Trends in academy accounts

Posted on January 15, 2026 by John Howson

The 2024-25 accounts for academy trusts, covering the year up to the 31^st August 2025, are now being posted at Companies House, for anyone to view. Not all Trusts have yet published their accounts. Some Trusts are large and complex, and others may not want to be in the first groups that might draw attention to their results.

This analysis is for 86 schools in one geographical area, and where the school has been in the Trust for at least two reporting periods. Two indicators are considered: the pay of the highest-ranking employee – often the Chief Executive, but in single academy trusts, normally it is the headteacher, and changes in declared reserves held by the school. This latter indicator is complicated, as some MATs pool reserves, while all others hold both reserves at the school level and for central services.

Salary Trends

So far, of the 13 Trusts reporting, there have been no really significant changes. The highest salary band reported band was £200,000-210,000, up by £10,000, the same increase of £10,000 as seen in 5 other trusts; one trust saw a £10,000 decrease; two trusts no change, and four increases in the £20,000 range. The lowest salary for the year was £100,000, for a trust with four schools.

Trusts with headquarters outside the geographical area tended to have higher salary bands for their highest paid employee than those headquartered in the local area. This might take into account the complexity of London weightings for salaries.

Changes in reserves

Here, two-year’s worth of data is available for 72 of the 86 schools in the area. The other 14 schools changed trusts, so the data for the two years is incomplete. Of the 72 schools with data for both years:

29 ended the 2025 reporting period with a deficit

43 ended with reserves

Of those schools in deficit at the end of the reporting period

14 increased their deficits over the year

5 schools went from surplus to deficit

Of schools with reserves

10 reduced the amounts of their reserves.

The other 33 increased their reserves.

The largest deficit reported in 2025 account, so far is £1,060,000 – an increase of £232,000 in one year, or more than 20%.

The largest reported surplus held by a school was £2,641,000 – up by £290,000 over the year. Another school in a MAT, but located outside the area reviewed, also had a balance of £2,400,000.

Comment

From the data on salaries, it seems that seven MATs had increases to their salary bands for the highest paid employee that were less than 10%; one MAT saw the incoming employee on a lower band than their predecessor. Five had increases in the band of the highest paid employee of more than 10%.

Four of the MATs surveyed paid their highest paid employee in a band above the salary of the local authority’s Director of Children’s Services. This is not surprising, since nationally, the highest starting salary for a headteacher in an advertised vacancy in 2026 has been £123,000.

On the issue of reserves, some schools are facing pressures while others are still adding to their reserves. I have always maintained that revenue funding should be spent in the year in which was provided, including up to 10% for a sensible reserve, based upon the profile of the past five years of expenditure where the reserve is not excessive.

Why do schools hold more than £2 million pounds of public money in their reserves? Schools in deficit, often seem to struggle to clear their deficit, and if they don’t attract pupils, then it is a challenge to ever return to a surplus without damaging the education of their pupils.

I will return to this topic when I have processed the data from the remaining MATs yet to file their accounts.

Accountability and falling school rolls. Was it different in the past?

Posted on January 9, 2026 by John Howson

Reading this new report from the Centre for Educational Systems on accountability in systems International Comparative Education Reviews & Resources | CES Centre for Education Systems set me wondering about the accountability of the school system in England at present. To help focus my thinking, I considered one of the key issues facing many policymakers in education at present: declining pupil numbers or ‘falling rolls’ as it is more commonly called.

My starting point was to look at the last time ‘falling rolls’ had a significant effect on the school system in England. The last serious occurrence was at the end of the 1970s, and into the early 1980s. The other periods of declining rolls since then have either been less significant in scale or offset by changes in the learning leaving age, as when it was increased from 16 to 18.

In the late 1970s, as the minority Labour government trundled towards its inevitable fate, education in England was still being described by academics as either ‘a partnership’ or ‘a locally service nationally administered’. In reality, the governance of schooling was on a journey from local decision-making to almost total national policymaking, or more realistically policy interference from the centre in those areas where policymakers at Westminster have an interest. The accountability strand within governance at the ‘macro’ level has been largely overlooked. Accountability of individual institutions, such as ofsted had been the subject of many discussions.

