Tag Archives: governement

What is the role of the State in schooling?

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This is an interesting philosophical question for a Sunday morning. It arises out of my post yesterday questioning a decision of the Labour government to allow a state school to open sites overseas, presumably for profit. Has Labour gone mad? | John Howson

The genesis of that blog  post was a tes magazine piece about a grammar school in London teaming up with a global brand to open sites in Dubai and Delhi Queen Elizabeth’s School to open fee-paying school in Dubai | Tes

What is the role of the state in schooling in the second quarter of the 21st century? When the 1870 Education Act was passed, as one of the Gladstone government’s first Bills before the new parliament, it was to ensure all children received at least some education. There was a feeling that a lack of literacy was resulting in British’s industry losing its advantage in the industrial revolution to countries with better educated populations.

After 1870, the State increasingly became the default position for schooling. Parents didn’t have to use it, but if they didn’t choose an alternative, basically the private sector or home schooling, then attending the local school from five to early teens was required of children. State paternalism or practical politics to allow the economy to continue to be successful?

155 years later, and we have the State, now run by a Labour government, sanctioning a state-funded school partnering with a global company to create school sites overseas selling its brand of education.

Why not allow this? After all, as someone pointed out on LinkedIn, the State too often rescues loss-making industries, why then shouldn’t it make money out of education?

Of course, the State already helps British Industry and commerce make money from exporting aspects of our successful education enterprise, from textbooks to teachers and private schools with sites overseas, as well as private schools bring in overseas students and their fees the government offers help and advice.

So, should State capitalism in this country support state schools opening branches overseas, and those schools making a profit on that work, to be ploughed back into their school in England, thus potentially earning it more cash than the State provides?

Firstly, profit is not a given. Secondly, how will the countries where such schools are located react. Happy not to worry about attracting expatriate workers because there will be high quality education for their children. And, also happy for its own citizens to attend such schools, with a different curriculum to what State schools in that country might teach?

The issue of state schools topping up their funding, whether from parents, donors or now profits, has worried me ever since I taught in Tottenham in the 1970s. School fetes, a feature of those days, run by primary schools in Highgate made thousands of pounds, those run by schools in Tottenham couldn’t match such income. Was this acceptable? At that time, local authorities ran schools and could compensate for this discrepancy. Now, the National Funding Formula make such compensation more challenging, except through the Pupil Premium.

The entrepreneur in me applauds the school making money overseas; the politician takes the opposite view. In this case, I think the politician wins. We need to debate afresh the role of the State in schooling in England, and both its purpose and its limits.

The other crisis facing schools

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In my experience, editors usually have September, and the national annual ‘return to school’ event, as a time to ask journalists to look for a school centred story. This follows on from the useful two-week period in August when there are examination results to cover in the month when there is often little news from the political scene.

This year, editors and their journalists didn’t have to work very hard, if at all, for their ‘return to school’ story. RAAC, and the school buildings saga, was a gift send. Would the story have topped the bill at any other time of year? Who knows, as it is an important issue, but more important say that a reshuffle?

What is clear, is that by focussing just on the school buildings issue, editors are missing the opportunity to take a wider look at the health of our schools. Had there not been RAAC, and the still largely hidden asbestos issue, might the staffing of our schools have been the main story this September?

This is a much more difficult story to sell, as except in rare cases such as a special school reported to the DfE in the summer, schools don’t send children home for a lack of teachers. Instead, they cut subjects from the curriculum – I have been told of a school that is no longer offering languages in the sixth from this September; increase class sizes; reduce non-contact time for teachers and, most commonly, employ what might be considered as under-qualified teachers to teach some groups.

Because anyone with Qualified Teacher Status can teach anything on the curriculum, it isn’t easy to identify the problem, as schools, quite rightly, don’t advertise any shortcomings in the staffing of their timetable. However, extrapolating from the last School Workforce Census that provided a baseline, and adding in the results of new entrants being below the targets set by the DfE through the Teacher Supply Model, it seems clear that some schools are not properly staff this September.

Does this matter? Like the lack of a schools’ database on building issues, we don’t know whether some young people are missing grades in those public examinations we celebrate each August because of staffing issues last year or even earlier in their school lives.

This blog has charted re-advertisements of teaching post against free school meal rates in schools. I wrote a blog on this issue last month, just before the exam results season started Are we levelling up? | John Howson (wordpress.com) I won’t bother to repeat what I said then, but it would be interesting to look at examination results in specific subjects at different centres with different levels of staff turnover for a period of three to five years, to see if there is any measurable effect of staff turnover on outcomes, including entry policies.

My hunch is that it is difficult to create a ‘normal’ distribution curve for results subjects such as ‘A’ level physics if many schools cannot offer the subject, and those that do only enter those likely to be successful candidates.

