Tag Archives: government

-U- turn on a Friday afternoon

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I prepared this post before the announcement of the government’s –U- turn on forced academisation. We still need to see the small print of any Bill to know how far the government has really made concessions. As a result, I thought it worth posting my thoughts.

Now that the Police & Crime Commissioner elections are over it can be back to normal again for this blog. The big debate over the past few weeks has been about forced academisation. Much of the debate so far has failed to address in depth any of the three main points behand the argument about changing the structure of schools: the place of democracy in education; how important is geography in the organisation of our schools and does the primary sector need a middle-tier to ensure the survival of small schools?

None of these issues are new. Indeed, the last one has been around ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act revealed the depth of the Thatcher government’s mistrust of local authorities. However, the first one is the most important. Do we want our public services increasingly managed from Whitehall with no local democratic involvement? As I have pointed out before that is what has become the lot of our National Health Service. There is a case for education to go the same way; a national funding formula backed by a National Curriculum and testing regime and a uniform arrangement of school types that does away with anomalies such as randomly scattered selective schools or 14-18 UTCs and Studio Schools could create such a system.  But, allowing free schools to spring up anywhere without fitting into this pattern suggests either a degree of anarchic thinking or a lack of understanding about the delivery of effective and efficient public services. The same arguments can be made for random collections of schools being formed into academy chains. How important is the need to have community involvement in schooling and if it is important is this aim weakened by chains with no link to the community where they operate a school?

I think everyone that wants to retain small primary schools, whether in rural areas or urban settings, recognises that they need support and help that larger schools could provide for themselves. This raises the issue of how such support should be arranged and paid for? If we knew the outcome of the government’s thinking on the National Funding Formula then this issue might be easier to resolve. A formula weighted towards pupil-based funding that did away with a lump sum for each school would probably spell the death of small schools and make the argument unnecessary. However, if the pressure on a Conservative government is to design a formula that allows small schools to survive, then it has to address the question of their organisation and support. Many years ago, pyramids were suggested with clusters of primary schools linked to their local secondary school or their nearest secondary school of the same faith in the case of church schools and those of the other faiths. This would argue that geography is important but harks back the part 3 Authorities of the 1944 Education Act that operated within the larger counties. Do we wish to go back to the pre-Taylor Committee Report of 1976 position with one governing body for all schools in an area? Does such a system produce rotten boroughs or community cohesion? My guess is that it depends upon how the system is regulated by the next tier upwards?

Any system is also only as good as the people operating it. The government needs to take a long hard look at the size of the leadership cadre, both professional and political and ask what the cost of increasing the size of the pool will be. I have watched leadership salaries increase in response to the economics of supply and demand and to ignore this basic principle of economics and to create say 500 new multi-academy trusts without working out how they could be funded doesn’t strike me as good government. To return to the Police & Crime Commissioner elections for a minute, it would be poor government that were to impose cuts on police forces to fund the academisation of all our schools.

 

Education not a priority for voters?

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The Conservative Party seems to have calculated that because education in general and schools in particular didn’t feature prominently in the 2015 general election campaign parents and voters generally were content with the direction of travel. This means Tory policy-makers think voters support the move towards a school system that deprived local authorities of most of their remaining functions regarding schools and required all schools, including all primary schools, to become academies.

The forthcoming local elections in May are an opportunity for many voters to prove the government spin doctors wrong. As this blog has asserted, primary schools should remain under local support and direction as part of a national system. Schools are an important part of their local community, indeed in many rural areas they are the only manifestation of the community other than a village hall. The pub, shop, church and all other services have disappeared. Many Tory councillors recognise this point. Indeed, I suspect than some even entered active politics in support of their local school.

Announcing the policy that all schools must become academies just before Easter and both the teacher conference season and local election campaigning was either an act of supreme self-confidence on the part of the prime minister – for he must have sanctioned the Chancellor telling the world about the policy in the budget – or a staggering lack of understanding of the feelings of voters for their local school and its place in the community. Why the Tories would want to offer opposition parties a campaign against wholesale nationalisation of schools is beyond my understanding.

