Tag Archives: local government

Take Care Seriously

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Anne Longfield, the former Children’s Commissioner has published an important report on children in the care of local authorities entitled ‘Out of Harm’s Way. https://thecommissiononyounglives.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/OUT-OF-HARMS-WAY-CYL-DEC-29-2021-.pdf?utm_source=HOC+Library+-+Current+awareness+bulletins&utm_campaign=834a4dd143-Current_Awareness_Social_Policy_E_29-12-2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f325cdbfdc-834a4dd143-103730653&mc_cid=834a4dd143&mc_eid=ae5482b5b9 the report by the Commission on Young Lives should be essential reading for all Councillors, Teachers, Social Workers and Emergency Service personnel, and members of police forces across the country.

The report starts with the case of Jacob, a teenager failed by authorities and who eventually took his own life. I wrong a blog about his case when the Serious Case Review was published back in January Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com) But Jacob sadly isn’t the only child let down by a system that is overloaded and under-funded. Not only are children in the care of local authorities suffering but, as seen recently in the outcome of court cases, young children below school age are dying at the hands of those supposed to love and care for them.

But for Jacob and for many children in care one of the key issues is the support they receive from the education system. The pioneering work by the TES more than a decade ago that helped with the creation of virtual schools to oversee the education of children in care on behalf of the ‘corporate parents/guardians’ must not be undermined by an education system that is still too geared to satisfying the needs of able middle-class parents who can make full use of a market-based schooling system.

In my post in January, I called for a Jacob’s law to ensure no child was left without a school place following a move either in care or for any other reason during the school year. Since then, I have heard of too many examples of children, often with complex educational needs, where a family move has meant the child has been denied a school place for far too long. We can debate home schooling when at the behest of the parents, but ‘no schooling’ because of the failure of some part of the state, whether a local authority, a diocese or an Academy Trust, is just not acceptable.

I hope that many Councillors and activists will read this report from The Commission on Young Lives and take action ahead of local authority budgets being set in February to ensure everything possible is done to improve the lot of these young people.

Some children do need to be moved away from their ‘home’ area for safety reasons, but these moves should be exceptional and not routine. No child of secondary age should be moved from a comprehensive system to a selective system where they have no access to selective schools regardless of their perceived ability levels.

We must care for the most vulnerable of our young people in a fit and proper manner and not as an afterthought.

Prudent measure or wasted opportunity?

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The DfE has recently published details of the revenue balances held by academies and Trusts. Academy trust revenue reserves 2019 to 2020 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Unlike maintained schools that follow the local government financial year, the academies financial year follows a September to August pattern, broadly in line with the annual cycle of school life. The different financial years would make comparisons between the two sectors difficult, but doesn’t prevent comment and analysis about the state of finances in either sector.

The DfE document contains this useful summary

Summary

At the end of the academic year 2019/20

• 95.9% of trusts had a cumulative surplus or a zero balance.

• 4.1% of trusts had a cumulative deficit.

• The average revenue reserve across all academy trusts was £1.15 million.

• The average surplus balance, of trusts with a surplus, was £1.22 million.

• The average deficit balance, of trusts with a deficit, was £376,000.

• The total cumulative surplus across all academy trusts was £3.17 billion.

• The total cumulative deficit across all academy trusts was £42.1 million.

• The total net financial position of all academy trusts was a cumulative surplus of £3.13 billion.

Trusts average reserves – In 2019/20 average revenue reserves across academy trusts were £1.15 million, compared to £0.96 million in 2018/19, an increase of 20%.

In 2019/20 the average surplus balance was £1.22 million, compared to £1.05 million in 2018/19, an increase of 16%.

The average deficit balance in 2019/20 was at £376,000, compared to £381,000 in 2018/19, a decrease of 1.3%.

Trusts average reserves as a percentage of income – average academy trust reserves as a percentage of a trust’s income stood at 11.4% in 2019/20, compared to 10.8% in 2018/19.

