Tag Archives: MATs

One law for parents …

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‘School sends children home because of a lack of staff’. The BBC have been running a story about a special school, part of a multi-academy trust that has been sending children home on certain days because of a lack of staff. Oxford pupils miss school amid special needs staff shortage – BBC News

The shortage of staff in the special school sector is nothing new. Indeed, I commented upon the use of unqualified teachers in that sector in a previous post. However, should any school be allowed to send pupils home because of staff shortages?

In 2017, (how time flies) the Supreme Court discussed the responsibilities of parents that contract with the State to provide schooling for their children for free. The case was Isle of Wight Council v Platt and the judgement can be read at Isle of Wight Council (Appellant) v Platt (Respondent) (supremecourt.uk)

The highest court in the land imposed a heavy burden on parents with regard to school attendance – paragraphs 31 onwards set out their reasons for doing so. In reaching their judgement, the court went further than the previous decision made in the 1930s, and placed even more restrictive reasons for parents being allowed not to send a child to school.

The court did not consider the opposite scenario of the responsibility of the State to parents that trust their child to the State to educate.  Lord Denning did discuss this in Meade v Haringey in 1979 at the end of the Winter of Discontent, but that case never came to trial as the strike ended and schools re-opened.  

Lord Denning’s comments in the case can be read at Meade v Haringey London Borough Council – Case Law – VLEX 793965949 The paragraph relevant to the present situation is in paragraph 3.

As I read the statute, it was and is the duty of the Borough Council – not only to provide the school buildings – but also to provide the teachers and other staff to run the schools – and furthermore to keep the schools open at all proper times for the education of the children. If the Borough Council were to order the schools to close for a term – or for a half-term – or even for one week, without just cause or excuse, it would be a breach of their statutory duty. If any of the teachers should refuse to do their work, the Borough Council ought to get others to replace them – and not pay the defaulters. Likewise if the caretakers refuse to open the schools – and keep the keys – the Borough Council ought to demand the return of the keys and open up the schools themselves if need be. For this simple reason: It is the statutory duty of the Borough Council to keep the schools open. If they should fail to do so, without just cause or excuse, it is a breach of their statutory duty.

These days, one must assume that either mutli-academy trust trustees have assumed the responsibilities formerly with local authorities in 1979 or that Regional School Commissioners acting on behalf of the DfE have responsibility for academies under their remit. Whoever is responsible, unless either a court rules otherwise or the law has been changed since 1979, it would seem that there is a statutory duty to open schools, and by implication to staff them during a school term. Of course, fire, plague or pestilence might cause temporary closure, but, as during the covid pandemic, schools were required to stay open for certain children.  

I guess that a parent will need to bring either a judicial review or a case against a school that sent children home. Judicial Review is an expensive process, so perhaps a Council, acting as a corporate parent, could bring the case on behalf of all parents.

It would be interesting to see how the Supreme Court balanced the rights and responsibilities of parents with the duties of the State in providing education. I am reminded that in the late 1940s the then Minister of Education summoned a Council because a school lacking a hall after bomb damage was not offering a daily act of corporate worship. What might that Labour Minister have made of schools sending children home due to staff shortages?

Do means matter?

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The DfE has published some performance data for academies and multi academy trusts Multi-academy trust performance measures (key stages 2, 4 and 5) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) The outcomes are quite rightly heavily hedged about with qualifications about how schools have become academies, and also that schools differ in size, character and parental choice. Indeed, I wonder whether the original reason for why a school became an academy, perhaps more than a decade ago is still relevant?

What struck me at first glance was that as the secondary sector becomes dominated by academies there is a reduction to the mean (average). Various Secretaries of State have wanted all schools to be above average, as this exchange with Michael Gove when in front of the Education Select Committee revealed. Michael Gove’s Kafkaesque logic – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate However, I don’t think he was the only Secretary of State to fall foul of this aspiration. Academies in the group forced to change their status because of under-performance not surprisingly do less well than those that chose to become an academy.