So far, despite their important as operators of primary schools, the churches and other faith groups seem to have bene relatively silent on the announcement about academisation. Easter Sunday sermons would be a good time for the Archbishops to convey to the faithful whether they back the government or will support those that want local authorities to retain an interest in schooling.

The honourable way out might be for Mrs Morgan to announce that in the first stage all secondary schools will become academies and that the policy will then be reviewed in the light of how MATs are working before moving on to the primary sector if the policy has proved successful. After all, we live in an age of austerity, as the government keeps telling us, and creating academies for the sake of it uses money that could be better spent protecting children’s centres, rural bus subsidies, disability benefits or a host of other more useful projects.

The Perry Beeches warning letter from the Education Funding Agency published on Maundy Thursday will just add fuel to the fire of those that worry about how MATs operate. Of course there were schools that broke financial regulations under local control, and even heads that went to prison for mis-appropriating public or parents’ funds. But, it would be interesting to know whether the trend towards financial mis-management is more likely in MATs with no geographical basis than those where they work closely with local authorities?

Who runs our schools could become the key battle of the 2016 local elections. If it does, there is no guarantee that the Tory programme for all schools to become academies will meet with universal voter approval.

 

Keep Primary Schools Local

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Now is the time for all those that believe primary schools are best kept under local democratic control to take action.

Please email or write to your MP asking them to defend the present position and to stop the government forcing all schools to become nationally controlled academies.

If you go to church this weekend, lobby your priest, vicar, minister or other faith leader, since the Churches, and to a much lesser extent other faiths, have a large interest in primary schools. Contact your local councillor and find out their views.

This is not a new campaign on my part to keep primary schools under local democratic control. Before the budget announcement I wrote on this blog about the BBC announcement foreshadowing the nationalisation of all schools that:

The interesting question is whether there is enough unity in the Conservative Party at Westminster to agree to ditch their chums in local government and fully nationalise the school system. Local government won’t enjoy being left with schools places, annual admissions and transport plus, presumably, special needs.

As I have pointed out in previous posts it is difficult to see how a fully academy structure built around MATs can save the government money to spend on the front-line. It is also an open question whether there is enough leadership capacity to staff such a system. I predicted this outcome way back in a post in February 2013https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/02/ when I wrote that:

“a National School Service is quietly emerging, with Whitehall connecting directly to schools. Localism it may be, but not democratically elected localism. A national funding formula, administered by schools where the Secretary of State determines who will be able to be a governor, and whether or not new schools are needed, and who will operate them, seems more like a NHS model than a local school system.”

So, I welcome the support of a number of Tory local cabinet members from across the country for the view that local authorities should still to decide how local education works and retain a general oversight of education, rather than transferring such powers to Westminster; especially for primary schools.

I heard Melinda Tilley, the Tory cabinet member for Education in Oxfordshire, where I have been a Lib Dem county councillor since May 2103, calling the government’s move to academisation a ‘diktat’. This contrast sharply with the silence from Labour on the issue, but then it was Labour that invented the academy programme.

Primary schools are an essential part of local communities, some face immense challenges in serving those communities, and not all may achieve their best every year for a whole host of reasons. There will always be a need for a school improvement service, and primary schools have worked in partnerships for years before governments at Westminster decided a free for all market approach was better than cooperation. The fact that the market approach failed wasn’t the fault of local authorities; nationalisation isn’t the answer.

 

Do we want to bring back the Sheriff?

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This is the pantomime season and the tale of Robin Hood is a well-known part of that of that cannon. Indeed, the Sheriff of Nottingham is well-established in folklore as an authoritarian baddy on the side of the State against the common people of England.

