Tag Archives: finance

No FEES for Trainee Teachers

Posted on by
3

I thought I would start off 2015 with a campaign. Readers of this blog know that there is a teacher supply crisis looming partly because of the large increase in pupil numbers over the next few years. As a result, we cannot afford to miss the recruitment targets for new teachers. At present, some trainees pay fees, and they create a debt repayable when they start teaching, but others, notably those on Teach First and the salaried School Direct route, don’t. Not only is this divisive, but it is also off-putting to some would-be teachers.

Imagine a career-switcher in their mid-30s just free from repaying the debt Labour forced upon them by introducing tuition fees after they won the 1997 election. Unless such intending teachers can secure a place on either of the programmes mentioned above they will incur new debt. The Institute of Fiscal Studies was wrong to say trainee teachers won’t need to repay their debt; this group will, and immediately they start teaching.

However, if the IFS is correct, and most new graduates now with £27,000 of debt won’t ever earn enough to repay the extra £9,000 or so of debt incurred as a trainee teacher why is the government taking this debt plus accrued interest onto its books? Abate the fees, as was the case from 1997 until the new fee regime was introduced and cut the government deficit and at the same time makng teaching more attractive as a career. Indeed, I would go further and pay every trainee either the same wage as an apprentice of the same standing or even the equivalent of the salary the Ministry of Defence pays officers in training at Sandhurst.

Perhaps the churches, as the largest employer of teachers, could lead the way by inviting church schools to pay trainee fees from the reserves they hold and negotiate a price with the church universities that is appropriate for the course rather than tie the current fee linked to higher education rates. After all, two thirds of the graduate course is spent in schools, so trainees are currently paying for the privilege of learning how to teach. All other professions abolished this notion of indentured service generations ago.

I wonder if the Carter Review could be even more radical and suggest returning teacher preparation to the employers as a group, thus undoing the 50 years of progress since Robbins started the move to more fully involve higher education in the preparation of all teachers. But, we cannot sit around waiting for Carter; there is an urgent need for action now. The government should act swiftly and announce they will pay the fees for 2015 graduate entrants because the cost of a teacher supply crisis will be far greater and longer lasting than the loss of income from the fees that are repaid.

Meanwhile www.teachvac.co.uk is now up and running offering job matching for secondary trainees, and indeed teachers looking for main scale posts in England for free. Schools can now post vacancies for free as well. I look forward to reporting on the 2015 recruitment round as it develops for both trainees and schools: regular updates will be posted here and schools registering vacancies will be told the current supply situation from later this month every time that they register a vacancy.

Crocodile Tears?

Posted on by
Reply

This is the time of year when the DfE reports the revenue details about the dwindling band of maintained schools. Dwindling, because state-funded academies and free schools report differently and also have a different financial year to Maintained Schools that would make comparisons difficult, even were the data easily available. The information on spending both by the maintained school system and by individual schools for 2013/14 can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-education-and-childrens-services-spending-2013-to-2014

Total expenditure by Maintained Schools was some £30 billion pounds in 213/14. It cannot be compared to the previous years because of the academy conversion programme and the development of free schools. However, remaining maintained schools on average had reserves of some £117,000 each, with the 93% of such schools with positive balances averaging around £130,000 each. Staffing was the largest item of expenditure by schools.

Although most schools spent more money per pupil in 2013/14, some £150 per pupil in the primary schools; £185per pupil in the secondary schools; £442 in the special schools; nursery schools spend £201 less per pupil than in the previous year.  The development of an Early Years Pupil Premium may see this decline reversed in future years.

More interestingly, despite the increase in spending per pupil, schools on average still managed to increase the size of their reserves. Primary schools with a surplus added £5,500 to create average balances of £98,000 and the remaining maintained secondary schools added on average £16,600 to create an average reserve per school of £422,000. In total, the declining maintained school sector still managed to amass reserves of £2.2 Billion pounds sitting dormant in bank accounts. One must assume that since the majority of academies are secondary schools the overall figure for school balances might be in excess of £4 billion and possibly even higher across the system.

