Tag Archives: funding

Funding and equality

Posted on by
5

In the good old days Cabinet office guidelines recommended 13 weeks for a public consultation by a government department. The stage one consultation on the ‘Schools national funding formula’ was published on the 7th March and closes on the 17th April. This is but five weeks including Easter. The closing day is a Sunday. (There might have been an exclamation mark here, but I am trying to conform to the new DfE guidelines).

The interesting feature for me of the proposals centres on the attempt by the government to marry together two different notions of equality. The first of these is the notion that everyone should have the same funding. In essence it is the argument of the F40 Group of authorities that felt they were short-changed when the current rules were introduced. The second notion is that of equal outcomes. If every child is to achieve the maximum possible from their education some will need more resources than others. This principle has long been accepted in relation to SEN and with the Pupil Premium the issue of the need for other forms of additional support was formalised at a national rate. The Pupil Premium will remain for the lifetime of this parliament, but no guarantee has been given for after 2020. The consultation identifies three categories of additional needs.

Without fully worked examples, it is difficult to do more than comment on the building blocks of the new formula. I suspect the one that will worry schools that might be potential losers under a new formula is the area cost adjustment. The level this is set at will need to be able to compensate for areas where salaries are higher because of high cost of living and working in the area. However, if it doesn’t recognise the high cost of housing in some areas outside London, it won’t help schools in those areas attract and retain staff. This is important because, as the consultation recognises, staffing costs are the major part of any school’s budget. Ever since the introduction of Local Management of Schools in the early 1990s, the decision to fund on ‘average salaries’ rather than actual salary bills has benefitted schools with a relatively young staff profile and eaten up more of the budget of those schools with a high proportion of staff at the top of the Upper Pay Band. The new formula won’t change that. Indeed, it might see the end of scales and move towards a single point or a first year starting salary and then the same basic salary for all with additions for responsibilities and other reasons depending on what the school could afford.

The notion of support for exceptional circumstance such as split sites, sparsity and business rates, not to mention the PfI payments from the Building Schools for the Future programme, is welcome news, assuming the funding is enough to cover all current needs.

And here lies the issue. With more pupils to educate, how much more cash will there be in real terms? Personally, I would also want to see modelling of outcomes when the current pupil numbers currently going through primary schools move into the secondary sector. What will be the effects on primary schools, especially small primary schools, when secondary numbers are rising and primary numbers are static or again falling? The nature of the formula will especially affect small rural primary schools. Does a Conservative government want to design a formula that might lead to their wholesale closure or will the sparsity factor balance off against the area cost adjustment? This will, I am sure, worry some of the more rural areas of England, not least Northumberland where, according to the DfE website, Holy Island Church of England First School currently has a per pupil expenditure or more than £27,000. I am not sure whether the statutory walking distance to the nearest schools works in cases like that but it might be another factor to add to the list of exceptions that can be covered through additional funding.

This just goes to show how much work DfE officials have done on trying to create a fair formula, but how complex the issue remains until there is agreement on what a fair formula is. What it isn’t is just allocating the same amount to every pupil.

 

Larger class for London schools

Posted on by
Reply

I guess the Chancellor wanted some good news to announce ahead of his Autumn Statement this week where the accepted mood music is of a round of cuts to department’s budgets. Is that the reason he leaked a reminder of the review of school funding and the creation of a national funding formula for schools to the BBC yesterday.

This news no doubt helps keep the f40 Group of largely Conservative shire counties happy and hopefully distracts them from the fact that they won’t benefit as much from the council tax increase allowed this year to pay for growing social care budgets as unitary authorities and London boroughs will because their council tax is split with district councils.

There didn’t seem to be anything radically new in the Chancellor’s announcement on school funding, but it is interesting to speculate how Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for London mayor, reacted to the news. As the BBC report noted, London boroughs will be the main losers in any redistribution of cash to schools, assuming there is insufficient cash to allow everyone to be a winner, as might have been the case if Labour had grasped this nettle before the 2008 recession. Will Conservative voters in the capital accept the news with equanimity or, like most losers in these situations, feel hard done by?

