Tag Archives: funding

Burying bad news: a dishonourable tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prediction comes true

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In December I wrote on this blog in a post headed crocodile tears that: ‘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.

’ According to figures obtained from the DfE and printed in the Guardian today schools are carrying balances of more than £4 billion and, as I predicted, academies had more than £2.4 billion in reserves at the end of March 2014, although one must be slightly careful as that isn’t the end of their financial year as it is for other state funded schools.
Although schooling is big business, with millions of pupils and more than half a million teachers, this is still a sum across all schools equal to half the level of investment it is suggested that the NHS needs in England between now and 2020. The question must therefore be, is this level of reserves necessary at the school level and, if not, what can be done about the situation?
Guidelines suggest reserves of 5% for secondary schools; 8% for primary schools and I would suggest perhaps 10% for the smallest rural primary schools. However, the Minister in his answer to Frank Dobson’s question referred to schools holding one month’s expenditure as the test of solvency. That equates to just over 8% of annual revenue, so probably a bit high for a large secondary school since academy financial years mirror the school year so salaries are secure for the whole of an academic year.
Today Children’s Services Weekly has reported that Cambridgeshire faced a large increase in home to school transport costs due to more staying on after sixteen and increased SEN transport costs. This highlights the dilemma facing our education system: putting the funding where it is most useful. Certainly sitting idle in schools bank accounts because there might be a rainy day at some point in the future, is a waste of public money. As regular readers of this blog know, I dislike revenue spending being saved and turned into building projects for future pupils. The money is, in my opinion, for the education of the present generation not for their younger brothers and sisters.
Personally, I think the government should now publish the revenue balances of all academies in the same manner as they do for other publicly funded schools. They should also measure overheads paid to academy trusts compared with local authority charges for similar services and those bought directly from the private sector. Protecting the education budget is one thing, but obtaining value for money is another and equally important duty.
As regular readers know TeachVac launches today. It was originally an idea to collect data about the labour market but now, like the disruptive retailers, it has been shown to offer significant saving while providing the level of management information any large organisation should possess about the turnover of its workforce. If you haven’t been to http://www.teachvac.co.uk do pay a visit and view the demo videos on both the schools and teachers sections of the web site.

Worrying reports for teaching

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Two new pieces of evidence that support the ‘NO FEES for trainees’ campaign launched by this web site at the beginning of January were published today. High Fliers, the organisation that has been monitoring graduate recruitment since 1995, updated its forecast for 2015 graduate recruitment to suggest the market is still growing and that Teach First will be the largest single employer of new graduates in 2015. But, they don’t count the 30,000 graduates entering training to be teachers in their survey partly because to do so would demonstrate how teaching dominates the graduate labour market.

The second piece of evidence was a research report by Income Data Services for the NASUWT on pay in teaching. This shows pay on entry falling behind. Governments have always been reluctant to accept that by imposing an extra year of unpaid preparation on would-be teachers that affects the decision of some that would become teachers when there are plenty of other graduate job opportunities. Making trainees pay fees just adds insult to injury and further reduces the incentive to teach. It have pointed out before that if the Ministry of Defence can pay trainee officers at Sandhurst, the DfE should be able to pay all trainee teachers rather than impost a levy on training through the fees.

With the labour market for graduates now recognised as buoyant, the fee remission is something that can be achieved quickly and relatively cheaply for government and could make a difference to recruitment. Yes, some individuals would have become teachers and be prepared to pay for the privilege, but the same is true for army, navy and air force officers, not to mention civil servants and many others in the public sector.  We don’t expect them to, so why teachers?

After the recruitment crisis of 2000-2003 teachers’ pay rose in relation to the private sector, partly because Ministers took the brakes off the progression through to the Upper Pay Spine. It may have been reasonable during the recession for public sector pay to be kept down, but once pay starts becoming uncompetitive something has to be done or a teacher recruitment crisis develops. The warning signs have been there since 2012, as readers of this blog know.

With most graduate jobs located in or around London traditionally it is in the capital that pay pressures have been likely to exert the greatest effect. But, with new businesses able to start in bedrooms these days and then turnover many thousands of pounds through a single computer pay and conditions have become a national issue that the government’s broadband strategy will only make worse.

Schools can offer what salaries they like these days, and we will try to monitor this trend. Schools may seek to use their reserves to offer higher salaries and savvy trainees will undoubtedly use the evidence from today’s reports to negotiate higher starting salaries, especially if they know that they are in a shortage subject. Schools that register their vacancies with www.teachvac.co.uk will be told about the size of the market and can respond accordingly.

At the end of this month we will know the initial recruitment figures for 2015 training places and can compare the situation with January 2014. Any deterioration will be bad news. Cut tuition fees now.

