Tag Archives: education

Wasting money in a time of austerity is unforgivable

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In September 2010 I seconded a motion about Free Schools and Academies at the Lib Dem Conference in Liverpool. Peter Downes from Cambridgeshire drafted the motion and proposed it to Conference where it was accepted after a lively debate. I have reproduced part of my speech winding up the motion because the Public Accounts Committee have today published a report on the managing of the expansion of the academies programme that makes sobering reading and reflects some of my concerns in 2010.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmpubacc/787/78704.htm

I have also included some of the PAC’s remarks after the quotes from my speech.

This motion was carefully crafted to recognise that being in coalition should not require us to abandon our basic principles: 

As Lib Dems we believe in

  • good local schools for all, that are
  • supported and coordinated by democratically elected local bodies; and a
  • a system based upon fairness, that protects the most vulnerable.

What we don’t believe in is an expensive and wasteful free-for-all.

Many of you in this hall joined the Lib Dems because of our education campaigns,

‘a penny on income tax’,

better early years education,

and a Pupil Premium championed as long ago as 2001.

Education has always been important to Liberal Democrats.

As you know, the Coalition’s programme for government is based upon, Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility- that’s what it said in the Coalition Agreement. 

If you pass this motion, you send a message to the government that Lib Dem activists understand the challenge of government, but are not prepared to abandon all our principles. 

We believe that government, an especially a coalition government, is for the many, and not just the few; for the future, as well as the present, and founded upon real principles. 

But Lib Dems know it is to work with schools, to inspire staff and pupils, to demand high standards in return for investment in teaching and learning, to have an appropriate curriculum, and to manage provision locally, not from Whitehall, and above all not to waste money we cannot afford pandering to the demands of the few whilst ignoring the needs of the many.

I don’t care who runs schools, but I do care that those who do so recognise that public money is for the good of all, not the benefit of the few.

Extracts from the PAC Report published 23rd April 2013.

10.  Despite some improvements, academies’ governance is still not sufficiently transparent for parents to scrutinise how their child’s school is spending its money, and for communities to hold their local school to account. There are gaps in the availability of key information such as academy funding agreements and governing body minutes, with less than 20% of academies surveyed by the National Audit Office publishing this information on their websites.

21.  When schools become academies, responsibility for their academic and financial performance passes from the local authority to the Department and the EFA respectively. However, local authorities retain some overall statutory responsibilities for young people in their area. The Department suggested that, in addition to these specific responsibilities, it would expect local authorities to retain some detailed knowledge of all educational provision in their area, including academies. At the same time, the Department and other witnesses suggested that academy trusts, particularly multi-academy chains, should also play a key performance-monitoring and intervention role in between academies and the Department and EFA.

22.  We heard conflicting views about whether inconsistency or uncertainty in the roles of these various players had created an accountability gap.  We are not convinced it is clear who is accountable for performance monitoring and intervention in academies, nor how the Department can know whether the system is operating consistently, effectively and with minimum bureaucracy across different localities and academy structures. We expressed concern that interventions in failing academies may be delayed if roles and responsibilities are not clear, or if central oversight is too distant to identify school-level problems before young people’s futures are put at risk.

In reading the PAC Report I wonder why such a waste of money was allowed to happen in a time of grave austerity. To take just one example, the DfE spent an extra £92 million on insurance premiums for academies, monies that should have been available to spend on educational outcomes. A simple national scheme administered from Sanctuary Buildings would surely have released most of that money to be spent where parliament intended, on education not on insurance premiums. Then there is the £350 million paid to academies and not recovered from local authorities, presumably over-funding schools in areas with more academies compared with the parts of the country where there are fewer academies. And, as the PAC remarked, ‘some of the budgets the Department drew upon to fund the expansion had been previously earmarked for other purposes – most notably £95 million originally intended for improving underperforming schools. There is a risk that the Department’s decision to solely use this money to create academies—many of which were already high-performing—may have been at the expense of weaker non-academy schools which could potentially have benefitted from it more. This is a particular risk in the primary sector.’

With local government being forced to cut important services, and other government departments having taken a heavy hit on their budgets, this cavalier approach to department spending at the DfE on a flagship programme is exactly the sought of concerns that were voiced in the Liverpool Conference motion. One might have expected better from Conservative majority partners in a coalition, and maybe it is time for the Secretary of State to take responsibility for his actions. At the very least he should explain what steps he is taking to prevent the waste continuing while he considers the overall funding formula for schools of all types.