The key question for the current Secretary of State must be what do you take from this data in terms of the ‘levelling up’ agenda? I don’t think the present incumbent of the post of Secretary of State for Education has been asked the question about averages, but that shouldn’t stop her asking the question about what policy changes are needed based upon these outcomes?

As an additional discussion point, the secretary of State might like to ask her officials two further questions. What is the relationship between the schools in these tables and the percentages of NEETs produced by different types of schools, and how can schooling work to help ensure as many as possible of our young people eventually enter the labour market at the end of their initial education and training journey? After all, we should all be life-long learners.

After last year’s aborted attempt to make all schools academies, and the mauling of the Bill in the House of Lords there is still a need to ensure the middle tier works to the best advantage for all children. Whether there is a role for local democracy in schooling is still a live issue, but not one that will feature highly at the next election.

But, regardless of who runs schools, there is still work to be done to achieve excellence for all and that no child is left behind, to quote just two aspirational messages from past attempts at improving the outcomes for our schooling system.

Of course, without sufficient teachers, the risk is of deterioration not improvement in outcomes; not what the Chancellor wants to see if the economy is to continue to grow.

The pay of senior staff in academies

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Yesterday was Oxfordshire County Council’s Budget Day. Along with the budget itself two reports were presented; one on gender pay differences, and the other a required report of the Council’s Pay Policy. The latter included the salaries of senior staff as at the 1st January 2023. During the discussion on the Council’s Pay Policy I raised the issue of the pay of senior staff in standalone academies and multi-academy trusts.

I wrote a blog about this issue The Pay of Academy Staff | John Howson (wordpress.com) after I had raised the matter once before in council in the form of a question to the Cabinet member.

In advance of yesterday’s meeting, I checked the accounts at Companies House for all Oxfordshire Secondary Schools that are academies (one school is still not an academy because of a budget deficit). By now, all academies should have filed their 2022 accounts ending in August 2022 at Companies House. However, some have still to do so, but they will be unlikely to affected the discussion about how much senior staff should be paid if the benchmark is set, as in my previous blog, at £150,000.

Interestingly, as in my last study, no MAT or standalone academy with a headquarters in Oxfordshire paid any staff member £150,000 or more according to their accounts. However, with the September annual pay increases it seems likely that inflation will have pushed two Trusts int a position of now paying more than £150,000 in salary to their highest paid employee.

Of more concern was the fact in the accounting year to August 2022, four Trusts, all headquartered outside Oxfordshire, paid their highest paid employee more than £150,000. All were in the list of five Trusts mentioned in my previous blog. I am especially concerned about one Trust with a reported top salary of £280,000 in the year to August 2022, as that is more than twice the salary of Oxfordshire’s director of Children’s Services. As the Trust is located in an area not considered high cost for property prices, and is not as large as some other Trusts, I wonder about the reasons behind such a high salary.

The DfE remained concerned enough about Academy salaries to recently publish a list of Trusts where at least one employee earns more than £150,000. The list runs more than 14 pages in length. Academies consolidated annual report and accounts: 2020 to 2021 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Annex 6.

This issue of pay of academy employees is relevant to local authorities because managing their remaining education functions will become more challenging because the government has failed to cap MAT employees’ pay. Recruiting staff into local government, already difficult will become even more challenging for our education service.

The present government has talked about the importance of Pay Review bodies in the public sector, but so far has exempted senior staff in MATs from pay controls. Ministers have written lots of letters urging pay restraint, but, seemingly, to no effect.

Paying extreme salaries in MATs also means higher central costs imposed on Oxfordshire schools and, as a result, less cash to spend on Oxfordshire pupils. The increase in pay of senior staff in academies isn’t the sole cause of the deterioration on Pupil Teacher Ratios secondary schools over the past decade, but it certainly hasn’t help prevent them worsening.

