Good News for All?

Posted on November 25, 2021 by John Howson

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.

	Primary	Secondary
2016/17	20.5	15.5
2017/18	20.9	15.9
2018/19	20.9	16.3
2019/2020	20.9	16.6
2020/21	20.6	16.6

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.

Leveling Up will need a new Funding Formula

Posted on May 9, 2021 by John Howson

The current National Funding Formula is fine as far as it goes. However, as I have written before on this blog, it is based upon a notion of equality that resembles the ‘equal slices of the cake’ model of funding distribution. That’s fine if that’s what you want out of the Formula, and the f40 Group of Local authorities have tirelessly campaigned for fair – more- funding for their areas. Again, they are right to do so.

However, if the new agenda has levelling up at its heart, then it is necessary to ask whether the present method of distributing cash to schools and other education establishments will achieve that aim?

As the debate about the High Needs Block of funding for SEND has made very clear, some children cost more to educate than others. If you want all children to achieve a minimum standard of education then some will always cost more to achieve that goal than others. The Pupil Premium recognised this fact. Changing the date of calculation and thus excluding some children from the Premium seems an odd way to start the ‘levelling up’ campaign.

There is a key decision for government to make if they really mean to introduce a ‘levelling up’ campaign in the school sector. Do you hypothecate, as with the Pupil Premium, creating funds only to be used for levelling up purposes or do you distribute more funds generally and leave it to the schools and Trusts to manage the distribution of the cash? This approach leaves maintained schools that are not academies in a bit of a limbo as they don’t have a mechanism to ‘pool’ funds for the common good, as MATs are able to do.

When it works well, the second approach is better, as it is less of a blunt tool than the first method as anyone that has read the history of school funding over the last century will know.

There is a further issue with a Formula tied to geographical areas, as this blog has noted before. Oxfordshire is largely an affluent county, but there are pockets of deprivation in Banbury and parts of Oxford; not to mention the issue of rural poverty as well. Any ‘levelling up’ agenda must tackle these issues in addition to the more obvious areas of underperformance in education achievements.

Overlaying this issue of ‘levelling up’ is the effect on the present Formula of the downturn in the birth rate and its consequences for small primary schools. Do we want them to compete by drawing in parents willing to drive their children to such schools? An alternative is to close them and let council Taxpayers pay the cost of transporting children to other schools. Might work in urban areas, but the Tories would quickly find that save our Schools campaigns can impact more on election chances for Councillors than almost anything else except perhaps closure of a local hospital. There are also implications for the climate change agenda. I would be interested to know where the Green Party stands on this matter.

Doing nothing won’t help the ‘levelling up’ agenda, so if the government is really serious in what it is saying, then action will be needed. Making all schools academies, however repugnant the loss of local democratic control is to people like me, does offer some levers hat MATs can use, but local authorities cannot under the present rules.

It will be interesting to see what plays out over the next few months in a debate where doing nothing will have as many consequences as doing something.

Schooling also needs a shake up

Posted on February 7, 2021 by John Howson

The news, in a leaked document, stating that the government is considering the way that the NHS operates, prompts me to remind readers that I have long felt that the arrangements devised under Labour for schools that were enthusiastically espoused by Michael Gove in 2010, in terms of how schooling is arranged, also need urgent review.

Some, including myself, have always maintained the importance of ‘place’ in our education system, and especially the school system. A sense of location is often weakest in relation to higher education and the university sector. However, even there, a place name, such as Oxford, has always worked well, grounding a university in a particular location. For schools, the link to a locality is generally much stronger than for higher education, and parents normally want their children to attend a good local school.

The academy programme dealt a severe blow to the locality based school system that was already under threat as local government fell out of favour at Westminster and institution level decision-making became the favoured approach. The 1988 Education Reform Act, with the move to local financial management and placing power in the hands of head teachers and governors, wrecked any chance of creating a locally managed system across England.

The arrival of multi-academy trusts in 2010, sometimes with headquarters many miles away for the location of the school for which it had responsibility failed to build upon the experience of the diocesan school model, where large diocese, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, often had responsibility for schools in several different local authority areas. Sometimes this worked well, but not always.

Crippling the funding for local authorities wrecked features such as staff development across a local area and the ability to talent spot future leaders, especially middle leaders, where most teachers don’t want to move house for promotion. It may be no coincidence that wastage rates for teachers of five to seven years of experience have increased as local frameworks for teacher support have been eroded.

