Tag Archives: local authorities

Time for Jacob’s Law

Posted on by
9

The naming of a young person in Serious Case Review Report is rare. But this week the Report into the death of Jacob in Oxfordshire contained his name. The family gave permission, and hope it will ensure the report is more widely read and acted upon. If so, it is a brave decision, and one that I applaud.

You can read the Report at https://www.oscb.org.uk/oscb-publishes-a-child-safeguarding-practice-review-concerning-jacob/ Full report link at bottom of the press notice

Three agencies, the Police, Children’s Social Services and Education have learning points to take from the Review. In this blog, I will concentrate on the education aspects, as they contain a message heard before on this blog.

Jacob was born in Oxfordshire, later moved to Northumbria, where I suspect he was educated in a First School, and then a Middle School, before being moved in Year 6 to an ‘alternative education provision’ – presumably a PRU?

In July 2017, note the date, the family returned to Oxfordshire. The Report concludes that:

5.1 He was not on roll at any education provision and was a child missing education for 22 months

Jacob’s mandatory need for education was not provided by Oxfordshire County Council when he lived at home and when he was in the care of the local authority both in and when out of county for 5 months. Four educational settings were asked to take Jacob on roll, however largely due to his perceived behaviours and risks to other students he remained off roll for almost 2 years. Jacob’s family were offered the right of appeal when places were refused. His situation was considered by education panels such as the In Year Fair Access Panel and Children Missing Education to little effect and his needs were overseen and monitored by various professionals, including the Virtual School and the Independent Reviewing Officer Service whilst in local authority care. There were no formal dispute resolutions raised14 by Children’s Social Care and his situation was not escalated to the Education Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA) as it should have been.

Had this been an isolated case then this would be understandable, but a month before Jacob arrived back in Oxfordshire I had had an exchange in public with the Cabinet Member for Education at the June 2017 Cabinet meeting of the County Council. Not all questions are for political gain, and this was one where I genuinely thought that there was an issue to be addressed. The question asked:

Oxfordshire county council CABINET – 20 JUNE 2017 ITEM 4 – QUESTIONS FROM COUNTY COUNCILLORS

Question from Councillor Howson to Councillors Harrod and Hibbert-Biles “How many children taken into care over the past three school years and placed ‘out county’ have had to wait for more than two weeks to be taken onto the roll of a school in the area where they have been moved to and what is the longest period of time a child has waited for a place at a school in the area where they have been re-located to during this period?” 

As you will see, I asked both the Education Cabinet Member and Cllr Harrod for Children’s Social Services and received this answer:

Answer Over the past three years it has been exceptional for a Looked After Child to be taken onto the roll of an out of county school in under two weeks. Indeed, of the nine cases of primary age pupils we’ve looked at, the quickest a pupil was placed was 12 days (there were two) and the slowest was 77 days. For the 22 secondary age pupils the picture is even worse, with 3 weeks the quickest placement and a couple taking fully 6 months to get some of our most vulnerable young people into a stable school setting.

The main reason for this completely unacceptable state of affairs is that the Council has no power to direct an academy to admit a Looked After Child. The only way we can force an academy’s hand is to get a direction from the Educations & Skills Funding Agency and this, as you can see from the foregoing times, can be a very long winded bureaucratic process.

The fact that it takes so long for academies to admit our Looked After Children shows how doggedly our officers pursue the matter; I suspect that many other local authorities simply give up when they meet an intransigent academy that doesn’t want to take responsibility for educating their vulnerable young people.

The minutes of the meeting note my supplementary question and the response as:

Supplementary: In response to an invitation from Councillor Howson for the Cabinet Member to work with Councillor Howson and the labour opposition to see what could be done Councillor Hibbert-Biles recognised that it was a national situation, and she would be asking for a meeting with local MPs and relevant minister.

How distressing to read the national recommendation in the Serious Case Review that:

Recommendation 2: This Review asks the Department for Education to acknowledge the education key learning and findings from Jacob’s Review and provide feedback as to the effectiveness of the Education and Skills Funding Agency process in resolving issues in a timely manner. The Review asks the Department of Education to provide statute and guidance to local areas and their communities on how to manage the Governance arrangements with academy run schools and local education departments who currently cannot be mandated to accept children on roll.