Now I suppose that the Chancellor is gambling that part of any loss through the change in the formula that will adversely affect London, where the funding per pupil is greatest, will be mitigated by the increase in pupil numbers which will bring more cash overall, if less per pupil.

A 100 pupils bringing £5,000 each generates half a million pounds for a school. If that was reduced to £4,500 the school would need to recruit 111 pupils to generate roughly the same amount. This would inevitably mean larger classes. While that might be possible in the secondary sector, where pupil teacher ratios have improved in recent years, it would be a real challenge for the primary sector where many schools are already running at capacity because of the extra pupil numbers that have been enrolled during the past few years as the baby boom generation entered schooling.

The other group that may be worried by the announcement are school leaders and governors. This blog has already shown that staffing schools in London is a real challenge. Any reduction in funding may make it more difficult to offer competitive salaries compared with schools in the Home Counties. Now schools in London with large numbers of pupils receiving the Pupil Premium will be protected against the change to some extent, but less so in the secondary sector than in the primary schools.

Of course, the Chancellor may also be going to announce backing for the third runway at Heathrow. In which case he may have calculated that the Conservatives have already lost the South and West London vote next May so he might as well announce all the pain at the same time and have done with it. Losing the London mayoral race might be small price to pay for winning the Conservative leadership race by pleasing the Tory shires. But, surely, I am just being an old cynic.

 

Too bright for the Pupil Premium?

Posted on by
1

The government seems to be briefing about possible changes to the Pupil Premium. The suggestion seems to be that bright children need it less than other children (choose an adjective with care here – dim/thick/less able but not SEN – all have implicit value assumptions associated with them). If this mooted alteration to the Pupil Premium is true, then it is the first change since it was agreed that pupils in primary schools needed more help than their secondary brothers and sisters and rates were altered accordingly. At the same time, pupils in care also received even more funding; quite rightly so.

Surely even the Tories wouldn’t want to say that because you are a bright five year-old, according to baseline testing, you don’t qualify for the Pupil Premium even though you are in a single parent household on low income and there is another toddler for your mother to look after, so you don’t receive the sort of attention you need to stimulate your innate ability. But, perhaps that is exactly what they do want to say. Reward the hardworking poor, but punish the children of those that aren’t aspirational for their offspring sounds like a Tory mantra.

Indeed, perhaps this is a change that is aligned to the return to selective school campaign. After all, if the Pupil Premium helps produce more children in primary schools for less well-off households that can pass the entry tests for selective schools then they will displace children from higher income brackets some of whose parents might then have to resort to paying for private education rather than allow then to attend secondary modern schools.

Of course, the concept of equality behind the Pupil Premium is to provide help where it is needed to bring everyone up to the level expected of them by the point at which you take the measurement of attainment; either Key Stage 2 and the move to secondary school or Key Stage 4 and the former school leaving age.

Now, if what the government are saying is that the use of Free School Meals as a proxy for entitlement isn’t the best measure, then we need to know what they are considering replacing it with? No doubt it would be helpful if any debate about changes to the Pupil Premium could also be a part of the discussions on a national funding formula for all schools. The present disparities in school funding levels mean that pupils from low income households in rural areas often receive much less funding than those in similar income households in some urban areas; especially in London. So, could the change to the Pupil Premium help iron out this problem if the government isn’t willing to tackle it in other ways?

One problem is that any degree of extra complexity added in to the Pupil Premium scheme will almost certainly significantly increase the cost of its administration. Sometimes, a universal flat rate programme is the most cost-effective, even if it is something of a blunt instrument. However, until the government reveals its hand, we won’t really know whether this is just an attempt to save money from the education budget or another attack on the low paid by this Tory government.

Tell it as is it – Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

The Public Accounts Committee has just issued its latest report entitled the ‘The Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils’.  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmpubacc/327/32703.htm

In the summary it concludes that ‘… the Department for Education needs to be better at supporting schools to share and use best practice more consistently so that more schools use the Pupil Premium effectively. In addition, there remain inequalities in the core funding received by schools with very similar levels of disadvantage. As the impact of the Pupil Premium will take a long time to be fully realised, the Department needs to do more to demonstrate its emerging benefits in the meantime. We also urge the Department to carry out an early review of the effectiveness of the Early Years Pupil Premium.’