This lack of consideration for accountability relating to policy in the school sector brings me back to ‘falling rolls’ as a case study. At the end of the 1970s, I had just completed almost a decade working in Haringey in North London; from January 1971 to December 1977 as a teacher at Tottenham School (now long disappeared from the scene), and then from September 1977 to August 1980 as deputy warden of the borough’s teachers’ centre – what would now be called a professional development centre, where such establishment still exist- developing courses mainly for secondary school teachers. Between September 1979, and my resignation in August 1980, I was on secondment – on full pay; those were the days – to study for the MSc in Governance of Education at Oxford University.

My role at the Teachers’ Centre, in an institution at the centre of the borough’s schooling life, allowed me to witness how falling rolls were dealt with from 1977 onwards in Haringey. In passing, it is also worth noting that 1979 was a traumatic year for schooling in Haringey. During the ‘winter of discontent’ the school caretakers went on strike and the schools were closed for a number of weeks. National government showed no interest in how the strike was handled, and ignored trying to enforce the legal requirement that schools remain open for 190 days a year. It was not until a parent, Dr Meade, took Haringey to law that the national government, through the Secretary of State took any interest, and the strike ended.

It is interesting to compare that ‘hands-off’ attitude of the Westminster government in 1979 to what happened in 2020 with the arrival of the covid pandemic, and the actions of the DfE throughout the pandemic in order to see how policymaking has changed. Although, even during covid, the DfE seemed to do little more than set high level policies, and left schools, MATs and local authorities to work out the details on the ground. There seemed to be little consideration of accountability during the pandemic and it will be interesting to see what the Covid Inquiry has to say about how schooling was handled during the pandemic.

But, back to 1977, and ‘falling rolls’ in Haringey. The borough was generally seen as a safe Labour borough at the time, having only run by the Conservatives between 1968 and 1972, following the Labour debacle at the 1968 local elections: a debacle that current followers of political fortunes might want to revisit ahead of the 2026 elections in London, to be fought on many of the same boundaries.

In the late 1970s, officers in Haringey were aware that when projecting school rolls into the 1980s, there would be too many places, especially in the secondary sector, where a new school, Northumberland Park, had been built on the eastern edge of the borough, even though this was where pupil numbers were likely to fall fastest, as the declining birthrate together with the reduction in Commonwealth immigration, especially from the Caribbean islands, was likely to exacerbate the school population decline.

Officers created a taskforce to review rolls. This may have also been stimulated by an internal survey into sixth form teaching in Haringey’s schools, undertaken by the Borough’s advisory service in 1976 that revealed extremely small sixth form teaching groups in many subjects across the borough. If groups were already small, I expect senior officers were interested in what would happen to secondary schools when rolls fell?

Afterall, the secondary schools in Haringey had only just become fully comprehensive in response to the Wilson government’s Circular 10/65 on the phasing out of selective secondary education.

In the spring of 1977, officers produced what was known as a ‘green ‘paper, setting out options for change, including the naming of schools likely to face closure. In view of previous leaks of confidential documents, it was decided to publish the report in full. In a borough with a lively set of pressure groups ranging from teacher unions, represented on the Education Committee, to a branch of CASE (The Campaign for the Advancement of State Education), not surprisingly a row erupted over the plans.

It is worth noting that the DES (as the DfE was then called) knew about ‘falling rolls’ from the early 1970s onwards. As early as 1971, the part of the DES responsible for the school building programme reduced the number of new primary school places being created, although, as with Northumberland Park, new secondary schools were still being authorised. In 1974, cutbacks in teacher training numbers were announced by the Teacher’s Branch at the DES, but it was only in June 1977, a month after Haringey’s paper was published that the DES issued their first circular on the subject to local authorities, Circular 5/77. Governance of the system as a whole seemed non-existent, even where specialist branches within the Des were making appropriate changes to meet the emerging trends.

The merits of the five different schemes in the Haringey paper does not concern us here. What is more interesting is that it took until 1983 for reorganisation to actually take place in Haringey, and then only after the Secretary of State gave his consent in February 1982 to the revised and more draconian re-organisation plans. By then, nearly six years had elapsed, and the Chief Education Officer had moved on from his position.