And in the local recommendations that:

Action Plan 2: The Education System

The key learning set out below is fully addressed in this action plan for children in the education system in Oxfordshire, overseen by the Chair of the OSCB Safeguarding in Education Sub-Group Key Learning:

An education system that ensures:

1. The paramount importance of the role of schools in keeping children safe

2. An education package is put in place in a timely manner for those children who may show challenging behaviours

3. Those children missing education are known and action is swift

This Action Plan should pay particular attention to ensuring: – Restorative work to resolve the fragmented arrangements between academy schools, alternative provisions and the local authority to ensure collective ownership – Policy and procedures to track when children are not on roll – The function of Education Panels in Oxfordshire (In Year Fair Access and Children Missing Education) – The local application of the Education Skills Funding Agency intervention – Education packages for children who may be at risk of exploitation and also present a risk to others.

For those that read the whole Report, there is further evidence on page 31 and footnote 56 of other issues about school admissions around the same time.

Here’s what I wrote on this blog on the 23rd June 2017:

In my post on 11th June, after the outcome of the general election was known, I suggested some issues that could still be addressed by a government without an overall majority. First among these was the issue of school places for young people taken into care and placed outside of the local authority. They have no guarantee of access to a new school within any given time frame at present. It seemed to me daft that a parent could be fined for taking a child out of school for two weeks to go on holiday but a local authority could wait six months for a school place to be provided for a young person taken into care.

The Cabinet Question reproduced above then appears followed by:

I found the answer deeply depressing. However, the good news is that MPs from the three political parties representing Oxfordshire constituencies have agreed to work together to take the matter forward. Thank you to MPs, Victoria Prentice, Layla Moran and Anneliese Dodds, for agreeing to seek action to remedy this state of affairs.

If readers have data about the issue elsewhere in England, I would be delighted to hear from you, so pressure can be put on officials nationally to ensure a rapid change in the rules.

I had forgotten that unique letter signed by every Oxfordshire MP after I had made my suggestion.

Nothing happened. Jacob died. We cannot wait any longer.

The DfE must act now to ensure all children have a school place within a specified time frame, whether they move to a new area or are excluded by a school. There must be a register of unplaced children of school age that is regularly reviewed by a senior officer and a politician in each local authority, and Ofsted should update the Secretary of State each year about the national picture.

It is time for a Jacob’s Law. His death will not then have been for nothing.

Read more on this BBC Report into the case https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-55841644

Enough potential school leaders?

Posted on by
Reply

When I wrote a blog recently about the significant level of head teacher vacancies recorded by both TeachVac and the DfE vacancy site during August, I promised to look into the possible size of the pool of school leaders able to step up to fill headships in the primary sector. (Feeling the Strain 31st August 2020)

The new arrangement for viewing the DfE Statistics of the School Workforce in November 2019 made this more of a challenge than in the past. Indeed, I have still not fathomed whether it is possible to add in age groupings as a variable in the composite table searchers are allowed to create from the data? This is an important variable in answering the question about leadership pool of talent since deputy and assistant heads in some age groups may be expected to be lacking in experience in post sufficient to consider promotion to a headship.

Even better would be details about age and length of service in post, something provided way back in the 1990s, but not seemingly available now without a specific data request. Perhaps the teacher associations might like to consider this issue in their next evidence to the Pay Review Body the STRB).

Historically, most head teachers are appointed from the ranks of deputy head teachers, although, as some small primary schools don’t have a deputy, a number of assistant heads or even teachers with a TRL have been appointed to headships in the past. More recently, deputy heads in secondary schools have been moved across to primary schools in the same Academy Trust in order to fill vacancies for primary head teacher posts.

