Tag Archives: free schools

Labour backs Free Schools

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Far more important than Labour’s reiterated pledge announced today to adhere to a watered down class size policy they first introduced in 1997 was the fact that at the same time they seemingly conceded that Labour now no longer universally opposes Free Schools as a concept; they just oppose them where they aren’t needed. Others will know whether this is a major concession or just a bit of real politick. Perhaps such schools might have been more acceptable if they had been branded as ‘voluntary academies’ to sit alongside converter and sponsored academies in the family of schools. After all, there has been a long tradition of voluntary schools in the state system and by no means are all of them faith schools.

Sadly, Labour seems to have ducked the issue of who will enforce class size controls. I assume it will be regional commissioners in academies, but will it still be local authorities in other schools and how will they be funded for such a duty?

The allowance of a year with an oversize class muddies the water since if on day one of the second year the school creates two classes but on day two reverts to one over-sized class for financial reasons will the clock start again providing another year of grace for the school? Realistically, as Labour understood in 1997, but doesn’t seem to now, if press reports are correct, an over-size class needs to be dealt with when it arises and either reduced in size or a dispensation granted because there is no other solution possible. There is also no pledge to extend the limit to the junior age pupils. They can still legally be taught in a class of any size.

I welcome the acceptance that teachers need to be trained and the work that Chris Waterman is doing with SATTAG and the manifesto on teacher education should help make clear to all where the Parties stand on this issue during the general election. Every MP seeking re-election will have received a copy of the manifesto in the post and as a contributor I hope that they read it and make their position clear.

There are big risks for education in England after the election as any coalition propped up by Scottish Nationalist MPs wouldn’t have a majority on education issues in England since it seems unlikely many Scottish Nationalist MPs would want to hang around Westminster to vote or even speak in debates about schooling in England; not a topic they know much about anyway. In that respect, education in England could be the big loser of a hung parliament with the Secretary of State having to be mindful of what might be voted down in parliament. This is an issue that no doubt will be discussed further between now and the 7th May.

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.

Free Schools now account for around 1% of all schools

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The DfE has just published updated lists of existing and proposed Free Schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/free-schools-successful-applications-and-open-schools-2014 There are 296 schools in the two lists. Of these, 112, or some 38%, are located within one of the London boroughs. Once the Home Counties regions of the East of England and the South East are added to the London figure the percentage increases to 62% of the national total. By contrast, there are just seven schools in the North East and 12 in the East Midlands. Birmingham, with 13 schools, is the local authority where the largest numbers of schools are located, although Enfield, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Tower Hamlets, three much smaller authorities than Birmingham: each have seven schools located or to be located with their borough.

The majority of the schools, some 232, are mainstream schools, but there are 49 either SEN or alternative provision schools, with 15 schools (sic) listed as 16-19 establishments – 7 of these are in London. Traditional primary (109) and secondary (93) schools dominate the age groupings. However, there are some 43 all-through schools, a number of which are in the special school sector. Personally, I am not yet a fan of such schools in the mainstream sectors where grouping all primary schools that feed a secondary school seems a more enlightened proposition than giving some pupils the opportunity to be part of the school for the whole of their careers while adding others later. Avoiding newcomers being seen as second class citizens seems like a wasteful and unnecessary use of resources. But, no doubt there is some research that shows such schools perform well for all pupils.

Free schools are still contentious with some groups, so it is interesting to see that 7 of the schools are ARK schools, already a large provider of academies in London, and 10 are under the Harris umbrella that has extended north of the river with its free schools, including into Tottenham, the most deprived part of Haringey. There are also three Oasis schools, and a number with E-Act in their name featured in the list.  The DfE don’t provide a faith analysis of the schools, but a number are clearly linked to faith groups of both the Christian denominations and other faiths.

This DfE report also doesn’t say anything about the size of the schools, both on opening and in terms of their future maximum numbers. There is no doubt the primary schools will help, especially in and around London, in providing places to cope with the boom in pupil numbers. The presence of some secondary schools in areas of falling rolls or adequate provisions seems rather more wasteful of scare resources. Once the Studio Schools and UTCs are added to this list, the shape of schooling will have changed more between 2010 and 2015 than at any time for a generation. Now might finally be the time to question the continued presence of selective secondary schools? How diverse a school system do we actually want and need? And is diversity and choice being put before the provision of a good school for all pupils?

