Tag Archives: politics

Re-writing the rule book on education

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Yesterday, Mr Gove fundamentally changed the rules about how schools in England operate. In answer to a question from Duncan Hames, a backbench Liberal Democrat MP, Mr Gove said:

Michael Gove: That is a very good point. Today we have outlined that we plan to consult on independent school standards, so that schools that are not funded by the taxpayer must meet basic standards of promoting British values, or the Education Secretary will have the capacity to close them down.

Now, I always understood that the State didn’t interfere in the freedom of an individual to educate their children as they saw fit within the law. The State’s role was to provide education for those that didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t provide an education for their children. The fact that most parents since 1870 have passed the obligation to educate their children to the State didn’t alter the basis on which State education was founded. That is until yesterday.

I can understand a requirement on a school not to teach terrorism, but I believe it is a long and worrying leap from there to the commandment that schools must promote British values or they will be closed down. What of the Lycee Francais, its German equivalent, or even the American school? Must they ditch their cultural identity within the curriculum in favour of only British values? Cricket not baseball; field hockey not ice hockey, isolationism not integration? And what about the home schoolers, are they now also to be monitored for British values, and parents told they cannot continue if Ofsted doesn’t think they are British enough?

I am not sure that I subscribe to such a totalitarian attitude, where a politician can decide on what represents British values, and prevent a parent from espousing any other set of values that is within the law. Take respect for the armed forces, whose ‘day’ we celebrate in a fortnight’s time. Can schools now teach about ‘white poppies’ as well as red ones, or will a Minister rule that not pulling together in memory of past wars is contrary to British values?

Even more fundamental is the issue of gender segregation in schools. Is it a British value to permit schools for either boys or girls, but not to allow gender separation within schools? What of the balance between rugged individualism and rigid conformity to social norms?  Can they co-exist as British values or must we sacrifice one in favour of the other? There are lessons from history here that surely won’t have escaped the Secretary of State when he rose to answer the question from Mr Hames.

The Secretary of State is now in charge of all education content in England, not however in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland as it is a devolved power, in these areas as it is in the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Not bad, for a Minister that created schools free from any national curriculum earlier in the same parliament.

As –U- turns go, this seems like that of a super-tanker not a black cab.

Birmingham is as much about governance as extremism

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There are at least two facets to the Birmingham story. One, mostly catching the headlines today, is about extremism; the other is about governance. Birmingham is our second largest city, with what looks like a generally centralised approach to governance from City Hall. Since most of the schools caught up in the row are academies, with only one apparently being a maintained school, Birmingham can claim ‘not our fault gov’ if you believe that academisation, started under Labour and pursued with vigour by Mr Gove, absolves a local authority from any involvement in the running of such schools. Personally, I don’t, but it shows what can happen when a system of education governance is systematically weakened over time by denigrating the role of one participant, in this case local authorities, and talking up the important of Whitehall.

When the discussions about how we educate our young people have subsided, and these discussions are important, especially when communities live in specific neighbourhoods, as I have known since a childhood being brought up on the borders of Stamford Hill and its orthodox Jewish community, the issue of effective governance will remain to be decided. Does education in London work better because education is divided between the different boroughs, whereas in our metropolitan cities of the midlands and the north there has been since 1974 one large local authority, and several relatively small ones, whether in Merseyside, Greater Manchester or West Yorkshire.

Realistically, the span of control is important; too small, and overheads become too expensive, especially without a geographical integrity common to local authorities: this is something some academy chains may well now be finding out. On the other hand, too large, and without sub-divisions, such as the divisional structure used before London was broken up into its boroughs, and there is a risk of a lack of oversight. This is especially true when resources for administration are seen as an unnecessary waste of money; a view strongly peddled by successive Tory administrations, and the last Labour government. In education, handling control of finance to schools just made certain most oversight would be neutered.

So why does all this matter? Well, apart from the mess the governance of education is in at present, there is the issue of eradicating illiteracy and innumeracy within a generation, highlighted by Mr Gove over the weekend, possibly as a diversionary tactic to his other problems. After all, what government doesn’t aspire to do so, and why hasn’t he, as Secretary or State, had a plan to do so over the past four years? Why has creating academies and free schools been more important? Governance matters in eradicating failure, such as illiteracy, because planning is involved.