How large should school reserve be? The DfE recommends 5% for secondary schools and 8% for primary schools. I personally think 10% for smaller primary schools might be a safer margin but, even so, there are many schools that exceed these limits as the DfE’s detailed tables reveal. Like rising house prices, the number of schools with revenue balances in excess of a million pounds also seems to increase each year. Despite the transfers to academies of some of the schools with large reserves last year there were still more than 100 schools with balances in excess of £1 million at the end of March 2104 and 14 of these had more than £2 million in revenue reserves. One can only assume that they are converting revenue to capital, an acceptable practice now, but one that deprives current pupils of some possible expenditure on their education.

Whether saved for a purpose or just saved these figures do call into account the issue of how well schools are being funded and why the teacher associations keep saying schools are under-funded? Possibly they are, and an increase in salaries could easily change the position overnight, but on the evidence schools still weren’t being squeezed anything like as tightly as many other parts of government spending during 2013/14. But, maybe it was the academies that were suffering.

And one for the lawyers

Posted on by
3

The recent IFS Report, discussed in the previous post on this blog, raised a number of interesting questions. It is essential that someone, whether the IFS team or another group doesn’t matter, looks into issues such as recruitment and retention and how the nation can ensure a sufficient supply of appropriately prepared teachers in the right places and willing to teach in all types of schools. Then, and only then, is it really possible to look at whether the government is paying too much to achieve that necessary aim.

However, one thought that was provoked by the fact that most new teachers won’t pay back their fees plus interest because their lifetime earnings in teaching won’t be sufficient is that they are better off than those under the former fee structure that started paying back as soon as the loan was drawn down. In effect, new teachers are paying a graduate tax for a set number of years and then the rest of the debt is cancelled. Of course, by teaching overseas they can reduce the impact of the tax even further, but potentially lose other benefits such as the chance to build up a pension fund.

However, the other thought that occurred to me after reading the IFS report, is the one where the lawyers might get involved. This is whether the government can now actually cap university recruitment to fee-paying courses? In the days when government paid fees for teachers and indeed contributed to other university funding it was easy for them to set a cap on both undergraduate and post-graduate teaching numbers. However after David Willets removed the ceiling on undergraduate numbers it is possible to wonder whether universities can actually recruit as many undergraduates to teacher preparation courses as they like: if not, why are they different to other courses pad for by the students using government loans?

In the case of PGCE allocations the legal question is even more interesting. Before fees were introduced PGCE type courses were within the ‘Mandatory Awards Funding’ even though not a first degree course because this allowed for government funding, unlike other post-first degree courses and provided funding for students that had already received student support for an undergraduate degree. By keeping post-graduate teacher preparation within the same sort of fee regime it is interesting to ask whether the removal of the cap on numbers also applies to these students. If so, could universities ignore the NCTL allocations and recruit as many PGCE students as they wanted: an interesting idea.

The government view would undoubtedly be that they couldn’t do so and the NCTL has the power to allocate places. But with no power over money, the only sanction might be to refuse QTS to some students not on allocated places – but since you now don’t need QTS to teach in an academy of any description that is somewhat of an empty threat. Of course, the Treasury might have something to say, but as it seems to have agreed to uncapped undergraduate numbers how can it treat teacher education differently if it falls within the same fee regime?

As the government has exceeded the Teacher Supply Model suggested numbers with its level of allocations in many subjects, it has effectively acceded to the principle of more trainees than needed, but is trying to control where they are located through the allocations process.

Could we see a battle for the hearts and minds of future teachers by universities ignoring allocations and offering a choice to potential teachers as to where they want to train: a school or a university?

More financial pressures for DfE

Posted on by
2

In the week that the Minister of State at the DfE announced the final figures for the Pupil Premium in 2013-14, with a £53 Christmas bonus for primary school pupils receiving the cash this year, and an increase to £1,300 for primary age pupils in 2014-15, the government also announced the latest thinking on school rolls until the early 2020s.