 

Are you paying too much to advertise a teaching vacancy?

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The most read blog post this month is the one from 2020 entitled ‘How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?’ Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) So far, yesterday’s 10th birthday post comes in second highes, with 20 views as against the vacancy post that reviewed the publication of the tes company accounts for 2019.

Today, the tes group, now entirely shorn of it print heritage, released its accounts for 2021-22 to August 2022. The company, fronted by its UK management, is ultimately owned by Onex Partners V, part of the Canadian ONEX Group of equity investors. Their third quarter report for 2022 identifies an investment of $98 US in the Tes Global (“Tes”), an international provider of comprehensive software solutions for the education sector  18d46e0 f-a5b9-435a-a039-9849ef723683 (onex.com) page 9

So, our major teacher recruitment platform, now offering a much wider staff management service to schools, increased its UK (mainly England) turnover from £54 million to £68 million in the year to August 2022. How important both staff management and the UK are to the profit of ONEX can be determined form the following figures

Turnover             2022                     2021

UK                        £68.2 mn          £54.0 mn

Europe                £  2.9 mn             £ 2.6 mn

Rest of World     £  9.0  mn           £ 9.0 mn

Income

Staff

Management    £61.2 mn          £56.5  mn

All activities      £80.2 mn           £66.1  mn

TES accounts – see link above page 29

So, in the last school year the tes took £68 million pounds from UK schools, the bulk of the money for recruitment and staff management by subscriptions from schools. 84% of staff management revenue came from subscription income and, as the accounts note (page 2) this was a 26% increase in revenue, presumably as more schools and Trusts migrated to subscription packages from point of sale purchase of advertising. The profit for the operating year was £28.7 million compared with £2.3 million the previous year that was badly affected by covid.

The group values its software at £46 million. That leaves me wondering what the book value of TeachVac’s simple but effective job matching service should be? Perhaps the £3 million suggested by our advisers is a little on the mean side.

TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk costs less than £150,000 a year to operate. Being generous, it might cost £500,000 if operating on a similar cost model to the tes. The DfE job site probably costs a bit more, but we don’t actually know how much. The question for schools, MATs and the education sector is ‘How much of the money you are spending with the tes is for the downstream activities on staff management and how much for the job bord and matching service, and is it value for money?

Assume only 10% is for the matching, that could be £5-6 million of the subscription income after allowing for the tes turnover on Hibernia and other activities. TeachVac was established to demonstrate to the sector the cost-effective nature of modern technology over the former print advertising methods of recruitment. Readers can make up their own minds over value for money when comparing the £500 annual subscription to TeachVac that will reduce as more schools sign-up, and the cost of a subscription to tes.

School Leadership trends in 2022

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This week TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has published its 2022 Review of Leadership Vacancies in schools across England. Next week, the report on classroom teacher vacancies will be published. If you would like a copy of either then email enquiries@oxteachserv.com Schools signed up to the TeachVac platform can request a copy of both reports.

These are challenging times for the public sector. Education, and in particular schools, has not escaped the challenges of a period of high inflation and full employment. However, the most serious effects in schools are to be found at classroom teacher and middle leader levels and the recruitment of non-teaching staff. These will be discussed in a future post once the Classroom Teacher Review of 2022 is published.

Leadership vacancies are mostly filled by those already working in schools or other posts in the education sector. Headteacher posts are frequently the final post in a teacher’s career, although some headteachers do change schools, often from a smaller school to a larger school, specially in the primary sector.