Last week we celebrated one of the major events of planning in the last century; the ‘D’ day invasion of Europe. Imagine saying to a group of regiments, and a bunch of ship’s captains, just work out your own plan of attack and then get on with it. Planning isn’t something Mr Gove is good at; take the introduction of Computer Science instead of IT. Because academies don’t have to follow the National Curriculum, many may have just ignored the change because they already had staff teaching the subject, and no vacancy to recruit a different specialist. Where is the follow through from Whitehall?

Ideas are a start, but not enough. A good Department has ideas, knows what is happening, and manages the outcomes. Perhaps that explains why our education system hasn’t been world class. Too many ideas, and not enough effective action.

Fine the feckless?

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There are reports in the media that Michael Gove wants to deduct fines imposed on parents of those pupils not attending school from child benefits. This policy was suggested earlier in the coalition by a Conservative adviser, but blocked by the Liberal Democrats. Presumably, this revival of the idea could be designed to prevent UKIP announcing it as a policy ahead of the Conservatives.

As a headline it no doubt resonates with groups that feel you shouldn’t get something for nothing, and part of the contract in receiving state benefits is that you play your part; in this case ensuring your offspring go to school regularly. From the opposite perspective it looks like punishing the child by reducing family income, often already low in real terms, because of the actions of the parents. The sins of the fathers or in this case possibly even the mothers, being transferred to the next generation.

None of this is to underestimate the problem of children missing education, and the part parents play in conniving in their absence from school, but to seek to discover how best to deal with the issue.

I have never liked the idea of schools being able to fine parents. Recent governments have taken the idea that fines can be administered by public bodies without recourse to the judicial system to absurd lengths. This means that, unlike in court, those imposing the fines have neither the whole picture nor the means to compel someone to attend to discuss their means. As a result, fines are a very blunt instrument, and this often resorts in them eventually being written off unpaid. If fines are the solution they need to be imposed by a court with oversight of all State imposed penalties: as a form of punishment a community sentence to some form of parenting programme might well be a better alternative, especially if imposed early in a child’s record of unapproved absence. Personally, I think returning Magistrates’ Courts to local areas so that they can act quickly and decisively with the ability to understand the whole picture might be better than allowing head teachers to cut child benefit.

On the other hand, schools do need to consider how, especially in the early years, they can tackle those children that fall behind in their learning through absence. I am sure that the best schools do this as a matter of course, but some research into outcomes at the 20 or some primary schools with the worst attendance records might pay some interesting dividends. It would be an easy win to ask these schools that the DfE has already identified whether they are using their Pupil Premium to help these children?

Where the welfare of the child is in danger a local authority has the extreme option of directly intervening in the parenting of a child. Perhaps the Secretary of State should start by asking his colleagues in the Children’s Services part of his Department what they would recommend before targeting benefit cuts as the headline solution. Liberal Democrats were correct to block this policy last time it was mooted, and although they cannot stop Mr Gove campaigning to put it in the Tory manifesto for 2015, I hope that they will make clear their opposition to it by a definitive statement to that effect from their education minister, David Laws.

Teacher training transfer window opens

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As I hinted in a recent post, things are seemingly not going to plan in this year’s recruitment round for teacher preparation courses. If they were, then today’s announcement from the NCTL would not have appeared offering as it does additional places to providers with courses that are full. http://www.emcsrv.com/prolog/NCTL/Additional-HEI-places-available-for-2014-guide.pdf What is interesting is not so much the list of secondary subjects reproduced below, but the fact that places are also still up for grabs for non-specialist primary trainees.

According to the NCTL places are available in the following subjects:

  • biology
  • citizenship
  • classics
  • computer science
  • design & technology
  • engineering
  • geography
  • health and social care
  • modern languages
  • music
  • religious education
  • primary mathematics specialist and
  • all non-specialist primary

And the NCTL will continue to allocate places on request for all physics and maths courses, as it has done all year.

