Tag Archives: education

Burying bad news: a dishonourable tradition

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The DfE has continued the tradition of publishing bad news at a time when it presumably hopes many won’t be looking. However, in the current digital age the tradition of burying bad news on a Friday afternoon before a school holiday no longer really works. Thus, even though the adverse report by the Education Funding Agency on the Cuckoo Hall Academy Trust plus the Financial Notice to improve appeared on Friday 13th February on the EFA website (under respectively transparency data and correspondence for anyone having difficulty finding the details), they didn’t go un-noticed.

Cuckoo Hall Academy Trust was one of Gove’s flagship convertor schools and an early sponsor of ‘free schools’ in parts of Enfield, the North London borough.

Indeed, Gove visited the school and the head teacher was on the panel set up by Gove as Secretary of State to review teaching standards. As a result, the investigations of the goings-on at the Trust makes uncomfortable reading in what must been seen as a Tory flagship Trust.

As Cuckoo Hall has also been at the forefront of some of the school-led innovations in teacher training the findings regarding the approach to employing staff without current DBS checks has hopefully also been investigated by the NCTL to ensure that the same shortcomings haven’t been happening with respect to those taken onto teacher preparation courses and not shown as employees by the Trust.

The previous week to the Cuckoo Hall publication the EFA published the heavily redacted report on the Park View Academy Trust. There are now 10 reports on one part of the EFA website in a list first published in March 2014.  But, that isn’t the full list ofreviews, as there is another list covering investigations into financial management and governance at academies that was started at the same time, but that now contains 15 reports including some schools and trusts not on the other list.

Some schools have always broken the rules and these remain a small minority of academy trusts, but the risks remain high that governance arrangements and audit trails don’t always seem to be good enough. Too frequently the mis-use of credit cards appears in the reports and good leaders seem too often to succumb to a failure to manage basic operational procedures in the correct manner.

One solution would be to require all internal management auditing to be brought back into government with local authority teams auditing academies as well as maintained schools.  It might also help if there was a common accounting year for schools of all types as maintaining two different periods as the NAO has shown can also lead to a lack of understanding and poor control.

The other development should be to ensure all schools have a properly trained bursar with the power to refer any anxieties about compliance matters to an external regulator. Ofsted should be retained for teaching and learning compliance issues but financial and other matters needs a mechanism that will encourage the highest standards of public life across the board in education.

Schools rebuff call to use unqualified teachers

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The DfE tables in the 2013 Teacher Workforce Survey that reveals the changes in pupil teacher ratios over time. The data also says something about the use of qualified and unqualified teachers by the different types of school. Despite the increase in pupil numbers, PTRs in the maintained primary sector appeared to have improved between 2012 and 2013. However, they worsened in primary academies. This may well be down to the mix of schools in the two groups and it is more instructive to note that PTRs across the whole primary sector remained unchanged for the second year in a row at 20.5 for teachers of all descriptions, despite schools adding to their cash reserves during this period.

In the secondary sector, where more schools are academies of one sort or another, PTRs for qualified teachers worsened from 15.5 to 15.7 after improving in the previous year. The overall PTR for the secondary sector is still 1.5 pupils per teacher better than in 2000, so the support for funding in schools during this parliament seems to have helped, at least with staffing levels.

The DfE also published data on the difference in the ratio between qualified teachers in schools and all teachers, qualified and unqualified. As the latter include Teach First and probably some School Direct trainees on the salaried route ‘unqualified’ isn’t the same as the former ‘instructor’ category. As this data is two recruitment rounds after Michael Gove freed academies to employ anyone as a teacher it is interesting to see what signs there have been of any change in the balance between qualified and unqualified teachers being employed.

In primary maintained schools the difference between qualified and all teachers remained at 0.4 of a pupil between 2012 and 2013. In primary academies it reduced from a gap of 0.8 to 0.7 of a pupil; so no dramatic swing towards unqualified teachers there. In the remaining maintained secondary schools the gap between qualified teachers and all teachers widened from 0.5 of a pupil to 0.6. In academies it also widened by 0.1 of a pupil from 0.7 to 0.8.

