Tag Archives: parliament

The risk to selective schools in the Chancellor’s announcement

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The Chancellor is putting in place an education system that will make it easier for a future government to end selective state secondary schools. By making all schools academies the government is ending the historic partnership between local authorities and the government at Westminster over the direction of education policy that has lasted for more than a century.

Now this may or may not be the right time to take this step – I personally think primary schools should be a local service supported nationally – but one consequence is that policy, including the rules on admissions and selection, will be firmly set out by Westminster.

Supporters of the academisation, or nationalisation, of schooling will no doubt suggest that Westminster already has the power to act over selection. However, as a weak Labour government found, after it passed the 1976 Education Act requiring all local authorities to provide schemes of non-selective education, the barrier to action presented by dilatory local authorities meant that supporters of selective schools just sat on their hands. For anyone interested in this period of education history, a read of the North Yorkshire court case over re-organisation in Ripon, would be very informative. Not for nothing was the first action of the Thatcher government to pass a short Bill through parliament to repeal the 1976 Act.

With all schools financed and managed from London, a future government with a majority at Westminster that was so minded could either direct Regional Commissioners to create selective forms of education across all areas or alternatively remove all existing selective schools. I am sure that neither option is in the Chancellor’s mind as he makes his announcement today.

His other announcement of what seems like a job creation scheme for unemployed art, PE and drama teachers is small beer in the £40 billion spent on schooling. However, £500 million a year is a sizeable amount if divided among 1,000 secondary schools, but decreases rapidly if the number of schools able to benefit increases significantly. Whether the money might have been better used to fund the overall growth in pupil numbers won’t be known until the second part of the consultation on the national funding formula takes place, when winners and losers will become clear. Indeed, the announcement already calls into question the national formula approach.

One consequence of this new fund might be that those school that have relied on PE teachers to teach Key Stage 3 science may now need to start looking for a new source of science teachers if they will now all running after school activities. But, until the details are made clear we won’t know whether it is possible for them to do both.

Will the Chancellor say anything about the National Teaching Service? One wonder what is happening on that front.

Finally, I am always suspicious when Chancellors start announcing plans for spending departments. History tells us it is often because they want to draw attention away from the Treasury side of the budget. This year, it may be the effects of the slowdown since the enthusiastic Autumn Statement. Still, the slowdown in the wider economy may help recruitment into teaching so it’s an ill wind …

Alice in Wonderland

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The Education and Adoption Bill has been published today. Its outcome, when passed, seems to be to further reduce the role of local authorities in both education and adoption. At least in the education part the bill seeks to honour a manifesto pledge about failing or even coasting schools.

As I have made clear in previous posts, the devil will be in the detail. But, a Bill that tackles only such schools not already academies of one description or another will be a deeply flawed Bill. It will in effect be the Queen of Hearts announcing ‘off with their heads’ or to be more accurate ‘take them away from local authorities and the churches’, for some of these schools will not be community schools but voluntary aided or controlled schools. In that respect it will be interesting to see the reaction of the Church of England and other faith groups. It would be ironic to say the least if  a failing church school could join a multi-academy trust run by the church, but a failing community school passed completely out of local control to an academic sponsor with no local affiliation at all. But, if faith schools are to retain their ethos it is difficult to see how they can do so if they are operated by a secular academy chain.

Of even more interest is how the Bill will deal with Tweedledum, the failing academy. After all, it really will be Wonderland if the government is prepared to create a whole section of the Bill to reform Tweedledee, the maintained sector, but not to acknowledge that  some academies may behave in the same manner that the government finds objectionable.

Since I suppose for many of us the education scene has increasingly come to look like the mad hatter’s tea party we should not be surprised if a political Bill speeds up academy conversions but ignores other ills such as failing academies and the increasing lack of local accountability or even consultation over how such schools are run.

In the end, the Bill begs the question of whether or not local politicians should try to hang onto the last vestiges of authority over schools in their locality or try to create a new order where all schools are academies of one form or another? Two years ago I advocated that all secondary schools should be academies, but that the primary sector should remain under local political control because of the strong links between such schools and their local communities. Personally, I still think that is the best way out of the current mess. After all, a failing local authority can be taken over by the government at Westminster and there is a clear span of control between central government and the individual school that is rooted in each local community.

However, what is really needed is a politician with the courage to craft a school system that everyone can understand in terms of governance and operation. Otherwise, it looks to me as if the Regional Commissioners are being cast in the role of the White Rabbit, forever running around on errands to prop up a system nobody understand and where lines of control are neither clear nor effective as we have seen over the question of academy closures.  Clearly a Wonderland.

