Tag Archives: election

Policy making is not campaigning

Posted on by
Reply

This blog is mostly about education. However, after three months of campaigning for last week’s elections, including fighting the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Thames Valley (TV) election for the Liberal Democrats, I felt like a final foray into a reflection on the interesting events of last Thursday.

During the whole of my recent campaign as Liberal Democrat candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Thames Valley (TV) I was never once emailed and asked for a manifesto of my policies. Sure, there were a couple of emails along the lines of we haven’t heard anything from you and what do you stand for. There were also several media events, including an appearance on BBC South Politics show were questions were asked about particular policies.

Despite this lack of voter interest in the details beyond what was available at https://www.choosemypcc.org.uk/ and other similar sites, turnout for the PCC election was 35.9% this time compared with25.6% in the last PCC election in May 2016. Not surprisingly turnout was higher where there were other elections being held on the same day as the PCC election. We won’t know the result until sometime on Monday.

There is an essential lesson to be learnt here. However good your policies, and, as in Education, the Liberal Democrats had devised some really good policies, as they  have for tacking crime and handling policing, it is the campaigning that matters. Know your electorate. The Obama Team in the USA were great at that understanding when helping him first win the US Presidency. The Tories have learnt that lesson: others haven’t.

Here’s an interesting analysis of the Hartlepool by-election from Mark Pack, President of the Lib Dems:

The by-election has simply seen Hartlepool’s politics catch up with elsewhere.

“… and, there’s the important first opinion poll that Survation carried out in the seat. Their final poll, showing a big Conservative lead attracted a lot of scepticism but was right.. However, it is their first poll for the by-election that is important for understanding what happened.

Combined, Conservatives and Brexit Party got 55% in 2019. Survation’s first poll put the Conservatives on 49%. Their second and final one put the party on 50% and the result saw the Conservatives secure 52%. No great drama there. But for Labour it was 38% in 2019, 42% in the first poll and then… 33% in the second poll followed by 29% in the actual result.

The story here is of Labour failure, not of Conservative surge. That’s a point reinforced by the English local elections. At 36%, the Conservative equivalent national vote share is decent but not stellar. That’s not some new era-defining level of support for Boris Johnson’s party. It’s a fragile result that has brought success this time, but could very plausibly be followed by failure.

It looks like Labour badly messed up its candidate selection and campaign. …I suspect that once more detailed analysis is in, this will turn out to have mattered rather more than the Labour candidate being a previous Remainer who lost his seat in 2019.”

There’s no doubt that a large section of the population of England like an identifiable character; Churchill’s cigar and Wilson’s pipe as well as Boris’s hair are visual signals the electorate can see and easily remember. Even Mrs May’s shoes and Mrs T’s handbag are what people remember. It works in local elections, where independents are rarely shrinking violets.

Of course, cash helps. It is no surprise that Liberal Democrats went from no Councillors on Amersham Town Council in Buckinghamhire on Wednesday to taking control after the votes were counted, with eight new Councillors. The impending by-election and local spending by the national party has made a difference by adding the push that was needed to shift unhappy tory votes into the Lib Dem camp.

Know your electorate is as important as know your class is for a teacher and for candidates and Councillors tailor your material appropriately. But, nothing still works as well as talking to voters on the doorstep and being visible in the high Street.

Governments lose elections more often than oppositions win them. But, sometimes, oppositions lose elections as well producing unexpected outcomes.

Election Day

Posted on by
2

Today is a busy day for me as I am defending my county council seat and standing for Police and Crime Commissioner in Thames Valley.

This extract from a 2018 post on the blog tells you why I am standing in both these elections

Crime and a lack of learning

Posted on August 28, 2018

During the summer, the Ministry of Justice published a report called ‘A Sporting Chance: An Independent Review of Sport in Youth and Adult Prisons’ by Professor Rosie Meek. You can access the report at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/733184/a-sporting-chance-an-independent-review-sport-in-justice.pdf

I have only just caught up with reading the report, but what struck me forcibly was the following paragraph:

Those in custody are likely to have disrupted and negative experiences of learning prior to incarceration, and to lack confidence in their learning abilities.