What was interesting in the 1970s was the fact that there was planning locally, and also open debate in a borough with a strong set of pressure groups willing to discuss policy in a framework of an Education Committee involving many elected councillors and key un-elected members, including figures from the Church of England and Roman Catholic dioceses, but little apparent oversight from the DES. Clearly, not a ‘partnership’, and realistically not ‘a national system locally administered, except in the widest sense of the phrase.

Compare that climate of relatively open debate with a strong local press, and local decision-making, with the current situation, where the local authority cabinet system puts great power in the hands of one local politician, and the officers, and where the historical issue of the voluntary school sector involvement in planning is further complicated these days by the existence of academies and multi academy trusts.

Governance may be easier today, but to what extent has local input from interest groups been removed from the process? To whom are decision-makers accountable in the 2020s, if they make mistakes? Does the DfE show any more interest in accountability over issues affecting the system, such as ‘falling rolls’ than it did in the 1970s?

Locally, perhaps all council Scrutiny Committees should have an annual review of education provision on their workplan that would allow regular discussions on how place planning was being managed across maintained and academy schools in a locality.

But, with the end of the semblance of ‘partnership’, still seemingly in existence in the 1970s, what role should the government at Westminster play today in ensuring a coherent and cost-effective solution to the falling rolls issue? That question sheds a light on the accountability for the schooling system as a whole in England at the present time.

For some, it seems the accountability of the market still dominates thinking in Whitehall, and there is no place for whole-system planning at any level. Government guidance on dealing with falling rolls, even at the level of ministerial statements might show there was some coherent thinking about problem solving nationally by the present government. How schooling is governed and what accountability measures should exist today, is worthy of debate. I don’t think the present Bill before parliament will add much, if anything, to the debate.

Winners and losers

Posted on December 29, 2025 by John Howson

How have my blog posts fared since I restarted this blog in May of 2025? Some new posts were well received, some old favourites from previous years continued to attract readers, and some of this year’s posts languished unread, according to WordPress’s dashboard.

So, as of today, 29^th December 2025, what have been the most read posts for 2025 and when were they written?

How much holiday do teachers have?					645
150-year-old Committee system to be abolished					75
Too many teachers?					73
Headteacher vacancies: even in August					68
Windfall profits and SEND					58
‘Stuck’ schools – who teaches in these schools?					55
Less than 400 teachers of physics entered service in 2023/24					54
DfE wasting money on ITT					51
Labour’s determination to recruit new teachers doesn’t include music					53
The governance of our schools – does pay matter?					51

Do we need local democracy in our schooling system?

Posted on December 24, 2025 by John Howson

Should local elected politicians have a say about schooling in their local areas? An alternative to that system is the NHS model of provision, a service run by professionals and managers, with little or no local democratic involvement, other than in public health.

As someone that has been involved in politics (for the Liberal Democrats) since the 1960s, I have strong views on this topic, especially as I have spent my whole adult life working in the education sector, as a teacher, lecturer, civil servant – albeit briefly – columnist and blogger, and entrepreneur. For me, local democracy is important. For others, it seems the need for local democracy has been declining in importance over the decades.

When I was at university, local authorities ran local education; they trained and appointed the teachers – often in association with the main Christian denominations – set the level of spending on schooling, and built and ran the buildings.

After the Robbins Report into Higher Education in the 1960s, local authorities grip on education began to weaken, and central government began to take more control over decision-making about schools and how they were managed.

First, the training of teachers was removed form local authorities into higher education, so by 1992 when all public sector high education became centrally managed, local authorities no longer controlled this vital resource.

At the same time, the consequences of the 1988 Education Reform Act saw a National Curriculum introduced. Funding was devolved to schools, significantly reducing the power of Education Committees to decide local funding priorities. The Blair government then effectively abolished Education Committees, putting power over schooling in the hands of a single Cabinet member, often with only weak scrutiny of the service.

However, notionally schools were still mostly community schools, except where they were under the control of charities and the churches.

The creation of academies by the Labour government of Gordon Brown, and their subsequent enthusiastic uptake by the coalition government of 2010-15 by Michael Gove, removed almost all the remaining powers of locally elected councils over the running of schools, while allowing the churches to retain their control over voluntary aided schools that had become academies.

By the present time, most councils now have children’s services, almost always run by a social work professional, with the lead officer in charge of schools being a second or even third tier position. The national funding formula left councils with few choices to make about schools, except over poisoned chalices like SEND and home to school transport.