Editors might like to pencil in a story for January 2024, when secondary schools facing unexpected vacancies will find recruitment even more of a challenge than for this September. What might be the effects on their results in Summer 2024 of an unexpected vacancy, especially if they started the school year this September with both a RAAC and a staffing crisis?

Can UTCs survive?

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Schools Week, the respected education newspaper, is reporting Michael Gove as saying that the UTC programme has failed.  http://schoolsweek.co.uk/michael-gove-utcs-have-failed/ This will be bad news for Lord Baker whose brainchild the idea was in the first place. UTCs were Lord Baker’s second attempt to kick-start a technology sector in schooling in England, after the limited success of his City Technology College programme initiated when he was Secretary of State for Education.

Mr Gove’s comment will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog. A thriving technology sector is probably a good idea for schooling in England, but to create a new type of school for some, but not all, pupils at age 14 was asking for trouble. To compound the recruitment problems facing these new schools by using the market model of either compete and succeed or fail and die was to demonstrate why Tory market economics finds it hard to work in education.

Incidentally, closure is a feature of market economics, as even Waitrose has apparently found out recently, with the announcement of the closure of five of its branches.

So, where does technology education go from here? The easy answer is to let the existing UTCs and their companion Studio Schools limp on, with some making a go of it where there is local support and others failing to recruit sufficient students to be financially viable. A better answer, and one that should be welcomed by the clutch of former accountants currently running the DfE, would be to call in the receivers and see how the assets can be best used for Schools England. Will the current Secretary of State have the courage to take this radical approach? We will see.

With the raising of the learning leaving age to eighteen, the break at fourteen for some pupils was always going to look out of line with the idea of a common curriculum up to the age of sixteen, even with those pupils that would benefit from a fresh start at fourteen. My guess is that the promoters of UTCs and Studio Schools didn’t plan effectively for the type of pupils other schools would encourage to switch in an era where cash rules and pupils come with a price upon their heads.

If UTCs are going to be a short-term feature of our education scene, could the Secretary of State please now pay attention to the fate of Design and Technology in all our schools? Post BREXIT we will need those with the skills and interest in the whole gamut of design and technology to help create our future wealth. Sadly, the subject has been ignored by the DfE for too long and the limp approach to the D&T teacher shortage adopted in the recent Migration Advisory Committee report didn’t receive the rebuke it deserved from the business community.

We need a thriving design and technology sector in our schools, please will someone now come up with a credible plan to help us achieve that aim?

 

Pension Fund concerns

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No, for once this isn’t about the Teachers’ Pension Fund, partly because there isn’t one: the government pays the difference between receipts paid into the scheme and the pensions payable to pensioners each year. There is an issue about why private schools are in the Scheme, but that may be for another post.

This post is about the report by UHY Hacker Young, the national accountancy group that was released earlier today. According to the authors, the Local Government Pension Scheme fund deficits around the country have increased between 75-100% on average over the last year, following Brexit-related market turbulence. This change affects all academies directly because nearly all non-teaching staff in schools are members of these schemes, unless they have chosen to opt out. As academies publish accounts each year, the scale of their deficit is easy to uncover

I raised concerns about growing deficits among academies in Oxfordshire earlier this year at a meeting of the county council, as they are the body that administers the scheme. Apparently, in 2013 the DfE gave some form of guarantee about under-writing the deficit. However, that seemingly has yet to be challenged, presumably because if an academy changes hands the deficit just passes to the new body running the school. I am not sure what has happened when a school closes completely as happened with at least one UTC in the West Midlands.

Of course, pension deficits are to some extent an a figure on a balance sheet of the type accountancy standards require, but most ordinary mortals pass over very quickly and nod sagely when it is explained to them at the meeting where the annual accounts are presented and discussed. However, with staff costs making up around 75% of the total costs of the average school, according to UHY Hacker Young, something will eventually have to be done to prevent these deficits overwhelming the education budget as a whole, so trustees might want to start asking questions when the accounts are presented to them later this term for sign-off.

As UHY Hacker Young explain:

“Pension deficits fluctuate each year according to market rates and other complex assumptions, however the trend over recent years, even before this latest increase, has been upwards. A deficit means the pension fund does not currently have sufficient assets to pay pensions that will fall due in the future to retired staff, so trustees are rightly questioning how the gap will be funded and where costs can be cut to plug the deficit.”

One option would be for the government to nationalise the fund rather than continue to allow a significant number of different local authority schemes to operate. This would, presumably, reduce the cost of administration, but some well-run schemes might see their returns reduce. However, schools would be secure in knowing that non-teaching staff were now being treated in the same manner as teachers. I assume if this somewhat drastic approach were to be chosen there would have to be a new Scheme, since taking away current assets from the market would be unthinkable.