Among the different types of secondary academies, in free schools the ratio between qualified and all teachers widened from 1.3 to 2.3, a noticeable change in the ratio in a single year. However, in converter academies there was little change in difference between the PTR for all teachers and for just qualified teachers increasing by just 0.1 of a pupil.

In UTCs and Studio Schools serving the post-14 age-group the gap was largest of any group of schools, with a difference of 3.4 pupils per teacher between the all teacher PTR and the qualified teacher PTR. This was up from 1.7 in a year, possibly because of the number of these schools opening had increased.

Overall, there doesn’t seem to have been a large swing towards the use of unqualified teachers and much of the change may be down to the expansion of Teach First and School Direct between 2012 and 2103. Rejecting the unprincipled use of unqualified teachers is sensible. Whether, as a recruitment crisis develops, there will be enough qualified teachers to go around is another matter. As regular readers know, we are tracking that situation in secondary schools through TeachVac at http://www.teachvac.co.uk if you are interested. The February newsletter to be issued next week will reflect our latest finding.

Happy 2nd birthday

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240 posts in 24 months: more than 30,000 views: visitors from across the globe. Little did I think when I posted my first entry to this blog in January 2013 that it would reach such an audience only two years later.

My thanks to those of you that read the postings regularly. I fear that the blog has strayed slightly from its original purpose of re-telling the stories behind the numbers into a wider range of topics.  Perhaps that was inevitable given the range of issues arising out of education policy over the past two years. However, the topic that has come to the front, especially during the past eighteen months, is that of teacher supply, and recruitment into both training and employment.

I started my career in teaching in January 1971 in the middle of a recruitment crisis, being hired as a supply teacher to cover parts of two vacancies the school couldn’t fill. The school was a challenging one and a place some teachers came to look, but didn’t bother to stay even for the interview as they know there were other vacancies they could apply for in easier schools. I don’t want to see this situation again. We came close to it in 2003, and the risks are once again in plain sight.

By the time the general election campaign is in full swing in April the situation both regarding recruitment for September and for recruitment into training for 2016 employment will be well known and the government will have nowhere to hide if the situation has deteriorated compared with last year, especially for entry into training.

As a Lib Dem county councillor I am still aware that the issue left over from the Labour government of a well defined and engaged middle tier to sit between Westminster and the schools still hasn’t been properly solved. Academies, as the recent events over their accounts show, are not part of a unified system working for the good of all. Competition hasn’t yet been fully replaced by cooperation, and the notion of good schools for all with choice between good schools and not between a good school and a less good one is still little more than an aspiration on parts of the country.

So, we now wait to see what will happen after the general election. Will there be another whirlwind, as there was in 2010 with the Academies Act arriving on the statute book less than three months after the election. I would be surprised if that turns out to be the case. Much, as ever, will depend upon the personality of the Secretary of State and what they want to achieve. Gove wanted to be Education Secretary: does either of the current Labour or Conservative politicians with the brief really want the job after May?

This year I have helped create TeachVac as a new and free matching service for schools looking for teachers and applicants looking for teaching posts. Full details are at www.teachvac.co.uk. This may take more of my time, so I cannot guarantee to continue ten posts per month in the next year: but I will see what can be done. Once again, thanks for reading.

 

 

Three Secondary Moderns for Sevenoaks

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Is this the prospect being held out to local people by campaigners for a new grammar school in the town? They might not be saying so, but it is difficult to see what the credible alternative would be if a grammar school took the 20% of local pupils that passed the entrance exam. Sean Coughlan the BBC correspondent has written a piece along these lines that is well worth reading at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30483031

What Sean doesn’t say it that unless the number of selective school places is fixed at a ratio to the overall school population successful entry to a grammar school can depend upon whether a child is born in a bulge year or at the bottom of the demographic cycle. Add to that distance from the school and house prices and a child from a family that cannot afford a house near enough to the school that was also born in a bulge year has less chance of gaining a place than other children, especially if the entry test is susceptible to coaching by private tutors. It is no accident that when selective schools were at their peak, a period of history when the bulge years of the 1945-47 post-war baby boom period were approaching secondary school age, prep schools and private primary schools enjoyed a boom period. Their secondary colleagues were less well favoured. After all, why pay for something you can have for free?