This last fact will no doubt raise some eyebrows, as putting more than one pound in every ten received into reserves doesn’t suggest a system in the financial crisis that is the regular message from the frontline in education. Of course, putting cash aside to pay auditors bills and other future expenditure is a prudent idea. However, saving across a Trust for a specific project benefiting only one school is somewhat against the spirit of budgets being devolved to schools, and one of the criticism that used to be levelled at local authorities when they were responsible for schools.

Removing local democratic accountability for schooling should not have allowed unelected bodies to either build up large reserves or to favour certain schools over others. I have always maintained that the concept of revenue funding is to provide the funds to educate the pupils of today and not to save for the future education of others. Perhaps it is time that the National Audit Office had another look at the nature and purpose of these reserves held by academies and the Trusts to which they belong?

Fewer pupils creates problems

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The DfE has released its annual update to pupil projections. This is of immediate interest both to ITT providers and those responsible for planning school finances going forward into the medium term. The publication and associated tables can be accessed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-pupil-projections-july-2021

Actual (2020) and projected pupil numbers by school type, England
  2020202120222023202420252026
State-funded nursery & primary schools4,6474,6354,5974,5314,4544,3954,345
 year on year change -12-38-66-77-59-50
State-funded secondary schools3,0033,0723,1333,1933,2313,2283,216
 year on year change 69616038-3-12
State-funded special schools113117119120121120119
 year on year change 4211-1-1
Alternative provision settings15161717181818
 year on year change 110100
Total state-funded schools7,7787,8397,8657,8627,8247,7617,699
 year on year change 6126-3-38-63-62
Projections on pupil numbers

The DfE make the following important point about the numbers:

This year only a simple update to the 2020 model has been created with the addition of newly available 2019 national population estimates and births from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The reasons for this are:

  • There are no new ONS national projections giving new estimates of the future overall population
  • The 2021 school census data shows notable decreases in enrolment in nursery and primary schools and alternative provision compared to previous years. These are expected to be temporary, as a result of the pandemic, rather than long-term changes. However, using this data results in decreases across future years which are not considered to be realistic estimates of the pupil population over the next ten years.

The new 2019 ONS data provides additional information on factors such as whether birth figures have continued the drop seen since late 2016. Therefore feeding this data into the existing model provides a useful update on expected future pupil numbers. 

The various views on whether or not the fall is temporary must be of great importance. A loss of 300,000 primary school pupils in six years with the current funding formula for schools in place will have significant implications.

For those preparing primary schools teachers for entry into teaching the implications could come as soon as this autumn if entry targets for 2022 announced by the DfE using the Teacher Supply Model take account of the start of the reduction in pupil numbers.

For the secondary sector, there are probably a couple more years at present levels for teacher preparation courses before reductions in popular and fully subscribed subjects along with recruitment controls come into force once again.

Of course, with the DfE controlling the application process it will be interesting to see how the different parts of the DfE interact with each other, especially in view of the recent ITT Market Review.

The years of relative planet are going to be followed by some years of belt tightening across the education sector. The announcement on pay may not be unrelated to these figures on pupil numbers.

Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTRs): An update

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The publication last week by the DfE of the school census discussed in the previous post on this blog means that a time series analysis of changes in PTRs can be undertaken using the DfE’s new ‘construct your own table’ tool.

PTRs are useful as a guide because they can provide evidence of changes in the trends of school funding, especially when most of that funding comes from pupil numbers. The measure is not perfect. Older teachers cost more than younger one, so schools where staff stay put after being employed at NQTs cost schools more each year until they reach the top of their scale. This extra cost isn’t recognised in the funding formula.

When schools are gaining pupils, you might expect PTRs to improve, and when rolls start falling then PTRs might worsen, although there is likely to be a time lag to that effect as schools come to terms with lower numbers of pupils going forward. After all, no school likes to make staff redundant.