Looking at the data for the last four years from the School Workforce Census, the number of full-time deputy heads in the primary sector has declined from 11,563 in 2017/18, to 10,729 in 2019/20. The number of part-time deputy heads during the same period has, however, increased from 1,062 to 1,236. Nevertheless, the size of the pool has not grown. This is despite the number of schools remaining almost constant during the same period, the total altering only from 17,191 to 17,178.

Assuming some 2,000 primary head teacher vacancies each year, with 25% being taken by existing head teacher changing schools, this would create a demand for 1,500 first time head teachers each year. Assuming ten per cent of the 12,000 deputy heads are too new in post to consider promotion and a further 10% are too old to be still interested in headship, the remaining 10,000 or so leaves a generous margin of possible applicants.

However, other considerations then come into play; type of school – infant, junior or primary; organisation – maintained or academy; religious affiliation or none – Church of England, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Jewish, Greek Orthodox; Sikh, Muslim; size of school – one form entry to four form entry or larger?

All these variables can affect the size of the possible pool of interested applicants. A further wrinkle is the time of year a vacancy is advertised. Historically, 50% of vacancies appear in the January to March period and are the easiest to fill as that is when the majority of applicants are job hunting. TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has detailed information on how schools advertising for a head teacher fare, and how many have to re-advertise. Each year, a report is published in January.

We shall be watching the current trends with interest.

Happy Birthday

Posted on by
Reply

Today is the 150th birthday of the 1870 Education Act. This was the Act of Parliament that established State Schools in England for the first time. There had been funding for schools before this date, but 1870 marked the start of a State education system.

However, there was no requirement in the Act to send children to school, and there still isn’t. Parents must educate their offspring, but it is up to them how to do it. If they make no provision, then the state school system is the default catch-all option: parents cannot simply ignore the issue of education once a child reaches statutory school age.

It is perhaps symbolic that the Prime Minister has chosen today, probalby unknowingly, .to talk of the new term and a ‘moral duty’ to get all children back to school.

As I said in an earlier post, I worry not for the children, but for those they come into contact with both at home and at school. High risk teachers should be deployed working with high risk and self-isolating children that cannot attend school by using the developing technology to offer appropriate learning strategies available to all.

Much also needs to be achieved with those that have fallen behind over the past five months so that they can catch-up without just facing a diet of just English and mathematics.

Cash strapped local authorities need to consider retaining uniform grants for those pupils attending schools requiring special clothes whose parents are unable to afford the cost of this specialist clothing. Schools should also make uniform optional, and not mandatory, in the present climate, and certainly not use it as a means of discrimination against certain pupils.

The government must also not forget further education and apprenticeships. Those with long memories will recall the TVEI scheme of the 1980s. Perhaps it is time to create a 20th century version, so that no young person leaves education without some offer of continued education or employment.

Local authorities should investigate how much cash they have taken from maintained primary schools through the Apprenticeship Levy that is currently sitting in bank accounts and set up task forces to ensure it can reduce youth unemployment locally. There is no point in giving the cash back to government. The same is true for the MATs.

MATs, diocese and local authorities should also review the level of school balances. Now is the time to spend them and not to leave them in the bank doing nothing. It is just a rainy day, but a monsoon of unimaginable proportions. If head teacher need convincing, then offer suggestions for how the cash can be spent.

Finally, I have suggested before that the class of 2020 that graduated as teachers all be offered work in view of the steep decline in vacancies that has led to many not being employed for September.

Let us celebrate this special day in the history of education in England by working to provide the children of today with the best possible education in these unprecedented times.

Bring back the Star Chamber?

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Fewer teacher vacancies since lock down

Posted on by
Reply

Laura of TeachTapp and and Freddie Whittaker have written an article in SchoolsWeek about teacher vacancies that confirms what TeachVac has been saying on Linkedin. http://www.teachvac.co.uk

Having crunched some numbers, the team at TeachVac have noted a bigger fall in primary teacher jobs than in the secondary sector. However, both sectors, and especially the secondary sector, had a very strong first couple of months of 2020.