Selecting children at eleven is a risky and inefficient business. Offering different courses at fourteen makes more sense, but if the leaving age is now eighteen a common curriculum until sixteen might be even more sensible for most young people. If the purpose of an education system is to obtain the best education for every child, then supporters of selective education for a minority have to show that areas without a break at eleven fared worse overall in terms of education outcomes than areas with selection, however outcomes are measured, at sixteen. After that comparisons aren’t as easy because there is a degree of pupil movement between schools and colleges.

In a recent poll on the subject of grammar schools it seemed that the older generations were more supportive of selective education than the younger generations that had experienced comprehensive schooling. It has also always been the norm in the primary sector for those that don’t or cannot pay for exclusivity.

As a Lib Dem councillor in Oxfordshire I would be extremely unhappy if the Coalition government sanctioned an expansion of grammar schools, even if it was by allowing an existing school to create a new site. At the very least such a proposal should be subject to a vote in parliament.

Grammar schools were a product of the nineteenth century that lingered into the twentieth and have no place in the modern world. We do not ensure the effective education of those gifted and talented in some areas by separating them from the rest of society at an early age. Even where their education is fundamentally different, whether for future ballet dancers, musicians, footballers or choristers some degree of integration with others less skilled should be the norm. Since intellectual ability isn’t fully developed at eleven, the grounds for grammar schools seem more social than educational even when cloaked in the guise of meritocracy. Scare resources are best employed developing better education for all, not in keeping a few Tory voters in Kent happy.

Kazakhstan

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As a geographer by background, I am always intrigued to see where the readers of this blog come from? Overwhelmingly, as might be expected for a parochial blog of this nature, the readers come from the United Kingdom. However, views from Kazakhstan have now topped the 100 mark over the past twelve months, making it the third ranked country by number of views of this blog: Thailand is ranked fourth during the same period, with the USA in second places, as might be expected. The People’s Republic of China notched up one visit the day after I commented that I hadn’t seen any views from that country: will the same thing happen again after this post, I wonder?

I am not sure who reads this blog in Kazakhstan and whether they are in Astana, Almaty – the largest city – or out on the Steppes of Central Asia, but I send them all best wishes for the celebration of their Independence Day in a couple of weeks time.

This musing about the geographical distribution of readers naturally followed on from writing the previous post about the likelihood of the need for the recruitment of overseas teachers to work in schools in England finding it challenging to recruitment enough home-based teachers. I doubt many Kazakhstan teachers will be headed for the bright lights of London just yet, but teachers from the Irish Republic do seem to be likely to face a publicity blitz trying to entice them to teach in London and other parts of the country.

Teaching is increasingly becoming a global profession with opportunities to practice across the globe. I first visited international schools in Dubai in 1991, coincidentally taking the first digital pictures on the trip – long since lost – with a Canon camera. The past half century has marked profound technological changes, the tablet might one day rival the original word processor as a change of monumental magnitude, a development rivalled only by the development of the internet that has made the communication of this blog possible. Or, it might, like the fax machine and overhead projector, become little more than a footnote in the history of technology and communications. Either way, I think that a teaching and education approach based upon a nineteenth century model of learning has eventually to succumb to new approaches. What that will mean for teachers and their relationships with pupils isn’t clear.

Such changes will also affect the State and its relationship with its citizens. Transferring the cost of education back to parents might be seen by some governments an alternative to raising taxes, especially as governments may think that such an approach has been working in higher education where tuition fees have been introduced. Although here, pressure to reduce fees through competition has yet to really manifest itself; probably because demand still exceeds supply in most countries.

For us, in England, the core is how to deliver effective learning to those that don’t see the value of schooling? Does that require us to do things better, or to do better things?