This seems to me to reinforce the point make in the study of the DfE by Dr Cappon, mentioned earlier this week by this blog in another post. Perhaps politicians have confused the concept of a market with the role of players within it. When I did Economics 101, or ‘O’ level as it was in the UK in those days, the first two lessons were on markets and effective demand. We were all told that we might like a sports car, but most of us would not be able to afford one. Our latent demand wasn’t the same as our effective demand for a second hand old banger as our first car. On markets, it was seen as the mechanism for determining the price of a good. Indeed, in areas such as the Stock Market, it still is. However, markets usually have winners and losers and losers react in different ways, such as by reducing supply or quitting the market.

Now the best thing to come out of the past twenty years in education is a recognition that there is more than one type of meaning to the term ‘equality’. It was a sharper focus on the recognition that spending on some pupils needs to be greater if they are to achieve a minimum standard of education that led to the Pupil Premium. I would argue that the Lib Dems were the first to articulate this concept under Phil Willis and Richard Grayson when he was at CentreForum as it then was. Indeed, Nick Clegg also brought an understanding of this notion of equality from his experience as an MEP to this debate.

The challenge, as the Public Accounts Committee and Dr Cappon make clear is, in a department of state where an idealistic notion of the market as a means of solving problems holds sway, how do you get consumers – the schools in this case – to use their resources to the end you seek: reducing the learning gap between the disadvantaged and others in society. Do you use a carrot – the equivalent of lowering prices – or a stick, send in Ofsted to create effective use of funds such as the Pupil Premium? The problem with the market model is that consumers -schools – have to want the same thing as the DfE, and that might not be their focus.

Is a ‘special offer this week – funds for disadvantaged pupils – buy here’ really the best way to eradicate the learning gap and increase social mobility? Clearly, the Public Accounts Committee don’t seem to think so. That they also think there are issues with the core funding of schools is another worry for another blog post.

Belt tightening in evidence

Posted on by
Reply

Life is beginning to return to normal after the summer break. The final figures on teacher training offers will appear later this week. However, last week the government published the last data of education spending under the coalition with the figures from the Section 251 budgets for planned expenditure by schools and local authorities’ services for this financial year.

With the split between academies and maintained schools comparing between authorities on schoolings remains a bit of a challenge. In other children’s services it is still relatively clear what is spent by local authorities on say, youth justice or fostering. However, now that the majority of academies are what is known as ‘recoupment academies’ this means some comparison between per capita spending across the country is once again possible.

Overall spend per capita on the individual school budget at local authority levels has seen an increase in expected expenditure from £4,361 to £4,408 per capita, up by £47 or a little over one per cent. This may well help to explain why schools feel that their budgets have effectively been cut, since increased government take back through pension contributions and increased National Insurance contributions have been greater than the increase in income. To some extent this has also reduced the recruitment crisis in some places by diverting funds away from employing staff.

The local authority per capita expected spend doesn’t distinguish between spending in the primary and secondary sectors in the government’s aggregate figures, so it is impossible to tell whether the authorities where spending per capita is expected to be lower in 2015-16 than in 2014-15 is across the board or in only one of the sectors. What is interesting, however, is that five of the bottom ten ranked authorities, or five of nine if Middlesbrough is excluded on the basis that the figures don’t look credible, have selective secondary schools across the authority. Additionally, three of these authorities appear to have a lower per capita spend in 2015—16 than in the previous year. Now, as academies have a different financial year to maintained schools, that may account for some of the difference, but it isn’t clear whether or not that is the case form the data as presented.

Another interesting feature is that per capita spend in Inner London has also declined from £5,842 to £5,759 per capita in 2015-16. The drop isn’t across the board, but is greatest in Camden and Kensington and Chelsea. Tower Hamlets still tops the list with a spend of £6,842 per capita, down by some nine pounds per capita, but still some £350 ahead of Hackney, the next highest. (These figures exclude the single school in the City of London and on the Isles of Scilly where figures are much higher. However, it isn’t clear why the primary school in the City of London should receive £600 per pupil more than the average for schools in Tower Hamlets.)