Recorded Vacancies for Teachers by TeachVac
All
2018 2019 2020
January 5492 6386 8216
February 5056 5791 8421
March 7159 9029 9302
subtotal 17707 21206 25939
April 1799 4233 1793
Total 19506 25439 27732
Primary
2018 2019 2020
January 1910 1568 1719
February 2046 1617 2103
March 2944 2844 2491
subtotal 6900 6029 6313
April 819 1423 419
Total 7719 7452 6732
Secondary
2018 2019 2020
January 3582 4818 6497
February 3010 4174 6318
March 4215 6185 6811
subtotal 10807 15177 19626
April 980 2810 1374
Total 11787 17987 21000

Contact me if you want details of secondary subjects.

Education for All

Posted on by
Reply

The new Report from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) about exclusions, building on their work earlier this year, is deeply worrying. https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Unexplained-pupil-moves_LAs-MATs_EPI-2019.pdf

Among the most concerning of EPI’s new findings are;

Amongst the 2017 cohort of pupils, we also found that approximately 24,000 children who exit to an unknown destination do not return to a state-funded school by the spring term of year 11.

The vast majority of unexplained exits do not appear to be a managed move.

51.9 per cent of all unexplained exits are to an unknown destination in the term following the exit.

Both LAs and MATs among the school groups with higher than average rates of unexplained exits, i.e. this is not a problem that is most prevalent amongst a particular structure of school governance. However larger MATs (those with at least ten schools with secondary pupils) all have above average rates of unexplained exits.

These snippets, taken from the Key Findings of a long and detailed report, suggest a system that is not operating to educate all children. Some teenagers have never been easy to educate. Indeed, challenging though schools are today most are not the same as they were up to the 1990s.

There is undoubtedly a trade-off to be had between the cost of educating challenging pupils and the funding a school receives. This trade-off may be starker in areas where Pupil Premium and High Needs Block funds are lower because of high employment and government funding calculations.

Nevertheless, the issue cannot and should not be solved by schools excluding pupils with nowhere to for them to go. EPI might also like to look at pupils that move into an area mid-year and the extent to which some of those with challenging problems are not offered school places.

The education of all our children is an issue for government to tackle. In the present governance hiatus, only central government can identify and tackle both the root causes of the problem and those schools and MATs that are the worst offenders. Ministers have been willing to take on academy trusts over the issue of high pay for Chief Executives. This is another issue for action by central government, with Ofsted, Regional School Commissioners and the Education and Skills Funding Council all acting together.

There is little local authorities can do except identify the size of the problem in their area and ensure missing children are identified and then put pressure on schools. But, with budgets largely in the hands of schools, there is little authorities can do even with maintained schools, and virtually nothing with these academy chains, often with headquarters located far away in another part of the country.

Sadly, one casualty of any intervention might be the right of genuine home schoolers to educate their children as they see fit without the need to keep the authorities informed. This principle goes back to 1870 and the start of state education. However, it must be at risk if it allows for a system that lets so many young people disappear from sight before the end of their statutory education. Out of sight must not mean out of mind.

Fostering needs more discussion

Posted on by
2

Congratulations to the BBC’s Today programme for highlighting the issue of children that are in foster care. The discussion was spread across the whole programme this morning. It can be as hard being a child suddenly required to move their placement as it is coming into care for the first time, as listeners heard so eloquently this morning.

I am also concerned about the extent to which the fostering placement service should be a commercial enterprise, with carers seen as assets having a monetary value. There must be a question as to why these carers are not offered shares in such enterprises? More importantly, why are these enterprises not run as social enterprises and not profit-making ventures?

If the DfE has the gumption to take on the private sector and provide a free job-listing service for schools, why should it not ensure all foster placement activity is also in the public sector?

My only serious concern with the BBC programme, that followed an in-depth analysis of the adoption process on The World at One earlier this year, was that the Today programme didn’t mention the issue of school placements for children in care and especially what happens when children are moved school in the middle of a school term? Not all academies subscribe to a local in-year admissions process, and it can be challenging to ensure a quick placement for some of these children, especially in a different local authority area to the authority responsible for the placement.