A recent data-matching exercise between the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education* showed that of the young people sentenced to custody in 2014, 90% have a previous record of persistent absence from school and almost a quarter of those sentenced to less than 12 months in custody have been permanently excluded from school.

In terms of achievement, only 1% of those sentenced to less than 12 months achieved 5 or more GCSES (or equivalents) graded A* – C including English and Maths.

Furthermore, illustrating the over-representation of people who have been in both the care system and the criminal justice system, 31% of those sentenced to custody for 12 months or longer, and 27% of those sentenced to custody for less than 12 months had been in the care of a local authority.

* MoJ/DfE (2016). Understanding the Educational Background of Young Offenders: Joint Experimental Statistical Report from the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education.

There is a powerful message here to schools that don’t have a credible policy for dealing with their challenging pupils, other than excluding them from school. We need to work together for the good of society. The DfE needs to ensure there is a coherent curriculum, including English and mathematics, but not necessarily the rest of the English Baccalaureate for pupils that can use these subjects to retain their place as learners. There is a space for sport and other non-classroom based subjects in the curriculum.

Thanks for reading

How rich are teachers?

Posted on by
Reply

With the details of the 2016 School Workforce Survey still awaited, we have to turn to data on salaries from the 2015 Survey, effectively reflecting pay during the 2014-15 school-year. Using the published data from the DfE, it looks as if some 8,700 of the 484,000 teachers, where the State pays their salary and the figure was disclosed, earned more than £70,000 at the reporting point. This is the figure that makes you rich if Labour is to be believed. In total that represents just 2% of the teacher workforce. However, we cannot know how many of the 22,900 with unknown salaries, earn more than £70,000. But, since over half of those where the salary was unknown were younger than 30, they are unlikely to be amongst the highest paid teachers.

By contrast to the top 2%, some two thirds of employed teachers earned less than £40,000 at the census date in 2015. They are unlikely to have seen much of a pay rise since then. The top 2% earning more than £70,000 include teachers working in London, as the summary data takes no account of the extra salary paid to teachers working in the capital; presumably because of higher costs, especially housing. It was interesting that Labour when making the announcement about taxation didn’t have anything to say about workers in London. Presumably Labour believes you are still rich in London if you earn £70,000?

Of course, pay is a crude measure of rewards, as Labour found with its pay policies in the 1970s. Too draconian an anti-high pay regime and employers turn to non-monetary benefits. The cult of the company car owes a lot to pay policies in the 1970s, a period when teachers’ non-monetary benefits came to be seriously eroded compared with those of other workers.

Public sector pay, including that for teachers, may well become an issue in the general election campaign once everyone has decided where they stand on Europe and the Tories hard BREXIT stance. I suspect many voters already know how that issue will influence their voting, especially where there are local elections and it has already been discussed on the doorsteps, as it has in my part of Oxford. Voters will want something else to talk about over the next seven weeks.

The issue is whether the many young teachers, increasingly saddled with big student loan debts and trying to build their lives, feel well off? I suspect most don’t, especially in high cost areas outside of London, of which Oxford is one. How much of the increase in jobs for teachers is due to large numbers quitting the profession: we don’t know, but with other opportunities on offer why wouldn’t you, especially if workload and low morale are affecting how you see your job.

Perhaps the political party offering most on improving workload, CPD and morale might win the teachers’ vote this time around. Here’s what the 2015 Lib Dem offer was in 2015:

Guarantee all teachers in state-funded schools will be fully qualified or working towards Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) from September 2016

  • Introduce a clear and properly funded entitlement to professional development for all teachers
  • Raise the bar for entry to the profession, requiring a B grade minimum in GCSE maths and English
  • Establish a new profession-led Royal College of Teachers, eventually to oversee QTS and professional development.
  • Continue to support the Teach First programme
  • Establish a new National Leadership Institute

So certainly room for more this time around, especially on workload pressure; retaining teachers in the classroom and making everyone working in education feel properly valued as a public servant.