Footnote

Since I wrote this piece last night Channel 4 News have carried a report of another school that has failed its Ofsted inspection. Unlike other free schools that have failed, where the promoters were new to education or offering a type of education not previously recognised within the state funded system, this is a school run by a group with extensive mainstream school experience, albeit overseas. Perhaps, this goes to show that running schools in England isn’t as easy as some might have thought and that some local authorities of all political persuasions should have been given more credit for their work.

Should the State fund more schools?

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Last week wasn’t a very good one for Free Schools that are effectively independent schools funded from general taxation. Firstly, there was the closure of the Discovery School in Crawley after an Osfted Inspection, then there was the National Audit Office Report that gave the whole Free School project something of a mixed blessing and led me to ask why, when governments local and national are busy cutting services because of a lack of funding, some Free Schools have been allowed to open in areas where there is no shortage of places for pupils at present. Finally, in a largely un-noticed Table in the Statistical Bulletin on Phonics testing published last week by the DfE it appeared that the 423 pupils tested in the 15 Free Schools did less well than pupils in any other type of school except for pupils in sponsored mainstream academies. The latter are probably in many cases schools in special measures that have been forced to become an academy with a sponsor. Interestingly, there was no difference in outcomes between pupils educated in infant and primary schools, with in both types of school 85% of pupils meeting the standard by the end of Year 2 compared with 82% in the Free Schools.

The Free School movement is entirely the opposite of the Gladstonian approach to State Education espoused by the Liberals in the Nineteenth Century. To Gladstone, the State was the default position and as a result if you wanted a different type of education, you had to pay for it. The only exception was that the revenue costs of existing schools that joined the state system were paid, but apart from on religious matters they then followed what the state demanded. To modern day Conservatives, including the Centre for Market Reform of Education and the Adam Smith Institute that jointly published a paper last week entitled School Vouchers: for greater equality and quality in English education it appears that the State should pay for any type of education parents want. As I have mentioned in a previous post, this is economic madness when the State is trying to cut back on expenditure. Those with even a limited knowledge of the history of education only have to consider the financial consequences if those former Direct Grant schools that left the state system in the 1970s over comprehensive schooling all applied to return to the state sector and ceased being private fee-paying schools.

There is a real debate to be had here about what the State should provide by way of education, and whether it should be encouraging more parents to move away from a private sector that is also busy becoming a significant export industry in its own right. If technology is about to play an important part in re-defining schooling, as some now claim, it may be worth considering both the purpose of schooling, and the role that the modern state should play in delivering a service. After nearly 150 years of one model, it might be time for a change. Whether that reform means extending the offer of free schooling to more pupils or restricting it to only those that cannot pay is an interesting issue we might need to debate as a society.

Leading on Free Schools

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The news that Nick Clegg’s speech on schooling, scheduled for later this week, has been either leaked or handed out in advance to the press that presumably then ignored an embargo should not come as much of a surprise. Even though Nick Clegg’s speech isn’t to be until Thursday, and was billed as about standards in schools, it would appear to have been communicated to the press further in advance than is usually the case. Either way, one wonders whether his office bothered to consult anyone in the Party with views on education.

After all, it is more than three years since the Liberal Democrat Party Conference at Liverpool passed the following motion about Free Schools:

Conference is concerned by the establishment of academies and free schools under coalition government policy.
Conference re-asserts its commitment to the key principles agreed at the spring 2009 conference in Harrogate in policy paper 89, Equity and Excellence, and specifically that:
i) Local Authorities should retain strategic oversight of the provision of school places funded by the use of public money.
ii) Local Authorities should continue to exercise their arms-length support for all state schools funded wholly or partially with public funds with particular emphasis on their work with disadvantaged pupils.