Incidentally, the fall in the birth rate and the exodus of overseas citizens will mean some tough decisions on ITT numbers may need to be made, possibly as early as this autumn for 2022 entry.

An analysis of changes in PTRs between 2016/17 and 2020/21 for the secondary sector shows only seven authorities, including the Isles of Scilly, where PTRs improved. In 13 local authorities the secondary PTR for schools across the Authority worsened by at least two pupils per teacher, with Slough unitary authority and the City of Nottingham having the largest changes in PTRS for the worse in the secondary sector. Most local authorities witnessed overall secondary PTRS deteriorate by between one and two teachers per pupil during this five year period. Historically that is quite a significant level of change for so many authorities. Now, some of that deterioration might have been due to keeping option groups going in the sixth form as pupil numbers in that age-group continued to fall but some could well be down to funding pressures across the sector.

In the primary sector, the position is more complex. Schools tend to be smaller and areas with new housing may be gaining pupils, even as other areas are being affected by the fall in the birth rate. Changes in PTRS have generally been in the range of plus one to minus one across most authorities, although during the five year period there are some outliers, notably, the City of Derby, where it is possible that the 2016/17 data point in the DfE database is a mistake. Such mistakes do happen from time to time.

It may also be a coincidence that both North Yorkshire and York unitary authority have recorded significant improvements during the five year period. A number of London boroughs south of the Thames also appear to have done relatively well during this five year period.

The longer that the National Funding Formula is in existence, it will be interesting to see what, if any effect it has on PTRs across the different authorities. Of course, if boundaries continue to be redrawn it will be impossible to tell. Happily, Outer London boroughs have had the same boundaries for more than half a century now.

Reverter Clauses and school sites

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The Supreme Court only features rarely in posts on this blog. There was the case of the parent from the Isle of Wight that decided the issue of holidays taken in school terms, and the case relating to when criminal offences should be spent that affected both volunteers and employees wanting to work in educational settings.

This month, the Supreme Court has decided a case about the use of the proceeds of a school site at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. The original site for the school was given to the local authority, not in the Nineteenth Century, when so many sites were, but in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the local Elementary School needed to expand and required more land for new buildings.

Eventually, that site needed to be replaced as well, and the County Council purchased an adjacent site and built new school buildings. The school moved into the new buildings leaving the former site vacant. The County sold the vacant former school site to developers. The successors of the original grantor of the land for use as a school then claimed the proceeds of the sale under the reverter clause, as the land was no longer being used for a school.

The Supreme Court had to decide who benefited from the proceeds of the sale; the County Council or those entitled if the reverter clause came into effect? Lower courts had decided first one way and then the other. You can read the judgement of the Supreme Court at https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0062-judgment.pdf

The court’s conclusion was that:

51. We conclude that, having regard to the purposes of the 1841 Act, Richard Spearman QC, at first instance, was correct to hold that, when section 14 is invoked, it is not necessary for the site to be sold before the school is moved to another site and closed on the site given by the grantor. Accordingly, we would allow this appeal.

In essence, this turned on a decision of how to interpret legislation, albeit in this case a piece of legislation 180 years old. As a young undergraduate in the 1960s at LSE, I took a first year course in constitutional law and I still recall the lecture on the rules of interpretation: in those days, as I recall, it was one of; the Literal Rule, The Golden Rule or the Mischief Rule.

In this case, the Supreme Court seems to have said that a piece of legislation must be read ‘in the round’ and that by doing so it places less weight on the Literal Rule. Applying Clause 2 of the legislation without Clause 14 being taken into account would have returned the land to the heirs of the grantor, but Clause 14 anticipated that there might be a need for a school to be rebuilt on a different site and created situations where to do so did not lead to a reversion of the land to the grantor or their heirs.  

This legislation is of especial interest to the Church of England as many of their schools were built on land granted under transfers, with a reverter clause attached if the site was not used for specific purposes, such as education. If the current downturn in the birth rate and a National Funding formula that makes small rural primary schools no longer viable over the next few years, then there might be more cases coming to court to settle who receives the proceeds of the land on which a school once operated.