It remains to be seen how responsive schools and universities will be at this stage of the year to the invitation to top up courses that are full.

What this move by the NCTL will mean for the regional distribution of places is not clear. In the case of geography, often a bellwether subject in terms of charting recruitment challenges, most regions of England have six or seven schools showing no vacancies today on the UCAS web site and would thus be eligible to take on more places. Helpfully, there are nine such schools in London, and 12 in the south East where teachers are often needed in greater numbers.

Two of the four universities that would be allowed to recruit more trainees are in the North East, where there appear to be no schools with their full allocation. The other two universities that could bid for more places are one each in London and the South East according to the UCAS public site.

It is surprisingly to see primary places being offered in June as historically almost all courses are fully recruited by now; many with waiting lists.

What the announcement does to the government’s intention to transfer more training to schools will not become clear until the autumn, when it will become clear how many places have been taken up, and by what providers. If these places need to be filled, and are not, then next summer some schools may struggle to recruit new teachers in a wider range of subjects than I was predicting only a couple of weeks ago.

Losing the teacher supply battle

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This time last year I raised the question of whether we would recruit enough trainees to become teachers in 2014, in a post dated 1st June 2013, and headed ‘Missing the Target is a Known’. Sadly, I have to make the same prediction for the 2014 round that now has but three months to run before the majority of courses start in September.

With schools so heavily involved, and would-be trainees needing to pass the Skills Tests before starting their course, anyone that hasn’t applied by mid-July, effectively at some point during the next six weeks, will probably struggle to find a course unless the NCTL makes it clear to providers that they should recruit right up to the wire, as many universities have always had to do when recruitment was challenging.

The auguries for recruiting new trainees are not good. Recently the Association of Graduate Recruiters said that nine out of ten graduate employers still have vacancies for this autumn, with businesses in engineering and IT particularly suffering. Recruiters, they added, ‘cannot find enough quality candidates’. So the golden years of the recession, when a surplus of good quality graduates flowed into teacher preparation courses at the point in the demographic cycle when rolls in secondary schools were falling, and demand for teachers was declining, is over. We need more teachers and they are becoming harder to recruit.

My current predictions based upon data released this week by UCAS from the unified application process is that the following  subjects may well miss the lower of their DfE Teacher Supply Model figure or their NCTL allocation:

  • Biology
  • Design & Technology
  • Geography
  • Mathematics
  • Music
  • Physics
  • Religious Education

The jury is still out on Chemistry, but science overall is likely to face some sort of shortfall, if only because of the serious shortage of physics trainees. Although English will meet its target, I still do not believe we are training enough teachers, and governors still tell me that they are facing challenges recruiting such teachers in some parts of the country. It is significant that the TES job site has around 250 main scale positions for teachers of English today, but only around 200 for teachers of Mathematics.

Many of the subjects in the list where I expect shortages of trainees this year, were also subjects where there was a shortfall last year, so the warning that I and others made this time last year may been heeded, but has not been dealt with, unless you consider hiring unqualified personnel as the solution.

This year, there is also some nervousness about recruitment to primary ITT courses in some parts of the country. A shortfall there would be a real disaster, especially as schools with cash reserves will undoubtedly start upping the salary they are prepared to pay in the new de-regulated world of teachers’ pay and conditions. From there, it is but a short step to abandoning the principle of free schooling so parents can top up school coffers to help attract teachers through better pay. How that will affect the notion of fairness and equity only time will tell.

 

Schools in chains or not?

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The DfE’s recent publication of some case studies relating to effective academy chains presents a useful contrast to the departure of an academy chain earlier in the week; the first such chain to effectively fold. The DfE research can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/academy-sponsor-profiles

Both these events set me thinking about the issue of control of schools. For the past three years, the favoured solution, at least in terms of what has been happening on the ground, has been the converter academy model where in most cases a school goes its own way. This has replaced the sponsored academy model introduced by the Labour government, and now often reserved for either newly formed schools or school that are taken over after failure by Ofsted, or possibly groups of primary schools.

