Tag Archives: education

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part Two

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The DfE is spending more money supporting their latest venture into the teacher recruitment market. Schoolsweek has uncovered the latest moves by the government to challenge existing players in this market https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ in an exclusive report.

The current DfE foray into the recruitment market follows the failure of the Fast Track Scheme of two decades ago and the Schools Recruitment Service that fizzled out a decade ago. The present attempt also came on the heels of the fiasco around a scheme to offer jobs in challenging schools in the north of England that never progressed beyond the trial phase.

The present DfE site rolled out nationally two years ago this month. How successful it has been was the subject of a Schoolsweek article earlier this year. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/  This blog reviewed the market for vacancy sites for teachers last December, in a post entitled Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons that was posted on December 7, 2020.

In that December post, I looked at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and The TES. As I pointed out, this was not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, I said, it might be regarded as an advertisement, and warned readers to treat it in that way.

There is an issue with how much schools spend on recruitment of teachers. After all, that was why TeachVac was established eight years ago. The DfE put the figure in their evidence to the STRB this year at around £75 million; a not insubstantial figure.

Will TeachVac be squeezed out in a war between the DfE backed by unlimited government funding and the TES with a big American backer? At the rate TeachVac is currently adding new users, I don’t think so. After all, the DfE site doesn’t cover independent schools, and in the present market I believe that most teachers want a site that allows access to all teaching jobs and not just some. That benefits both TeachVac and the TES as well as other players in the market, such as The Guardian and Schoolsweek, as well as recruitment agencies.

How much the DfE will need to spend on ensuring they cover the whole of the state-funded job market in terms of acquiring vacancies by the ‘school entering vacancies’ method is another interesting question? As is, how much will it also cost to drive teachers to using the DfE site and not TeachVac or the TES?

A view of TeachVac’s account reveals that Teachvac provides access to more jobs for teachers at less than the DfE is going to spend on promoting their site over the next few months. Such spending only makes good commercial sense if you want to remove a player from the market.

So here’s a solution. Hire TeachVac to promote the DfE site and use the data TeachVac already generates to monitor the working of the labour market. After all, that was also one of the suggestions from the Public Accounts Committee Report that spurred the DfE into action and the creation of their present attempt at running a vacancy site.

Data in: garbage out

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Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my post of the 15th March about the freedom of Information request that I have made to the DfE. The request was about to total of vacancies on their teacher vacancy site. New readers need to know that I am Chair of TeachVac, a similar site for teachers seeking permanent jobs in schools anywhere in England. Hence my interest in the topic.

When TeachVac staff checked the DfE site today, it was showing a total of 1,805 vacancies: a good score and about 45% of the vacancies numbers being displayed at that point on TeachVac. However, just over 600 of the DfE’s vacancies appeared to be duplicates. This would reduce their unique vacancy number to around 1,200, of which a proportion are non-teaching posts or posts in the further education sector not covered by TeachVac. Such a lower number would be less impressive for a site fully functioning for as long as the DfE site has been, and with unfettered access to free marketing to schools.

Interestingly, a vacancy for a school cleaner apparently appears multiple times on the DfE site when a user tried looks through the site to discover the composition of the 1,800 vacancies making up the total.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this approach in an open site, such as the DfE operates, but it does make comparison more of a challenge. I am still awaiting the DfE’s response to my FOI request – they have until after Easter before the reply period expires, and I would need to take the matter further.  Using the filters on the DfE site avoids the problem of duplication, but masks the issue of the total number of unique teacher vacancies being carried by the site.

This week has seen schools ramp up recruitment ahead of the Easter break, with an increasing number of vacancies being recorded in the primary sector. I shall be writing the April newsletter for TeachVac’s subscribers over the weekend, ready for publication at the start of the month. At this point, it still looks as if recorded teacher vacancies in the first quarter of 2021 will be below the number recorded in the same quarter of 2020. The big test will be vacancy levels in April and the first couple of weeks of May, especially now that schools are open and functioning as near to normal as possible in the present conditions.  

TeachVac has already predicted that there will be shortages in design and technology; business studies and computing this year, and mathematics is expected to be added to this list of subjects either just before or just after Easter.

