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Tag Archives: Liberal Democrats
Windfall profits and SEND
There is no doubt that the rise in demand for special school places over the past few years was neither anticipated nor effectively dealt with by the State. One consequence is that large amount of off-balance sheet debt being carried by many local authorities responsible for schooling in England. Another consequence, highlighted by the Liberal Democrats in a press release issued today, is what might be described as the ‘windfall’ profits being made by a few in the SEND sector. Lib Dems demand cap on SEND providers profits as top firms rake in £100m – Liberal Democrats
When the highest paid director of a company operating both care homes for children and special schools is paid over £300,000, or more than twice the salary of a Director of Children’s Services commissioning the use of places in the schools and homes, it seems sensible to question whether such use of public money should continue.
At this point, I must make clear that I am a capitalist. The 40 years I have traded on my own account and through a company, as well as held a portfolio of investments in other companies. However, there are two issues that concern me. Where should the boundary line between services offered by the State and those run by the private sector be drawn? And how should price be determined?
It is interesting, as I have noted before, that in the USA and many other countries, public transportation is just that: a service run by the State. In England it has become a battleground between the State and private enterprise and the differing political opinions. Most would expect SEND to be a public service.
What often seems to be lacking is a mechanism to regulate the costs of suppliers to the State. When the private sector funds its enterprise by borrowing to provide the services and then expects the State to service that debt with a profit element added, it seems to me like time to take the service out of the private sector, and back into public provision.
In the case of SEND school places, national and local government should work together to prove places in state-run schools that would obviate the need for private sector intervention. This means the State, in this case the DfE, being much more interventionalist than has been the case.
The Liberal Democrats, of which I am a member and activist, noted in their press release that
‘Research commissioned by the party and carried out by the House of Commons Library showed that the top handful of profiting companies each took home tens of millions a year. One Group, operators of 28 special schools, turned over just over £200 million a year, making £44 million in profit – a margin of over 20%. That profit is 150% what the company made in 2022.’
How many more teachers might the £44 million have funded? While we wait for the government to produce a White Paper on SEND, perhaps the Local Government Association should set up a taskforce to remove the need to use the private sector.
I am sure that when John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century philosopher, said that’ it was the duty of the State to see it citizens were educated, not to educate them itself’ he did not expect the cost to the State to be more than a reasonable amount.
What Lib Dems want for SEND pupils and their families
I was delighted to see the Liberal Democrats weighing in on the SEND debate by writing to the Prime minister and setting out five key principles behind any reform of the SEND system. This is what their letter to the Prime minister said:
Our five principles and priorities for SEND reform are as follows:
- Putting children and families first Children’s rights to SEND assessment and support must be maintained and the voices of children and young people with SEND and of their families and carers must be at the centre of the reform process.
- Boosting specialist capacity and improving mainstream provision Capacity in state special provision must be increased, alongside improvements to inclusive mainstream provision, with investment in both new school buildings and staff training.
- Supporting local government Local authorities must be supported better to fund SEND services, including through:
- The extension of the profit cap in children’s social care to private SEND provision, where many of the same private equity backed companies are active, and
- National government funding to support any child whose assessed needs exceed a specific cost.
- Early identification and shorter waiting lists Early identification and intervention must be improved, with waiting times for diagnosis, support and therapies cut.
- Fair funding The SEND funding system must properly incentivise schools both to accept SEND pupils and to train their staff in best practice for integrated teaching and pastoral care. Our five principles for SEND reform – Liberal Democrats
These principles come from a motion debated at last year’s Party conference and represent a check list against which specific policies can be measured, such as increasing the supply of educational psychologists to deal with both the annual reviews and initial assessments of EHCPs.
If there is anything missing from the list, it is the role of the NHS, and specifically around mental health and education. This is the area of need where the system has really broken down. Many of the other issues are cost related due to inflation and more young people living longer as well as increased demands from an age range of support than can now reach up to the age of 25. The issue of mental health has swamped the system and the NHS must play a part in helping define what is needed.
With the main opposition at Westminster disinterested in the issues of education that are facing most families, the Lib Dems should be leading from the front. This letter should have been sent at least a week ago.
As my earlier posts of today have shown, the Lib Dems next education campaign can be around securing enough teachers for schools in our more deprived areas. Such a campaign can take on both labour councils and Reform voters to show there is a radical alternative in the Liberal democrats.