Of course, both chains, and individual schools within the State system, are nothing new in education. The dioceses that manage the large number of church schools might be described as the original chains, and it is interesting to see the Diocese of Wakefield as one of the DfE’s academy chain case studies. At the other end of the spectrum were those individual voluntary aided schools that traced their history back to charitable foundations. Many were, and often still are, selective secondary schools, but, for instance, around London there is a ring of schools linked either to the livery companies or to long-established charities. At one time there were many more, but the amalgamations of the 1980s, during the drop in pupil numbers, witnessed the disappearance of quite a number, including the final vestiges of three in Haringey alone.

Now that the remaining community schools are not very different from academies in respect of their control as local authorities have few powers left, even where they are able to retain considerable influence, the question of the span of control needs properly debating properly.

The chief officer for Children’s Services in Hampshire recently expressed concern to the Select Committee about a dip in performance in some converter academies, and the DfE recently released figures for the number of schools not opening an email about safeguarding. Both these incidents raise the question about effective span of control. The other key question is the place of education in the democratic process?

Put the two questions together and you essentially ask the question successive governments since the Thatcher era have ducked; town hall or Whitehall as the key player in education.

Despite my preference for the local, especially for primary schools, where most children attend their nearest school, and there must be key links to other community services such as health and welfare, I fear we are moving inexorably towards a Whitehall run system with un-elected local commissioners; and not even the semblance of a School Board as in the USA.

I predict that whoever wins the 2015 general election, assuming the nation isn’t in a state of legislative paralysis after a hung parliament when the notion of five year fixed term parliaments may yet come back to haunt the electorate,  any sensible government will take decisive action to make clear the policy and decision-making processes within our school system.

Hopefully, the system that emerges will be effective at continuing to raise standards. Certainly, it won’t be as democratic as what has been the position during most of my lifetime, and possibly it will be expensive in managerial overheads. Whether small chains will survive is still a matter for debate.

Minister hides his light under a Select Committee

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I needs must start this post with an apology, and a confession. Despite my interest in teacher supply and training, I missed the Minister for Schools announcement about the changes to the Teacher Supply Model. By way of mitigation, I would point out that the announcement appeared in a reply to the Education Select Committee following his appearance in front of the Committee in February to talk about underachievement by white working class children, and has seemingly been documented as DfE supplementary evidence to that inquiry. For those of you having difficulty finding what he said, the link is http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/education-committee/underachievement-in-education-of-white-working-class-children/written/7989.html

What is of interest is David Laws updating of the Committee about the Teacher Supply Model. After all the usual platitudes about how well the Department and NCTL are doing on teacher recruitment and retention, and that School Direct is proving popular on the basis that schools have been signing up for places, David Laws confirmed to the Committee that the Teacher Supply Model was being redeveloped, and that the replacement is expected to be ready by autumn 2014; presumably in time to run the numbers for teacher preparation courses starting in 2016. The Minister didn’t say whether the work on the Model was being done entirely in-house or whether the DfE had convened a group of experts to help with the necessary changes.

However, that may not matter because the Minster also told the Committee that the new Model would be available online, as previously recommended by the Committee, and advocated by myself since I first appeared in front of a Select Committee to discuss the modelling of teacher supply in 1996.

David Laws went further by stating that publication of the Model will enable public examination of the assumptions and working of the Model to help estimations of future teacher demand and projected ITT recruitment. Furthermore, he told the Committee, worked up examples will be included in the online model. This is good news, as it will help the current debate about why so few teachers of English are needed when fewer pupils are being taught by teachers qualified in the subject.

However, the fact that David Laws then went on to offer the Committee data from as far back as 2009-10 about teacher stocks and flows as if this is the latest available to the DfE raises considerable concern in my mind about his understanding of the function of planning. And there may be revealed one of the serious issues in the debate about whether we should be planning teacher training or leaving it to the market as Mr Taylor of the NCTL would seem to prefer. As I have pointed out in the past, information gleaned at one stage of an economic cycle may not be helpful in planning for another stage, so using information about teacher flows during a recession, and the deepest post-war recession there has been, may not be helpful in projecting training numbers needed in 2016, when the economy is still hopefully motoring forward, unless that is teacher supply is entirely disconnected from the wider economy.