Councils taking children into care could not even direct academies to provide a place for the child, but on the other hand were forced to deal with decisions on exclusion of pupils made by schools.

Is the system better run now than in the 1960s. The big test currently facing much of England is how local areas will deal with falling school rolls. Who will decide on which schools close or take reduced intakes? Should there be local democratic debate about this issue, or, in our fast-moving modern worlds, are local views irrelevant?

I am on the side of those that still believe there is a role for local communities in the management of schooling, and do not like the NHS style model that is increasingly commonplace. However, because education never polls highly as an issue during general elections, I fear we will have a schooling system designed and run by professionals, and with little or no scrutiny or oversight. We will be the poorer for this outcome.

This post was written for the University of Liverpool’s School of Education blog in November. however, the link has been broken, so i am reposting my thoughts here on my own blog.

SEND funding switched to schools?

Posted on December 18, 2025 by John Howson

Has the funding of SEND just become even more complicated for 2026-27? Under the arrangements announced by the DfE, cash has moved from the High Needs Block to other funding streams within the Dedicated Schools Grant. Dedicated schools grant (DSG): 2026 to 2027 – GOV.UK

Now I am no expert in schools funding, and the labyrinthine calculations employed by the DfE in deciding both the size of the cake and its distribution. However, it does seem as if all local authorities will see their High Needs Block funding stream reduced in 2026-27 when compared with 2025-26. As seem usual, some London boroughs have been less affected by the change than other upper tier authorities, with 10 of the 20 local authorities with the smallest percentage decrease being London boroughs. There are no London boroughs within the top 20 authorities with the largest percentage reductions, with the highest ranked London borough coming in at 23^rd place.

Oxfordshire, where I served as the Cabinet member until May’s elections, has seen a decline of 18.75% in its High Needs block. That decline ranks it in the top 25 local authorities for the largest reductions in their High Needs Block. Hopefully, the cash has been distributed to schools, but the Schools Block for the County has also reduced, by around £5 million – effectively a standstill. No doubt the reduction is due to falling pupil numbers on a formula that is heavily driven by pupil numbers. The implications for schools faced with falling rolls was discussed in my blog post How might a school react to falling rolls? | John Howson

What does the DfE say about the High Needs block changes?

16. As the existing SEND system will continue for 2026 to 2027, the Department’s assessment is that limiting the funding in this way will not necessarily translate into negative impacts on children and young people with SEND and will not mean that we see negative equalities impacts. This is because the requirements on local authorities to secure provision to meet the needs of children and young people with SEND will remain in place, and local authorities must meet these requirements. The consequent budget pressures will therefore lead to accruing DSG deficits rather than having a negative impact on SEND provision.

And 17. We recognise that the size of deficits that some local authorities may accrue while the statutory override is in place may not be manageable with local resources alone, and will bring forward arrangements to assist with them as part of broader SEND reform plans, as explained in the Government’s provisional local government finance settlement document. Given that local authorities will continue to be protected from the adverse impact of those deficits through the so-called “statutory override”, and because we are seeking to protect school level allocations of high needs funding through the conditions of grant attached to the DSG, we do not envisage any adverse impact on those children and young people with protected characteristics, including those with disabilities. The national funding formula for schools and high needs 26-27

Of course, this assumes that the cash channelled through the Schools Block of the DSG is actually spent on SEND by schools, and accounted for as such in academy and MAT budgets. I am sure that will be the case.

Still, those special schools that see the base funding per pupil stuck at £10,000 for another year will no doubt wonder what has happened to inflation accounting.

All we can hope for is that it won’t be too long before the SEND reforms are announced. However, with consultation session running into 2026, it is difficult to see how SEND reforms and local government reorganisation won’t become mixed up together, with who knows what results. Perhaps the new arrangements announced for Surrey might give an indication. Hopefully, the fact that West Northamptonshire has the largest reduction in the High Needs Block of any upper tier authority (25%+) is due to its past history, not its present resourcing.

Will local government reorganisation pose a risk to Children’s Services?

Posted on December 15, 2025 by John Howson

I don’t often comment on Children’s Services in local government, preferring to stick to education about which I hopefully know more. However, having served a period of time as a Cabinet member for Children’s Services in a shire county, I couldn’t resist reading the report published last week by the DfE from the commissioner put into Devon County Council to oversee the improvement oft heir Children’s services.