Readers are reminded that for the past four years I have been the Lib Dem spokesperson on education on Oxfordshire County Council.

 

Figures don’t add up

Posted on by
1

The big news story this week has been the Conservative Party’s attack on Labour’s plans for education in the next government. Specifically, the Tories have attacked the costings for three of Labour’s policies: that all teachers should be qualified; the creation of 100 University Technical Colleges; a Director of School Standards in every local authority. Of course, if you ask the Treasury mandarins to cost a policy, they will do just that. What they won’t do is ask the wider questions, such as how does this match your own policy so we can factor in those cost as well?

Nowhere is this more evident than in the costing of the UTC policy. The government paper has estimated Labour’s policy as having capital costs over the parliament of around £1.4 billion and staffing of £75 million. But, it hasn’t identified whether the present government, if re-elected, would cease to open any new UTCS or Studio Schools for 14-18 year olds and then taken those costs into account. It also doesn’t seem to have assumed any staff cost saving resulting from the transfer of these students from existing schools. If there isn’t any savings, then the present UTC policy is extremely wasteful of resources and Labour are just copying the Tories in the same manner as the Tories copied Labour over spending on academies. These figures also don’t taken into account the need for any new spending on secondary school places resulting for the birth rate increase over the past decade that will have filtered through to secondary schools by the end of this parliament. It would be legitimate to assign some of those places to UTCs if that we what was wanted.

The valuation of the Director of School standards policy is another area where the government document has assumed a worst case scenario. I am sure all local authorities already have an officer responsible for monitoring standards. The issue is whether the new Directors would be at a higher pay grade? The Tories seem to have assumed that they will be not just responsible for standards but effectively new-style Chief Education Officers and paid appropriately.  As Labour’s Blunkett Commission suggested regional commissioners, and the idea was then taken up by the Tories, it seems unlikely that Labour want to recreate split between education and social services, especially as they introduced the merger of the two departments. Personally, I think there is something to be said for a return to separate departments, but that isn’t what the costing should have been based upon.

The third policy of all teachers being qualified is one I heartily agree with and have argued for in this blog. Sadly, the government costing document is the slightest of the three, with no background information on how the costs identified were arrived at. Indeed, so shabby may be the calculations that it is possible that Teach First trainees have been counted as requiring training even though the government already funds the training for these trainees, but describes them as unqualified teachers. Indeed, the 17,000 or so unqualified teachers identified in the 2013 School Census may also have included some School Direct salaried trainees and those completing their GTP programmes that were already being funded creating more double counting.

As Labour’s policy is for new teachers, I assume that existing unqualified teachers – formerly called instructors – would not be sacked but rather allowed to acquire their qualification part-time. This would be far cheaper than any assumption the paper might have made about full-time costs. However, as we don’t know what criteria were used in reaching the nearly £400 million over the life-time of the next parliament assumed as the cost by the government  paper it is impossible to take these figures seriously at all. They could either be totally spurious or might have some meaning to them. Either way, the policy of requiring all teachers to be trained is one that should be debated. If the training is pre-entry in future, then the costs are no more than for other teachers required in the numbers agreed by the government. It may be legitimate to recognise that qualified teachers earn more than unqualified ones, but what assumptions have been made about this cost aren’t clear. With training places being regulated, and many left unfilled at present, the comment about increased numbers is training is just silly.  The real issue is, if there is a teacher recruitment crisis, who is going to teach in our schools?

These three policy documents do not do the Conservatives or The Treasury credit and sadly don’t say how much they cost the government to produce? This would be worth knowing as we can then debate whether it was a useful expenditure of scarce public resources.