In the period after King John and the signing of Magna Carta local democracy came slowly to England, probably reaching a high point in the 1960s when the voting age was lowered to eighteen from twenty-one. Since then the State has rowed back on local democracy with more and more services being taken over by Westminster. Utilities and the health service departed local government in the post-war Labour nationalisation spree, even though public health found its way back in recent years. Police and the lower tiers of the court service largely disappeared although councils were handed power over alcohol licensing, if not licensing hours. Since Labour started the academies programme, based on the Tory Grant Maintained School model, schools have also been also been coming under direct control from Westminster.

Children’s Services seem to be the latest function of local government likely to be removed from local democratic control. The Prime Minister’s announcement just before Christmas presages what might be a two stage process, where firstly, poorly performing children’s services are taken away from democratic control and then, no doubt in the name of effectiveness, the remaining effective services are nationalised and boundaries rationalised to meet some new criteria of efficiency. The plans for adoption services seem to suggest the way forward.

Does it matter whether services are the responsibility of local councils? In a piece on this blog in March 2013, I argued that it did in relation to schools.  I think it does even more in respect of children’s services. These services deal with some of our most challenging and challenged young people that need the help of others. Do those services need democratic oversight? I believe that they do. Part of the problem is that local government now lacks a coherent rationale. There are cities with elected mayors; areas with one principle tier of government; other areas with two tiers and sometimes a third locality tier as well in the form of parish or town councils.

The lack of understanding of the need to manage and develop services locally is also hampered by a government that doesn’t understand about funding. Business Rates and Council Tax supported by government redistribution grants to deal with areas of low income has always been a challenge to get right. However, capping income without allowing local areas to manage local services is a recipe for the death of effective local government, especially when placed alongside the creeping centralisation of services.

Local councils had one big advantage, the discipline of the ballot box made for regular rethinks in all but those authorities where the present electoral system has created single-party states. Whether you call them commissioners, commissars or sheriffs, they are un-elected officials whose responsibility to the services sometimes risks coming before responsibility to the locality. I would change the electoral system to retain democracy rather than create services where decisions are taken far from the point of operation; but maybe I am just old-fashioned and a relic of a former age.

 

Larger class for London schools

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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.

 

Teacher Supply news from the seaside

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The news from Brighton that the policy area of teachers and teacher supply is one of the key issues for Labour’s new Shadow Secretary of State for Education is clearly to be welcomed by this blog. Hopefully, Ms Powell and her advisers will be more adept at keeping the subject in the headlines than her predecessor, one of whose best briefing on teacher shortages appeared on the Monday of a Christmas week when all the press had just gone on holiday. As a result, it was entirely wasted.

Clearly, Ms Powell has also been listening to the teacher associations about retention problems. However, she will need to come up with some data on the matter if she is going to convince the government to take the issue seriously, especially as some schools would probably be shedding teachers next year if costs continue to increase faster than income.

I am not sure what labour’s position is about academies and why they singled out free schools for specific mention? Do they include UTCs and studio schools in the group of schools to be curtailed or are they happy with them?

More importantly, who do they really want to manage the oversight of all state-funded schools? Will they retain the un-elected Regional Commissioners, having now as a Party accepted a role for the Police & Crime Commissioners?

The key issue in education is that of governance and whether schools and education policy is decided locally, regionally or nationally. Place planning and the effective use of resources is at the heart of the matter. If individual schools can dictate how many pupils they can take, then local authorities in rural areas face an open expenditure line on home to school transport that they cannot control. The same is true where schools can exclude pupils without having to take a corresponding number of such pupils from other schools. Allowing all nationally funded schools to set their admission criteria also doesn’t help local planning and the efficient use of taxpayer funds. However, that doesn’t matter if parental choice is more important than providing a good school for every pupil. Do the Labour Party want to channel funds to achieve the best outcomes for the largest number of pupils or do they just want to satisfy just the parents concerned that their offspring can attend an excellent school?

I haven’t heard anything about the curriculum and examinations from Labour, so presumably this is a policy work in progress area. I had hoped to hear that Ms Powell would call for fees to be paid for trainee teachers, but perhaps the new shadow Chancellor isn’t up to allowing spending promises from other colleagues around the shadow cabinet table.