At the present time, there is still no end in sight to the growth in the primary school population that will increase from a low point in 2009 of 3.9 million pupils to a predicted 4.8 million by 2022. That is a rise of nearly 850,000 pupils, or an increase in the primary school population of more than a fifth in thirteen years. The secondary school population in years 7-11 is still on schedule to bottom out in 2015, at just over 2.7 million pupils, before recovering to just over 3.0 million by 2022, with more increases to come in the rest of that decade.

An extra million or so pupils by 2022 will place considerable strain on education finances that currently cost the nation £27 billion just for the remaining local authority maintained schools, with the costs of academies in addition. (Academies have a different financial year to local authority schools thus making comparisons almost impossible.) In 2012-13 the average cost of a primary school pupil in a maintained school was £4,193, up from £4,099 the previous year. On that basis, the additional 600,000 pupils expected in the primary sector by 2022 will cost £2.5 billion by 2022, even without the compounding effects of inflation during the intervening years. It is difficult to see how the government will be able to protect school budgets throughout the whole of that period since an economic recovery rarely lasts for a decade, and a more likely scenario is that the economy will have traversed through another whole economic cycle during that period. Hopefully, the downturn will not be of the same magnitude as was inflicted on the economy during the Labour government under Gordon Brown’s stewardship.

With around half of primary school expenditure going on teaching staff, and recruitment pressures already emerging, according to the teacher associations, sorting out the wages bill may become even more important in the future if expenditure is not to spiral out of control. However, after so many years of pay restraint that may be easier said than done. The imposition of any national funding formula for schools in 2015 that doesn’t take account of differing labour market pressures is probably doomed to failure, with some potentially dramatic repercussions if the government miscalculates. It will not be enough to say that the decision can be left to schools, as they are too diverse a group to be able to manage any substantial pressures on what amounts to half their budgets.

Mr Gove has not shown himself very good with numbers, but he will surely not want his legacy to be a school system not prepared for the financial challenges that lie ahead.

Hard times hit some secondary schools

Posted on by
Reply

There was good news for some primary schools this week with the announcement that the Pupil Premium for pupils in the primary sector would increase from £900 per pupil to £1,300 from April 2014 despite the general cutback on government spending. The Premium for secondary school pupils will remain at £900 for another year; the level of the Service Children Premium for 2014/15 has yet to be announced.

In Oxfordshire, the changes will especially benefit schools in the East Oxford constituency which has the highest levels of deprivation in the county. There will also be some schools in Banbury, Didcot and Abingdon that will receive additional cash. The breakdown of the Pupil Premium by Oxfordshire’s parliamentary constituencies is shown in the following table.

Parliamentary Constituency

Pupils included in the Deprivation Pupil Premium allocations

(Jan 13 census)

Total funding for the Deprivation Pupil Premium for 2013-14 at £900 per pupil

Illustrative primary funding totals for the Deprivation Pupil Premium for 2014-15 at £1,300 per pupil

Increase between 2013-14 and 2014-15
Banbury

1675

£1,507,500

£2,177,500

£670,000
Henley

713

£641,700

£926,900

£285,200
Oxford East

2421

£2,178,900

£3,147,300

£968,400
Oxford West and Abingdon

987

£888,300

£1,283,100

£394,800
Wantage

1236

£1,112,400

£1,606,800

£494,400
Witney

1045

£940,500

£1,358,500

£418,000

The government has now taken to calling the Pupil Premium the Deprivation Pupil Premium, presumably to explain to schools exactly what it is intended to be used for. However, the naive attempt to distinguish why the rate has been set higher for the primary sector than for older children by demanding that primary schools make pupils ‘secondary ready’ can only have come from politicians without any real understanding of the education sector.