TeachVac’s main findings for 2022 are that:

  • There were more leadership vacancies on offer during 2022 that during the previous two years, when recruitment was badly affected by the covid pandemic
  • In the primary sector 2034 headteacher vacancies were recorded during 2022, compared with 1,556 during 2021. In the secondary sector, the numbers were 585 headteacher vacancies in 2022 compared with 368 during 2021.
  • For schools advertising during the 2021-22 school-year there was a re-advertisement rate for primary schools of 25%, and 19% for secondary schools. The South East was the region with the highest re-advertisement rate for primary headteachers
  • Schools advertising for a headteacher outside of the first quarter of the year were more likely to need to re-advertise their vacancy, as are schools that differ from the norm in size, type of school or control by a faith grouping.
  • After two years of lower vacancy number for deputy headteachers, 2022 levels recorded a rebound to pre-pandemic numbers across both the primary and secondary sectors.
  • There was a strong demand for assistant headteachers in both the primary and secondary sectors during 2022. The grade is now popular in schools across more regions than previously.
  • One effect of the covid pandemic may have been more retirements of senior leaders. Any effects resulting from ‘long covid’ on the labour market for senior staff in schools is yet to be fully appreciated. 

Readvertisement rates are for the 2021-22 school year to allow for re-advertisements during the autumn term to be included in the totals. Re-advertisement rates in the primary for headteacher vacancies are towards the lower end of expectations, whereas re-advertisements for secondary headships are at a percentage more in common with long-term trends.

The most interesting statistic is the increase in vacancies for assistant heads during 2022. Is this because middle leaders of large departments need the salary available on the Leadership Scale to attract them to apply for such posts, especially in high cost areas in and around London? Some of the increase may be due to new schools building up their leadership teams, but that fact alone does not seem sufficient to account for the increases.

What will 2023 bring in terms of leadership vacancies? As around half of such vacancies appear during the first three months of the year, we won’t have long to wait to find out.

Is your school using TeachVac?

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Created eight years ago, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has already matched nearly 4,000 teaching posts so far in 2023 with teachers and other interested in filling these jobs.

After eight years of being a free service TeachVac now charges secondary schools less than £10 per week -£500 per year plus VAT – for matching all their teaching posts for a year with its ever growing database of new and experienced teachers and recruitment companies. Primary schools pay £75 per year and can be free to academy trusts and other groups of schools that sign-on together with at least one secondary school.

Schools can sign up on the website – use the button to start the registration process or email enquiries@teachvac.co.uk and the staff will answer any queries about the service.

As TeachVac has traditionally had more jobs that the DfE site, it is a better place for jobseekers to register to be sent the links to jobs that meet with their specifications and a few that they might not have thought about. New registrations are being added to the list of those matched with vacancies every day.

With 75% of the teaching posts in 2023 posted by schools in or around London, schools in London, the south East and East of England should be at the front of the queue in signing up to TeachVac. Can you afford to miss out on access to the jobseekers in TeachVac’s database that receive relevant new jobs every afternoon. www.teachvac.co.uk

As an example, those teachers looking for a maths teacher post in North London will have received details of 14 different vacancies over the past two days from TeachVac. If your school isn’t using TeachVac then your vacancy won’t have been one of these sent to TeachVac’s users, if you posted one.

TeachVac is looking to use the income from schools to expand into offering a similar service for non-teaching posts and if enough schools sign-up the additional cost would be minimal. In the school-term, where schools offer a visa service for overseas applicants we will be introducing that fact into the matching service shortly.

TeachVac’s users are loyal, with 75% of all registered users still receiving daily matches,. This allows teachers considering a  move or looking for promotion to monitor the job market in the area where they are interested in working. Feedback tells us teachers used TeachVac to secure their job.

However, there are shortages of teachers in some subjects and TeachVac acknowledges that fact. But by not using the TeachVac platform for less than £10 per week schools can miss out on TeachVac sending their job details to those that are registered with TeachVac. Is it worth the risk for just £10 per week?

Tomorrow, TeachVac will publish an analysis of the first two weeks of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022 and compare the position with the government’s ITT census of trainees expected to be job hunting for a September 2023 post. The figures in some subjects will look extremely worrying.

TeachVac special offer

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TeachVac are now offering a FREE subscription, up until February 2023, if you register a school with TeachVac now! From February, TeachVac will invoice a yearly subscription of £1 per match with a ceiling of £500 for secondary schools and £75 for primary schools.