There were two interesting comments from that report caught my eye.

The first deal with the issue of local government re-organisation: not strictly part of the Commissioner’s brief, but an interesting and thoughtful comment

“Although not in the remit of this particular piece of work it would be wrong not to highlight a second significant risk. The current round of Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) consultations is already consuming large amounts of political and operational time. However, that isn’t the main risk. The bigger concern would be for any recommendation which leads to the break up and fragmentation of Devon CC and the existing arrangements for children’s services. Given the positive improvement trajectory I have seen and identified in this report and the critical importance of having a well led and well functioning children’s services for the local population anything that breaks that model would risk stopping the existing work in its tracks with an even bigger risk that things would quickly slip backwards. As stated, this is not strictly in my brief to comment on, but the potential impact of LGR on services that are now showing signs of improvement should be appropriately considered by government as part of their decision making process.”

The second comment was, of course, interesting to me as a Liberal Democrat.

“Following the recent local elections Devon now has new political leadership. The Lib Dem group have made an impressive ‘fresh start’ and they are very clear that they will be judged on the improvements they are determined to see in Children’s Services. Children’s services are undoubtedly the top priority for Devon County Council. Three cabinet members (including the Leader) hold portfolios across Children’s services – Education, Lead Member and SEND. My observations of two cabinet meetings and scrutiny alongside additional face to face meetings assures me that the Leader and his team are very serious about bringing about the improvements needed.”

Commissioner’s report on children’s services

Managing a Children’s Services is probably a much more complex task than managing adult social services in local authorities, as Children’s Services encompasses not only the whole of the remaining education functions of a local authority, but also children in care or at risk, plus youth justice, and youth services, as well as relationships with the NHS over SEND. This wide range of activities may be why so many local authorities have received adverse reports over the past few years.

Indeed, an analysis of the reports by the size of the authority may well help to support the view of Devon’s commissioner about local government review. Is there a minimum size for a Children’s Service to function effectively, and does it need good political oversight?

Banning young people from social media – a sign of the times?

Posted on December 10, 2025 by John Howson

I wonder how many readers of this blog in the United Kingdom remember the passing of the The Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955? The passing of the law in Australia banning those under 16 from a slew of social media platforms jogged my memory of the campaign in the 1950s to ban ‘horror comics’ from sale in the United Kingdom that led to the passing of the legislation.

These comics were imported from the USA, and created something of a panic. Interestingly, it was the Communist Party that started the drive to ban such comics, but it wasn’t until the campaign gathered mainstream support from those that would never vote for a communist candidate that the conservative government of the day took notice and action.

See Wikipedia Comics Campaign Council – Wikipedia for more details. I recall the debate about these comics in our household as a primary school pupil at the time, although I never actually saw any of the offending titles. This was, perhaps, my first awareness of the power of mass movements.

At the same time as that debate bout harmful publications this side of the Atlantic, there was discussion about the consequences of free local telephone calls in the USA. These were provided by the Bell Telephone Company. Films of the time showed teenage girls, and it always seems to be girls, coming home and spending all their free time on the phone to friends they had just left at the high school gate.

For landline phone or the 1950s, read mobile phones of the 2020s.

The Bishop of Blackburn in his ‘Thought for the day’ on BBC Radio 4 this morning made the interesting point that perhaps the cuts to youth services and the decline in alternative activities in a society, where adults don’t have time to volunteer in the way that they used to do, might have left young people with fewer opportunities, so that interacting with a phone or screen has replaced the comment that ‘he always has his nose in a book’.

I think that the bishop has a point. The problem with the Australian move is twofold. Firstly, it doesn’t offer anything in the place of the banned activity, and secondly, and more worrying for the governing party in Australia, is whether there will there be any long-term consequences when the generation banned from social media become voters. We won’t know for a few years yet, but how long will the ban linger in memories? Of course, much depends upon what happens over the next few months.

I trust young people, but my instinct is that just banning something without wondering what will happen is not a smart political move. Anyway, can young people, better versed in the technology of the future than their elders, just use VPNs or similar to avoid the ban completely?