Youth parliament debates

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Yesterday afternoon I attended a debate held by Oxfordshire’s youth parliament. This body is the local arm of a national organisation and eventually elects representative to the national youth parliament that is provided with an opportunity to debate in the House of Commons chamber. The youth parliament creates an opportunity for young people to receive their first taste of that part of the democratic process in action. During the day they discuss topics in groups, creating arguments for and against policies that allow them to see and understand how the debating process operates.

The topic for debate yesterday was around the issue of young carers and the responsibilities schools have to this group of young people.

The debate was surprisingly balanced between those that felt schools had a key role to play in helping young carers and others that felt school was a place to escape the burden of care and be yourself. This group was afraid of the stigma other pupils might attach to young carers if their role was too clearly known at school. Most contributors on both sides of the debate made single points that were rather more in the form of interventions than speeches although the opposition closing argument was an impassioned speech that may have swayed a few votes in his direction.

Four county councillors, including the Council Leader, along with a group of senior officers, turned up to listen to the debate and support the young people.  Each councillor was able to express their support for the scheme and encourage the young people in their actions. After all, the teenagers had taken a day out of their half-term holiday to be at the youth parliament.

It was good to see the level of support and it is important that young people don’t take democracy too lightly, especially if England were to follow Scotland’s actions in the referendum and reduce the voting age for some if not all elections from eighteen to sixteen.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the introduction of state education in England, in 2020, it is important to remember the part education has played in helping shape our democracy. One important change I have mentioned before is that the emphasis is now on educating children as individuals and not as classes. This makes more work for teachers, but creates more opportunities for children. How the rest of society handles that in terms of its effects on social mobility is another matter. But, we still struggle as a service to help those, whether young carers, pupils suffering from childhood illnesses and diseases, or children with parents that don’t appreciate the importance of school attendance. Unlocking the potential in all is a good phrase for an election slogan on education as it shows what we have still to do, but in a positive manner.

There is far more to a democratic state than the skill of debating, but to make at least that aspect of parliament real to young people might be to awaken the interest of the next generation of politicians.

The real issue is not QTS, but how it is achieved

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There is clear water developing between the three main political parties at Westminster over the need for teachers in state funded schools to be qualified only after a period of training. Regular readers of this blog will know where I stand on the issue as I have made clear my belief in the need for QTS to be backed by a preparation course – see my last blog ‘Teachers are made not born’.

This afternoon the Labour Party at Westminster have an opposition day debate in the main chamber around the topic. This is the sort of debate that normally passes relatively without comment, but what is interesting is the amendment put down by the government in the names of the prime minister and his deputy; and Michael Gove and David Laws. I have reproduced it below with the key section underlined:

Line 1, leave out from ‘House’ to end and add ‘notes that this Coalition Government is raising the quality of teaching by quadrupling Teach First, increasing bursaries to attract top graduates into teaching, training more teachers in the classroom through School Direct and providing extra funding for disadvantaged pupils through the pupil premium which schools can use to attract and reward great teachers; notes that the part of the Coalition led by the Deputy Prime Minister believes all schools should employ teachers with Qualified Teacher Status, and the part of the Coalition led by the Prime Minister believes free schools and academies should retain the freedom to hire teachers without Qualified Teacher Status; further notes that funding agreements with academies and free schools will not be altered in relation to Qualified Teacher Status prior to the next election; and regrets the findings of the recent OECD skills report which revealed that those young people educated almost entirely under the previous administration have some of the worst levels of literacy and numeracy in the developed world, underlining the need for radical schools reform and demonstrating why nobody can trust the Opposition to protect education standards.’

Of course, the really disingenuous of you may reflect that QTS could be awarded after a period of service in the classroom untrained, and that period, as in the past when it was the route into teaching I used, could be two years. The subtle change to the Staffing Regulations in 2012 allowed for schools to confirm that there had been no competency proceedings against a teacher in the past two years. This might permit an unqualified person to be granted QTS as in the past after two years of successful service or at least develop a career in different schools. So long as QTS can only be granted after a period of prescribed training, by an approved route, this is not an issue, but as ever the devil is always in the detail. The real issue is not QTS, but how it is achieved.

There are also matters for those in favour of QTS needing to be backed by training to resolve, especially around training for specific types of school now funded by the State that follow a particular philosophy of education not covered in the present training arrangements. But that should be possible to resolve once the key principle of mandatory preparation has been agreed.

Finally, the Liberal Democrat position on Qualified Teacher Status owes much to the motion passed at their Spring Conference that David Laws thought last week he had proposed – actually it was Lord Storey that proposed it, and Baroness Brinton who seconded it – that had its genesis in the work of Liberal Democrat education activists including the late Andrew Bridgwater who had a hand in the drafting of the motion’s wording. It would be a nice gesture, and a fitting memorial, if a Lib Dem MP recognised that fact during the debate this afternoon.