No FEES for Trainee Teachers

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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?

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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.

Should trainees bring benefits as well as costs?

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The IFS Report on The Costs and Benefits of Different Initial Teacher Training Routes published on Monday makes for interesting reading. On the face of it, paying all trainees a salary might be less expensive for government than paying bursaries to some but not others and trying to reclaim the fees that the government used to pay anyway, from some, but not all, trainees.

The IFS study has shown that the costs of training differs according to the route chosen and the nature of the trainee, but that many costs are not fixed but rather variable in outcome, dependent upon factors such as the quality of the trainee and how much input they require during their preparation period as well as how much government must pay to attract them into the teaching profession.

Generally, the costs of preparing a teacher can be divided into student support (fees and bursaries on some routes and salaries on others); training costs, and finally marketing and recruitment costs.

On the other side of the ledger is the benefit a trainee can bring, especially towards the end of their course when they may require less supervision. However, since they could acquire more skills if the training cost was regarded as a fixed cost this might push up standards rather than trying to quantify a benefit from a trainee. Herein lays the issue at the heart of the IFS research; should schools be expecting to reap benefits from trainees?

I am sure that those that think teaching is a profession where you don’t need training will regard the cost of some routes as too high and will try and focus on the benefits of early immersion in the classroom. However, as anyone that has watched the recent spy on the wall documentaries about schools will know some teachers need more help than others at the start of their careers and that such help comes at a price.

The other part of the IFS study that concerns me is the manner in which views of teachers about trainees are turned into numbers. Although the responses aren’t large for the different routes I would have liked to know, if this approach is going to be used, whether trainees in subjects where recruitment is easy returned more positive feedback from the schools than subjects where trainees were more of a challenge to find. In relation to School Direct I am not sure at this stage whether there has been any attempt to quantify the cost to the school of an unfilled place and to set this off against an overall sum for the route.

Traditional higher education providers may set the threshold for entry into training at a lower level than schools offering the newer routes. This will undoubtedly increase the cost of their training, but if taking risks provides sufficient teachers and only recruiting certainties doesn’t then, although the cost of training may be lower, the cost to education may be higher unless, for instance, teachers were prepared to teach larger classes.

At first glance the IFS study provides a good basis for further thinking by policy makers, but there is still a great deal of work left to do. For instance, what are the longer-term costs of programmes with lower retention rates in the profession; and are different routes better at attracting future leaders?

Free Schools but not Free Education

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The report from The Children’s Commission on Poverty saying that the cost of basics, such as uniforms, school trips, materials and computer access can amount to £800 per child each year in state schools raises fundamental questions about what should be paid for by the State in terms of schooling.

https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/sites/default/files/At%20What%20Cost%20Exposing%20the%20impact%20of%20poverty%20on%20school%20life%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf

I have long been aware of schools identifying specific textbooks and expecting pupils to have access to them and also in some cases in the past even expecting parents to donate to a fund for the school. Over the years these practices seem to have been growing as local democratic control has been eroded by successive central governments of all political persuasions. The Pupil Premium and free school meals for infants are at least a step in recognising there is a balance that needs restoring and these pupils with extra funding should not be asked to pay for items that are part of the basic life of the school.

Of course, different schools have always had access to different fund-raising abilities. When I worked in Haringey, at the start of my career, schools at the Highgate end of the borough made many more times profit at their summer fete than did schools at the Tottenham end of the borough.  Indeed, one school always seemed to be able to pull in a TV personality that guaranteed good attendance regardless of the weather.

I do think schools should be compelled to publish on their web site what they charge for each year. Where schools have reserves above the generally accepted norms then they must explain to parents why they are not providing the items they charge for from school funds. Perhaps someone might like to complain to the Secretary of State that a school is acting unreasonably by not spending its own money on a basic item.

Taking a cut of uniform sales through suppliers puts up the cost to parents as does having uniforms that cannot be easily bought from high street retailers, perhaps because the blazer is an unusual colour or has piping around the edges. Whether or not these are devices designed to exclude certain children from a particular schools, especially once the cost of sports kit has been added to the basic uniform cost, they do create a burden on less well off parents that should be prevented in state-funded schools.

The issue of internet connections at home has been one that has raised concerns ever since IT became so important in homework. Schools need to monitor whether this is a problem and follow best practice in ensuring all pupils can use the internet to complete homework tasks regardless of where they live. This is especially true for less well off families in rural areas where access to broadband may be partial or even non-excitant at reasonable costs.

I hope Lib Dem ministers will take up the cause outlined in the Commission’s report and not shelter behind the notion of schools being free to decide their own policies. I would also like to hear from the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches a clear statement that their schools will be expected to provide an education that doesn’t cause hardship to some families and exclude pupils from some important activities. Free should mean free in all respects and not free, but only if you can afford it.