Education may not feature very high in polling about issue in elections, but on a day-to-day basis it isn’t far away from the conversations in many households. From mobile phone to AI, funding for school meals to citizenship, Liberal Democrats should be calling the government to account.
Taking up the reigns again
Nineteen months ago, I paused this blog when I was appointed as the cabinet member for children, education and families on Oxfordshire County Council. Tomorrow, I officially relinquish that role after failing to win one of the newly created seats in the county council election: one of the few Liberal Democrats to be in such a position.
As a result of no longer being a councillor, and cabinet member, it does mean that I am able to start this blog again. However, even when I was a cabinet member, I have continued to post my views about recruitment into teacher training on LinkedIn. I am grateful to those that have commented on those monthly updates.
Much has changed in the education scene during the time that my blog has been paused. We now have a Labour government, but two-party politics has disappeared from the scene.
What is it, I wonder, about the third decade of each century that results in massive changes in the political landscape. A century ago, the Labour Party displaced the Liberal Party of Asquith and Lloyd George as the opposition to the Conservative Party in a two-party system. Two centuries ago, the start of the urbanisation resulted in a rapid growth in the electorate; a change that in 1832 was to lead to the Reform Act and the start of a road to universal suffrage.
In this context of political change, it is interesting that the DfE’s Interim Curriculum Review had little to say about citizenship as a subject. Perhaps the results of last Thursday might persuade the government to reconsider the importance of protecting democracy by reintroducing the subject into the curriculum.
However, to do so might mean changes in funding, not least for ITT subject targets. I am pessimistic about future funding for education. More funding for defence and the NHS will put pressure on government funding for department such as Education.
Nevertheless, I do believe that rationalisation within the academy sector could reduce spending on back-office salaries. I am also firmly of the belief that with a National Funding Formula being pupil driven, the practice of pooling schools’ balances within a MAT is unhelpful.
When such pooling involves cash balances being pooled across different local authority areas, then I am totally opposed to such a practice. But, then, I believe schooling has a very strong ‘place’ component. I also believe that the local community should have a democratic involvement. I do not want a schooling system with the same level of local accountability as the NHS.
The nightmare that is SEND was simmering in the background 18 months ago, and it was a poor ofsted judgement that parachuted me into Oxfordshire’s Cabinet, after the Labour Party walked away from the administration. With the National Audit Office, The Education Select Committee and others revealing the scale of the task ahead, there remains much work to be done to support the education of our most physically and mentally challenged young people. As with adult social care, where the Select Committee has reported today, relationships between education and the health service are an important part of the resourcing debate about the best use of funds for the SEND sector.
I take my hat off to the officers managing the remaining local government functions within schooling, many of which, as with home to school transport, often bring parents and officers into disagreement. Although no fan of the undemocratic MATs, I also acknowledge the great work many of their leaders are doing for the education of the nation’s children. I just wish they had more local democratic oversight and support.
Ending child illiteracy by 2025: reprise
Sometimes a visitor to this blog uncovers a previous post that is worth a reprise. I think that this post from 2015 is one such post. Many of the points hold good today, even to the issue of the Labour Party and tuition fees. Let me know in the comment section what you think.
Ending child illiteracy by 2025
The Liberal Democrat plan to end illiteracy by 2025 announced today would mean that every child born in 2014, ought to leave primary school in 2025 able to read and write at a standard identified to lead to success in secondary school and beyond. To help them meet this commitment to end child illiteracy by 2025 the Lib Dems would boost the early years Pupil Premium to an even higher level than the primary school Pupil Premium thus recognising the vital importance of a child’s early years for learning and development.
The Lib Dems would also overhaul early years teaching qualifications by letting nursery staff work towards Qualified Teacher Status and by 2020 requiring a qualified teacher graduate in every school or nursery delivering the early years curriculum.
As a Lib Dem, I have been fighting for better early years education for decades. This aim is reminiscent of the Millennium Development goals of 2000 that sought to ensure primary education for every child throughout the world by 2015. And what’s the point of primary education if children don’t learn to read, write, count, and lay down the skills to acquire the tools they will need for their future lives as adults.
Despite a focus of attention on the lack of education success among the poor that goes back to work undertaken when Ruth Kelly was Secretary of State in the Labour government, it is still clear, as Nick Clegg pointed out, that it is those less well off in society whose children don’t make the expected levels of progress.
