Tag Archives: national funding formula

School funding and outcomes

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After the pomp and ceremony of Tuesday afternoon in Oxford, yesterday afternoon was devoted to attendance at a seminar arranged by the Centre for Education Economics around the topic of ‘school funding and outcomes’. The seminar was chaired by the Chief Executive of NfER and they also contributed one of the speakers. Other speakers included, an academic from the University of Surrey; a speaker from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a civil servant from the National Audit office.

Data presented on the international evidence about funding and output used OECD data. This can be affected by the presence of so many different variables as to provide no clear signal, we need to know a lot more before any conclusions about direct causal relationship between funding levels and outcomes can be drawn. Teacher quality has featured as an important variable in some studies, especially in the USA, but even here it isn’t clear whether parental support and direct investment has been taken into account when looking at teacher outcomes.

The private spend by parents and the effects of such income on school outcomes needs further research and CfEE, the sponsors of the seminar, might like to look into how such influence might be researched. As long ago as 1986, I recorded a state school in Weybridge as including in its prospectus that ‘a donation of £14 requested from new pupils towards the school fund’. (Schools in London’s Commuterland). These days that same school now provides a list of support materials, including some that look like textbooks, parents may wish to provide for their offspring on arrival at the school. As an off-balance sheet expenditure it is difficult to measure the effects of such purchases on school outcomes, but the research community should try to do so.

Leaving aside the complexities of measuring teacher quality as a key variable in determining output levels, the seminar speakers and the audience, when asked to project forward how funding might change over time, were almost universally gloomy on the levels of school funding likely between now and the mid-2020s. Even beyond 2020, there is no clear picture, but rising pupil numbers and the prospect of a slowdown in the world economy at some point from present levels all seem to suggest continued funding challenges are likely, even if there isn’t any rebalancing of funds towards either or both of early years and further education.

The nightmare scenario of repaying student debt from existing government funding suggested by Labour must not be at the expense of other parts of the education system, including schools. Nevertheless, channelling funds to early years or technical education may require schools to make further economies unless new money can be found. This may, of course, reduce the teacher supply problem by creating fewer teaching posts, but if it increased the departure rate for existing teachers it could perversely make matters worse.

As the setter of policy for the school system, the DfE must take these issues into account. Whether it has done sufficiently we will hear some clues today when officials from the DfE appear in front of the Public Accounts Committee at Westminster.

 

School Funding heads for the long grass?

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Efficiency saving all round are being used to camouflage the lack of significant extra cash for schools during a period of rising school rolls. The Secretary of State’s statement to parliament, made earlier this afternoon, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/justine-greening-statement-to-parliament-on-school-funding has to be read very carefully to disentangle the rhetoric from the reality.

There will be a national funding formula, but not fully until post 2019-20 when a new spending round will be in place. Until then there will be the following;

  • Increase the basic amount that every pupil will attract in 2018-19 and 2019-20;
  • For the next two years, provide for up to 3% gains a year per pupil for underfunded schools, and a 0.5% a year per pupil cash increase for every school;
  • Continue to protect funding for pupils with additional needs, as we proposed in December.

So, 0.5% will be the basic increase per pupil; will it even cover inflation? What are underfunded schools? Will the increases be enough to offset the inevitable pay increase that will be necessary at some point to stop the loss of teachers from the profession and under-recruitment of new entrants into training? Why set a minimum of £4,800 for secondary school pupils, but no minimum for primary schools? What will this mean for small rural primary schools, are they to be abandoned to their fate?

In their manifesto the Conservatives said no school would lose out as had been proposed in the national funding formula, but it is not clear if the final decision on that point is now being handed to local School Forums and whether this manifesto pledge is being honoured in terms of the primary sector other than through the 0.5% per pupil increase and the up to 3% for under-funded schools? Since there might have been an expectation of a cost of living increase anyway has the 0.5% replaced the cost of living increase? Is it 0.5% per year or across the two years? Some winner now don’t look like seeing the gains that they had expected.

However, primary schools are to receive more cash through their PE and sports premium funding. This may be good news for unemployed PE teachers in some parts of the country, but not for secondary schools that might want to have employed them as maths or science teachers.