On the other hand, physical education and history has far more trainees than vacancies and recruiting even more trainees in these subjects seems to reflect a government with little understanding of the cost of training teachers and the implications for trainees in these subjects. I am not one that advocated recruitment controls lightly, but thought should be paid to the consequences of training too many teachers for the state sector’s needs.

ITT: not all plain sailing

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Normally during a downturn in the economy, and the associated rise in unemployment, teaching does well as a career choice, and applications for places on graduate teacher preparation courses surge; they only peak when the labour market shows signs of picking up again.

The trend during the pandemic of the past year has been slightly different to this pattern. Yes, overall applications, and applicant numbers are up, as commentators that just look at the overall numbers have noted. However, for those more concerned with the details, the picture is more nuanced.

In primary, applications have not yet reached the peak seen in the 2016/17 round, and are some 5,000 or so below that level, and only 8,000 applications above the low point reached in March 2020 before the full extent of the current pandemic had become clear. There may be a warning here about the desirability of becoming a primary school teacher among the group that society has relied upon to ensure an intake of high quality new teachers each year. The public data doesn’t allow for any further comments, but someone should be taking a look at the detailed data.

It is in the secondary sector that the outcome is more nuanced. Three subjects stand out for concern. In biology, overall applications are down on March 2020, by around a thousand, to 2,360. While there will be plenty of chemistry trainees this year, with applications double what they were in March 2020, physics, as a subject, seems unlikely that it will meet its target for the year unless applications pick up in the second half of the year. As a result, any shortfall in biology may leave school struggling for science teachers for September 2022, if demand return to more normal levels next year.

In geography, applications are down by around 300 this year on last, meaning offer levels are not much above the low levels seen seven and eight years ago. However, with ever more history trainees competing for jobs, schools will be able to replace geography teachers with humanities teachers. Whether their quality of subject knowledge will be acceptable is an issue for others to debate.

Design and technology, the ‘ugly duckling’ and neglected child of the school curriculum is a real and serious concern. Applications by mid-March were just 760, compared with 820 at the same point in 2020. That’s application and not applicants. As a result, offer levels are at their lowest point for March for any year in the last decade.

I would content that design and technology is an important subject, and the DfE needs to address where the future stock of teachers is to come from? An urgent look at the details of applicants and why only 190 offers have been made is needed. In reality, this could be a few as 100 actual applicants offered places on design and technology ITT courses by mid-March.

Nearly half of the growth in applicants can be found in the London and South East regions. Whether this means that some rebalancing of ITT places might be required, as these are the two regions with the greatest demand for teachers, is no doubt a matter for active discussion. It would be foolhardy to leave places unfilled in other parts of the country whilst turning away acceptable applicants from London, especially as London often produces a higher percentage of BAME trainees than other parts of England.

Next month the blog will consider the different routes into teaching, and how they are faring and also revisit the issue of the age profile of applicants.

Another nail in the coffin of 3-tier schooling

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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

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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.

Fire Chiefs support school sprinkler system for new schools

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Those readers that have been following this blog for some years will know that one of the few matters that The Daily Mail and I both agree upon is the need to fit sprinkler systems in new schools.

On the 15th April 2019 this blog carried a post headed ‘Install Sprinkler Systems’. This followed a call to ensure all new schools had sprinkler system built into them during construction.

Zurich Insurance, a major insurer for local government risks has now come out in support of this suggestion in a new report. A review of their view can be found in this link to pbctoday https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/health-safety-news/fire-risk-in-schools/81974/

I fully support the recommendation that all schools should be built with sprinkler systems for the reasons cited in my blog post of April 2019.

Zurich found that the average school posed a fire risk 1.7 times greater than non-residential buildings. When compared to 2.9 million non-household properties, school buildings were also three times more likely to fall into the ‘high’ fire risk category (58% vs 20%).

Now the National Fire Chiefs Council has added their voice to those calling for the compulsory fitting of sprinklers in schools.

Over the last five years, 1,100 classrooms have been gutted by fire, with 47 schools destroyed among a total of 2,300 fire incidents – while just 2% of buildings were fitted with sprinklers. The National Fire Chiefs Council is calling for sprinklers to be mandatory in all new schools, in line with Scotland and Wales.