You only have to read the recent post on this blog about Jacob’s Law, to see the important role local authorities play in the admission and management of pupils across a local area. To allow individual schools to frustrate the ability to find a place for a pupil is poor government, as anyone reading that Serious Case Review can easily understand.

The recent problems with the supply of laptops and internet access to those without, would have been better handled locally, with strategic support from government. Managing it from Westminster showed how this central model for operation rather than strategy just didn’t really work.

One question remains, should schooling, like the NHS, be largely run by professionals, with little local democratic involvement or should schooling have a strong local democratic element in the way it operates, in view of both the number of families involved and its role in the local economy. I have made my view known on this blog over the past eight years.

When I started in education, two phrases were in regular use: ‘a local service nationally administered’ or a ‘partnership’. Is it now time to work out what type of school system we want for the rest of the twenty first century?

Can a mean be mean?

Posted on June 30, 2020 by John Howson

When I first moved from teaching in a Tottenham secondary school to higher education in Oxford I brought with me an interest in the disparity of funding for schools. Partly this was because working in Haringey, and having been brought up right on the border with the London County Council – by then the Inner London Education Authority – I was aware of the disparity of funding for schools in Haringey compared with those just across the border in Hackney.

One of the early books I read on the subject was by John Pratt and his co-authors and was entitled ‘Depriving the Deprived’. Published in 1979 by what was then, Kogan Page. The book was based upon research that looked at school funding in one London borough over the course of a single year.

I was reminded of this when looking at the latest Free School Meals data for England, published by the DfE last Thursday. As a measure of potential deprivation it as good as it goes. If you consider Oxfordshire, generally rightly regarded as an affluent part of South East England, by the data on Free School Meals taken on census day for the six parliamentary constituencies, you find the following

% of children on Free School Meals on Census day Oxfordshire’s constituencies ranks

Oxford West

& Abingdon 8th lowest out of 534

Henley 28th lowest

Witney 35th lowest

Wantage 55th lowest

Banbury 94th lowest

Oxford East 237th lowest -.i.e. about halfway

Within Oxford East, some wards will be even worse ranked than others. Now this shouldn’t matter with a National Funding Formula for schools. But it does, because not all the funding calculations take into account differences between schools, rather than between local authorities. Indeed, if each district council area was a unitary council with education responsibility their funding might be different. But, none of the districts are large enough to ‘go it alone’ in the present funding regime.

As a result of the general affluence of Oxfordshire, the nine most deprived council wards in the county; five of which are in Oxford East constituency; three in Banbury and the other one in Oxford West and Abingdon constituency, probably lose out on funding compared to if they were part of a urban area. Such funding arrangements do not help close the achievement gap between high performing areas and the lowest performing schools in the county.

Now, of course, if all secondary schools in the county were in a single Multi-Academy Trust, the Trust could move funds around to mean the extra need of schools in deprived area, albeit by reducing the amount some schools received. However, with many different Trusts, and one remaining maintained secondary school, this option isn’t possible.

Another option of creating an ‘Opportunity Area’, used by Conservative governments in some other parts of the country, mostly in the North of England, doesn’t seem to be open to East Oxford, even though it has been suggested as an option.

So, taking the mean as a measure of funding may really mean depriving those living in some areas 40 years after the issue was exposed in one London borough.

Bring back the Star Chamber?

Posted on June 4, 2020 by John Howson

Bring back the Star Chamber? Head teachers retuned to schools on Monday to find that the simple form the DfE had be asking schools to complete about pupil attendance during lockdown had suddenly, and without warning, ballooned to one of over 19 pages in length.

Now, as someone that has made a career out of management information, I expect the required information is very useful to help Ministers answer the inevitable barrage of questions about their handling of the extension of the opening of schools. I nearly wrote re-opening, but of course, most schools never closed, and in some cases remained open during the Easter holiday period. As a result, it is wrong to talk of re-opening.

Anyway, in the past, it sometimes took up to two years to achieve a very small change in any data being collected from schools. I well recall the lead up to the introduction of the School Workforce Census, and the debates about what could and could not be collected.

Of course, the net result of imposing additional data collection on schools is that probably more schools will have thrown up their hands in horror and not returned anything, not even what they were returning by way of management information up to Friday of last week.