Finally, it will be interesting to see how the teacher supply model copes with shortfalls in recruitment to training. Exposing this issue, and making sure it is debated, is a key feature that will make the current discussion about creating sufficient teacher numbers different from past periods of teacher shortage. This letter to the Select Committee has placed one more brick in the wall.

 

Bureaucratic and undemocratic: just what you expect from Labour

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David Blunkett’s blueprint (interestingly this the colour of the cover of his report, a colour once associated with the Tories and not Labour)  published yesterday has little to say in favour of local democracy. The Party that made sure the NHS was established on a national basis now seems determined to do the same for schooling. I have to declare that I am not unbiased in this debate as I am a Lib Dem County Councillor in Oxfordshire, and I firmly believe, at the very least, that primary education should remain a local democratic function whatever the fate of secondary and further education.

At the heart of David Blunkett’s proposals lies a new post of Director of School Standards (DSS):in reality a local commissioner for education reporting to a boss in Whitehall. However, with multi-borough and sub-regional officials, even “local” will mean many different things.

This new cadre of Labour bureaucrats will effectively remove any meaningful control over schooling from elected local authorities. The DSS, it is proposed, will monitor standards, and intervene where necessary; decide on new schools; and would have an un-elected panel to turn to for advice. The analogy with public health is used in the document, although, interestingly, public health was returned to local councils last year, with the director of Public Health making  an annual report to the Council.

Indeed, Oxfordshire has decided to provide a school nurse for every secondary school from September, something presumably Mr Blunkett would not think it was the local authority’s job to decide.

The fact that some local authorities have been less good at providing schooling for some children is not, in my judgment, a reason to take education away from local authorities as a whole, and to reduce them to toothless husks of their former selves.

In Oxfordshire, there is an Education Scrutiny Committee that has an attainment working party reporting to it; and officers monitor standards and report progress. Councillors are concerned about standards – the same is true elsewhere. Councillors need the ability to intervene if things are going wrong. Most of the powers suggested in the Blunkett review can be provided to existing local authority directors without the need for a new bureaucracy, and the inevitable costs associated with it.

Furthermore the Blunkett Review flies in the face of what Labour said before Christmas about Police and Crime Commissioners: then  their review, led by ex-Met Police Commissioner Lord Stevens, said PCCs, introduced in 2012, should be scrapped in 2016 and more power given to local councillors and local authorities. So, more power for councils over the police, but no power over schools now seems to be Labour’s inconsistent line.

Labour may understand the problem, and in part it was a problem created during their government, but their anti-democratic, centralist approach – under the guise of extending school-based, or in practice, groups of school based management – is not, in my judgment, the way forward. Providing a new ‘duty’ on local government to inform and support the interests of pupils and parents merely rubs salt in the wound.

There are, of course, good things in the other parts of the Review. The support for qualified and properly-trained teachers, improved careers advice, and a strengthening of the admissions code are all welcome. However, in the scale of things, you cannot escape the fact that at the heart of the Blunkett philosophy for schooling is a disregard for local democracy and an admiration for a managerialist approach.

Local councillors are much more accessible to parents that a Director of School Standards that may well be responsible for a sub-region. If the proposals in this blueprint make it into the election manifesto, it is Labour candidates that will have the biggest challenge in selling their party as interested in keeping education local come the general election next May.

 

 

Why keep a dog and bark yourself?

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The quote at the head of this piece came into my mind when I read the announcement by Michael Gove that he was establishing an independent review of teacher training courses led by a Surrey Primary head teacher with 26 years experience in one school. The DfE gave the aims of the review as:

  • define effective ITT practice
  • assess the extent to which the current system delivers effective ITT
  • recommend where and how improvements could be made
  • recommend ways to improve choice in the system by improving the transparency of course content and methods

Now these seem suspiciously similar to the task of Osfted inspectors when they look at teacher training provision. So, will the review team just read Ofsted reports, collate the findings, and publish a Report? In view of the time frame; a Report by the end of the year, from a group yet to be established, means that it will be interesting to see what more they can achieve.