The Secretary of State made clear that the £1.3 billion additional investment in core schools funding which she announced today will be funded in full from efficiencies and savings She said,  ‘I have identified from within my Department’s existing budget, rather than higher taxes or more debt’. By making savings and efficiencies, the Secretary of State said that she is ‘maximising the proportion of my Department’s budget which is allocated directly to frontline head teachers – who can then use their professional expertise to ensure that it is spent where it will have the greatest possible impact.’

At TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk we are happy to help by promoting the free national job board that costs schools nothing to place adverts for teachers. We will even extend it to handle support staff for a relatively small further investment.

A wise Secretary of State would have established a joint commission with the teacher associations to work on these central efficiency gains and in doing so help to neutralise the inevitable complaints from those who projects are being cut, especially if they include spending on professional development. Will, I wonder, the £10 million tender to recruit overseas teachers still go ahead and what will happen to the campaigns to encourage new entrants into teaching?

Finally, I am interested to read that one group of consultants will be retained; those to trawl over the budgets of schools in deficit.

High Needs Block

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Alongside the consultation on the national funding formula for mainstream schools there is a similar consultation for what is known as the ‘High needs’ group of pupils. This consultation has received far less notice than the mainstream NFF consultation, but is arguably as important for pupils with some of the most challenging of needs.

At the heart of the consultation is the central dilemma facing education in England. Who makes the decisions? The new formula proposes placing a great deal of responsibility with local authorities, as at present. That’s fine, but it ignores the fact that free schools can be established where local authorities might not want them and existing schools can become academies and thus alter their governance structure in relation to the local authority.

The ‘high need’ special education sector has always been a complex area to understand. There are some that think the current proposals out for consultation show that even the government doesn’t fully understand the issues. For example, the government doesn’t seem to have a policy for the use of the often highly expensive independent sector for placements of children where there is a shortage of space or expertise in the state-funded sector. This can be a real burden on some authorities. However, the consultation, in as far as it addresses the issue, seems to opt for the status quo. It might have been helpful to have tried to work out nationally how this expenditure could be reduced without damaging the education of the young people.

The formula has also to grapple with the issue of providing enough places, even if not always filled, and how far to use a methodology where funding follows the pupils, as with pupil unit funding in the mainstream school formula. I am not sure the proposed methodology is going to work as effectively as it might be required to do so. I am concerned that it mustn’t persuade some mainstream academies to ditch existing special provision units leaving the local authority to figure out how to provide a high quality education for these children plus a possible increase in the local transport bill. Local authorities should be able to challenge, if not veto, changes in existing provision not part of a planned and agreed local arrangement, especially where the MAT has its headquarters outside of the authority’s area.

I am worried about the inclusion of IDACI as one of the formula factors. Taken together the total of formula factors seem slanted to special needs caused or exacerbated by deprivation. I understand the concept, but for an authority such as Oxfordshire with limited pockets of urban and rural deprivation, many of our children with high needs don’t live in areas where this factor will be a key determinant. However, those children still need the funding necessary for their education. A review of SEN transport, especially in rural areas and complex non-residential cases, might have raised some issues about planning.

Overall, this looks like a redistribution of the current funding envelope rather than a formula based upon an understanding of the complex needs of this group of young people. It is also a work in progress since the funding of hospital schools isn’t included. I hope when it is a full understanding of the needs of young people with both physical and mental health issues and their relationship with the hospital service is included.

If you haven’t yet looked at this consultation, please do so.

TeachVac offers a helping hand

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The Social Mobility Commission Report published earlier today is quite hard hitting on education. Gilliam Shephard, a former Conservative Secretary of State for Education is the Commission’s deputy chair, so this cannot be seen as just a rant from left-wing pro-local authority supporters. The full report can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/569410/Social_Mobility_Commission_2016_REPORT_WEB__1__.pdf

A key recommendation in the section on schools relates to teachers.

Recommendation 2: The Government should fundamentally reform the process which recruits and distributes new teachers across the country.