Labour has been hinting about cutting tuition fees if elected. As Labour was the Party that introduced them in the first place in 1997, and then increased them, requiring students to repay the cash borrowed from day one rather than when they started earning, as now, Labour must say if it favours supporting undergraduates ahead of ending illiteracy in the next parliament; it cannot do both and still stick to its spending plans.
To achieve the ambition of ending illiteracy by 2025 means providing the cash for schools and early year settings to achieve this goal. Depriving local authorities of the cash to support pre-school settings where health, welfare and education issues can be dealt with together won’t allow the goal to be achieved. Yes, the bulk of the funds should go to schools and through an early years premium, but the work needs co-ordination and that is where local authorities need funds. By all means make it a ring-fenced grant, but do not force local authorities out of supporting initiatives by cutting their funding.
Schools also need to know how to deal with that small group of parents that are indifferent to their child’s progress and don’t, can’t or won’t work with the school and pre-school setting in helping their children learn. Helping schools know what works rather than everyone re-inventing the wheel will also ensure best use of the money. Does that mean a role for local authorities?
Four-day week for teachers?
A Labour MP has called for a four-day working week to be introduced across the public sector.
Lib Dem-run South Cambridgeshire District Council’s cabinet will meet today to approve the continuation of the trial for all desk-based staff as well as extending it to cover caretakers and binmen.
These are just two of the headlines from an article that I read this morning. What would be the implications for teachers of the introduction of a four-day week? The answer depends upon whether the same amount of face-to-face contact with pupils was maintained as at present and whether that was contact time spread over four or five days? What effect would four longer school days have on pupils, especially younger pupils? After all, some early years settings already offer wrap around care that is much longer than the traditional school-day.
What would the psychologists and those that study brain development in children have to say about putting five days of work into four? Perhaps a model would develop of four days of taught time and the fifth for ‘homework’ or supplementary activities.
On the plus side, parents also working a four-day week would have an extra day with their children: on the downside, parents whose working week did not coincide with the school four-day week would have to deal with the need for extra childcare.
Any change would come with a cost both to individuals and to the State. If there wasn’t sufficient funding, schools might be tempted to cram the teaching into four days and use the fifth day to generate income from their school sites and playing fields.
In a sector struggling to recruit enough teachers at present, would a four-day week make the profession more or less attractive to potential teachers. Certainly, if the bulk of graduate careers moved to a four-day week, teaching, already operating an employer-driven form of flexi-time, might be unattractive without some other boost to conditions of work.
A four-day working week might be a real challenge to the private school sector, where the additional costs would most likely have to be passed on to parents through increased fees. An increase of this magnitude might drive more parents back into the state sector, upping the cost of state education to the government. Add VAT on to the costs, and such numbers switching might increase still further.
During the Corbyn era, Labour proposed four additional bank holidays for workers; all during school holidays, so teachers would have seen no benefit from them. The implications for the teaching profession and others working in schools of the widespread introduction of a four-day working week do need to be considered.
However, I don’t think that the present model of schooling will continue as it has for the past 150 years. The AI revolution may well turn out to be as profound for society as the microchip revolution that started in the 1970s and transformed the world of work beyond recognition in many areas, but only to a limited degree in schools.
Technology and its interaction with the process of schooling has further to go in the future. Perhaps the pressure for a four-day working week for humans might be the catalyst for major changes in schooling?
Policy making is not campaigning
This blog is mostly about education. However, after three months of campaigning for last week’s elections, including fighting the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Thames Valley (TV) election for the Liberal Democrats, I felt like a final foray into a reflection on the interesting events of last Thursday.
During the whole of my recent campaign as Liberal Democrat candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Thames Valley (TV) I was never once emailed and asked for a manifesto of my policies. Sure, there were a couple of emails along the lines of we haven’t heard anything from you and what do you stand for. There were also several media events, including an appearance on BBC South Politics show were questions were asked about particular policies.
Despite this lack of voter interest in the details beyond what was available at https://www.choosemypcc.org.uk/ and other similar sites, turnout for the PCC election was 35.9% this time compared with25.6% in the last PCC election in May 2016. Not surprisingly turnout was higher where there were other elections being held on the same day as the PCC election. We won’t know the result until sometime on Monday.
There is an essential lesson to be learnt here. However good your policies, and, as in Education, the Liberal Democrats had devised some really good policies, as they have for tacking crime and handling policing, it is the campaigning that matters. Know your electorate. The Obama Team in the USA were great at that understanding when helping him first win the US Presidency. The Tories have learnt that lesson: others haven’t.