In one sense, I don’t suppose that Ministers will mind, assuming the demands originated from the political end of the DfE, since so long as they have some returns they can say ‘evidence suggests that …’ and nobody can gainsay the quality of the evidence, then they are satisfied. What ONS might make of this could be another matter.

I took part in a conference call on Tuesday with a hardworking set of local government officers, many of whom had been sending me emails over the weekend as they helped schools prepare for their new world order. So, this is the time and place to pay tribute to both the officers and the staff and governors of schools that have all worked so hard to keep the teaching and learning show on the road since lockdown was introduced.

Local authorities have had a hard time of it over the past thirty years, but those that have preserved a functioning education section have shown the value of a tier at this level to help the DfE manage the system. I don’t see all academies or MATs working with their Regional School Commissioners, but I do hear of them joining in with the local authority. And, as a politician, I know that parents turn to local politicians if they have any questions about what is happening. I wonder how many contact either RSCs or the DfE.

Issues of the span of control dominate structures in all organisations, and in the review of how the pandemic has been handled, the role of local authorities and education should be properly assessed and compared with the NHS and social care sectors, one of which has little or no local accountability these days and the other is a hybrid. Which works well and for what tasks?

Give us the data

Posted on May 11, 2020 by John Howson

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has produced a set of papers about deaths of those with COVID-19 and their occupational grouping. https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/covid19relateddeathsbyoccupationenglandandwalesdeathsregistereduptoandincluding20thapril2020

Teachers are seen as a group with a high possible exposure to any disease, presumably as they work close to large groups of children. In that respect, secondary school teachers interacting with many different pupils in the course of a day might been thought to have a higher potential risk factor than primary school teachers who are largely interacting with a smaller group of children each day. Of course, this is too simplistic, as it ignores the many other settings in schools from playgrounds, assemblies and meal times where all teachers can interact with large numbers of children. Primary teachers, and especially school leaders may have the added factor of interaction with parents that bring children to school and cluster at the school gate at the end of the day.

This data will no doubt have some bearing on the decisions about –reopening schools. The most useful table in the ONS data is Table 5 helpfully entitled ‘Deaths involving COVID-19 and all causes among minor occupation groups by sex (those aged 20-64 years), England and Wales, deaths registered up to and including 20^th April 2020.’

ONS use SOC minor occupation Code 231 for Teaching and Educational Professionals. This Group includes HE, FE primary and secondary teachers and school lead, as well as SEN teachers, advisors and a catch-all group not classified under any of the other categories. Although men have more representation in some of the groups, women almost certainly dominate the group as a whole.

ONS recorded that 22 of the 95 recorded deaths for men in Group 231 were deaths involving COVID-19, as were 25 of the 143 recorded deaths among women in the Group. Of course, there may be other deaths not signified as COVID-19 related, perhaps due to a lack of testing or other underlying causes, especially early in the notification period that might make these underestimates. However, on this data ONS show males in the Group having a death rate of 6.7 per 100,000 (range 4.1 to 10.3) and women 3.3 (range 2.0 to 4.9) for COVID-19 related deaths. For women it may be important since many occupation groups don’t have enough data to provide a figure for COVID-19 related deaths. Group 231 for women has COVID-9 related deaths per 100,000 of the population at about half the rate for all Nursing and Midwifery professionals. For men, the figure of 6.7 compares to 10.5 for Construction and Building Trade Group 531.

Secondary teachers account for half the male COVID-19 total for Group 231, whereas women they account for only a quarter of the total for female COVID-19 deaths in the Group. However, six of the seven COVID-19 related deaths in the primary sector were women, so that across the two sectors the deaths were similar in total at twelve men and twelve women. However, with far more women in classroom teaching than men, this might suggest that as elsewhere, men are most likely to become a casualty of the pandemic.

This is the sort of data that the government and teacher associations will have to discuss when considering how to restart the education system. No doubt they will also use similar data for across the world, where it is available. On the face of it, there is a risk that is less than in some occupational groups, but possibly higher than in others. What level of risk is acceptable will be the key question.

Tidying Up

Posted on April 23, 2020 by John Howson

One of the side effects of isolation is the time to do those jobs you have been putting off doing for ages. In my case, this includes tidying up part of my study. However, as I a great believer in ‘creative chaos’ rather than the clean desk method of working, I find it all too easy to become distracted.

