Tag Archives: politics

100 not out

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When I used to write a weekly column for the TES it would have taken me about two and a half years to write 100 columns as a result of holidays and other interruptions. By contrast, I only started this blog in January of 2013, and have reached a century of posts before the year is out, even though I originally aimed at only one post a week. I reckon that’s now about 50,000 words, give or take a few.

Although I started with the intention of just continuing to write about education data, the topics I have covered have broadened somewhat during the past 10 months to encompass other education issues. So, I thought that I would think about my personal top three posts in this the 100th post.

My personal top three posts are:

Sunshine, but political and personal sadness  – posted on 17th July

National Poetry Day  – posted on 3rd October

STEM subjects lead retreat from teaching – posted on 7th August

The first, and one of the most viewed, tells of my sorrow at the death of a leading Liberal Democrat education activist and the departure from the Party for other reasons of another former activist. The National Poetry Day poem is one that tried to link together school history and the First World War by starting with the notion of a school trip to the killing grounds of France. Unlike many poems it starts in the third person but switches to the first person as a pupil reflects on what might have happened had he been born a century earlier. The third post was the part of a sequence about initial teacher education that charted the debate about recruitment and the new routes for training teachers. This particular post found me in hot water with some people who didn’t agree with what I wrote.

So, where does the blog go from here? After a period when there has been little data to write about, suddenly it seems much more data is becoming available once again. That should provide me with plenty to write about over the next couple of months providing I can find the time to do so.

I would also like to thank the many readers from this country and around the world that have sent me comments about particular posts. To date, there have been nearly 6,000 views from people on all continents, although South America and Africa are less well presented than Europe and Asia. Perhaps that to be expected because of language and internet issues. As might be expected with a blog of this type, the bulk of the views have come from within the United Kingdom, and I am grateful to those who regularly re-blog my thoughts to others.

I now look forward to the next 100 posts or perhaps the milestone will be 250 rather than 200, with a target date of the end of 2014. But, as government over time have found, targets can be a double-edged sword: so we shall see.

 

Did the PM see this one coming?

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Ofsted put a secondary school in the Prime Minister’s constituency into special measures this week. This was the second secondary school in Oxfordshire to go into special measures in less than a year. Between the two schools they garnered a score of seven out of eight possible Grade 4s, with a clean sweep only being prevented by the Grade 2 in the pupil behaviour and safety category awarded to the latest school to enter special measures . The fact that the latest school to be put into special measures was graded ‘outstanding’ last time Ofsted came to call in 2010 must also be matter for some concern.

In the same week Tory MP Nick Boles said he wanted more freedom for head teachers to employ who they want, and not be told by the State who can teach, so presumably he would not agree with the ban imposed by Ofsted on both these schools employing newly qualified teachers. But that is a sideline to the big question of who is responsible for allowing these two schools in middle England to deteriorate to a point where they are judged inadequate? As I know from personal experience, the lack of a middle tier overseeing schools has proved a problem. Last year, a Report suggested the creation of Education Commissioners along the lines of the Police and Crime Commissioners elected last November across most of England. Rumours in the press now suggest that Michael Gove’s officials are considering going further with the idea of unelected officials to oversee the running, and presumably the improvement, of schools. Apparently, this would be a job for former head teachers. On the basis that each ‘controller’ was responsible for 100 schools, that might require around 200 new appointments, with no doubt nine seniors across the regions, and a chief ‘controller’ of schools.

For such a scheme to work, local authorities would need to lose their remaining powers over education, as it would be nonsensical to have two competing bodies trying to achieve the same end. As I have said in the past, such a move would effectively be the completion of the process of the nationalisation of schools started by Mrs Thatcher’s government with grant maintained schools that would bring schooling in line with health as a Westminster function. I don’t see why local councillors should have to wrestle with thorny issues such as paying for school transport and policing absence among pupils, as well as deciding how schools admit pupils, if they have no effective powers to manage the system to best effect when balancing education and costs.

Local authorities could, under such a national system, act more effectively in their role as parents, and challenge school ‘controllers when they felt that schools were not being successful. How ‘controllers’ would respond to challenges from either councils or parents if they were unelected appointees is an interesting question. But, it is not one that has ever seemed to bother the health service, or indeed further education in the twenty years since it was divested from local authority oversight. How much freedom would be allowed to the faith groups and others that now operate schools would be an interesting question that no doubt officials are considering at the present time.