Indications are that with increasing pupil numbers and the government’s commitment to austerity the 2016-17 budgets now being assembled at the macro level aren’t likely to be any more generous than this year, and might put schools under even more pressure at the per capita level. That will make free services like our TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk more valuable to schools than spending money on services that often increase in price every year regardless of inflation levels and technological changes.

Where the long grass grows

Posted on by
5

It doesn’t look like there will be rapid action on coasting schools. Neither, despite it having been an issue for many years, does it seem as if the DfE has yet completed work on a scheme for a national funding formula for schools; another two years work is estimated to be required. With coasting schools being judged on outcomes up to 2016 that presumably won’t be available until early in 2017, schools that can do so have time to meet the criteria announced yesterday by the Secretary of State.

I had suggested using data for two years in my earlier post on coasting schools, so measuring progress over three years up to and including 2016 provides an even longer time scale.

The DfE announcement suggests:

The new measure … sets out a clear definition of what a coasting school is.

Those secondary schools that fail to ensure 60% of pupils achieve five good GCSE grades and have a below average proportion of pupils making expected progress over three years, will be classed as coasting.

From 2016 onwards those secondary schools who fail to score highly enough (over a three year period) on Progress 8 – our new accountability measure that shows how much progress pupils in a particular school make between the end of primary school and their GCSEs – will be deemed to be coasting.

At primary level the definition will apply to those schools that for three years have seen fewer than 85% of children achieving level 4, the secondary ready standard, in reading, writing and maths and which have also seen below average proportions of pupils making expected progress between age seven and age eleven.

Of course, the Bill Committee might amend the definitions in some way or at least put a clear appeal procedure in place; perhaps for small schools where the introduction of one child not speaking English  late in the day might tip the balance for the school. As I suggested last time, schools must be able to recruit the staff to teach pupils effectively. It would be silly for the government to create a staffing crisis and then penalise schools that suffered as a result.

I was amused to read of the Regional Commissioners that the Secretary of State’s announcement said that the eight education experts had in-depth local insight supported by elected head teacher boards from the local community. How local is the knowledge for the Commissioner and associated Board of six about Oxfordshire when their remit stretches from Brimsdown in Enfield to Burford on the Gloucestershire borders seems questionable, but perhaps this statement is just government hyperbole.

However, of more importance is where the cash to pay for extra powers for Commissioners will come from? Surely, it is time that the Treasury asked how we can afford to run two parallel system of local authorities and Commissioners, not to mention the costs of transferring schools between the two systems. Money is still tight, yet the education department and the Conservative government seems willing to waste money on a governance system no longer fit for purpose. Either schools are run by elected officials or they aren’t: if not, then should the government not put all schools under the control of Commissioners and treat the issue of ‘coasting’ as a problem to be solved and not a reason to change the governance of individual schools.

Food for thought

Posted on by
1

Last Friday the DfE published its annual census data on schools. This deals with the number of schools and also provides details about the number of pupils. The headlines, larger classes and larger schools, were well covered by the media. The increases in pupil numbers were not unexpected, although the increase in average class size at KS2, while average class sizes at KS1 remained the same, might not have been predicted by everyone.

Average class sizes in the primary sector are now larger than a decade ago, but remain 1.4 pupils per teacher smaller than in 2006 across the secondary sector as a whole. Average class sizes in the primary sector are at their smallest in parts of the North East, where the growth in pupil numbers hasn’t really happened yet and largest in parts of outer London where they are approaching 30 pupils per teacher in both Sutton and Harrow at 29.6:1. Several other London boroughs have average class sizes of over 29 pupils per teacher.