For most of history, governments have regulated or banned certain activities. It is only in the past half century that freedom rather than censorship has been the watchword. Is the pendulum of public opinion, and hence government action, now starting to swing in the other direction?

ITT becomes more cosmopolitan

Posted on December 5, 2025 by John Howson

Over the past few years, the percentage of the total number of graduates training to be a teacher coming from the United Kingdom has fallen, year on year. On the other hand, the percentage of trainees on these courses from both EEA and ‘other’ countries has increased.

YEAR	UK	EEA	OTHER	KNOWN	% OTHER	% EEA	EEA + OTHER
16/17	23658	1295	506	25459	2%	5%	7%
17/18	24223	1294	532	26049	2%	5%	7%
18/19	26550	1422	634	28606	2%	5%	7%
19/20	26562	1470	806	28838	3%	5%	8%
20/21	31418	1747	919	34084	3%	5%	8%
21/22	27628	1210	823	29661	3%	4%	7%
22/23	20019	1201	722	21942	3%	5%	9%
23/24	19363	880	1053	21296	5%	4%	9%
24/25	20586	1381	1351	23318	6%	6%	12%
25/26	22492	1543	2082	26117	8%	6%	14%

The table has been abstracted from the DfE data catalogue associated with the annual ITT census.https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/initial-teacher-training-census/2025-26

This year, trainees from countries in the ‘other’ group accounted for a record eight per cent of postgraduate trainees. Taken together with the percentage from EEA countries, some 14% of the current cohort of postgraduate trainees were from these two groups. The home student total was still 86%, but that is the national figure.

This influx of overseas trainees has helped the government meet more of its targets for secondary subjects than had it just had to rely upon home-based students to fill the places. These cosmopolitan students bring fresh perspectives that will help widen the experience of the home students they are studying alongside.

However, as my previous post suggested, these ‘overseas’ trainees are not likely to be spready evenly across courses, or across the country. A significant number will be on courses in London, while few will be on courses located a significant distance from the capital.

What matters more, is what happens to these trainees at the end of their courses. Will they be able to enter the labour market for teachers, and be provided work visas.as important, after training in England, will they want to teacher in this country or will they look to the rapidly expanding international school market for employment opportunities.

Interestingly, of the nearly 4,500 vacancies currently listed on the DfE job site, only 18 appear to say that ‘visas can be sponsored’. No doubt, when faced with a great trainee and a vacancy that might prove a challenge to fill, attitudes might alter. However, none of the current physics posts sponsor visa students.

Why am I interested in this data? Mostly because the DfE seems to think its job is done with the publication of the ITT census, and the provision of a vacancy website.

Ever since I founded TeachVac in 2013, I have been of the firm belief that as local authorities recede into the background with regard to schooling, so central government needs to know more about the workings of the labour market for teachers. If all 3,500 non-UK trainees didn’t teach in state schools in England, and a number of UK citizens decided to teach overseas, what would be the implications for schools across England? And what would it do to the agenda of lifting young people out of poverty?

Ethnic minority trainee teachers: still huge regional differences in trainee numbers

Posted on December 4, 2025 by John Howson

1n the autumn of 1997, Baroness Estelle Morris, at that time a junior minister in the DfE, in the new Labour government of Tony Blair, opened a conference about recruiting more ethnic minority students to become a teacher. The conference was organised by the then Teacher Training Agency. That conference was held in East London, and was followed by two more in Leeds and Birmingham.

Fast forward to the ITT census produced by the DfE today, and ask the question: how successful has the campaign to recruit certain ethnic groups into teaching been since that first conference nearly 30 years ago? Initial teacher training: trainee number census 2025 to 2026 – GOV.UK

Looking at the group that has found most difficultly in becoming a teacher over the years – Black African/Black Caribbean – there still seem to be big challenges looking at today’s data. Whether these are because students from this ethnic grouping aren’t attracted to parts of the country where there are few of their compatriots or whether there are other reasons cannot be determined just from the numbers.

However, over 500 courses have no candidates recorded from this group in the data published in Table 12 today. Just over 900 courses have between one and four candidates from the ethnic group. A further 83 courses have the number suppressed as being too low, as it might allow an individual to be identified.

A quick review of courses with the highest percentage (over 50% of each course code) shows that 24 are courses run by providers in London; just three are from outside London, and for three the name does not provide a clue to the location.