Youth numbers in custody halve in a decade

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One of the more impressive statistics of the past few years has been the reduction in the number of young people held in custody. For much of the first decade of this century the average number of children and young people held in custody (including 18 year-olds) averaged around the 3,000 mark for England and Wales. The peak year was 2002/03 when the average was 3,451. With a month to go in the 2012/13 financial year the latest figures show that the average number in custody is now down to 1,755 almost exactly half the average in the peak year a decade ago.

Even more impressive is the decline in the 10-14 age group held in custody, down from a peak of 236 in July 2005 to 54 in February 2013. The decline in the 14-17 age-groups in custody has been from a peak of 2,885 in June 2008 to 1,266 this February. These figures can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/youth-custody-data along with other useful data for those interested in the topic of youth custody. For instance, only 52 of those held in secure institutions are females compared with 1,268 young males. Some 765 of the young population are classified as ‘White’ compared with 506 from the BME and ‘other’ classifications. The reduction in the ‘White’ population in youth custody from a peak of over 2,000 has been much steeper than for the BME and ’other’ group where the peak was less than 800. There are clearly questions to be asked about the differential rate of decline in the custody population by ethnic group. One explanation may be geographic since 389 of the custody population come from London, the most racially mixed part of the country with the other urban areas outside of the North East also over-represented. One disappointing statistics is that 281 of the young people in custody were on remand. However, if the census was taken on a Friday it may be a proportion of these were on ‘warrants’ awaiting an appearance at a Saturday remand court. However, even this number is well down on the peak of almost 700 recorded in June 2008.

Hopefully, keeping these young people out of custody will also reduce the revolving door where one custodial sentence invariably leads on to another, especially for those handed down sentences of six months or less where support after custody is often insufficient if not non-existent.

Schools have a part to play in reducing exclusions since a large proportion of those in custody were as some point excluded from school. It may be no accident that youth custody rates were at their highest when secondary schools in urban areas were struggling to recruit sufficient numbers of teachers. If there is a relationship between sufficient teachers and a reduction in youth crime then the DfE would do well to ensure we don’t slide towards another teacher supply crisis in the next couple of years.

Mrs. Thatcher as Education Secretary

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When I left LSE in 1969 I cannot recall a single person who wanted to start their own business. Although I took over the running of AIESEC-UK the student organisation, most of my graduating class headed for the civil service; large companies or a period of further study. It was not until the advent of the Thatcher government that entrepreneurship once again became something for the new breed of graduates to consider or even aspire to achieve in large numbers.

In reflecting on that change in society; a change that may have done more to allow the development of new industries that have in part replaced the ‘smokestack’ industries of the first industrial revolution I recalled that Mrs. Thatcher’s time as Education Secretary in the Heath government has perhaps received less notice than her premiership. However, as it was on her watch that I first entered the profession as an un-trained graduate and temporary supply teacher, at Tottenham School, in January 1971 some six months after the election. Those years between 1970 and 1974 that Mrs Thatcher spent as Education Secretary may be worth a moment of reflection on the day of her funeral.

The legacy of Mrs. Thatcher is best remembered by the general public through the slogan ‘Mrs. Thatcher: milk snatcher,’ as she was responsible for removing the right to free school milk from many older pupils. But, is that a fair summing up of her time as education secretary? Interestingly, as an aside, at least two Labour controlled education authorities, of which one was the London Borough of Hillingdon, attempted to take the ruling as only applying to the provision of milk, and continued to supply a ‘nourishing beverage’ to replace the lost milk supply. This stopped in Hillingdon when Labour lost control at the next London council elections. So what else did her time as Education Secretary leave behind as a mark on the world of state education?

One of Mrs. Thatcher’s first actions as Education Secretary was to continue the plan to eradicate schools built before 1906, started under the former Labour minister. I am not sure why that date was chosen, and it was interesting that Mrs. Thatcher extend the plan to cover primary as well as secondary schools. Those who teach or were educated, and indeed still are being educated in schools built either substantially or completely before 1906 will know that the ambitious plan failed, and has never featured in any subsequent discussions about school building. Indeed, until Mr. Blair’s ‘Building Schools for the future’ programme there was a period of almost 30 years when there was no national plan for a replacement school building programme, and Mr. Blair was seemingly only interested in the secondary sector, like so many politicians both before and after him.