This is a powerful new ally in the campaign to fit sprinklers.

Those concerned about climate change might also add that an unnecessary fire in a school, as in any building, releases gases from the burring materials into the atmosphere that could be prevented by having installed sprinklers.

The removal of the requirement for sprinklers in new schools was a short-sighted measure that ought to have been changed already. Better some water damage than the destruction of a whole school and the disruption to the education of many children.

Schools and the pandemic a year on

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Health and Social Care, business and education. Along with the vaccine, these are the three big stories from the pandemic. Behind them lie probably close to 150,000 deaths; each one a tragedy for a family and friends. As befits a blog about education, I will concentrate on my thoughts of what has taken place in education since last March.

Cooperation can be better than competition

Not all expertise resides in one place, and fighting a pandemic is best achieved with teamwork.  Sadly, the government didn’t harness the expertise contained in bodies such as the professional associations. The worst example was probably the announcement that schools would open in January only to be rapidly changed a day later. The on-going saga over assessment is another example of unreal assumptions leading to damaging changes.

Technology finally caught up with schooling or teaching discovered technology

It has taken a pandemic to challenge the existing format of teaching and learning. The technology revolution has impacted on many areas of life over the past half century, since email and the internet entered our lives. However, the resistance of the school sector as a whole to embrace new technology in a systematic manner beyond just installing bits of kit, such as whiteboards, led to there being no road map for when schools were forced to close.

The closure and lack of foresight revealed another problem that has always been there, but had disappeared under the carpet in the past two decades

The deprivation gap

The National Funding Formula marked the low point in recognising that not all children have access to equal opportunities in life. In the 1970s this issue was a hot topic. Books such as, ‘Depriving the Deprived’’ ‘The poverty of education’ and ‘Planning and Educational Inequality’ are worth revisiting as is the section of the Plowden Report that deals with the issue. Despite Labour’s Education Action Zones and the Conservatives’ Opportunity Areas, little real attention has been paid to the lack of education progress linked to deprivation except by a few individuals, such as the work of Professor Dorling, until the pandemic exposed the gaps in society.

The fact that it took a footballer to motivate a government over the issue of free school meals was an indictment of a school system where responsibility for the system was concentrated at Westminster.

The importance of place in local decision-making

It has taken the pandemic to make clear that local decision-making can deal with local issues far better than long chains of command. The current dual system of academies and maintained schools doesn’t work. Either nationalise schools and create the education equivalent of the NHS, with little democratic accountability or return to a system where local democracy has a central role to play in the local school system.

Schooling is still a people-driven activity

Schools never closed, and most school leaders found themselves running two systems for learners: on-line and face to face. Early in the pandemic a headteacher in Cumbria died with covid.  Without committed staff, backed by parents, schooling an unhappily fail to meet educational goals. There is a task to be done in areas where parents are not engaged with schooling to encourage a change of attitude.

And above all

Schools Matter

Children are eager to return to school. In these days of small families – by historical standards – and less community involvement than in the past, schools undoubtedly play a significant social role in the lives of children and young people. I am sure that looking at families where siblings of one parent have attended school as children of key workers and those of another have not been in school for most of the past year will show up the differences in outcomes both intellectual and socially.

Finally, all schools rely upon dedicated and hard-working staff. This blog wants to thank each and every one of you for what you do for children and young people.

Understanding Academy Finances

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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.

Undergraduate applications for Education courses

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UCAS has published a Statistical Release about the number of applications received for undergraduate courses by the January 2021 deadline. The deadline was extended by two weeks this year because of the unusual circumstances created by the covid pandemic. https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/ucas-undergraduate-releases/applicant-releases-2021/2021-cycle-applicant-figures-january-deadline

Normally, I don’t take account of undergraduate numbers, but I thought it worth looking at the JACS3 code for Group X that covers both teacher education and the teaching of the academic discipline of education. The numbers are for applications from applicants domiciled in England.

Overall applications for the X code area have fallen over the past decade, presumably as teacher training places have reduced in number at the undergraduate level.

2012       65,610

2019       41,250

2020       38,130

20121    42,310

The majority of applications come from women. Applications from males were:

2012       11,260

2019         4,960

2020         3,930

20121      4,820

So, although overall applications in 2021 are higher than in 2019, those from men have not recovered to the level of 2019 by deadline day.

