Tag Archives: Education Investment Areas

Military families missing out

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Neither Oxfordshire nor Wiltshire were included in the published list of Education Investment Areas designated as part of the government’s levelling up programme. Package to transform education and opportunities for most disadvantaged – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) This may be important because these are two of the local authorities with large concentrations of military families attending schools within their areas.

The RAF will generally benefit because the whole of East Anglia and Lincolnshire are included in the list of authorities and that is where many RAF bases are located. The inclusion of Plymouth and Portsmouth will cover many naval families. However, the families of troops based on Salisbury plain at Tidworth and many other barracks in Wiltshire will still need to rely just upon the Service Children’s Premium and the Pupil Premium for extra support. The same is true for garrisons in Oxfordshire at Bicester, Abingdon and Didcot, and the RAF bases at Benson and Brize Norton.   

Troops moving from Catterick in North Yorkshire or RAF bases in Lincolnshire to Wessex will find the support for their children’s education may reduce under these plans.

Now, our armed forces may be a small part of pupil population, but they do serve to highlight the fact that there are children that don’t stay in one place for their school life. Levelling up probably needs to be more than just about geography and picking areas off a map.

A geographical strategy is anyway easier to achieve when there is a coherent basis for local government areas. Sadly, that is not the case at the present time. Cambridgeshire includes the successful parts of Cambridge, although I acknowledge that like Oxford the whole of the city is neither affluent not without need for extra funding. Was Cambridgeshire included because it is part of a combined authority with a mayor, whereas Oxfordshire is one of the few remaining two-tier local government setups, with no unitary authority.  

I wonder how Medway and parts of Cumbria feel looking at the list of Education Investment Areas? Do they feel that they have missed out?

As I wrote, in the previous post on this blog, the education measures will need to be backed up by hard cash to have any real effect. In terms of teaching staff turnover, TeachVac has provided a number of the Opportunity Areas with data about their local teacher labour markets and can do so for the new Education Investment Areas.

One thing is certain is that teaching cooking and healthy eating to secondary school pupils is going to need a rethink about staffing as within design and technology – a subject that attracts few to teaching these days – food technology is the most challenging discipline in terms of finding teachers anywhere in England.

Levelling up is as important today as ever for our schooling system. How far these moves will help is a matter for debate.

Bizarre

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The DfE’s helpful note issued ahead of tomorrow’s White Paper contains the following:

“In these new ‘Education Investment Areas’, the Department for Education will offer retention payments to help schools keep the best teachers in the highest priority subjects.”

My first reaction was a sense of ‘Deja Vue’ as this was an idea tried in the 1970s under the label of payments for teachers working in schools of exceptional difficulty. There was an initial salary uplift of £201 for all teachers and after three years of service this increased to, I think, £279.

Then I thought, what about the permission that already exists within the Pay and Conditions document for recruitment and retention payments. This permission appears in Section 27 of Part 4.

27. Recruitment and retention incentives and benefits

27.1 Subject to paragraph 27.2, the relevant body or, where it is the employer in the case of an unattached teacher, the authority, may make such payments or provide such other financial assistance, support or benefits to a teacher as it considers to be necessary as an incentive for the recruitment of new teachers and the retention in their service of existing teachers. A salary advance scheme for a rental deposit may be one of a number of tools that schools may wish to consider using to support recruitment or retention.

27.2 Where the relevant body or, where it is the employer in the case of an unattached teacher, the authority, is making one or more such payments, or providing such financial assistance, support or benefits in one or more cases, the relevant body or authority must conduct a regular formal review of all such awards. The relevant body or authority should make clear at the outset the expected duration of any such incentives and benefits, and the review date after which they may be withdrawn.

Teachers Pay and Conditions document England 2021-22

So, the powers are there. This will only mean anything if it creates a hypothecated grant to schools singled out for support. Such an action would be a move away from the idea of the National Funding Formula. Since, I expect, many of the schools are in areas where the Pupil Premium is already being paid at relatively high levels, this will be an interesting measure to examine in detail once the White Paper appears.

Will it be paid to all classroom teachers or just some subjects in secondary schools but all primary school teachers or perhaps no primary teachers at all?

Then there is the issue of how any such payments will be funded if there is no extra grant? Will schools be directed to pay the additional salary and left to sort out the budget implications? It is difficult to see how such a move helps levelling up if some other useful programme is to be cut to fund salary increases for teachers but not for other staff.