Looking at the courses with more than 100 candidates from the Black ethnic group: four are located in London – two each from UCL and Teach First – and the fifth is a national SCITT.

As might be expected, the University of East London, and several other London post 1992 universities, feature in the list of providers with between 25% and 50% of course numbers from the Black group, each with several courses in this percentage range. Most other pre-1992 universities and other post-1992 universities and the SCITTs in London have many of their courses in the 15%-25% group of providers. Few, if any, London providers feature in the list with zero percentage from the black group.

While it is good that courses in London do seem to be attracting applications from the Black ethnic group, there are still many courses in large parts of the country where that seems not to be the case. Does this matter? Would a ‘token’ representative on a single course in an institution be anything more than a token. Should we encourage such students to be trailblazers r should we accept that outside of the conurbations and a few university towns, graduates from the black ethnic group are still relatively rare.

I went to school in the 1960s with one of the few Black pupils in the school. He went on to become a teacher when Black teachers were even thinner on the ground than now, even in London.

So, there has been some progress, but not enough.

Teachers still need more holidays

Posted on December 2, 2025 by John Howson

The DfE recently released the results of the latest study into teacher workload and attitudes to teaching as a career. Working lives of teachers and leaders – wave 4 summary report

There is some good news for the government in the report, not least on pay, where teachers seem slightly more content about pay than a few years ago. It makes the possibility of industrial action less likely than before the recent pay awards.

This improvement in attitude may also partly be down to the fact that hours worked, as reported in the survey, have been reducing. Primary teachers were working 1.8 hours less per week in the 2025 survey than in the 2022 survey, and secondary school teachers, 1.9 hours less. Leaders work longer hours than teachers, but have also seen a slight fall in recorded hours worked.

Phase	2022	2023	2024	2025
Primary Teachers	53.2	53.9	52.5	51.4
Primary Leaders	57.2	57.9	57.6	56.5
Secondary Teachers	51.2	51.4	50.3	49.3
Secondary Leaders	54.7	55.5	54.8	52.8

Source Table 3.2 Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders Working lives of teachers and leaders – wave 4 summary report

My blog about ‘how much holiday do teachers have?’ that appeared on 20^th May 2022 has received more views than any other post on this blog; notching up over 6,000 views.

As a result, I thought that it would be interesting to see what the latest figures mean for teachers’ holidays. Assuming a normal week of 40 hours – yes on the high side, but stay with the calculations – this produces an average overtime of between 9.3 hours for a secondary school teacher and 17.3 for a secondary school leader.

phase	notional	actual	Difference in 2025	38 weeks	weeks hours/40
PT	40	51.4	11.4	433	11
PL	40	56.5	16.5	627	16
ST	40	49.3	9.3	353	9
SL	40	57.3	17.3	657	16

Now, multiply that overtime by 38 weeks, on the assumption that similar amount of time is spent working each week during the time pupils are in school (the use of 40 hours provides some leeway for lighter and heavier weeks. This provides a gross number of hours which when if divided by 40 produces unpaid overtime in weeks. The outcomes are

Primary Teachers 11 weeks

Secondary Teachers 9 weeks

Primary and secondary leaders 16 weeks.

Now, using the 38 weeks worked, and ignoring the 5 CPD days, that leaves 14 weeks for holidays and compensation for term-time working. On these calculations, school leaders receive no compensation, and thus no holiday under these calculations, while primary teachers have 3 weeks holiday and secondary teachers 5 weeks holiday.

Of course, pay may compensate for the additional workload, even if not paid as overtime. Personally, I doubt, except for the most well paid headteachers that the time teachers work is well fully compensated, if these numbers are correct.

The teachers’ contract is not radically different to the one I signed in 1971 with regard to holidays. My graduate colleagues outside of teaching have seen significant improvements in their holiday entitlements over the years since 1971 – many will not be working for two weeks over Christmas and the New Year, and if they are, they will receive time off in lieu.

Hopefully, as school rolls fall, the working week of teachers will also continue to reduce, especially with more sensible approaches to tasks such as marking and preparation. However, there is still a long way to go for teachers to feel that they genuinely have the same of holidays entitlement as most other graduates.

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

Tag Archives: politics