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.

What’s a trainee teacher worth?

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Earlier today the DfE and NCTL announced the bursary arrangements for 2015/16 graduate entrants to teacher training. These arrangements apply to almost all graduate entry routes except Teach First. Interestingly, gone is the uplift in amounts for trainees working in schools with high percentages of free school meals that existed in previous years. On the other hand new subjects are now eligible for bursaries, including religious education. There is still, however, a pecking order with some subjects attracting higher amount than others regardless of where the trainee obtained their degrees. Physics, chemistry, maths and IT/computing graduates with doctorates or first class honours degrees will be paid £25,000, whereas geographers and design and technology trainees with the same level of degree will be paid only £12,000 despite probably being in scarcer supply than either chemists or mathematicians at the present time.

Even worse off will be RE graduates with a 2:2 degree as, despite the shortage of trainees, they won’t receive anything. The same goes for the many primary, history and English trainees with similar degrees. There are some shortage subjects, such as business studies, that once again seem to have been overlooked, whereas it is at least arguable whether there is a shortage of classics teachers in state-funded schools but they qualify under the languages heading. As a result such trainees will receive £15-£25,000 depending upon their degree class.

Once again there is no recognition for trainees on bursaries of the differential cost of living in and around London although those training in adjacent classrooms on the School Direct salaried route do receive such differentials to mark the fact that there are different salary bands for teachers.

One of the risks of this market-based approach, an approach not favoured by the army when deciding whether to pay gunners at Sandhurst more than future armoured regiment officers or those destined for the infantry, is that some candidates may hold off applying in the hope that the amounts paid in future years will be even better. However, hopefully, this is balanced by those for whom the cash makes a difference when deciding whether or not to train as a teacher.

Personally, I would favour paying the fees for all trainees with degrees as to expect those who take a subject degree and train as a primary teacher to pay up to £9,000 more in fees than those that opt to train as part of their first degree seems a bit unfair.

As the period between now and February is vital in setting the basis for the success of recruitment to training in 2015 it is to be hoped that the announcement about funding taken together with the recently announced recruitment campaign are successful in attracting more applicants of a suitable quality into teaching than in recent years since the prospect of a third year of under-recruitment at a time when pupil numbers are rising is not a prospect that anyone wants to contemplate.

Please spend the extra cash

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Last week David Laws, the Minister of State, announced new funding allocations for schools that would disadvantage no school, but add some £350 million to funding for schools in around 60 local authorities. These were mostly shire counties, but there were a smattering of London boroughs and unitary authorities. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/fairer-schools-funding-2015-to-2016 Apart from Bury, Salford, Barnsley and Walsall, the Metropolitan Districts were conspicuously absent from the list.

Generally, the announcement was greeted with pleasure. After all, extra cash is always welcome, especially as it came on the same afternoon that the Treasury was taking cash away from schools to pay for the increase in funds to the hypothetical teachers’ pension fund. However, pleased as I am to see more cash going into schools, I did wonder whether the poorest authorities with the largest increases in cash had lots of schools with deficits because they were so poorly funded at present? Bromley, the largest gainer by authority, with an 11.3% increase, mostly has secondary schools that are academies, so it is difficult to know their financial position. However, it had 16 primary schools with reserves at the end of 2012-13 in excess of the guideline eight per cent, and only six primary schools with a deficit. Even more curiously, the Primary School with a reported total revenue balance of more than 16% scored poorly on the Ofsted dashboard, being in the lowest quintile for Key Stage 2 outcomes on certain factors. They may need more money, but should surely be spending the cash that they are given. Shropshire, a county that receives some 6.2% more under the Laws’ plan, had a greater mix of schools with deficits and above guideline balances at the end of 2012-13, but again one of the schools with significant balances performs less well than the national average at Key Stage 2.

I don’t know whether any of these schools have used the parable of the talents in their school assembly,  but they certainly need to be questioned about whether they have taken the message behind the parable to heart. I have consistently maintained that revenue income is there to be spent in the year it arrives, and not to be squirreled away for some possible emergency or future capital project. If the message really is that poor performing schools are too often cautious with their cash, and this is holding back their pupils, then something needs to be done about it, and quickly. Otherwise, the extra cash won’t add value where it is really needed.

There is one further question about the announcement. In rural areas, the School Forum, for it they and not local authorities as the document seems to imply that set funding parameters, could choose to use a sparsity factor in their formula. Some, including Oxfordshire’s Forum didn’t do so. Was this a strategic mistake, and might the outcome have been even more cash for the county’s schools if they had done so? This just goes to show how complicated the whole funding business has become. Still, at least all the cash now remains within education, and cannot be siphoned off into other services.