However, one table that interested me and hasn’t been widely reported on was the take-up of school meals. This was the first year of the free school meals for infant pupils. At the census, the average take-up of school lunches by infant pupils was 85.6%. However, since pupils absent on the day are included in the overall total, the actual take up by pupils present in school was presumably somewhat higher than that in schools where some pupils were absent. Redcar in the North East had the highest take-up at 94.5% of it infant school population if you exclude the 100% in the City of London’s one primary school. Not far behind were a group of six London boroughs that included Kingston and Islington. At the other end of the table were Brighton and Hove, at just 70.5% take-up and Oxfordshire with the second lowest figure of 77.4% take-up. These authorities were followed closely by Thurrock, Medway and Hillingdon. The south east had the lowest take-up of any region at just over 81% whereas Inner London averaged over 90% take-up, closely followed by the North East region.

It is difficult to know what to read into these figures on take-up. Are families in affluent areas happy to ignore the free meals on offer or were these authorities where the meals service had collapsed after the assault on provision during the Thatcher years? The former clearly doesn’t work everywhere as a reason, otherwise places like Kingston upon Thames would not be so close to the top of the list. Perhaps, parents in these areas understand the value of the £400 of saving taking up the free meal deal can provide, especially when the alternative is spending income taxed at 40%.

It isn’t a rural urban divide either, so may be some other factor is at work. As a councillor in Oxfordshire I will be asking questions about why the take-up is so low locally? But, the Tory cabinet member was always opposed to the free school meals policy, so that may have had some effect.

Oops there goes …

Posted on by
4

Earlier this year I reported on the summary closure of a state funded school. In that case it was an academy in Kent. That event followed closely the demise of an academy chain, but not the closure of its schools. Now we learn of the summary closure of another state funded school; The Black County UTC.

Following a second Ofsted inspection the school has decided to close at the end of this term.

Here’s the message on their web site;

Planned closure of Black Country University Technical College

The Governors of the Black Country University Technical College (BCUTC) based in Bloxwich, Walsall, regret to announce that it will close on August 31 2015.

The wellbeing and success of the students at the school is the priority for the Governors and sponsors and full support and guidance is being given to them all, in particular those undertaking exams this term.
This outcome has been reached following a recent disappointing inspection, a thorough assessment of actual and projected student numbers, financial challenges, staffing capacity and the impact these will have on standards of teaching and learning.

“This has been a difficult decision for all concerned. Our primary focus remains the wellbeing and success of the students at the school, not least of all those due to sit exams this term. We are absolutely committed to ensuring that all of our students can continue with their chosen learning outcomes.

“Support and guidance is being provided to students and their parents and carers both internally and through our local partners including the Walsall Connexions Centre, Walsall Council and our neighbouring authorities of Sandwell, Dudley, Wolverhampton and South Staffordshire, and our sponsors at Walsall College and the University of Wolverhampton.

“BCUTC will work closely with the Department for Education, Walsall College and other local education institutions over the coming months to ensure a smooth transition for all students.”

Now it was always the case that private schools could summarily close, in bad times some did the day after the end of the summer term, but state funded schools had to go through a process of consultation and approval. Indeed, a school in Oxfordshire having gained approval for a sixth form is now going through the consultation process to revert to its former 11-16 status because it believes a sixth form won’t be economically viable. Had it been an academy it could seemingly just have closed that part of the school down.

As I reported in an earlier post, there are some UTCs and studio schools that appear to be struggling. Whether closing them down is the answer is a moot point, but it does beg the question of who is really in charge of the education system in England. Presumably, since the Prime Minister was prepared to extol the virtues of UTCs in parliament last week, his Education Secretary hadn’t told him of the impending closure in Walsall. With so many UTCs and studio school heading the table of schools with high absence rates something needs to done; and quickly. Rules about closure also need to be made clear to academies, free schools and others in receipt of public money.

National Funding Formula

Posted on by
1

I have been reminded that my last post didn’t explicitly mention the need for a new funding formula for schools. This has been such a long-running saga, started under the Labour government and not brought to a conclusion during the coalition that I confess it slipped my mind.  My apologies to the F40 Group of local authorities that have long campaigned for better funding for their parts of England.