I hope that Labour will support the continuation of universal infant free school meals and the Pupil Premium both of which can help with the vital early years of education where closing the gap can make a real difference as I am sure that Ms Powell knows from her former role in the Party during the last government.

Good, bad and indifferent (coasting)

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The headline  of this blog sort of sums up my view of the performance of academy chains as I read it in the Sutton trust Report issued today. http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Chain-Effects-2015.pdf

As a local politician, I might be forgiven for saying that such a judgement might have been made about local authorities when they were more directly responsible for schools and not, as now, just the education young people living in their communities receive. Even though that battle for local authorities to be allowed to act as academy chains was lost, at least with the two historically large political parties, some time ago, the need for an understanding of the effects of geography on academy chains and their performance is worth monitoring.

The Sutton Trust report seems somewhat light on the effects of funding. Where chains have schools in different funding bands – Ark has most schools in London, but some in Birmingham and on the south coast – do schools with different funding levels perform differently?  This might suggest that either the Pupil Premium or a national funding formula would be the better policy initiative to support.

The Sutton Trust accepts that generally London schools do better than schools elsewhere and academy chains with a strong London focus seem to do well. Is that because they are better funded; because they are nearer the DfE and can meet officials more often; have better leadership; or some other factor perhaps related to how we measure disadvantage?

I think, as in the days of local authorities there is a clear message about both leadership and purpose in this report. By itself neither is sufficient. Perhaps a score on leadership turnover might be added to a future report. Both Harris and Ark have strong central direction and some continuity of leadership. The best Chief Education Officers ran authorities where they knew what was wanted and set out to do more than just manage their schools. To the extent that hasn’t yet happened with the academy chain model means that governments seem to have replaced one system regarded as failing by another that probably isn’t yet any better overall. Whether the loss of democratic accountability is a price worth paying for the cost of the change is a matter for debate.

In defence of some academy chains they have taken on some very challenging schools. There may have been a degree of self-belief in the academy process that verged on naivety among all concerned. Changing the label on the door and upgrading the uniform may be necessary but not sufficient requirements for changing a school, but every academy chain needs to understand what works for the type of schools it is managing. The DfE needs to make sure they do so: hence the need for Ofsted to inspect academy chains in the same way as they do local authorities.

Finally, it would be interesting to rank academy chains on the central costs of running the chain compared with outcomes. I don’t know whether better performing chains are leaner or whether less well preforming chains need higher overheads to manage support for challenging schools? Certainly, salary costs needs looking at when some chains are paying their directors more than Directors of Childrens’ Services that are responsible for both far more schools and a social services arm of their service. Both, after all, are being paid with public money.

It’s official: no recruitment crisis

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The Minister for Schools has told the TES there isn’t a recruitment crisis in schools. However, in the same interview he did admit that there was ‘a challenge’ and that the challenge was ‘being managed’. The on-line report of his interview can be found at: https://www.tes.co.uk/news/school-news/breaking-news/schools-minister-there-no-recruitment-crisis

Now it may be mere sophistry to claim that there isn’t a crisis but to admit to a challenge. After all, we don’t have a definition for what would constitute either a crisis or a challenge in teacher recruitment. So let’s try and crunch a few numbers. According to the DfE Teacher Supply Model the for 2014/15 was a need for 14,295 trainees in the secondary sector. Assuming 10% would drop out during the year that would left just under 13,000 potential completers looking for teaching jobs this year if all places had been filled. However, the ITT census, confirmed in figures re-released this week, showed 13,866 trainees were recruited. Take off the 10%, and the available number of trainees is likely to have been 12,500, including the over-recruitment in physical education and history. As the DfE estimates that 50% of classroom teacher vacancies each year are taken by new entrants that would require 25,000 vacancies for classroom teachers in secondary schools across the whole of 2015 to exhaust the pool of trainees. To date, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has recorded just over 16,000 such vacancies since January, with just the autumn term to come. So, the headline figure might well not yet be at crisis level, although it is obviously challenging.