The latest distraction has been around two unique books in my collection. Both were given to me as leaving presents. In both cases I had made it clear to colleagues that the normal envelope passed around the staff wasn’t what I wanted. If people wanted to thank me for my time with the organisation, then they need to use their intellectual capital not their cash.

When I left Brookes University in 1996 to join the then Teacher Training Agency as its ‘Chief Professional Adviser on Teacher Supply’ to quote for the press release issued at the time, I asked staff for something that either inspired them in their own education or had been important to them in their career either as a teacher or working in an education establishment. They were kind enough to put the resulting collection to a book, and then to allow me to add some thoughts of my own. I have always wondered whether this might form the basis of an interesting anthology.

The second book was presented to me when I retired from Times Supplements in 2011, just under three years after they had bought my company. My then deputy, crafted a book containing many of the columns that I had written for the TES over the 11 year period when, in one form or another, I churned out a weekly piece, usually about numbers somewhere in the school system. In those days the government produced many more statistics than it seems to do these days.

In the past few years, I have returned to that compendium from time to time, either to check a fact or to reflect how some things have changed and others have stayed the same.

As many regular readers know, I wondered about stopping this blog in January with the 1,000^th post. This is the 20^th post since then, so that was a New Year resolution that didn’t last. But, looking at the other books, set me thinking whether I should produce two more? Firstly, a collection of the first 1,000 posts on this blog: the good; the bad and the plain indifferent, and secondly a shorter collection of the ‘best’ posts selected by readers?

Do please leave a comment and a suggestion either if you think it a good idea or if you think it a mere vanity project that should be discarded without further ado.

Either way, it is always good to hear from readers and I am still wondering who it was that downloaded every posts on Christmas Day 2019, creating a record score for views on any one day during the history of this blog.

Government response to crisis predicted?

Posted on April 20, 2020 by John Howson

The Insight team’s article about the handling of the present emergency, written up in yesterday’s Sunday Times, must have made uncomfortable reading for some. However, a visitor to this blog this morning also reminded me of Dominic Cumming’s famous essay in the autumn of 2013 about the education system in England.

To quote just one paragraph:

The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre. A tiny number, less than 1 percent, are educated in the basics of how the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ provides the ‘language of nature’ and a foundation for our scientific civilisation and only a small subset of that <1% then study trans-disciplinary issues concerning the understanding, prediction and control of complex nonlinear systems. Unavoidably, the level of one’s mathematical understanding imposes limits on the depth to which one can explore many subjects. For example, it is impossible to follow academic debates about IQ unless one knows roughly what ‘normal distribution’ and ‘standard deviation’ mean, and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability. Only a few aspects of this problem will be mentioned.

I first used this in a blog post on the 13^th October 2013. I especially wonder whether the comment that

…. and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability …

Might have come home to roost as the present outbreak bites ever deeper into national life? Why, for instance, is the government not commissioning the BBC to create a single on-line learning tool instead of setting up a competing organisation? All it needed was to ensure the BBC used UK technology to create the platform rather than to waste scare resources when we should be saving every penny we can.

On the same subject, those that have viewed my LinkedIn page will know of the graph demonstrating TeachVac is still well ahead of the DfE vacancy site in terms of teaching posts on offer. Why waste school staff time uploading to the DfE site when we can offer a more comprehensive solution.

Indeed, as Chair of TeachVac’s parent company, I would be willing to approve a free feed to the DfE site for the summer term to show what can be done.

Schools will need to cut costs in the future, and recruitment is not one that they should be expecting to spend lots of money on from now onward. However, until there is a single site carrying most teaching vacancies, schools will still want to try other methods.

The full text of Dominic Cummings essay was located at: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/804396/some-thoughts-on-education-and-political.pdf

Will it be an ‘ill-wind’?

Posted on February 16, 2020 by John Howson

At the start of half-term, TeachVac has recorded record levels of vacancies for teachers in the first six full weeks of 2020, compared with vacancy levels or the same period in recent years. A proportion of the increase is no doubt down to the increase in pupil numbers that there will be this coming September. Although National Offer Day for admissions is still a few weeks away, I am sure that schools already have some idea of whether they will be full in Year 7 this autumn.