Perhaps Mrs Thatcher’s high point as Education Secretary came in December 1972 with the publication of the White Paper ‘Education: A Framework for Expansion’. Sadly, this document appeared just as the oil crisis was breaking, and the Barber Boom was collapsing, so its plan for a ten-year expansion programme largely disappeared in the economic turmoil of the following decade.

However, here are a few extracts from what was promised:

Nursery Education

Within the next 10 years nursery education should become available without charge to those children of three and four whose parents wish them to benefit from it. If demand reaches the estimates in the Plowden Report, some 700,000 full-time equivalent places may be needed by 1981–82. Some 300,000 are already available, half of them for children of rising five. As the extent of demand and its future growth are uncertain it will be necessary to watch the development of demand carefully in the early years. As a first step the Government propose to authorise earmarked building programmes of £15m each in 1974–75 and 1975–76. Total current expenditure on the under fives is expected to rise from nearly £42m in 1971–72 to nearly £65m in 1976–77.

Besides helping families in deprived areas—both urban and rural—in bringing up young children, the extension of nursery education will also provide an opportunity for the earlier identification of children with social, psychological or medical difficulties which if neglected may inhibit the child’s educational progress.[fo 2]

The provision of nursery education will be generally on a half-time basis but allowance has been made for about 15 per cent—as recommended in the Plowden and Gittins Reports—of three and four year olds to attend full-time for educational and social reasons. It is hoped that most of the extra nursery places will form part of primary schools to avoid a change of school when the child becomes five.

School Building

There should be a more systematic long-term approach to the renewal of school buildings, to prevent the accumulation of backlogs of obsolete buildings. But such a policy needs to be very flexible, not only between primary and secondary schools, but also to take account from year to year of variations in the level of basic needs and other factors.

The size of the Teaching Force and Pupil Teacher Ratios

School staffing standards should continue to improve progressively. The Government believe that local education authorities will welcome a broad policy objective of securing by 1981 a teaching force 10 per cent above the number needed to maintain 1971 standards. After allowing for the increase in school population and the increased proportion of older pupils, this will require about 110,000 extra teachers, bringing the total to about 465,000 qualified teachers for pupils aged 5 and over. With about 25,000 teachers needed to staff the expanded nursery programme, and another 20,000 to meet the needs of the Government’s policy for in-service training and the induction of new teachers, there would be some 510,000 (full-time equivalent) qualified teachers employed in maintained schools by 1981. The Government propose that this figure should be adopted as a basis for planning. This would represent an overall pupil/teacher ratio of about 18½:1 by that date compared with about 22½:1 in 1971.

Teacher Training and Professional Development

The Government propose to work towards the achievement of a graduate teaching profession. During probation teachers should receive the kind of help and support needed to make the induction process both more effective and less daunting than it has been in the past. Also they should be released for not less than one-fifth of their time for in-service training. For the remainder of their time probationer teachers would be serving in schools, but with a somewhat lightened timetable, so that altogether they might be expected to undertake three-quarters of a full teaching load. The Government propose to give effect to the James Committee’s recommendation that teachers should be released for in-service training for periods equivalent to one term in every 7 years of service. It is their aim that a substantial expansion of such training should begin in the school year 1974–75 and should continue progressively so that by 1981 3 per cent of teachers could be released on secondment at any one time. This involves a four-fold increase in present opportunity.

Some of these proposals have still not been achieved more than 40 years later, especially in respect to teachers’ professional development. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the lack of attention by successive governments to primary teachers, their training and professional development that includes the current coalition. With a primary sector facing many of the same issues as during Mrs Thatcher’s tenure at Elizabeth House, the home of the Department in the 1970s, especially in relation to rising pupil numbers and the pressure on places, and a young and relatively inexperienced teaching force, it is to be hoped that the current administration will find time to do more than just talk about creating a world class school system and take the steps to ensure it actually happens.

Finally, it is perhaps the supreme irony of Mrs Thatcher’s times as Education Secretary that she is also remembered for implementing two of Labour key education policies that were blown off course by the economic crisis of 1967: the raising of the school leaving age to 16, and the creation of a largely non-selective secondary school system. Both had a massive impact on the England and Wales of the Thatcher government, and will continue to do so when the coalition introduces the further raising of the learning leaving age to 18: again a proposal initiated by a Labour government.