I suppose one good thing to emerge from the coalition was that both the Pupil Premium and Universal Infant Free School Meals were funded at the same rate across the whole country and not pro-rata to authorities on their other funding levels for education. There are those that might argue that the funding wasn’t enough, but it was the same for all. However, that doesn’t obviate the need for a coherent plan for education funding that can be justified on a rational basis. Any reforms must accept the consequences of the raising of the learning leaving age to eighteen. In rural areas the continuation of the old transport rules that assumed staying in education post sixteen was an option need urgent reform.

During the election campaign I met sixth formers of all abilities in both further education and schools that had faced considerable challenges to be able to continue their education. With subsidies to rural bus services under renewed threat this is an unfair burden on young people living in the countryside. If we tried to take away the free travel enjoyed in London there would no doubt be a great outcry.

There is no doubt that what funding there is will increasingly be taken up by increased pay. In those parts of the country, notably London and the Home Counties, where recruitment is at its most challenging it won’t take long for teachers to recognise that the new pay freedoms mean they can ask for more in their pay packets and leave it up to school leaders and governing bodies to decide how to manage the consequences of saying ‘no’.

One outcome is likely to be larger classes, especially in the secondary sector. However, judging by the downward trend in pupil-teacher ratios seen in recent years the system should be able to handle some worsening in ratios and larger class sizes. But, that makes planning teacher supply just that bit more difficult, as trainee PE teachers are no doubt finding out to their cost this year.

Schools will have to look for ways to cut costs, and recruitment advertising is one obvious source of savings as we have shown with TeachVac. By providing a free service to secondary schools that now covers promoted posts as well as main scale vacancies we have created a platform that could save school many millions of pounds as well as providing them with more information about the state of the labour market. If you haven’t visited www.teachvac.co.uk they pay a visit and register. The site will shortly be extending to cover leadership vacancies directly input by schools and I will announce that development on this blog as I will our future plans for extending into the primary sector.

Tory muddle over new schools?

Posted on by
4

Free Schools Good: UTCs bad. Is that the latest message about schools coming from the Tory Party?  If so, where does that leave studio schools, converter academies and regular sponsored academies. Frankly, I haven’t got a clue.

Readers will recall that UTCs are 14-18 schools created by this government along the lines of the City Technology Colleges championed by Kenneth Baker when he was Education Secretary. Not surprisingly, he is in favour of the UTCs as well. One might have expected that the Tory Party having invented these schools would be in favour of more of them in the next parliament, but no, in January, as this blog reported in a post on the 6th January, the Tory Party attacked Labour’s costings for 100 new UTCs during the life of the next parliament. At that time it didn’t offer any suggestion that extra schools would be needed to cope with increased pupil numbers. Depending upon your view of how large schools should be come, new schools may or may not be necessary to deal with the growth in pupil numbers.

If we do need new schools, are 14-18 schools now off the Tory agenda or only going to be present if there is local demand and hang the problems that might be caused for existing schools. It is one thing to protect the education budget from cuts, but surely that doesn’t mean wasting money on creating schools where they are not needed.

The Tory Party is no doubt relying on the Policy Exchange review of Free Schools published today to support the case for more of these schools. The evidence in the report is debatable to say the least and might support more than one conclusion as a Policy Exchange spokesperson agreed on the Today programme this morning when debating with Rebecca Allen of the FFT’s new datalab research centre. I guess if you take out the religious free schools, such as those opened by members of the Jewish community, the data on performance by free schools might be even more questionable.  With a drive to raise standards in all schools, the fact that some high performing schools near free schools apparently saw their performance decline is worth unpacking as in most situations those tested didn’t have the option of the choice between a free school or their current school when deciding on school choice.

Probably the most distressing aspect of the announcement today is that in a time of austerity the Tory party still seems to want to favour the few over the many. Spending all available funding on raising standards for all rather than wasting time and energy on the few parents that want their own form of education will surely do more to help England plc in the future.

Anyway, as Policy Exchange have shown, more and more free schools are being opened by academy chains and other established groups rather than by parent or teacher groups. Why not rebadge them as voluntary schools, for that is what many of them increasingly are, but under a new guise.