Middle tier in schooling needs democratic input

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Shock horror: local councils are back in favour to play a part in education. After around 30 years when local education authorities have been increasingly both emasculated and marginalised in the running of education in their local areas the Schools’ Minister, David Laws, seems to be calling a halt to this sidelining of democratically elected local councils in a speech to the CentreForum think tank later this morning. According to the Local Government Information Unit press summary:

Minister plans to hand back power to councils

Proposals by schools minister David Laws would see councils given more powers to intervene in struggling academy schools, reversing the trend of increasing autonomy. The Liberal Democrat minister is expected to argue in a speech today that the system of school governance introduced by Michael Gove has abandoned schools that converted from local authority control to standalone academy status, leaving them without the resources or support they need to improve. Mr Laws wants responsibility for improvements to be passed from the DfE to a “middle tier” of local authorities and academy chains, backed by successful schools and head teachers. This middle tier would also potentially assist any schools in need of improvement, not just academies. More than 4,000 primary and secondary schools out of 19,000 mainstream schools in England are currently rated as “requires improvement” or “inadequate”. “I think in a good and realistic scenario, where we had an effective middle tier, we would have 2,000 fewer schools in the ‘lowest’ categories of requiring improvement or special measures,” Mr Laws will say.

Personally, I hope there is also something about both admissions and the creation of new schools. It is daft that academies with spare capacity can deny that space to local councils potentially forcing them to bus pupils elsewhere at public expense. Councils also need more control over who runs news schools and if they select a school or group approved by the DfE then Regional Commissioners should no longer have the power of veto unless there was something at fault with the selection process.

There is an earlier post on this blog outlining in details why I think these issues matter, especially for the primary school sector. Such schools are deeply rooted in their communities and breaking up that link with local authorities, which has generally worked well, has made no sense at all.

The real issue is whether there will be time to implement any of the changes suggested by David Laws before the election; or is it just an attempt to put some distance between the Lib Dems, a Party I represent as a county councillor in Oxfordshire, and the Tory Party ahead of the most interesting general election probably since 1906 and the rise of the Labour vote.

The design of a sensible middle tier is the key issue in education. Academy chains haven’t worked; Regional Commissioners have as much cache as Police and Crime Commissioners and are even less democratic, being appointed; and local authorities have been withering on the vine. I am off to listen to the speech in detail and will report back later about whether the substance was materially different from the press reports.

Today is also ITT census day, so hopefully a post on that topic this afternoon.

Was Professor Halsey right after all?

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Educational Priority Areas grew out of the desire in the 1960s to improve the quality of education for those children living in the most deprived parts of the country. Now over half a century later we find the government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission that is chaired by a Labour politician and includes a former Tory Secretary of State for Education among its members recommending paying teachers 25% more to work in the most deprived schools as an experiment in improving outcomes for disadvantaged children. Well that sounds very like the Schools of Exceptional difficulty payments introduced under Margaret Thatcher’s regime when she was Edward Heath’s Education Secretary. This idea along with the instruction to Teach First to extend to certain coastal fringe areas this seems like another step in the move away from a free-market economics of education solution to a more planned and directed outcome to a problem that has be-devilled this country; the gaps in attainment between different social classes.

The Commission’s idea that the Pay Review Body might designate a new pay category that was non-geographical and thus unlike the present arrangements is really a challenge to the free market and comes remarkably swiftly after the abolition of national pay scales by the previous Secretary of State. The Commission noted that few academies had made use of the powers over pay that had been available to them in the past and this seems to have been one of the reasons for them advocating a more interventionist approach. Elsewhere, the Commission seem to have a somewhat fanciful notion of what local authorities can now achieve. It is all very well using the example of the London Challenge, but that was developed in a timeframe before the wholesale introduction of academies and free schools decimated local authority education departments. Realistically, the Commission needs to pay more attention to how far the complexity of running today’s school system may be adding to the very issue that they are trying to solve. As regular reads know, I would prefer local democratic involvement, especially in the primary school sector, but even more I would prefer a coherent management and leadership regime for the whole system that is dedicated to raising standards for all.