Sir Christopher Wren’s inscription in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, the church where Mrs Thatcher’s funeral took place, finishes with the Latin words LECTOR SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE which translates as, ‘Reader, if you seek his monument – look around you.’ It is a thought that each and every education secretary might bear in mind when they contemplate their legacy.

More secondary schools or better secondary education?

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According to the BBC, but not yet the DfE, the government are going to allow a further 13 studio schools for 14-18 year olds. These schools seem somewhat similar to University Technical Schools, another new form of school administered, along with academies and free schools, from Whitehall. These schools are in the tradition set by Kenneth Baker when he was Secretary of State for Education and established the City Technology Colleges, not all of which were in cities, nor were colleges rather than schools and had varying degrees of technology in the curriculum.

Also according to the BBC there is an interesting array of employers involved in the new studio schools, including charities such as the RSPCA. One does wonder why it needs a new type of school, with all its associated overheads including the salary of the leadership team, to solve what looks like local skill deficiencies in the labour market. Now that pupils can move to further education colleges from 14 onwards why cannot specific courses be developed there rather than creating yet more institutions, especially when numbers at the upper end of secondary schools are generally still falling.  It is worth recalling that in the famous Section 6 of the Thatcher Education Act that granted parental choice over schooling there was a ‘get out’ clause of not being ‘prejudicial to the efficient use of resources’. No such fetter appears to hamper the present government when it comes to setting up new schools.

However, Andrew Webb, the new President of the Association of Directors of Children Services believes that the debate about new forms of schooling is over, and everyone should just move on. Like so many others, his comments seem to focus mainly on the secondary sector whereas the future of the growing primary sector seems anything but clear.

One of the new Studio Schools announced today is to be a space studio in Banbury with the involvement of The National Space Centre, UK Space Agency and European Space Agency. This is a town where one of the current academies has just been consulting on altering its admission arrangements to introduce banding. Across the town there were 697 pupils in state schools at the end of Key Stage 4 in 2012 according to DfE figures. If the Studio School is to have an intake of, say, 100, giving a school of about 400; small by current standards for secondary schools, it will need to take almost 15% from each existing school or perhaps 10% if the catchment area is widened to include towns like Brackley, Bicester, Leamington Spa and Oxford where there are good travel links to Banbury. What the knock-on effect on the viability of science and technology courses at these schools will be is a moot point, but has not doubt has been considered somewhere before approval was given for the space studio to be announced.  And some pupils may choose instead to opt for the new University Technical School to be established elsewhere in Oxfordshire that was announced on the 28th March and will specialise in science research, engineering and computing. Its proposer is Oxford and Cherwell Valley College. The university sponsor is the University of Reading and according to the DfE its partners include BMW, IBM, Culham Science Centre, and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

There are those, not least in some of the teacher associations that are concerned about whether these new schools will encourage specialisation too early, and it is to be hoped that pupils who attend these schools will not have too narrow a focus too soon in their education. Will they also be drawn from across the ability spectrum or just from those regarded as in the top third of the ability range?

What is becoming clear is that the blueprint for the shape of schooling in England isn’t being widely discussed and tested in the cauldron of public debate. It hardly constitutes open government and if the new President of ADCS doesn’t care, who does? 

Excluded should not mean forgotten

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Just before Easter the DfE published a research brief about a trial programme into dealing with school exclusions entitled: Evaluation of the School Exclusion Trial: Responsibility for Alternative Provision for Permanently Excluded Children – First Interim Report Brief. The report can be found at: https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-RB284

Reducing the number of exclusions could have an impact on both schools and society in general since many of the young people who fall into criminal behaviour as teenagers were excluded from school at some point in their education: often during the last few years of formal education when exclusions are at their highest in relation to the school population.

Although the trial is relatively small scale and still in the early stages it has produced some interesting findings. However, the authors of the report suggest that most of the issues raised during the baseline research phase were not directly related to the trial but concerned issues related to Alternative Provision (AP) that is often used with pupils at risk of exclusion.

The issues included:

-the shrinking of the AP market currently underway;

– problems in rural areas where the possibilities for managed moves and AP were limited

because of geographical location;

-managing changes in demand and requests for increased flexibility when AP providers may

have limited capacity;

-providing AP providers with regular income, particularly when they are not operating in

highly populated urban areas, to ensure stability of provision and high quality staff;

-the current lack of AP at Key Stage 3; and

-the availability of AP at Level 2.