With lots of children’s homes, and no doubt foster places as well, in areas with selective schools, how do we ensure that these children do not lose out in their education? Virtual schools do great work, but must battle against a system that isn’t in any way integrated to deal with this sort of problem even though the Pupil Premium acknowledges the additional financial needs faced by these young people in schools and colleges.

If either the Secretary of State or the Permanent Secretary at the DfE were listening to the Today programme this morning perhaps they would like to instruct officials and Ministers to review how the education of children in care can be further enhanced, especially over the issue of changing school mid-term.

Finally, there is the issue of what happens to children when they exit care? For those interested in the whole issue of children and the care and adoption services, I recommend a visit to The Rees Centre website at http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/rees-centre/ and some of the research that they have conducted over the past few years.

 

Admissions still a headache for everyone

Posted on by
Reply

The DfE has recently published data about appeals for admission to primary and secondary schools. The data relates to admissions for the start of the 2018-19 school year; mostly for September 2018, but some schools may start their year in August. Although the data relates to admissions to any year group at the start of the school year, it seemingly doesn’t cover in-year admissions from parents moving into an area during the school year. There also doesn’t seem to be any mention of special schools and the evidence appeals could provide about the pressure on places in that sector. The basic information is available at  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/admissions-appeals-in-england-academic-year-2018-to-2019

As pressure on primary places has eased, with the downward trend in births, so the percentage of appeals lodged in relation to admissions to infant classes in the primary sector has also reduced; from 3.3% of admissions in 2015/16 to 2.0% for the 2018/19 admission round. There has been a similar, but smaller percentage, decline in appeals for places in other years in the primary sector.

By contrast, in the secondary sector, where pupil numbers are on the increase, appeals are on the increase, up from 29,000 in 2015/16 to nearly 38,500 for the 2018/19 admission round. The percentage of these appeals decided in the parents’ favour has also been in decline during this time period as pressure on places has intensified.

This data is important to parents that will soon be struggling with the admission process for 2020. Local Authorities must publish their admission booklets by the 12th September, in order to allow parents to express their preference for schools by the end of October, for the secondary sector, and by early 2020 for the primary sector.

Last year, parents in Oxfordshire faced the problem of deciding whether or not to apply for a place at a school that didn’t exist. Some parents in the London borough of Enfield face the same prospect this autumn. Wren Academy want to open a new school and have created a set of admission criteria, including:

The remaining places will be allocated equally between Foundation and Community applicants as follows:

  1. a. Faith places (up to a maximum of 92) allocated in the following order: i. Up to 55 places for Church of England applicants ii. Up to 37 places for other Christian faith applicants b. Community Places (up to a maximum of 92) for all other children 
  1. Where there are places available in either category 3 or 4 above,these will be filled from the other category.

Leaving aside the issues parents will have about whether they can apply for both a Foundation category faith place and a community place as well, and whether both parents need to be of the Christian faith for a Foundation place or just one will do, there is the issue surrounding the fact that the school hasn’t yet been created by the DfE, and thus no Funding Agreement has been signed.

The DfE really needs to update the Admissions Code to deal with this situation and make explicit that any school included in the admissions booklet is guaranteed to open the following September.

 

 

 

Bad news on closing the gap

Posted on by
2

The Education Policy Institute’s 2019 Report on Education (EPI Report) has largely been noticed for the comments about social mobility and the stalling of attempts to close the gaps between disadvantaged and other pupils as this is a key feature of its findings  https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/epi-annual-report-2019-the-education-disadvantage-gap-in-your-area/ Reasons for this ending of the reduction in the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and other pupils as noted by EPI are the decline in funding for schools and the challenges some schools face in both recruiting and retaining teachers.

This latter explanation is one that has been regularly championed by this blog as likely to have an adverse effect on outcomes. So, it would seem that money matters, and the idea of just providing cash to under-funded local authorities, as seemingly suggested by the new Prime Minister, might not necessarily be the way forward.