Here’s an interesting analysis of the Hartlepool by-election from Mark Pack, President of the Lib Dems:
The by-election has simply seen Hartlepool’s politics catch up with elsewhere.
“… and, there’s the important first opinion poll that Survation carried out in the seat. Their final poll, showing a big Conservative lead attracted a lot of scepticism but was right.. However, it is their first poll for the by-election that is important for understanding what happened.
Combined, Conservatives and Brexit Party got 55% in 2019. Survation’s first poll put the Conservatives on 49%. Their second and final one put the party on 50% and the result saw the Conservatives secure 52%. No great drama there. But for Labour it was 38% in 2019, 42% in the first poll and then… 33% in the second poll followed by 29% in the actual result.
The story here is of Labour failure, not of Conservative surge. That’s a point reinforced by the English local elections. At 36%, the Conservative equivalent national vote share is decent but not stellar. That’s not some new era-defining level of support for Boris Johnson’s party. It’s a fragile result that has brought success this time, but could very plausibly be followed by failure.
It looks like Labour badly messed up its candidate selection and campaign. …I suspect that once more detailed analysis is in, this will turn out to have mattered rather more than the Labour candidate being a previous Remainer who lost his seat in 2019.”
There’s no doubt that a large section of the population of England like an identifiable character; Churchill’s cigar and Wilson’s pipe as well as Boris’s hair are visual signals the electorate can see and easily remember. Even Mrs May’s shoes and Mrs T’s handbag are what people remember. It works in local elections, where independents are rarely shrinking violets.
Of course, cash helps. It is no surprise that Liberal Democrats went from no Councillors on Amersham Town Council in Buckinghamhire on Wednesday to taking control after the votes were counted, with eight new Councillors. The impending by-election and local spending by the national party has made a difference by adding the push that was needed to shift unhappy tory votes into the Lib Dem camp.
Know your electorate is as important as know your class is for a teacher and for candidates and Councillors tailor your material appropriately. But, nothing still works as well as talking to voters on the doorstep and being visible in the high Street.
Governments lose elections more often than oppositions win them. But, sometimes, oppositions lose elections as well producing unexpected outcomes.
Election Day
Today is a busy day for me as I am defending my county council seat and standing for Police and Crime Commissioner in Thames Valley.
This extract from a 2018 post on the blog tells you why I am standing in both these elections
Crime and a lack of learning
Posted on August 28, 2018
During the summer, the Ministry of Justice published a report called ‘A Sporting Chance: An Independent Review of Sport in Youth and Adult Prisons’ by Professor Rosie Meek. You can access the report at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/733184/a-sporting-chance-an-independent-review-sport-in-justice.pdf
I have only just caught up with reading the report, but what struck me forcibly was the following paragraph:
Those in custody are likely to have disrupted and negative experiences of learning prior to incarceration, and to lack confidence in their learning abilities.
A recent data-matching exercise between the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education* showed that of the young people sentenced to custody in 2014, 90% have a previous record of persistent absence from school and almost a quarter of those sentenced to less than 12 months in custody have been permanently excluded from school.
In terms of achievement, only 1% of those sentenced to less than 12 months achieved 5 or more GCSES (or equivalents) graded A* – C including English and Maths.
Furthermore, illustrating the over-representation of people who have been in both the care system and the criminal justice system, 31% of those sentenced to custody for 12 months or longer, and 27% of those sentenced to custody for less than 12 months had been in the care of a local authority.
* MoJ/DfE (2016). Understanding the Educational Background of Young Offenders: Joint Experimental Statistical Report from the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education.
There is a powerful message here to schools that don’t have a credible policy for dealing with their challenging pupils, other than excluding them from school. We need to work together for the good of society. The DfE needs to ensure there is a coherent curriculum, including English and mathematics, but not necessarily the rest of the English Baccalaureate for pupils that can use these subjects to retain their place as learners. There is a space for sport and other non-classroom based subjects in the curriculum.
Thanks for reading
Does Nationalisation always work?
Discussions about State ownership has been a feature of this general election campaign. As a Liberal Democrat (Candidate in Castle Point in Essex including the Canvey Island) I prefer J S Mill’s approach as espoused in his treatise ‘On Liberty’. Writing about the role of the state and education, Mill concluded that generally, it is not the role of the State to educate its citizens, but to see that they are educated. Not a view of liberty that is accepted by Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.