Sign up at   http://www.teachvac.co.uk

TeachVac has made 2,000,000 + MATCHES MADE in 2022

 TeachVac has listed 100,000 + TEACHING JOBS in 2022

2023 vacancies will only be listed for schools signed up to TeachVac.

The average secondary school received more than 500 matches in 2022.

2023 will be another difficult year for teacher recruitment, so can you afford to miss this offer?

Middle Leaders: Hard to Find. Part 3 – What matters?

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This is the final blog post in the series of three posts about re-advertised TLR level vacancies in geography recorded by TeachVac at http://www.teachvac.co.uk. In this post some of the evidence about school outcomes and the need to re-advertise are considered.

The number of schools in the sample is 80 for this exercise. The number is lower than in the previous posts for two reasons. There are a small number of independent schools in the sample and also a number of new schools. Both groups do not have data on Attainment.

Although there are discussions about the utility of the DfE’s Attainment 8 measure, this measure in its provisional outcome state for 2022 was used to classify the schools.

Of the 80 school, 24 had an Attainment 8 score better than that of the score for their local authority as a whole. This meant that 56 schools with re-advertised posts were below the average for their local authority as a whole.

Of the 24 schools that scored better than their LA average for all schools, eight were located in London; three in the South East and two in the East of England. Thus, 13 of the 24 might be seen as schools in London and the Home Counties where house prices might restrict the ability of teachers to move into a particular area.

Not only did the schools re-advertising perform worse in Attainment 8 than local schools, but in the case of 41 of the 80 schools they were also below the average for all schools in England.

Another characteristic of the schools re-advertising was that in 53 out of the 80 cases, the school re-advertising had a percentage of pupils on Free School Meals at some point in the last six years that was above the national average for England, in some cases markedly so.

Of course, other factors, such as the time of year of the initial advertisements may make a difference in terms of the need to re-advertise, but many of the schools in the sample experienced more than one round of re-advertisements for their TLR vacancy.

Another interesting feature is the presence of six schools from one large Multi-Academy Trust in the sample of 80 schools and three from another large MAT. Is their presence just a matter of the size of the MAT? Perhaps, in some cases, they have taken on schools in challenging circumstances that might seem less attractive places in which to work. Some of the schools are in parts of London with high housing costs, and that may be another issue.

Some years ago, during the coalition government there was a trial scheme designed to place middle leaders in schools finding recruitment a challenge. For some reason, Yorkshire and Lancashire authorities were selected for the trial. At the time the choice of area seemed odd to me. As it was, for several reasons, the scheme never progressed beyond the trial stage, although various potential bidders did contact me about participating in possible bids.

The data for this study came from TeachVac. Schools can have access to TeachVac’s data and analysis by signing up to the vacancy matching service. The basis cost is just £1 per vacancy match made with a teacher with a maximum cost of £500 per year. Schools should go to www.teachvac.co.uk to sign up and see whether there are any special offers either for groups or for different types of school.

Can state services save money for schools?

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When I first started writing this blog, back in early 2013, now nearly a decade ago, one of my mistakes was not to create an index. With more than 1,300 posts later, to do so now would be a labour of love that at present I don’t have the time for. The lack of an index means I am largely dependent upon visitors throwing up links to former posts to supplement my own memory of issues such as Jacob’s Law – discussed in the previous post.

Today, I have been reminded of a post from January 2018 about costs and savings in the education system that is relevant to the present economic situation. You can read the full post at Not Full Circle? | John Howson (wordpress.com) but one key paragraph was this:

“…. I wonder whether another stage in the cycle of government contracting is starting to emerge. In the immediate post-war period of central planning, public bodies often ran most services. There was no profit element to consider, but cost controls were of variable quality. The Thatcher era saw a mass transfer of services to private companies, with an expectation that costs would fall. Maybe some did, but others didn’t and some benefitted from the proceeds of technological change that drove down costs, but didn’t create competition and didn’t always drive down prices.”