Fire Chiefs support school sprinkler system for new schools

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Those readers that have been following this blog for some years will know that one of the few matters that The Daily Mail and I both agree upon is the need to fit sprinkler systems in new schools.

On the 15th April 2019 this blog carried a post headed ‘Install Sprinkler Systems’. This followed a call to ensure all new schools had sprinkler system built into them during construction.

Zurich Insurance, a major insurer for local government risks has now come out in support of this suggestion in a new report. A review of their view can be found in this link to pbctoday https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/health-safety-news/fire-risk-in-schools/81974/

I fully support the recommendation that all schools should be built with sprinkler systems for the reasons cited in my blog post of April 2019.

Zurich found that the average school posed a fire risk 1.7 times greater than non-residential buildings. When compared to 2.9 million non-household properties, school buildings were also three times more likely to fall into the ‘high’ fire risk category (58% vs 20%).

Now the National Fire Chiefs Council has added their voice to those calling for the compulsory fitting of sprinklers in schools.

Over the last five years, 1,100 classrooms have been gutted by fire, with 47 schools destroyed among a total of 2,300 fire incidents – while just 2% of buildings were fitted with sprinklers. The National Fire Chiefs Council is calling for sprinklers to be mandatory in all new schools, in line with Scotland and Wales.

This is a powerful new ally in the campaign to fit sprinklers.

Those concerned about climate change might also add that an unnecessary fire in a school, as in any building, releases gases from the burring materials into the atmosphere that could be prevented by having installed sprinklers.

The removal of the requirement for sprinklers in new schools was a short-sighted measure that ought to have been changed already. Better some water damage than the destruction of a whole school and the disruption to the education of many children.

Schooling also needs a shake up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Dunkirk than D-Day

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Last March it was probably acceptable that schools had to invent their immediate responses to lockdown. After all, we were all facing situations we hadn’t expected. Much like the sudden collapse of the Allied armies in France in 1940, when faced with the Panzer Divisions assault, we muddled through and achieved more than might have been expected.

As I wrote on the 29th February in a blog post. ‘We are better equipped to deal with unforeseen events these days, whether fire, floods or pestilence; but only if we plan for them.’ I also pointed out that ‘In 1939 the country managed a mass evacuation of children from our cities under a Conservative Government.’ And I asked, ‘Does the civil service have the mentality to handle arrangements on such a scale today? After decades of a philosophy of private choice rather than public good, it may need a rethink, and quickly.’

In April, I mused that ‘Strategic thinking is still in short supply. There are group of Year 13 students, now to be assessed on their work before the outbreak that could form a useful coordinated volunteer force organised by their Sixth Form Tutor and reporting to the local hubs.

Apart from the obvious use of their talents to produce PPE on the schools’ 3D printers; sowing machines and other D&T resources they could be reducing the traffic jam of delivery vehicles clogging up suburban streets by trialling last mile cycle delivery from trans-shipment points to see how this would work. If petrol pumps are a transfer risk for the virus, we could use some as pump attendants, at least for vulnerable customers so that they could avoid touching the pumps and know that only the person serving them had handled the filling mechanism.’

Fast forward to January and we have the same level of chaos and muddle that professionals in education were faced with in March. The only change seems to be that the DfE guidance is clearer than it was in the spring.

Why did the government not use the time between March and December to plan for another lockdown. To move from the ‘make it up as you go along’ evacuation of Dunkirk to the meticulously planned D-Day assault on the Normandy beaches, backed by the deception exercise around Operation Fortitude.

Take provision of laptops and tablets. This system hasn’t worked. But nobody seems to have thought of all the reconditioned tablets sitting in small shops around the country. Even if they only lasted for a year, they might see some schools through the pandemic. Yes, I would like top of the line new equipment for those that haven’t access to any IT, but something now to start with is better than nothing until some uncertain date in the future.