However, even Tory governments are not afraid of a spot of nationalisation when it suits them. And here I must declare another interest, for the remainder of this blog is about teacher recruitment, and I am both the chair and the largest shareholder in TeachVac, the free on-line job board for teachers and schools.
Over the past year, the DfE has been developing its national vacancy site for those in schools; teachers and non-teachers alike. The genesis was a NAO Report followed closely by a Select Committee report and a Public Accounts Committee session that all highlighted how little the DfE know of the labour market for teachers in real-time. At the same time head teachers were complaining about the cost of advertising vacancies, one reason for the creation of TeachVac and its free service to schools and teachers.
The DfE could have created a portal to existing sites for teacher vacancies that would have cost little by way of public money. Instead, Ministers sanctioned a full frontal attack on the private sector with a government funded site where state-funded schools could place vacancies for free, with only the cost of training their staff to use the site being borne by the school. Fine, if it works and is value for money.
So how is the DfE doing with this use of public money? Taking a day in late November as a snapshot, it would seem not very well.
An analysis across the core platforms revealed the following numbers of vacancies for teaching posts being listed.
| TeachVac | 2,053 | |
| TES | 1,808 | |
| Eteach | 845 | |
| Guardian | 593 | |
| DfE | 580 | |
Of course, the DfE is hampered by not accepting vacancies from private schools, and that will always limit the attraction of the DfE site to teachers looking for vacancies in any type of school.
Apart from TeachVac, all other sites mix non-teaching vacancies up with teaching posts to some extent or other on their sites. This makes the numbers even more difficult to calculate. TeachVac only records teacher vacancies.
Then there is the question of how long vacancies are allowed to remain on a site. Best practice is to remove them the day after the closing date specified by the school in the advert. Some adverts don’t have a closing date these days, and TeachVac will generally ignore these as there is a question about whether there is a real current vacancy at the school or these are just attempts, quite legitimate, at talent banking for the future.
So, on this evidence the DfE is not using public money wisely. Might it, perhaps, be cheaper for the new government to buy a feed from either the TES or TeachVac than to continue to operate its own site.
A Tribute to three Liberal Democrats
December has not been a happy month for me as a Liberal Democrat. During the past four weeks I have seen the loss of three important members of the Party. All had an interest in education. This post is by way of thanks for their dedication and service.
Paddy Ashdown was Party Leader when the ‘penny on income tax for education’ policy was promulgated in the 1990s. The policy was to contrast with the then Conservative government’s reduction on spending on education that continued into the first two years of the Labour government under Blair and Brown. Paddy was an inspirational figure and came to help me become elected in 2013 to Oxfordshire County Council.
Honorary Alderman Jean Fooks was a City Councillor in Oxford for a quarter of a century and a County Councillor for sixteen years. A physics graduate from Oxford, when women physicists were even less common than they are today, Jean taught me all I know as a councillor about the concerns over children taken into care and their education. These young people suffer in many different ways, but the lack of concern on the part of some schools and those in national government for their education is a burden they really should not have to bear.
Education, is about learning, butt it must be set in the context of the child. If the Christmas story tells us anything it is not to judge a person by their circumstances. Most children are taken into care because of the failure on the part of others. We must not expect the system to compound that failure, especially when these children are moved into other areas. When, for reasons of economics, these children end up in areas where there are many of them located together in a small area, the State must consider what the implications for their education will be? Removed from their families, they must not be cast out of our education system because they are troublesome. Jean realised this, and through her work on Corporate Parenting and visiting the children’s homes on a regular basis, she set an example of leadership.
Gordon was, until the summer, the treasurer of the local Lib Dems. He was then diagnosed with the condition that sadly ended his life all too soon afterwards. Gordon, was also a volunteer with Children Heard and Seen, a small Oxfordshire charity that works with the children of those in prison. All too often children with a parent, usually a father, in prison have a high risk of a life of offending themselves in later life or even as adolescents, this is especially the case for many boys. CHaS has sought to recognise the needs of these children that often have nobody to turn to that understands their position. They can be bullied at school and have lost a vital role model. Mentors, and those such as Gordon, can show these children that they are worth talking time over and can help them to fulfil their potential.
All of these three have been inspirations to me in the steps that they were prepared to take to help others. As we enter 2019, the memory of all of them will remain with me as I continue to try to do my best for Oxfordshire and its residents.
John Howson 