Tag Archives: politics

Losing the teacher supply battle

Posted on by
2

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?

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
4

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?

Posted on by
6

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

Posted on by
1

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.

A rose by any other name

Posted on by
3

One of the interesting things about language is that it has the ability to be both precise and vague at the same time. As a wordsmith, the Secretary of State, who always seems more comfortable within the literacy domain than the numeracy world, has made two interesting statements this week. As already reported in an earlier post on this blog, he told the House of Commons on Monday that Osfted inspected Academy Chains. This fact was news to many who thought that Ofsted inspected only the schools in such chains, and that although the Funding Agency could look at the books of academy chains, Ofsted didn’t have the power to inspect their overall performance as they can with local authority support for school improvement orChildren’s Services.

And then, yesterday, the Secretary of State was interviewed by pupils experiencing the life of reporters as part of the BBC’s annual School Report exercise. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/26768138

During the interview the BBC reported that Mr Gove said:

“Teachers should definitely be paid more than they are at the moment,” But he added that his department paid off the debts of some teachers at the start of their careers in the form of bursaries or additional support – particularly those teaching key subjects such as maths, physics or chemistry.

Now the idea of using bursaries to pay off student debt – at the same time as requiring the trainee teachers to take on further student debt as part of their PGCE or Tuition Fee School Direct course – is a curious one. In fact they could only voluntarily pay off existing student debt using the bursary if they were allowed to: it seems pretty unlikely that the Student Loans organisation would be able to offer a new loan with one hand will taking payment on an earlier one with the other. Perhaps the Secretary of State meant that the bursary allowed those trainees not to take out further loans (and thereby increasing their debt) to study to become a teacher.

He may, of course, have been mixing up what happens on Teach First with the situation faced by the much greater number of trainees on the other routes into teaching. In my view, working towards a salary for all trainees, to encourage the best in all subjects to become teachers, would be a positive policy development. After all, graduates that enter most private sector training programmes are now normally paid a salary and don’t have to pay for their training. Most employers recognise that making possible entrants pay for training puts off some applicants.

So, using the phrase ‘paid off the debts of some teachers’, if indeed the transcript shows that those were the words used by the Secretary of State, seems like a somewhat loose use of language. Perhaps Mr Gove could explain both what he actually meant about paying of the student debt of teachers and the inspection of academy chains, so we can all be clear.

He might also like to elucidate on the statement about ‘paying teachers more’, perhaps in his next remit letter to the Pay Review Body.

 

Ofsted inspects academy chains

Posted on by
2

Until Monday afternoon I was under the illusion that Ofsted didn’t inspect academy chains. I knew that it did inspect the schools that were under the control of academy chains, but not, I believed, the management of the chain responsible for the schools. This was unlike the situation with local authorities, where Ofsted has the power to inspect, and has exercised it regularly over recent years.

However, the Hansard record of Education Questions in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon shows how wrong I was. In answer to a question from a Labour member, as to whether it was time to inspect academy chains, Mr Gove, our literary mastermind masquerading as Secretary of State for Education, replied with the statement that:

Michael Gove: Ofsted already inspects academy chains. It has inspected both E-ACT and AET.’

Now assuredly, Mr Gove already knew when taking Education Questions that Ofsted would be publishing a damming report the following day on the standard of education at many schools in the E-ACT chain; and would put several of the chain’s schools into special measures. Possibly the most damming feature of the Ofsted report was the assertion by the heads of at least some of the schools inspected said that the academy chain had required them to top-slice their Pupil Premium cash and remit the top-slice to the administration. This was the very policy that local authorities were castigated for and the reason why budgets were taken away from them and handed directly to schools. In this instance, it wasn’t even apparent to the school leaders how the cash top-sliced had been used to further the aims behind the Pupil Premium scheme of helping with the improvement of the education of disadvantaged pupils.

As Ofsted put the fact in their letter to E-ACT that: During the inspections, senior staff informed inspectors that E-ACT had, until 1 September 2013, deducted a proportion of the pupil premium funding from each academy. It is unclear how these deducted funds are being used to improve outcomes for disadvantaged pupils.