This 2018 post had built upon an even earlier one from July 2014 Private or public | John Howson (wordpress.com) that dealt with the issue, concerning even then, of the cost of outsourcing children’s services to the private sector with no control over rising costs.

At that time, I was establishing TeachVac www.teachvac. To demonstrate how costs of recruitment advertising could be reduced. I concluded the post with the comment that;

“In a time of cutbacks on government expenditure, as we have witnessed during the past six years, it is inevitable that staffing costs will come under pressure, and the debate between cutting wages or cutting services will rage. Sometimes there is a third way, and a new technology or a different approach, can achieve the same service level for lower costs. Is that what we ought to be striving for in education? The only other alternative to preserve service levels is higher taxes.”

This debate about the profit element, and where the most cost-effective system can be found, is once again a live one as the country faces a new round of coping with living beyond its means and the consequences of a foolish attempt to ‘dash for growth’ when other global factors were pointing towards the need for sound government.

How to make savings in a devolved system such as schooling in England is an interesting question. Perhaps we should start with the role of the DfE. Is it there to provide services on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis, such as their vacancy site or is it there to bring together the different players to work out the best value approach for schools. If the latter, how does it enforce such a best value approach? Perhaps the annual audit report should make a comment to governors about where a school spending exceeds a benchmark?

TeachVac is currently in the process of creating an index on recruitment showing the position that a school sits both locally and nationally. Such an index would provide evidence to show the degree high spending on recruitment was necessary and justified.  

Academies dominate teacher recruitment market

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TeachVac, the National Vacancy Service for Teachers, has estimated from an analysis of its data that 65% of teacher vacancies in 2022 have been placed by either MATs or stand-alone academies. Maintained schools, more common in the primary sector, where nationally advertised vacancies tend to be fewer in number, have accounted for only 35% of vacancies.

Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) with more than 100 vacancies so far in 2022 accounted for 19% of the overall total of vacancies, and a higher proportion of the vacancies for secondary teachers.

One large MAT has posted more than 1,000 vacancies so far in 2022. There is an interesting question for the sector arising from this, as that MAT is one of those selected by the government to lead the new Institute of Teaching. Will there be a barrier between one side of the business and the other or will the MAT be in a more favourable position to recruit trainees than other MATs and maintained schools?

Recruitment has never been level playing field. Indeed, in 1995, I made just this point on page 213 of a book by Bines and Welton entitled ‘Managing partnership in teacher training and development’. Interestingly, I also pointed out in that chapter the need to integrate professional development into a programme that stretched beyond the then probationary year. Some things never change.

In order to meet the demands for teachers that have seen record levels of demand by schools this year, TeachVac, the on-line job board where I am Chair has just launched a new Premium Service that places subscribers’ vacancies at the top of the list of matches sent out each year.

TeachVac’s basic service remains free to schools, but the Premium Service that lists vacancies at the top of the daily match list sent to users costs £1 per match up to a maximum charge per school of £1,000 +VAT per annum for secondary schools and less for primary schools. As more schools sign up to the Premium Service the cap could be reduced to £500 per annum. With approaching 80,000 vacancies handled in 2022 to date and more than 1.8 million matches the premium service offers outstanding value for money and as more teachers sign up to the platform will over even better value. Schools can find out more at enquiries@oxteachserv.com or by messaging me directly.

Recruitment for unexpected January 2023 vacancies and for September 2023 will be challenging and as MATs and academies are currently putting their finishing touches to their 2022/23 budgets, now is an excellent time to adopt TeachVac’s No Match: No fee Premium Service with its cap on annual expenditure that can be built into the budget.

TeachVac doesn’t waste money on the hard sell. Sufficient schools have signed up to produce 1,100 matches through the Premium Service in June alone, after the May deadline for resignations. We believe that results are the best form of marketing.