However, the DfE has a responsibility not just to worry about the overall numbers, but the component parts as well. Here the TeachVac data reveals a different story. Applying the 50% rule to the ITT pool and setting the number against recorded vacancies since January 2015 reveals that business studies, social studies and design and technology already have more vacancies recorded than trainees. In English, IT and geography the remaining ‘pool’ of trainees is below 10% and in most other subjects the pool is between 20-30%. This latter number should be sufficient, if evenly distributed across the country; but that almost certainly isn’t the case. As a result, some areas of the country will have concerns about recruitment across a wider range of subjects.

It is also worth noting that comparing the School Workforce Census for 2014 with that of 2013, vacancies had increased, albeit as the census is taken in November the absolute numbers were still very low; the percentage of teachers teaching English and mathematics despite not having any post ‘A’ level qualification in the subject had increased and the number of temporary and unqualified teachers had also increased.

Taking all this together, the Minister is definitely correct to accept that there is a challenge. I think he ought to spell out at what level it would become a crisis? He also told the TES that he was ‘managing the challenge’.  Now managing isn’t synonymous with tacking, so I wonder exactly what he meant by managing. I guess, making sure pupils aren’t sent home because a school cannot find a teacher and reminding everyone that not only do academies not need to employ a teacher with qualifications in the subject they don’t even need a qualified teacher: any suitable person will do.

Where the long grass grows

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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.

Statesmen and Politicians

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The Education Bill announced today in the Queen’s Speech to parliament is first and foremost a politician’s Bill. It will probably lack the grandeur of spirit to be a Bill associated with a statesman – this word needs a gender free equivalent; suggestions please – as was say the 1944 Act or even the Education Reform Act of the Thatcher government that introduced the National Curriculum and local management of schools. Nevertheless, by accident, its outcome might be monumental in re-shaping the landscape of school governance.

Much will depend upon how rigorous the DfE and its henchmen the Regional Commissioners are at taking over coasting schools. (How redolent with male gendered words education still is despite such a large proportion of those that work in schools being of the female gender.) Where will the threshold be set? What will be the attitude of the voluntary controlled sector be to forced academisation? Will the churches and other faith groups feel they have enough control over their schools taken over in such a way that when they stop coasting control once again rests with the diocese? Frankly, on the basis of the academy programme to date that looks unlikely. Even though the Roman Catholics have been adapt in some diocese in establishing multi-academy trusts of Roman Catholic schools what happens if one schools is regarded as coasting; will it be taken out of the Trust and nationalised with leaders with no experience of faith schools put in charge?

We have already seen academies closing without consultation; operating illegal admission arrangements and generally behaving in a manner that ignores the need for any understanding of local priorities. A badly worded Bill could finally spell the end of local government’s involvement in formal schooling. Indeed, after reading Ofsted’s recent letter to Suffolk, I wonder what, apart from a loss of civic pride, is now the consequence for a Council of an inadequate rating for its education section of Children’s Services? With even more cuts to come in local government many Tory authorities will no doubt see the abandonment of responsibility for schools as a means of saving money, assuming that they can hand over pupil place planning and home to school transport to the Regional Commissioner’s Office once all their schools are academies; and why not?

A Bill designed by a Statesman with an eye on history will tackle the governance issues head on and craft a piece of legislation that will shape the landscape of schools for a generation. However, a rushed Bill, designed mainly to satisfy a manifesto pledge, will lead to a further decline in the state of education.

The OECD pointed out today how poor many graduates from universities in England are at maths. Taking a stand on the 16-19 curriculum and making maths and a language compulsory for all ought to find its way into the Bill ahead of worrying about coasting schools that don’t need legislation to improve, but rather good teachers and effective leaders. Sadly, I fear politics will win the day.