Some issues, which may impact on the trial, but are not directly related to it, concerned schools.

These included:

-the difficulty of engaging some parents;

-the need to improve intervention in primary schools to address underlying serious

behavioural problems early on; and

-ensuring that schools have sufficient accommodation to be able to provide a range of in school provision on and off-site.

Two issues were identified which directly relate to the implementation of the trial. These are:

-ensuring that schools have the capacity and expertise to commission, manage and monitor AP;

and

-increasing the extent of early intervention at the first sign of difficulties.

At their heart, many of these issues relate to the extent that the schools are separate entities or part of a system of schooling responsible for the education of all children whose parents want to trust the State with the education of their children. In the muddle that is our school system at present this issue is important to deal with if schools are to be able to feel confident about helping challenging pupils. One solution is to commission the market to provide AP services over a wide area, or even nationally, and leave the contractors to identify how to allocate resources and still make a profit while meeting service levels. Cash could be recouped from schools that made use of the service.

However, this doesn’t deal with the issue of prevention at the in-school level, especially at the primary school where these problems often first manifest themselves. As the research report identifies, finding a way of providing early intervention is important. Such early investment may be a good investment, but will require co-ordination and support for schools. Ministers might want to start thinking this through in time to have some policies ready when the final report appears around the time of the general election. One policy might be to ensure better professional development for primary teachers whose initial training is so crowded that at present it leaves scant room for more than basic behaviour management techniques. There is also the issue of how far parents can exploit their child’s rights to avoid facing up to difficulties when they arise in a school

This trial is an important look at an area too often neglected by policy-makers and it is to be hoped it will attract the attention of Ministers since behaviour is too often quoted as a reason teachers feel demoralised and want to leave the profession.

Babies and budgets

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In the week that the Chancellor delivered his 2013 budget the DfE published new projections for the size of the school population. The DfE now has some idea of what the school population is likely to look like into the early years of the next decade, taking us past the 2020 point for the first time. On present predictions, the birth rate is likely to peak in 2014, meaning that the total headcount of pupils aged less than 5 in maintained nursery and state-funded primary and secondary schools is projected to reach a peak of 1,086,000 million in 2019; a 14% increase since 2012.

In 2010, the number of pupils in primary schools began to increase as the birth rate upturn started to have an impact on schools. By 2016, there are projected to be 4,462,000 million pupils in state-funded primary schools, an increase of 9% from 2012. By 2021, the number is projected to increase to 4,808,000 million, 18% higher than in 2012, and a figure not seen since the early 1970s.

Secondary school pupil numbers aged up to and including 15 are projected to rise again from 2016 onwards. By 2018, they are likely to have recovered to 2012 levels. The total size of the secondary school population will depend upon where those extra young people remaining in education until eighteen after the leaving age is raised decide to continue their studies; many will no doubt opt for the further education sector as it offers a wider range of learning opportunities to that of many school sixth forms.

The education of all these extra pupils must be funded. Recent debates have been about school places, but soon it will switch to the additional costs of extra teachers and the other resources that will be required for their education. Assuming that the increase in primary school numbers will be around 700,000 by the end of the decade, such an increase will require an extra £2.1 billion per year, even if only £3,000 is spent on each new pupil. In practice, the average spend across England is nearer £4,500 per pupil, so that would mean more than £3 billion extra may be needed each year even before factoring in the regional differences in the growth in pupil numbers since the average spend per pupil is £1,000 higher in London than for England as a whole.

In the budget Red Book, the Chancellor estimated spending on Education as a whole would increase from £51.4 billion in 2012-13 to £53.8 billion in 2014-15, possibly more than might be required during that period to fund the extra primary pupils. But, don’t forget that there is general cost inflation to take into account; schools pay more for their energy bills just like the rest of us, and there is the salary bill to take into account. The one per cent increase on an average salary bill of say of £166 billion adds £166 million to the annual teaching wage bill, plus the net effect of salary progression for those teachers not yet at the top of their pay scales. Add the cost of support staff of around another £80 million, and the annual age bill increases annually by close to £250 million a year before any more staff are employed. If non-pay inflation is only 2% that can add a further £140 million to expenditure even in a mild winter, meaning close to half of the increase over the two years is absorbed in rising prices and wages. Add in the net effect of academies whose expenditure isn’t contained in most DfE figures and the margin for new spending on the extra pupils entering schools becomes even tighter.