The Commission also discuss parental involvement and the poor quality of career advice that is often linked to low expectations. More must be done to encourage parents that the education system failed not to let the same thing happen with the next generation. Breaking the cycle of hopelessness is a vital component to raising standards as the Commission acknowledges. How to disseminate best practice rather than ritual nods to devolving training to schools and Teach First might have allowed for discussion about the content of both initial training and professional development of teachers.

Where I do agree with the Commission is in the vital role played by primary schools and the need to focus more attention on success in the early years. Regular attendance and strategies to help pupils that miss school are important moves in helping all pupils achieve success as last week’s publication of the EYFS profiles showed.

For anyone interested in the issue of social mobility this is an important but at times challenging and even depressing Report to read. It can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/364979/State_of_the_Nation_Final.pdf

 

 

 

 

25,000 not out

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My thanks to everyone that helped this blog reach the total of 25,000 views in less than two years and with just over 200 posts. It took just one year eight months and eighteen days to be precise to reach the 25,000 figure if anyone other than me is interested. There has been at least one visitor from each of around 100 different countries during that time, although the bulk of visitors, over 22,000 views, have been from the United Kingdom. Still thank you to my local followers in Kazakhstan, Australia, Thailand, Canada, and across much of Europe as well as the rest of the world. I guess that the power of the State is the reason I am still waiting for my first viewing from the People’s Republic of China and from Tibet. Much of Francophile Africa is another area where there have been no views, but that may be less surprising given the language barrier and internet penetration in the region. My especial thanks to the more than 150 regular followers and to those that re-blog the most interesting posts to others.

Over the course of the last year the issue of teacher supply and the associated issue of training have together come to be a dominant theme in the posts on this blog. In view of the changes to training with the government in England preferring school-based preparation to higher education courses this is probably not a surprise. What started as a continuation of my column about facts and issues behind the numbers has progressed to consider some wider educational issues. No doubt that trend will continue as the UK general election looms ever larger. Indeed, the 2015 general election looks like joining those of 1906; 1945; 1979 and 1997 in the annuls of political history as one when seismic changes takes place at Westminster.

I originally started writing about education statistics in the Times Educational Supplement in 1998 in a column called ‘hot data’. In one form or another that run until 2011 when I retired from the TES. For a period it then ran in the on-line Education Journal, and many those columns can still be accessed on Amazon in the e-book ‘Please Miss- can pigs fly?’ For various reasons I eventually became attracted to the greater freedom that a blog can provide where editorial decisions and what to write are entirely within the compass of the author: hence this blog.

Do I have a favourite post? I am not sure that I do. As I only write what I want to, in one sense every post is a favourite. Certainly the post of early August 2013 on School Direct and teacher training recruitment generated the most consequences at the time. One of the most distressing to have to write was my tribute to Andrew Bridgwater after his untimely death; liberalism and special education lost a great friend that day. My submission to the Carter Review has been one of the most viewed of recent posts.

Most posts aim for around the 500 word mark, but as usual this one is slightly over-length as I am not good with the red pen. So, let me close by once again thanking everyone for reading and for the many comments I have received. The next challenges, 50,000 views and 500 posts.

All or nothing

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According to the press this morning David Cameron is set to announce the creation of a squad of high-quality teachers, to be employed centrally that will be sent out to assist poorly performing schools. The National Teaching Service (NTS) will be made up of up to 1,500 ‘super teachers funded by central government, and will be deployed to so-called failing schools.

If true, this development poses a number of issues for trainee teachers, schools, and indeed parents. Historically, apart for the ill-fated and short-lived Fast Track Scheme introduced by Labour over a decade ago to recruit and place the best new teachers, recruitment has been a discussion between an individual teacher and a school or in a few cases a group of schools. Even in the latter case, except in the primary sector, posts advertised have usually been associated with working in a particular school. In the primary sector, pooling arrangements for the first stage of recruitment were popular when local authorities managed schools even though they sometimes might have discriminated against ‘returners’ in favour of newly qualified teachers.

