Tag Archives: GDP

Good News for All?

Posted on by
Reply

The latest Education and Training Statistics issued today by the DfE offers both government and opposition something to shout about Education and training statistics for the UK, Reporting Year 2021 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK (explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk)

For the government, the news that Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTRs) have improved in the primary sector and not worsened in the secondary sector can be seen as good news even though the improvement in PTRS in the primary sector probably has as much to do with the decline in the birth rate as it does to direct government actions. With pupil numbers still on the increase in the secondary sector, it is not surprising to see no improvement in PTRS in that sector.

 PrimarySecondary
2016/1720.515.5
2017/1820.915.9
2018/1920.916.3
2019/202020.916.6
2020/2120.616.6

Source: DfE Statistics of Education 2021

PTRS in the secondary sector remain at historically high levels for the country as a whole, and there will be areas of the country where the ratio in the secondary sector is even higher than the national average. Too often high PTRs have been associated with areas of deprivation and there are challenges here for the levelling up agenda if that remains the case. The Conservative Government invented the idea of Opportunity Areas to seek to address this issue: have they worked?

Opposition parties will no doubt seize upon the fact that education expenditure in real terms declined by 0.4% comparing the most recent year with the previous year. However, expenditure in the primary sector increased by two per cent and by seven per cent in the secondary sector in cash terms, presumably as a result of the weight on pupil numbers in the funding formula.

One outcome of the covid pandemic is that education’s share of GDP increased between 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 from 4.0% to 4.5%. No doubt it will fall back next years as the wider economy will have recovered from lockdowns and the other disruptions economy brought about by the covid pandemic.

The government can also point to improving percentages in the number of young people classified as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). In the quarter April to June 2021 the overall figure for the 16-24 age-group was 9.3% as NEETs, down from 11.3% in the same quarter in 2029/2020. Only 3.7% of 16–17-year-olds were classified as NEETS in the April to June 2021 Quarter. However, the largest fall in the percentage of NEETS over the past year was in the 18–24-year-old age-group.

 There is a wealth of other statistics in the release, but many have been so badly affected by the consequences of the pandemic that there is little to say except that 2020/2021 was a highly unusual year and the data will remain as an anomaly in longer-term trend lines of statistics. What will be interesting will be to see how long the recovery period is, and whether if different groups respond in different ways to the outcomes of the pandemic, plus any steps that the government will take to ensure that some groups are not left behind.

Secondary Sector PTRs worsen

Posted on by
Reply

Government statistics whose dates have already been announced before an election is called generally escape being caught up in Purdah during the run-in to the general election. Thus, it was that the DfE announced its Education and Training Statistics for 2018/19 earlier today, along with some revisions and updates to the 2017/18 data.

Much of the data on education and training are uncontroversial, but there are some tables that may cause ripples. The most notable is the table on Pupil Teacher Ratios and Pupil Adult Ratios.

In the primary sector, there was no change in PTRs nationally at 22.9 pupils per teacher. However, this is still way worse than the 15.7 pupils per teacher of 2000/01. In the secondary sector, ratios worsened over the last year from 16.0 in 2017/18 to 16.3 in 2018/19. Again these ratios were well adrift of the 14.0:1 of the millennium.

The secondary school ratio almost certainly reflects the fact that sixth form numbers are either static or still falling, while the number of pupils at Key Stage 3 is on the increase. The latter are, of course, taught in larger class for the most part. The fact that the adult to pupil ratio also worsened in the secondary sector is a testimony to the financial pressure schools have found themselves under and why, in the new post-austerity world, political parties of all colours, including my own (the Liberal Democrats) are announcing more cash for schools.

The pressure on education spending is best illustrated in the table that shows education spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. This equates to a spending of some £88.6 billion in 2018/19.

Education Expenditure as % of GDP
2012/13 4.90%
2013/14 4.70%
2014/15 4.50%
2015/16 4.40%
2016/17 4.20%
2017/18 4.20%
2018/19 4.10%

There is a long way to go just to return to the levels under the Coalition. Much of the increase, when it finally appears in schools’ bank accounts, is likely to be absorbed in higher staffing costs.

This is especially likely to be the case in those parts of England where house prices are high and private sector graduate wages for many professionals have risen to recognise the competitive state of the labour market. Teachers’ wages will have to increase to allow teaching to remain competitive. How far and how fast may become obvious next week, when the ITT Census for 2019 is slated for publication.

More pupils means a demand for more teachers, and anything less than an improvement on the figures for trainee numbers in 2018 will make uncomfortable reading for Ministers, especially if mathematics and physics were to record reductions on the 2018 numbers.

Further improvements in workload will also come at a price, but may be necessary to retain teachers overloaded with unnecessary busy work driven by a culture based around quality control rather than one of quality assurance and professional development.

Ministers might also reflect that improving the morale of the school workforce is probably the least expensive route to greater satisfaction, and should be used alongside improvements to pay and conditions.

 

Managing the pounds and pence

Posted on by
Reply

For aficionados of government spending the past few days have brought two interesting announcements. Firstly, there is the revised arrangements for handling the accounts of academies and MATs by the DfE in England. The failure to get to grips with this information has led to some embarrassment for the DfE over the presentation of the full departmental accounts in recent years. Hopefully, this new arrangement will mean unqualified departmental accounts in the future. It may also help everyone to understand the spending patterns of this now significant part of the education landscape. The details of the new arrangements can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/academies-sector-annual-report-and-accounts

According to the government announcement:

The new report will:

  • provide a more holistic report of the academies sector by aligning reporting of financial results with educational performance
  • separate academies spending from that of the DfE and clearly show for the first time the resources academies receive and how they use them
  • make it easier for Parliament, parents and taxpayers to scrutinise and test information about academies funding and spending

At the same time, DfE expects new arrangements to speed up validation checks by up to 2 months and enable accounts production much earlier than in previous years.

To support new reporting arrangements, the Education Funding Agency (EFA) has developed a new online accounts return for 2015 to 2016. EFA will write to all academy trusts in November with information about how to submit the accounts return.

Academy trusts must submit their accounts return by 31 January 2017. 

The second announcement came with the publication of the Education and Training Statistics for the United Kingdom 2016 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/education-and-training-statistics-for-the-uk-2016

This statistical release is a pale shadow of its former self and is mostly interesting for the tables it contains about qualifications across the system. However, tacked on to the end are two tables about expenditure on education across the UK.

The first years of the coalition reflect the austerity agenda instituted by the Labour government following the economic upheaval of 2008. Indeed, on one reading of the numbers, total spending on education fell throughout the period 2011-12 to 2015-16. However, this may due to the way student loan accounting changed between the Labour and coalition governments as the majority of the reduction was in the tertiary sector. As a result, education spending as a percentage of GDP fell from 5.3% to 4.4% during this period.

In cash terms, spending on both primary and secondary education was higher in 2015-16 than in 2011-12, by £1.6 billion in the primary sector and £2.7 billion in the secondary sector. The latter is surprising to the extent that pupil numbers were falling, but may be explained by the raising of the learning leaving age from 16 to 18 during this period and the resulting increase in participation feeding through to increased spending. Although these increases look large in cash terms they are not in reality so, spread as they are over a number of years. Indeed, they show spending probably flat or even declining in real terms per pupil. Interestingly, that isn’t a figure included in the data and there is no breakdown across the four home nations. This is despite education being a devolved activity.