This is one of those classic dilemmas where politicians at Westminster can happily say one thing about protecting spending on education while their activists at the grassroots level are experiencing a very different reality. In this case, protecting may not mean improving. It probably won’t protect expenditure per pupil while numbers are on the increase and that will be hard to understand at the school gates.

Personally, it seems like a time for humility. Education has done well compared with many other government departments in this age of austerity, but the increased demands on its services means that the benefit probably won’t be felt in many schools. There’s also a message here for the teacher unions, and their leaders, during this conference season: be realistic not dogmatic. 

Is School Direct working?

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How much of a mess is teacher supply in at the moment? And are we heading for another teacher shortage? Might such a shortage pit Michael Gove against the Home Secretary in demanding more immigration to allow those teachers from America and the Commonwealth that he granted QTS last year and the ability to take up vacancies not filled by UK trained teachers?

There are certainly straws in the wind pointing to challenges that might be looming. A head contacting Canada to source teachers; concern from the media in Kent that the county is having difficulty recruiting enough teachers; a rise of around 16% in vacancies for secondary school teachers advertised during the first two months of 2013 when compared to 2012. These all point to, at the very least, a tightening of the labour market. Add to this the fact that I haven’t heard as many stories about last year’s crop of NQTs being reduced to stacking shelves in supermarkets because they couldn’t find work as teachers, and we have the situation were the pointer is certainly swinging away from ‘over supply’ and towards ‘in balance’, even if it has yet to cross into the ‘shortage’ zone.

For all these reasons it is vital that the 2013 training round works both efficiently and effectively. Data from the Graduate Teacher Training Registry that manages applications to graduate teacher preparation courses in universities shows that apart from Modern Languages many subjects are experiencing a lower level of applications in the current round compared with the same time last year. Some of this may be because would-be applicants have diverted to apply for the new School Direct scheme that not only replaced the former employment based schemes, such as the Graduate Teacher Programme, but also took some of the training numbers formerly allocated to universities in previous rounds. With more than half of the application period before courses start now passed, it is interesting to review how School Direct is faring?

For the purposes of this blog I reviewed the data provided on the DfE web site regarding the total number of places, and how many remained available at the middle of March in two subjects. Physics was chosen because it has traditionally been a ‘shortage’ subject, and even those not offered a salary can claim relatively generous bursaries. By contrast, history has not been regarded as a shortage subject, and those not on the salaried scheme may find little by way of financial support to help them through their training.

The results when I looked on the 15th March were that only 4% of the ‘salaried’ School Direct places for Physics were shown as ‘unavailable’, as were just 6% of the ‘non-salaried’ Physics ‘Training’ places. That’s a total of 29 places out of 572 on offer for Physics shown as ‘unavailable’, and presumably, therefore, filled. In history, the position was better, with a quarter of the 336 places shown as ‘unavailable’, and presumably filled.

Now it is too early to be sounding alarm bells but, with the Easter holiday fast approaching, schools probably won’t be holding many more interviews until sometime in April. By the end of that month there will be just four months before the new school year when the School Direct candidates will be expected to start their training. By now Teach First has usually closed its book to new applicants, but this year even that programme is still accepting applications in the sciences, mathematics, computer science/ICT and English.

Taken together, the fact that the three leading routes used for preparing teachers are finding this a challenging recruitment round means that the government must take notice, and, if necessary, action.

Now it may be that School Direct partners are just slow in notifying the DfE that they have accepted candidates. It may also be that they are used to recruiting teachers for September largely between March and May and don’t appreciate the fact that training places have generally been organised earlier in the year than that. Schools may also be expecting a higher standard from potential applicants than higher education has sometimes been able to demand. Whatever the reasons, we will not produce a world-class education system unless we have enough teachers.

Perhaps Mr Gove ought to send David Laws, his Minister of State, to open preliminary negotiations with Mrs May about visas for teachers in the future. He also needs to ensure that the Teaching Agency is managing the situation effectively. And with fees around the £9,000 level it may be time to review how we fund those who want to train as teachers before we reach crisis levels.