Conference calls on government to ensure that schools remaining within the Local Authority
family are not financially penalised by the creation of academies and specifically:
a) That academies should be required to pay the full cost including administrative overheads for
any services they buy back from the Local Authority.
b) That academies should have only observer status on the Schools Forum as they have placed themselves outside the democratic system for the funding of education.
In relation to ‘free schools’, conference calls on all Liberal Democrats to urge people not to take up this option because it risks:
1. Creating surplus places which is prejudicial to the efficient use of resources in an age of
austerity.
2. Increasing social divisiveness and inequity into a system which is already unfair because
of the multiple tiers and types of schools created by successive Conservative and Labour
governments and thus abandoning our key goal of a high quality education system for all
learners.
3. Depressing educational outcomes for pupils in general.
4. Increasing the existing complexity of school admissions and exclusions.
5. Putting at risk advances made in making appropriate provision for children with special
needs.
6. Putting in jeopardy the programme of improving school buildings.
7. Wasting precious resources, both human and material, at a time when all efforts should be

focused on improving educational outcomes by enabling effective teaching and learning to

take place in good local schools accessible to all.

8. Increasing the amount of discrimination on religious grounds in pupil admissions and the employment of teaching staff, and denying children access to broad and balanced Religious Education about the range of different world views held in society.

That motion was proposed by Cllr Peter Downes of Cambridgeshire, and seconded by myself. As the BBC noted, earlier this week the Minister of State, David Laws, was still taking a different line to that now being espoused by his leader about free schools. So that raises a second issue, about leadership styles. I voted for Nick Clegg in the leadership election because, having been on working parties with both candidates, I admired Nick’s positive attitude to making things happen. But, taken to extremes such a driving force can make others feel left out, as I imagine most of the part’s education lobby are feeling this morning after listening to the BBC news report.

We await the details of the speech to see how far Nick has moved his position within the Party away from both Mr Gove’s and Mr Hunt’s ‘private schools on the rates’ approach to education, and also what justification Nick gives for his change of heart. but, I suppose we must be grateful for any re-think of policy in this area that was never a part of the Coalition Agreement.

350 pupils educated in ‘outstanding’ free schools

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As regular readers will know, I am not a great fan of free schools. Not because I don’t agree with the principle of different groups running schools funded by the State, because I have no problem with that concept per se. After all, ever since 1870, churches, charities, and many other voluntary bodies have been funded by the State to run schools even before the Labour/Tory academy programme was developed. Generally, in the past such bodies have open schools within an arrangement that has at least some local coherence, even if that has meant some parents weren’t able to persuade their local authority to fund a school that they wanted. The present arrangement sees Westminster ignore the views of local authorities, and even their planning for future places can be disregarded by Ministers.

I agree with Mr Gove that J. S. Mill’s view was that the State shouldn’t necessarily run schools. I think he said that it was the role of the State to see its citizens were educated, but not necessarily to do the education themselves. Where I probably differ from Mr Gove is that I see the State as the default provider of schooling, not the funder of first resort. I find it frankly incredible that a Conservative minister can advocate an open-ended cheque to any parent who wants the State to fund their child’s education, especially in a time of economic uncertainty and with so many other demands upon the resources of the State.

All this is by way of a rather long preamble about the fact that Ofsted has released inspection data on the first 81 free schools as what were originally known as ‘additional schools’ are now universally known.

Four free schools were judged ‘outstanding’. Together they currently educated some 350 pupils at the date of their inspection, but their pupil numbers will grow over the next few years as they develop to serve all year groups. In one case the inspection report noted that attendance didn’t meet the school’s target, and was only broadly in line with national trends. In another school judged outstanding the inspector noted that the school would need to: Raise achievement further by ensuring that all lessons progress at an equally good pace, and pupils are encouraged to think critically about their learning. This was a comment I found slightly surprising for an ‘outstanding’ school.

Still it is interesting to know that these schools when inspected in numbers have a profile similar to the profile of schools in general, but that fact doesn’t assuage my concerns about their role in the education system as a whole. It is also surprising that in a free school in Tower Hamlets the proportion of pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium is well below the national average as that is probably not typical off the borough as a whole or perhaps even of the faith schools across the borough. Indeed, one Limehouse community primary school, not all that far away, had 61% of pupils on free school meals in January 2012 according to the Ofsted dashboard. No doubt, as the number of pupils of school age increases at that free school so too will the percentage of those on free school meals, although whether from both the 50% of faith places or the other 50% reserved for community applicants will not be clear for some time to come. By then we will have a lot more comparison data on free schools and, hopefully, no more will be in the placed in the inadequate category as was one of the original 81.