Were I to commission a review it would have had terms of reference something like: consider the nature and content of the teacher preparation scheme needed to deliver an effective and improving school system that measures its performance among the best in the world for the range of children it serves while competing for entrants in a thriving labour market for those who after training will teach a diverse range of subjects and ages of pupils in many different types of schools.

The Gove review will need to consider what the purpose of choice is within training? We don’t need choice about standards. We may offer choice of course that is different for new graduates and older career switchers but we may also like both groups to train together. The Review might also ask why we don’t offer methods to allow teachers post-entry to retrain for different subjects or phases.

However,, perhaps the central question that any Review will need to address, if it is not to be a superficial endorsement of current policy directions, is how do we ensure sufficient teachers in the right places to drive the school system forward when an improving economy makes teaching seem less competitive to some new graduates as a career choice than other possible options? And once trained, how do we ensure they are recruited where they are needed?

As a primary head teacher, I hope that Mr Carter takes a long hard look at both the PGCE for primary teachers and School Direct in the primary sector, as well as Teach First’s primary offering, even if it is not actually included in his formal remit. Are there enough high quality applicants to sustain the pressure of a 39 week course that puts them in the classroom almost from day one? If not, how can we achieve such performance from the 20,000 trainees we need each year to create an improving school system?

On the secondary front, there are almost as many issues to consider, but I doubt course content and methods are really an issue except, perhaps, to see where subject knowledge fits into the picture.

Finally, the Review might like to comment on whether QTS should remain unspecified after the preparation phase or be more linked to specific subjects and phases of teaching.

 

 

Even in a coalition Ministers are Party politicians

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The good news from David Laws at the ATL Conference this week was that the Lib Dems back the need for qualified teachers in all state funded schools, unlike their Tory coalition partners. How far they are prepared to support the principle as a Party, as opposed to a Conference where delegates voted for a wide-ranging motion on the subject in the spring of 2103, only the Manifesto will reveal, but it would be helpful to see a return to at least the 2005 position of the need for appropriate preparation to teach that included subject knowledge plus pedagogy for all teachers, with a more restricted permanent licence to teach than the present un-restricted QTS that in practice is little different to sanctioning the use of under-qualified if not un-qualified teachers without letting on to parents what is allowed.

Now it is becoming more of a challenge to recruit new entrants into the teaching profession, it does seem sensible to keep track of what is actually happening post-training. We won’t achieve a world-class schooling system by letting some schools return to a position where they have insufficient trained staff. Personally, I hope that someone somewhere at either the DfE or the National College is asking the unthinkable questions about supply, and how the newly diversified system would respond to a severe shortage. One scenario that has already arisen in Oxfordshire is that of academies with spare capacity refusing to take local children, and putting the local authority in the position of having to find other places for them, even if that means paying for unnecessary transport. If schools felt they might not recruit staff, as academies they might trim their admission numbers even though it caused extra expenditure for others.

David Laws also told the ATL Conference he wanted stability in the system after the next general election. Personally, I want predictability ahead of stability. Michael Gove is increasingly looking like his Labour predecessors of the 1960s who wanted a universal comprehensive system for all, but failed to impose their will on local authorities, leaving a legacy of secondary education that was little more than a geographical lottery when it came to the type of school system. There was some explanation then for the reticence of the Labour government in that schooling was seen more as a local responsibility. There is no such excuse in the new nationalised world of schooling in the Labour/coalition era of the last decade. At least make all secondary schools academies, so that parents know the rules they will play by, even if the rules are set in Westminster. A failure to take this action will leave a legacy of school organisation that is different across the country, and also with local government still struggling to know its role in education. The position of the primary sector is more complicated, and there is a need for the faith communities to engage more in the debate since they manage a significant proportion of primary schools, especially in the rural areas. Are they happy to see power transfer to Whitehall from the local town or county hall?

Sufficient teachers, of the right type and quality in a school system that is sound in organisation seems like a good recipe for moving the education system forward, especially if some of the more idiotic curriculum changes are also addressed.