Planning School Places: More than just about the numbers

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On Friday 15th March the National Audit Office issued what can be seen as a critical report about capital funding for primary school places in England http://media.nao.org.uk/uploads/2013/03/10089-001_Capital-funding-for-new-school-places.pdf

The media, as might be expected, latched on to the fact that 250,000 extra places will be needed by September 2014, with a further 400,000 required by 2018, rather than the more technical discussion about the manner in which places are funded, and the value for money associated with the process. The figures for pupil places required are not new, although the shortfall still remains too large, and until recently hasn’t been treated with any degree of urgency at Westminster.

More important than the numbers is what can be read into the Report about the two competing ideologies in British politics – on the one hand, the market as a mechanism for solving all problems; and on the other some form of state planning. The post-war period has been marked in many parts of the public sector by a shift from a planning-based approach to public policy to a more market-based approach. The current generation of think-tank and policy research probably don’t realise that in September 1939 when DORA was introduced overnight (Defence of the Realm Act), using the experiences gained during the first World War, Britain became one of the most controlled and planned societies in the world: today planning is a concept that often seems to have a bad name in public sector policy, especially in education. However, the NAO Report ought to mark a reappraisal if not a turning point in the debate.

In the private sector, future planning is an integral part of every successful business. Just consider the fate of either those retailers that didn’t plan for the effect of the internet on their customers or the train operators who have failed to cope with a record growth in passenger numbers. Without planning comes not just chaos, but also inefficiency and public disappointment that eventually can lead to a sense of dissatisfaction with politicians. Now of course, planning isn’t an exact science, and bad planning can result is poor outcomes for society. But, planning for school places ought to be a basic part of the management of our education service.

Part of the reason for the failure in dealing with provision for the current upswing in the birth rate is undoubtedly the breakdown of the arrangements for controlling schools that stared a quarter of a century ago with the Education Reform Act, and site-level  management of schools. When the Labour Government invented sponsored academies to take over failing schools they destroyed many of the remaining education planning frameworks without making clear what would replace them. With Westminster and Town Hall both either unable or unwilling to take on the responsibility, there has been a sense of drift and ‘passing the buck’ rather than of co-ordinated planning: hence the NAO’s concerns about both numbers and value for money.

One outcome will be that parents in many areas are now faced with Hobson’s choice over what school they can send their child to, and the notion of parental choice will become, like the red squirrel population, restricted to ever smaller areas of the country, at least for the next decade.

Those parents whose children are starting school in locations where selective education still divides children at eleven might also want to consider how their secondary school system will cope with the increased numbers, and whether a system designed in the Nineteenth century for the few fits the educational needs of the many in the Twenty First century, one where all students will be expected to remain in learning until they are eighteen, irrespective of parental income or status.

From my perspective, however we procure the school places, and that might be through a market based approach, the State has a duty to ensure all pupils have a school place available to them that is not an unreasonable distance away from their home and doesn’t demand they attend a school that has an ideology or teaching methodology objectionable to their parents. To fail in planning for this basic task, while still requiring parents to send children to school, if not educated elsewhere, under pain of the criminal law, is a basic failure of government that is unlikely to go unpunished at the ballot box; although whether the right tier of government will shoulder the blame only time will tell.

If the provision of school places isn’t at the top of Minister’s agendas at present then it ought to be. There may be more fun tasks, but concentrating on the basics must now be top of both Ministers and officials ‘to do’ lists. History will judge a Secretary of State harshly if he or she as steward of our state education system fails to provide enough school places during the next decade.

Who is in charge of our schools?

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A slightly amended version of this article appeared in the Oxford Times on 31st January 2013

Who is responsible for schools in Oxfordshire? This innocuous question reaches to the heart of the current debate about publicly funded schooling in England. Historically, there were three levels of responsibility: individual schools; local authorities, in our case Oxfordshire County Council; and the government at Westminster. Interestingly, this year, sees the 25th anniversary of the passing of the Education Reform Act. That legislation, by introducing local management of schools, started the process of delivering autonomy to individual schools while at the same time reserving power over the curriculum to the government at Westminster. During the following 25 years local authorities have steadily lost control of their local education service. New types of schools have been developed, ranging from Kenneth Baker’s City Technology Colleges through the grant maintained schools of the 1990s to the more recent sponsored academies of the Labour government, and finally the new converter academies, free schools and university technology colleges all managed from Westminster.