However, I do have some concerns about parts of the methodology used by EPI as it relates to the presentation of the data. A focus on local authorities as the key determinant does tend to ignore areas, whether urban or rural that have wide variations in levels of disadvantage within the same local authority boundary. For the two tier shire and district council areas, it would have been better to use the data at a district council level, but that doesn’t help in cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and boroughs where there may be wide variations between different parts of the authority. To some extent the data for an authority doesn’t reveal the whole picture and can provide results that might mis-lead the casual reader.

EPI avoids this issue to some extent by producing tables using parliamentary constituencies as the basis for the data. Thus the gap in months at the secondary level relative to non-disadvantaged pupils nationally can differ widely within one authority by looking at data at the level of the parliamentary constituency. For Birmingham, it is 13.6 in Selly Oak, but 19.6 in Ladywood; in Kent it differs between 27.0 for the Dover constituency and 13.8 in Tunbridge Wells.

This is not to say that drawing attention to the gap between where pupils start their education journeys and where they complete them isn’t vitally important at a local authority level. But, providing everyone with equal shares of the cake is not an answer for anyone that wants anything other than administrative simplicity, important though it is to ensure that base funding levels are sufficient for the task in hand.

EPI do make the point in their report that despite no progress in narrowing the disadvantage gap, overall pupil attainment has continued to rise. This suggests that an overall rise in standards does not guarantee a reduction in the disadvantage gap. (Their emphasis).

The Report also highlights the fact that the post-16 education routes taken by young people are becoming increasingly segregated by socio-economic status, with disadvantaged pupils disproportionately represented in certain routes. In particular, the increased segregation is driven by an over-representation of disadvantaged students in further education. These trends may damage the government’s ambition of rectifying imbalances between further and higher education. (Their emphasis).

 

 

More wasted cash?

Posted on by
2

The DfE has today updated the list of academies (SATs and MATs, but possibly not MACs) where there has been a change in overall responsibility, either from a standalone academy (SAT) into a multi-academy Trust (MAT) or between MATs. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/academy-transfers-and-funding-england-financial-year-2018-to-2019

These changes are generally not cost free. They can take place for a variety of reasons including, ‘due to intervention’, usually after an inadequate rating by Ofsted; ‘initiated by the Trust’ and as a result of the fact that the Trust ‘sponsor closed’. The last of these reasons seems to have incurred costs of around £3 million in the 14 months from January 2018 to February 2019. The DfE can offset such costs against any balances held within the Trust, but that cash cannot then be spent on educating the pupils.

Now it has to be recognised that in the past costs were incurred in dealing with failing local authorities. Hackney in the early years of the Labour government was one example, and I think that Bradford was another. Indeed Commissioners are still sent into Children’s Services rated as ‘inadequate’. However, the ability of trustees to effectively close their Trust brings a new dimension to this issue. I suppose that some of these Trusts might have, so to speak, fallen on their sword before they were the subject of intervention by the Regional School Commissioner’s Office.

Nevertheless, the fact that trustee can voluntarily decide to abandon one or all of their schools at a cost to the system does raise questions about the best use of scarce resources, an issue highlighted in the previous post on this blog.

There also doesn’t seem to be any requirement on trustees to think of others when making decisions to close a SAT or a MAT. There are times of year when such actions might be allowed, but others where it should be banned. I recall a few years ago a MAT announcing the closure of a school a couple of weeks before the notification of places for the following September was to be relayed to parents. The local authority had to re-run the whole exercise for that area, with a waste of time and money. Those costs would presumably not be included in the figures provided by the DfE, and I suspect the local authority were not reimbursed for the time an effort of their officers in ensuring every pupil had a place at secondary school that September.

The DfE might also like to publish a list of ‘orphan’ schools, declared ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted and requiring conversion to academy status but finding it a challenge to secure a MAT willing to embrace them.

I don’t know whether the Select Committee in their Inquiry into school funding looked into this sort of cost to the system, if not, then they might like to put such a study on their list for the future.

As I have written in previous blogs, there are some areas, such as pupil numbers increases, where costs cannot be avoided. There are other areas where reducing waste should be a real priority for the system. This looks like an example of the latter.