	-21	-8
high migration	4,492	3,226	21	8
low population	4,383	3,210	-88	-8
high population	4,541	3,226	70	8
Source: national population projections (2020 model). Figures in 000s

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/national-pupil-projections

However, at the other extreme, the primary population might be some 70,000 greater than the Principal projection. This would require more teachers, assuming funding is closely tied to pupil numbers.

In the secondary sector, there is less difference between the projections, as the pupils in the secondary sector by 2026 are already in the school system. Any significant change would be the result of changes in migration patterns.

Would I consider applying to university in the autumn to start an undergraduate degree in primary education in 2021? Well, there will still be a need for teachers, but if the birth rate continues to fall, perhaps as a result of concerns arising from the covid-19 pandemic and decisions on family size, then it might not seem as attractive a career is it did a few years ago.

Since most secondary sector teachers are prepared through postgraduate routes lasting around a year, there is less urgency to consider pupil numbers are a reason for evaluating teaching as a possible career.

Of course, if there is a drop in private school enrolments, there may be more pupils in the State sector, but also more teachers competing for jobs.

All this is at the national level for England. There are also regional differences to consider.

Update on rural schools

Posted on December 20, 2019 by John Howson

In December 2017, I wrote a post on this blog about the DfE’s list of rural primary schools. At that point there were four such schools within the Greater London boroughs that were designated by the DfE as ‘rural’. In the 2019 list, published today there are now five such schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rural-primary-schools-designation

The two each in Hillingdon and Enfield have been joined at some point in time by Downe Primary School in Bromley, classified as being in an area of ‘Rural hamlet and isolated dwellings’. For those living in truly rural areas, the notion that somewhere within Greater London can be categorised as ‘rural’ might seem a bit of a joke. But, I am sure that for the residents using these schools that are located in what is presumably ‘green belt’ locations, the designation as ‘rural’ seems accurate. However, it is still within the TfL transport area, so pupils attending the schools from within the Greater London area can have free travel on the 146 bus, or presumably the R8 as well.

Across England, this year, the DfE has classified 3,353 primary schools as being in ‘rural’ .locations. The designation is important, as with school rolls in the primary sector now falling, and the absurdities of the National Funding Formula view of equality not yet fully understood, the added protection from closure being a ‘rural’ school provides may still be useful in the future.

However, it won’t stop closures happening. Culham Parochial Church of England School in Oxfordshire is shown in the table as, ‘open, and proposed to close’ and the County Council has now agreed that the school should close as it is no longer a viable education establishment in its own right. This follows a series of battles over its future, stretching back into at least the late 1980s. This fate also hangs over another 26 primary schools in the list, including five schools in Nottinghamshire and three in Staffordshire.

Fifteen of the 26 schools proposed for closure are designated as Church of England schools. This reveals something of the heritage of schooling in England as we approach the 150^th anniversary of State Funded Schools next year. It would be interesting to know the date when these schools, now up for closure, were first opened. There is fertile ground here for those interested in the history of education in England. I gather that this subject is being considered as a topic for an optional module in a Masters’ level degree currently being put together by the University of Buckingham. Such units or modules already exist in some other programmes.

There are many interesting stories contained within this list of schools. Picking just two at random. The Bliss Charity School in Northamptonshire was first opened several centuries ago, and the Charity still owns the former school house built for a head teacher in the Nineteenth Century. The rent from the house is used to fund extras at the school. Holy island Church of England First School in Northumberland is federated with a school on the mainland and is shown in some DfE tables as currently having just one pupil. The school web site says that ‘Holy Island and Lowick C of E First Schools are a federation – the children study together at Lowick with the children who live on the island coming to Lowick when the tide allows.’

There are many more interesting stories within the rich tapestry of our school system. Will these be lost because of a rigid financial system that takes little or no account of communities and their needs? I hope not.

A weak economy won’t help school funding

Posted on October 15, 2019 by John Howson

According to information contained in a House of Commons Library research Report on Education Funding, the government is either shooting itself in the foot or presenting statistics in a manner that makes already challenging comparisons difficult, if not impossible.

The Library Research Paper, BRIEFING PAPER Number 1078, 9th October 2019 entitled: Education spending in the UK, states on page 11 that

“the Department for Education currently records all spending on academies under secondary education. Secondary schools account for most of the spending on academies, but there are also include large numbers of primary and special academies. They are looking to improve the separation of spending across the education categories in the future. This skews the primary/secondary breakdown somewhat and limits the comparisons of primary and secondary spending between the home countries of the UK.” (Their emphasis, not mine)

As the number of academies in the primary and secondary sector increases, this method or recording allied to the fact that academies and free schools have a different financial year to maintained schools makes comparisons even harder than before.

Nevertheless, the Report is able to demonstrate how closely funding follows two key influences; demography and the state of the economy. For the past few years, both of these have been negative in the sense that the economy took a hit after the banking crisis at just the time when the birth rate was rising to higher levels than previously. Both factors created an almost perfect storm, not least because rising pupil numbers means a greater percentage of education expenditure has to be used for capital projects rather than revenue spending. Add in the laudable decision to raise the learning leaving age to 18 from 16, and another funding pressure was added to the equation.

The cuts facing schools would undoubtedly have been worse, unless taxes had risen, if the contribution of participants to the funding of higher education had not been increased by the raising of tuition fees and also the manner in which these loans were accounted for on the government’s balance sheet.

The Report also notes that “In 2017 an estimated £23 billion was spent privately on education.” Citing Consumer trends, ONS, as the source of the figure. Now, I assume this will include all the funds parents spend on private tutoring ahead of exams, and on Maths Centres that have sprung up around the country, as well as what the Labour Party includes in its definition of private education that it would seek to abolish.

Apart from probably driving at least part of that provision of schooling offshore, where the export income would be lost to the National Exchequer, there would obviously be the cost of educating such pupils as needed to be educated by the State. I don’t know how many billions that would cost, but it would have to be found from somewhere.

However, I understand the feeling that education is so important that it cannot be left to personal choice, but only offered by the State. From there it is but a short step to mandating only one type of state school that parents have to send their children to attend. As a Liberal, this is not a road that I would want to go along.

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

Tag Archives: education funding