Any announcement of an NTS has implications for current trainees if it is to start in 2015. More likely it will not commence before September 2016. However, savvy trainees on PGCE or School Direct courses, especially in shortage subjects, may decide to avoid working in schools likely to be targeted by NTS flying squads on the basis that they might need to be replaced by the in-coming teachers. Teachers already working in these schools now have an extra incentive to find another job just in case the alternative is redundancy or dismissal on other grounds when the NTS arrive.

Announcing the NTS in October is probably the most stupid move in the teacher labour market made by a government since the 1996 announcement of changes to the pension scheme drove an unprecedented number of head teachers to quit by the following summer. Even though 1,500 NTS staff, and it is not clear whether they will encompass all grades of teacher or just say, middle leaders, need to be recruited it is not clear how many schools will be targetted. That issue alone will be interesting as presumably there will need to be incentives to secure the NTS staff away from their present posts.

Now, as someone who working for seven years in a school likely these days to be a top target for an NTS squad to replace existing staff, I fully accept that there are under-performing schools. I also accept that some staff drafted in may make a difference. The famous arrival of Mike Tomlinson at The Ridings School in Yorkshire in the late 1990s had an immediate impact but longer-term change proved more elusive.

At the heart of this announcement is the issue raised before in this blog of whether schooling has now been nationalised in England. The very term NTS suggests the answer, but in a typically British manner it may be being handled in a cack-handed manner. However, it probably explains Labour’s announcement of the idea of a teacher’s oath yesterday. As usual, I am left wondering what is the position of my own Party, the Lib Dems on the idea of who is responsible for teachers and their employment

Funding of academies and free schools

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I was intending to keep the 200th post on this blog for a reflective piece looking back over the first 199 posts. As a result of a Statistical Release issued today by the DfE that blog can wait. The DfE published data about academies and free school and their expenditure during 2012-13 at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/360139/SFR24_2014_Main_Text.pdf

There is a major anomaly on the front page where some headline statistics are presented. Nowhere does it say that the figures used are derived only from those relating Single Academy Trust information and thus seemingly don’t include data from schools in Multi Academy Trusts. Yet that is the message in a footnote on the un-numbered table in the spreadsheet of detailed tables associated with the release where on the index page it says of the National Median data ‘National median income and expenditure for academies with certain characteristics’. If it is the case that the data only applies to schools in SATs then the headline page should be revised to make clear that the data does not cover all schools with the title academy or free school but only those not part of MATs as it indeed does on page 2: but who will read the small print?

I haven’t had time to work out whether or not the addition of MATs would alter the figures and I haven’t yet considered in detail whether the median figure is the best of the available measures of central tendency to use with this data. Representing the data in graph form using candlestick graphs that allowed the number and range of outliers – both low and high – might have provided a more interesting picture of the range of expenditure.

Comparing two years of data when the sector is growing probably isn’t helpful either as if the balance between schools in and around London and the rest of the country was changing that would skew the income side of the picture and might account for some or the entire decline in income between the two years.

One point that did stand out was the relatively high figures studio schools and University Technical Colleges spent in teaching staff costs. As these schools were mostly in their first year of existence, teaching costs in excess of £6,000 per pupil may be acceptable. Should they fail to recruit sufficient pupils in the future, and a previous post has expressed some anxiety about their numbers and attendance patterns, then whether this is money well spent may be a subject for discussion in the future. Certainly in comparison with the three City Technology Colleges their staffing costs look very high.

It is also interesting to note that although the median figure for primary academies expenditure in 2012-13 was above their income, presumably meaning that they had to draw on reserves, the secondary academies in the median group didn’t spend all their income and put away £48 per pupil into reserves. At this stage of their existence it is too early to tell whether that is both sufficient for depreciation and other unforeseen expenditure or too much. It would have been helpful to see this figure against the school reserves to identify what has happened since these schools changed status.

Finally, as academies and free schools use a different financial year to other state-funded schools it is difficult to make any comparisons between these and other schools.