Indeed, I assume that new schools opening in September have received their Funding Agreement from the ESFA. If not, this is a policy issue the DfE might want to consider, since preventing such schools recruiting at the most opportune of times is not offering them the best start in life.

On the face of it, this is, therefore, going to be a tricky recruitment round if once again for schools seeking teachers. In part this reflects the lack of recruitment into training in some subjects, as well as the increase in pupil numbers. But, is there now a new factor in the equation?

What effect will the ‘coronavirus’ outbreak have on the labour market for teachers in England? Apart from the knock on consequences on the wider economy, and a possible economic slowdown that is always helpful for teacher recruitment, will the outbreak both deter some teachers from seeking overseas jobs, and encourage some of those overseas to return to the United Kingdom, and schools in England in particular? (As an aside, what, if anything, will the outbreak do for the flow of pupils and students from Asia into schools, colleges and universities in England this year?)

Now, it is too early to tell what the outcome might be of a change in attitude to teaching in Asia in general and China – including Hong Kong – in particular, and there are plenty of other parts of the globe where schools are keen to appoint teachers from England. However, even a small downturn in those seeking to work overseas and an upturn in ’returners’ will be a welcome outcome for the local labour market for teachers in England. It is indeed, ‘an ill-wind’.

TeachVac monitors activity on its site by geographical location on a regular basis. This is a somewhat imprecise methodology, since not all users reveal their geographic la location. However, the site has seen an upturn in activity from certain countries, when compared to this point last year. So, perhaps we might see more ‘returners’ this summer?

Funding still not fair?

Posted on October 5, 2018 by John Howson

Is opposition to the current National Funding Formula for schools growing? There are those that see it as neither national, because it has so many variations, nor a formula, because it carries so many restrictions carried over from what went before. Indeed, the F40 Group of local authorities that campaigns for fairer funding has issued a recent document outlining their concerns about the present state of play.

In one sense the idea of every child having a basic unit of funding tied to the provision of their education has been the Holy Grail of many educationalists ever since the autonomy of local authorities over education funding began to be curbed around the time that local management of schools or LMS began to be introduced in the early 1990s.

At that time there were wide disparities in the funding of schooling across the country. Local business rates meant that Inner London had access to vast resources of income generated from the City of London and the West End. At the other end of the scale were former manufacturing areas and many rural areas where income was insufficient and central government had to provide funds to support an education service. These areas were also joined by many of the shire counties where education competed with social services for a limited amount of resources.

The goal of those seeking a National Funding Formula was to level up less well funded areas, so that all received the same basic level of funding as close to that of the best as possible. Of course, if it wasn’t at the level of the best then there would be losers. The first attempt at a Formula created too many losers. It is now becoming apparent that the current version also has problems associated with it.

As the F40 briefing note says;

One of the key principles set out in the early NFF consultations, supported by f40, was that pupils of similar characteristics should attract similar levels of funding wherever they are in the country (allowing for the area cost adjustment). Therefore, NFF should be applied to all schools on a consistent basis. However, the protections applied, such as the 0.5% funding floor, ‘lock in’ some of the historical differences for those schools which have been comparatively well funded for several decades.

Their solution:

The government must continue to develop the national formula so that it is fit for the future i.e. is fairer, more easily understood, transparent and adjustable. Transition to the new formula is sensible but locking in past inequalities is not.

The F40 Group is also seeking continued funding flexibility to support specific local issues or organisational requirements. They assert that no two schools in the country are exactly the same, but the current formula assumes all schools are almost identical. The F40 say that are good local reasons why some schools have costs that others do not have, and an inflexible national system cannot support these schools equitably. As a result, some local flexibility is essential in achieving a fair formula that works and stands the test of time.

Here is the nub of the argument, how to manage a national formula with a degree of local flexibility. The government’s solution for academy chains is to allow funds to be moved between schools as necessary, but that approach doesn’t help either stand-alone academies or maintained schools.

With increasing pupil numbers and an under-funded 16-19 sector, the government has limited room for movement in the short-term, even if austerity really does come to an end as a policy objective. Perhaps we might see a return to the separation of funding into two separate funding streams with pay as one funding stream and other costs funded through a different funding stream more open to local flexibility to reflect local circumstances. This might imply a return to rigid national pay scales and limits of promoted posts to control the pay stream.

What is clear is that without more thinking, the present arrangements for school funding are likely to be unfair for many pupils across the country.

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

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