You can read the Ofsted letter to E-Act here: file:///C:/Users/John/Downloads/E-ACT%20Multi-Academy%20Trust%20inspection%20outcome%20letter.pdf

If Ofsted has also inspected the academy chain, as the Secretary of State said, then no doubt there is another report waiting to be published that will clear up the issue of what happened to this Pupil Premium money, and how large the transfer of cash actually was over what might have been a two or three year period. Should the chain be expected to repay this cash to the schools concerned, and also, in this present litigious culture, are lawyers already looking to see whether pupils whose education was regarded as unsatisfactory have a legal case against the chain under some aspect of the civil law that they might not have against a public authority undertaking the same duty?

Normal service has been resumed

Posted on by
4

The technical difficulties replying to comments made to me have been resolved. The issue was with my internet browser. I was using Chrome but have switched to Firefox through which I can access all parts of my blog again, including updating posts and replying to comments. My apologies for the down time. The rest of this post still remains relevant

However, I am not the only one to have had difficulties. The DfE seem to have pulled the research and priorities document from their web site that featured in my post of earlier this week. If anyone downloaded a copy before it was removed, I would welcome a copy. You can email me via the comments page, and once WordPress is fully functional again I will be able to access it.

The suite of DfE documents that emerged, and in some cases disappeared, today did seem to lack coordination, and it is tempting to wonder which Minister gave approval for their release?

The whole saga might merit a footnote in Private Eye.

No role for local authorities in education

Posted on by
6

NOTE: This document appears to have been removed from the DfE’s web site shortly after this post appeared. There may, of course, be no connection between the two events.

A report on research priorities and questions published today by the DfE under the title ‘Accountability and governance’ makes it clear that there is no role in the new national schooling world for local authorities. The document can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/288118/Accountability_and_governance_research_priorities_and_questions.pdf and within it the government makes clear that:

Our vision is for an accountability system which is challenging, fair and transparent – one in which school level governance and national arrangements hold autonomous schools and colleges to account for the education they provide.

So there is seemingly no role there for local authorities.

The document also states that:

where children are at risk of being failed through poor providers, central government will intervene swiftly – primarily through Ofsted. High-quality Ofsted inspection will challenge all schools and Colleges to strive for excellence in achievement, leadership, teaching and behaviour (schools only). (sic)

Local authorities risk being relegated to little more than educational trading standards watchdogs, having to report concerns to big sibling in Whitehall or their regional Commissioner Representative. For the document concludes that:

There are now many types of governance structures, including standalone and federations of maintained schools, single academy trusts, sponsored academies, multi-academy trusts and umbrella trusts. We want to understand the factors that lead to the most robust governance arrangements and hence the most effective school-level accountability, particularly for education standards.

Again there is no mention of any local accountability other than through governing bodies since multi-academy trusts are not required to have a geographical coherence, although many do in reality.

The absence of mentions of diocesan responsibility might provide the faith communities with pause for thought were it not for the fact that they have seen a local elected body replaced by one at Westminster that is far more remote to most of them. The challenge will come when Ofsted, having obtained powers to inspect academy chains, as it surely will, then asks to inspect diocesan education arrangements where faith schools are under-performing, and some undoubtedly are  not doing as well as they might as schools.

Startling for its absence from the document is any mention of teachers, their training and employment. Who is concerned about the governance of that process, so vital for any achievement by schools? I have expressed concern before about the lack of supervision of the National College now that its Board has been abolished. Presumably, it is good enough that the DfE Board can monitor its performance;: but who sets standards for success and failure in say, recruitment into the profession, and what are the sanctions?

The 2015 general election will mark the passing of local education services, whatever the polite fiction that is maintained. Sadly, none of the main political parties were prepared to stand-up and fight for local political involvement in education. It may be self-seeking, since I am an elected county councillor in Oxfordshire, but I regard the change as likely to be detrimental for our education system.