Of course, a range of different bodies running schools is not a new concept. The major churches have been a part of the education landscape since compulsory elementary education was introduced in 1870, and more recently these schools have been joined by those from other faiths. What needs to be resolved now is the chain of responsibility and accountability for publicly funded schools, and whether, as I believe they should, elected local authorities still have a central place in the organisation of schooling?

Since the funding for schools is now largely determined at Westminster, with little room for local political discretion, as is when and where new schools may open, councils have been left with responsibilities, but often no funds or powers to implement them.

The rhetoric from Whitehall has been that chains of academies are the way forward. Local authorities are nowadays pale shadows of such chains, without many of the powers conferred on these private sector chains by the Labour government that invented them. One solution is that councils become just a watch dog, with questions about school performance solved by Whitehall mandarins. This might work for the secondary sector, but with more than 18,000 primary schools across England the chain of command between each school and Whitehall is just too long. Last summer the RSA suggested unelected School Commissioners, along the lines of the Police & Crime Commissioners. That is a possible solution, but it takes away democratic control from a key publicly funded institution, and would create a system for schooling more akin to the NHS.

While the debate about who is responsible for our schools remains unresolved, the present system, especially for the primary sector, risks heading towards a complete collapse. Already, professional development services for schools, effective planning of school places, admission arrangements, and provision of services to children with special educational needs are either under threat or have been severely curtailed.

There is a ray of hope locally in the way that both the County and Oxford City responded when I revealed in November 2011 that KS1 results in the City were the worst for any district council in England. But, it shouldn’t have been up to me to start that debate.

I support local democratic responsibility for schools, directly so for the publically funded primary sector, regardless of who actually operates the schools, and as a watchdog for both the secondary and further education sectors where performance can be the key to the success of local communities. However, what really matters is that the government takes swift action to deal with the present lack of a viable control structure for our school system.

Professor John Howson is the director of dataforeducation.info and holds a visiting professorship at Oxford Brookes University and a visiting senior research fellowship at Oxford University’s Department of Education and has lived in Oxford for more than 30 years. He is a lifelong Liberal Democrat, and Vice President of the Liberal Democrat Education Association. These are his personal views

Unionised, but not necessarily militant

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Unionised, but not necessarily militant

A recent report for the DfE from the NfER about trade union activity among teachers in state funded schools in England found a high degree of membership of professional associations among the 1,600 teachers surveyed during November 2012, but a less active participation rate in the current round of work to rule by some of the associations. Teachers were members, but not at the current time necessarily militant ones.

Of the 1,305 classroom teachers in the survey, all but 3% were members of professional associations, as were the same percentage of the 300 school leaders surveyed. Two thirds of classroom teachers belonged to either the NUT or the NASUWT, with the former more dominant in the primary sector and the positions reversed in the secondary sector. That’s good news for the NUT who can probably expect their membership to grow as more primary teachers are recruited over the next few years in order to meet the growth in the school population.  At least the NASUWT can reflect that once the secondary school population increases later in the decade they may be well benefit more.

The most popular reason for joining a union was to have support if there was a problem at work. Seven out of ten teachers (72%) cited this as their main reason. The second and third most popular reasons were a belief in trade unions (11%) and the campaigning that unions do on issues that mattered to teachers (6%). These top three reasons were ranked the same across school phases and levels of seniority. That barely more than one in ten of respondents cited a belief in trade unions as their main reason for joining a trade union probably reflects the age we now live in. Despite the economic downturn, the position of unions in society isn’t what it was during the first half of the last century.

Two teaching unions (NUT and NASUWT) were instructing their members to ‘work to rule’ at the time of the survey in November 2012. Two-thirds of respondents belonged to the NUT and NASUWT, the two unions taking action. When asked whether they thought the current ‘work to rule’ was having an impact in their school, the majority of all respondents (60%) said that staff were not working to rule, and therefore there was no impact. Eight per cent said that teachers at their school were working to rule, but that it was not having an impact, and ten per cent were not sure if the working to rule at their school was having an impact. Thirteen per cent of respondents said they did not know if staff members were working to rule or not. Only nine per cent of all respondents overall said they thought that working to rule was having an impact at their school.

After several years of a pay freeze, and with union general secretaries telling their members at every opportunity that the government is cutting funding for education, classroom teachers don’t seem to have as much enthusiasm for militancy as their leaders would expect if this survey is accurate; and there is no reason to doubt the survey methods used by the NfER.