Commentators have been suggesting for some time now that money spent ensuring pupils make the best progress early on in their schooling pays dividends later. But, to call it making them ‘secondary ready’ was an insult to the real purpose of schooling at both primary and secondary levels. As a cheap sound bite it fell flat, but sadly it did draw attention away from the real purpose of the Pupil Premium that is to help ensure that more pupils are able to achieve higher standards. There is plenty of data to demonstrate that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve less well than those from more favoured homes when at school. Indeed, figures released by the army this week showed the poor literacy and numeracy rates among young trainee soldiers compared with ratings in the navy, and recruits to the Royal Air Force.

The government hopes that the extra Pupil Premium will help whole classes move forward faster together as a unit. Although it admits that Schools will be able to spend this money in ways that they feel helps their pupils best. Evidence shows some schools use it to hire extra staff, reading and maths classes for children who need an extra hand, or to provide appropriate other facilities. The scale of the problem can be seen in the fact that in 2012, only 68 per cent of 11 year olds eligible for the Pupil Premium achieved the expected level in English and Maths despite the fact that 84 per cent of all other pupils aged 11 achieved that level.

Of course the downside is that some secondary schools, still losing older pupils as their rolls continue to decline at the upper end, won’t see this extra cash just as their intake of pupils from the primary sector that hadn’t benefited from the Pupil Premium at the start of their school careers begins to increase. Only time will tell if Ofsted will take this factor into account when judging secondary school performance.

Tear down the ring fence?

Posted on by
Reply

The Think Tank Reform today published a report about spending on schools. http://www.reform.co.uk/resources/0000/0765/Must_do_better_Spending_on_schools.pdf

As a right of centre think tank it might be accused of having arranged some of the data to make the most of its thesis that spending on schooling has increased without an associated rise in outcomes. Taking the period from 1999-2000 as a base for some of the analysis means the analysis started from the end of a period when government spending had been depressed during the Major government and the first two years of the Blair government, so some recovery in spending on schooling as a proportion of GDP might have been expected.

The overall thesis is that the ring fence on school spending should be removed, and the same degree of efficiency imposed on schools as on other public services. Now the issue of funding of schools has featured in several earlier posts on this blog. Interestingly, I cannot find any reference in the Reform pamphlet to the growth in school reserves. This issue, the subject of the first column in this blog, is one that has disturbed me for some time. In an age of austerity why are schools taking cash from taxpayers and putting it in their bank accounts rather than spending it? Why, indeed are some schools sitting on balances of over £1 million pounds: the number of schools with deficit budgets was at an historic low in 2012.

Reform also seem to neglect to note that during the period 1999-2003, before spending on schooling increased significantly, there was a teacher supply crisis. They don’t model anything about labour costs in detail. A failure to staff schools does lead to poor performance, and one reason I expect the next PISA results to be better is because schools have been better staffed during the past decade than at any time during my adult life. My anxiety is that an end is now in sight to that period of full staffing unless the government is very careful.

One issue the Reform report does note in passing is the difference between spending on primary and secondary schooling. According to the figures used by Reform, secondary schools accounted for 46% of spending in 2011-12, whereas primary accounted for only 27%; or 33% if under-fives spending was included. In my own view targeted spending on primary pupils who fail to achieve where they could do so might produce the best return on investment within the school system. The Pupil Premium has the capability to achieve this end, providing schools fully understand its purpose.

Indeed, adopting the suggestions in the Reform Report, and abandoning the ring fence on school spending while still aiming to improve educational outcomes and pupil attainment, might affect more affluent areas more than the less well off parts of England. Reform’s supporters might well reflect that it was David Blunkett as Secretary of State who imposed a maximum class size of 30 at Key Stage One. The major beneficiaries of his policy were mostly schools in Tory authorities where large class of over 30 were more frequently to be found at that time. Removing the funding cap might cause a return to that situation. It might also sound the death knell for small and expensive post-16 provision in some schools that is already under threat from other government actions such as the introduction of studio schools and UTCs. Reform’s authors should be careful about what they wish for.

Wasting money in a time of austerity is unforgivable

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Babies and budgets

Posted on by
Reply

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.