Remote learning has been mostly un-coordinated and largely left to schools. This is an area where schools should have pooled knowledge and effort. It is as if no Minister has ever read Adam Smith and understood the principles of mass production over cottage-based industries. Expecting each school to reinvent the wheel is silly.

To continue the military analogy, it is as if infantry destined for the D-Day beaches were told, design your own training, and just get off the beach. The lack of a coherent middle tier that could pull MATs, diocese and local authority schools together to provide effective remote learning has frustrated both parents and young people with an outcome that hasn’t been as good as it could have been, and through no fault of teachers and school leaders.

Re-reading the ONS Report of May about risk to teachers from Covid, it was obvious, as I pointed out at the time in my blog that staff in schools, and especially in secondary schools, were classified as

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

https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/covid19relateddeathsbyoccupationenglandandwalesdeathsregistereduptoandincluding20thapril2020

This risk should have been monitored through the autumn and especially since the new variant was detected, as it was a vital piece of information in the analysis of whether schools could continue to open on site or switch to remote learning. That it has taken FOI requests and other tactics for the professional associations to secure the data is not acceptable.

The lack of either strategic planning or operational excellence in terms of the school system is a disappointment, and will no doubt eventually have political repercussions. After all, schools impact widely on all families.

update 1230 6th January. According to The Guardian the government has designated all pupils without laptops as vulnerable pupils and thus able to access schools. Well, that’s one way of solving the problem.

Happy Birthday

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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.

Coherent planning needed: not directives

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Earlier this week, I offered this action plan for providing education for all in Oxfordshire by September, in some way or another. Such a position needs to be the objective. It would need cooperation from all groups coordinated by Schools Forum and the Local Authority. Like NHS and the economy, it will need extra funds

The aim to ensure teaching and learning is available to all 5-18 year olds in the county by September will be a challenge, but one we should embrace..

Creating learning for all needs strategic planning on a large scale. It should involve school leaders; teacher associations; governors and trustees of schools; administrative services of both local and national government and dioceses with responsibility for schools, as well as parents and politicians.

On the assumption that ‘normal’ schooling won’t restart until January 2021 at the earliest, there are a number of key areas where information is needed before effective planning can take place.

These are based upon assumptions of classes of no more than 15 pupils– how many attend may be another matter.

Teaching spaces – how many extra spaces are needed by each school –

What community assets might be available to help? Teaching A level arts and humanities groups in church halls and empty office space might be easier than relocating some other year groups. But, could a village primary school adjacent to the village hall make use of its facilities. Each school needs to know its needs and what the community might be able to offer. There are risks, but there are risks leaving children in the community without any formal education arrangements.

Staff teaching and non-teaching

Oxfordshire is lucky to have three initial teacher education locations. The first need is to discover how any extra staff would be needed for all children to return to school on a maximum class size of 15. This is different to a Pupil Teacher Ratio of 15.

Assuming staffing costs at the top of the main scale for both teaching and non-teaching staff, some idea of the cost of the exercise can be calculated once the number of teaching units is known. Additional teachers could be employed on a termly basis, if necessary with emergency certification. Academies already have the right to employ anyone as a teacher and other school are allowed to do so ‘in extremis’. Retired teachers could be in high risks groups so not recommended as a main source of extra staff

Technology

All pupils need access to technology and there needs to be an audit of those without the technology and those without access to an internet connection. These problems need solving at a local level, using what government support is available, but not relying upon it.

Creating coherent learning packages is the role of the teaching force. The loss of a local advisory service makes this harder than it would have been in the past, but schools can identify where there are gaps and how we can best work to help drive learning forward., especially as some young people will not be able to attend school sites because of their own health or the health of others.

Support services

Bringing back all children requires full support services from transport to meals to health and welfare support.

We can sit back and wait for events or we can all work together to make things happen.