The majority of applications come from school-leavers. For men aged 18-19 the number of applications was 3,270 of the 4,820, with only around 1,230 from all he age groups over 21.

Should there still be vocational training at undergraduate level for teachers? It is interesting that UCAS have pointed out the large increase in applications for Nursing courses. “Total applications for nursing courses have risen by almost a third (32%) to reach 60,130, with increases seen in each age group – from UK 18 year old school leavers (a record 16,560 applicants, up 27% on 2020) to mature students aged 35 and over, where for the first time over 10,000 (10,770, a 39% rise) have applied.”

UCAS also note that” the largest proportional increase in UK applicants by their declared ethnic group has come from black and mixed race students, both up 15% to 40,690 and 25,830 respectively. Applicants from the Asian ethnic group have increased by 10% to 70,140, while 11% more white students (to a total of 352,170) have applied.” There is also good news on the social mix of students, “more than a quarter of 18 year old students from the most disadvantaged areas (26.4% from quintile 1 of the UK using the POLAR4 measure, 33,960 students) have applied, up from 24.5% at the same point in 2020.”, but there is still from for more participation from students from these areas.

UCAS report that “overall, a total of 616,360 people had applied, an increase of 8.5% and a new record for this point in the application cycle.” However, perhaps not surprisingly, applications for the EU (excluding the Irish Republic) have declined this year.

Higher education still appears an attractive proposition for school leavers, this despite the tales about on-line learning and a lack of social life students have faced this year.

However, the future of undergraduate teacher training must be the focus of debate. Perhaps a generic degree working with young people might be a better option leading to an appropriate postgraduate teacher preparation course?

Teaching School Hubs: will schools be forced to use them?

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Has anyone noticed the DfE vacancy site padding out the number of jobs on the site by repeating entries? It doesn’t happen with the search facility, but if you scroll through the pages, some jobs appear more than once. Today, it happened to me with the Head of Sixth Form at Burford School and the Principal at Phoenix College: there may be other examples as well.

Why was I scrolling through the DfE site? Two reasons, I wanted to see if the new Teaching School Hubs were advertising posts yet: at least one is, and I am always interested to know how TeachVac fares compared with the DfE in offering a free site to schools for their teaching posts.

After stripping out non-teaching posts from the DfE site – these include a maternity leave replacement for a cleaner and a school matron – that TeachVac doesn’t handle, the DfE comes in around 40% of TeachVac’s vacancies still within closing date. Both sites offer school a way to save cash for many ‘easy to fill’ vacancies.

The news on Teaching School Hubs https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-teaching-school-hubs-to-be-rolled-out-across-the-country was announced on Wednesday and reminds me of the Teachers’ Professional Development Centre where I worked for two years in the 1970s. Those centres had the advantage of being neutral spaces not associated with particular schools, but the disadvantage of not having pupils on site for demonstration lessons.

The DfE said in the announcement that “Each hub, all of which will be operational and helping schools from this September, will have its own defined geographical patch and will be expected to be accessible to all schools within that area, serving on average around 250 schools each.”

Now this takes me even further back to McNair and his Report, and the development of what were known as Area Training Organisations. This approach, so contrary to the Conservative’s market model approach, suggests a more controlling approach. Will schools be able to buy professional development either where they want or will they be forced to support their local Teaching School Hub? 

Will the pupils in the schools benefit from the employment of the best teachers by the Hubs or will the staff of the Hub be fully employed on professional development and initial teacher preparation?

To whom will the Hubs be responsible and will they be inspected by Ofsted or some other body set up especially for that purpose?

What is clear is that the government has so emasculated professional development in the past that some sort of national programme, backed by research, is badly needed to help support the teachers working in our schools. I hope the Hubs will also offer support to those taking a career break that want to return in the future.

The Hubs must also address the conflict between the needs around the professional development of an individual teacher and those of the schools where they work. They may not be the same.

Finally, the government must be sensitive to the fact that next year many teachers will want to recover from the effects of the pandemic and Ministers must not be surprised if teachers want a quiet year to rest and recuperate even if that means avoiding after-school professional development activities.