The school-led approach to teacher training is not working to get the quality and numbers of teachers into the schools that need them most. The Government should introduce a new national system which acts as a front end for school led initial teacher training programmes and which provides central marketing, applications, screening and first stage recruitment processes (initial interviews). A system along these lines would provide economies of scale and would mean that teaching could better compete with other top professions in presenting a high quality marketing offer. The provider of this service could work with school partners to develop a process matching schools to candidates, heavily involving the schools themselves and ensuring a fair distribution of quality candidates.

This is the first serious criticism of the school-led approach to teacher preparation, and it is based not upon the quality of the training, but on how it works in practice. As the Commission say in the recommendation quoted above, it doesn’t get (sic) the quality and numbers of teachers in the schools that need them most.

The Commission didn’t mention the large sums spent on recruitment of teachers – £200 million on leadership recruitment was mentioned in the research published last Friday – and the lack of a coherent regional policy in preference for teacher preparation places being allocated in either schools or providers rated as of high quality even where they don’t deliver recruits into the schools that need them.

Regular readers will know that at this point I will mention TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk that has for the past two years been offering a free recruitment site to the teaching profession. The aims of TeachVac were to provide high quality data about how the labour market works in real time and also to help schools reduce the cost of recruitment in order to allow more money to be spent on teaching and learning. TeachVac is effectively already offering part of the Commission’s vision and are happy to work with others to provide the whole process.

The Commission has other recommendations, including re-inventing the Schools of Exceptional difficulty Allowance of the 1970s whereby teachers were paid more to work in specific schools. The Commission should note that it has to be schools and not local authority areas else teachers at Kendrick School and Reading School would benefit from an area based scheme. Neither school has difficulty attracting staff for the reasons the Commission consider affect the outcome of children from deprived backgrounds in Reading.

Overall, this is an important report that reinforces many of the messages about what has happened to education. The over-emphasis by governments on structures and not outcomes together with competition not cooperation has stalled and even reversed the drive towards social mobility. As the Commission says bluntly. Selective schools in greater numbers are not the answer, if they are at all.

Funding formula delay?

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The DfE have written to the Chair of the Education Select Committee saying that they are not now in a position to comment on the development of a new national Funding formula when the Minister appears in front of the Committee next week. The reason given is that there were over 6,000 responses to the first stage consultation and officials haven’t finished analysing them yet. Ho hum, so what were they all doing during the period of purdah?

The response for the chairman of the Committee reflected anxiety that the timetable for introduction may now slip, even if there isn’t a general election in the autumn. After all, any changes for 2017 that affected maintained schools would need to be approved by Schools Forums across the county in the autumn term, ready for introduction in April. Such a timetable is looking unrealistic now and impossible if it needs the approval of a new Prime Minister if one isn’t in post until September and even then such a timetable assumes that the current ministerial team remain in place.

However, even more urgent, is the publication of the 26th STRB Report and the DfE’s response that has now taken over two months to formulate since they received the report at the end of April. Schools need to know how much they will have to pay staff from September. Even where schools have freedom to pay what they like, the churn that could result from some schools, with more cash, paying more than others won’t help create the stability that the system needs at the present time.

The government’s whole education strategy as outlined in the March White Paper now looks as it could suffer the same fate as the contents of Mrs Thatcher’s famous White Paper, ‘Education: framework for expansion’ that was scuppered by the economic crisis of 1973 onwards. It is not clear whether or not there will be an economic crisis now, but a political one there certainly is across both of the two traditional ruling parties.

Whether the news of the easing of the fiscal rules so as not to need to eradicate the deficit by the end of this parliament will be good news for education it is too early to say. However, if capital projects get the nod for expansion, school buildings have the advantage that they can be built in any part of the country. Even where pupil numbers aren’t increasing as fast as in the south of England, there are always old buildings to replace. After all, it was in 1969 that a Labour government first announced a plan to re-build all pre-1906 schools. A revival of such an idea in order to help unemployed builders in the regions might go down better than, say, pushing ahead with HST2, however desirable that project is in the long-run.

Unless there are a rush of announcements over the next few weeks, schools will start their summer break facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty. Not a good place to be.