For the Prime Minister, the issue is more parochial, will a school going into special measures cost more votes if it is a national school or will it be better if he can still blame the local authority for the shortcomings?

Do we need a Board?

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Much fuss is being made this morning over whether the Revd Flowers had the right expertise to chair a bank, and whether the regulators took any action to ensure his fitness for the post. Being chairman of a Board is an important post, arguably as important as the role of Chief Executive, but in a different way. For that reason it is unfortunate that unlike Ofsted or Qfqual the teaching profession no longer has a board to oversee the actions of the full-time officials working in the field of teacher preparation and development.

When the TTA and its successors in title were non-departmental bodies they had a Board to which the Chief Executive nominally reported. That did allow for some debate about issues of teacher preparation and development. It may not always have been the most challenging of Boards, but at least it was there. The same was true for the National College. Since the functions of teacher preparation and development have been taken back into the Department no such balance now exists, and the only checks on what is happening are either through the media or the parliamentary process. The absence of a balance to the Executive may well account for the extra scrutiny that teacher preparation changes have come under this year. However, to the good, there has been much more data published by the Department than in previous years, including the recent profiles of 2011-12 teaching graduates. Used properly, these data can help inform the debate.

It was inevitable that a switch to School Direct as a training route, especially for secondary teachers, would attract attention, as any change where there are winners and losers always does. Might a NCSL Board have aired some of the issues it has been left to the professional associations, politicians and participants in the teacher education process to raise in public? I would have hoped so. That is why I have worked with Chris Waterman to suggest the government establish an Advisory Committee on Teacher Supply and Training in order to bring together those concerned with the long-term development of a world-class teaching profession rather than just leave decisions to politicians and officials whose horizon rarely extends beyond the next funding cycle, and only as an election approaches beyond the end of the present parliament or term of office of the Secretary of State.

Next week sees the publication of the ITT Census for 2013, and the extent to which teaching has retain its glamour as a profession in all subjects and phases will become apparent. This week, the new UCAS application system is to go live, and the first applications by graduates wanting to train in 2014 as teachers will start to be made. Undergraduates have been applying ever since the UCAS system opened.

I hope 2014 will be a good year for recruitment, but I am pessimistic about whether the government has done enough to attract sufficient high quality applicants with the right range of academic knowledge into the profession. After all, social mobility will definitely be hindered if we run into another teacher supply crisis, even in just one part of the country.

Teachers are not born but made

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I want my doctor to stand up every time I enter the surgery; take my blood pressure at every appointment, and write clearly in handwriting I can read. Actually, delete the last requirement since doctors all use word processors these days, and replace it with a requirement to write in language I can understand. This should be part of all their basis training. Now, I would never presume to impose training requirements on doctors, because as a lay person I have views, but not the expertise to do so, but I do expect them to be trained, and GP training can take four years.

In education it is different; perhaps because everyone went to some sort of school, commentators of all descriptions feel free to pronounce not only what training is needed for teachers but that no training is needed at all. Teachers are born they conclude, and don’t require to be made. Speaking from personal experience that view is just plain bunkum. Let me remind you what was said 50 years ago:

“In the primary and secondary modern schools teaching methods and techniques, with all the specialized knowledge that lies behind them, are as essential as mastery of subject matter. The prospect of these schools staffed to an increasing extent by untrained graduates is, in our view, intolerable.”

Now I am perfectly sure that anyone with the appropriate subject knowledge can teach after a fashion in private schools where parents and children want to succeed, and classroom management isn’t an issue. But even in the selective school I attended in the 1950s and 1960s there were untrained graduate teachers that couldn’t control classes. I recall one sixth form teacher prevented from starting a lesson by the ‘A’ level group placing the desks between the window wall and the door so that he was effectively barred from entering the classroom. Insubordination was not uncommon, and often vicious and personal in its manifestation. Untrained teachers often didn’t have any skills to combat this until they learnt them on the job over time; some learnt faster than others; and some never learnt them at all.

In January 1971, I embarked on my own career as a teacher by joining the staff of Tottenham School in Haringey. I was an untrained graduate persuaded to fill a casual vacancy by a head desperate to have a full staffroom that January. Frankly, I taught nothing to anyone for the first two terms. I had no skills, but lots of subject knowledge I couldn’t pass on to the pupils. Gradually, over the next five years I acquired the skills so that I believe that I could eventually teach any group of pupils and also manage the other parts of a teacher’s role to the level required in those days; a much lower standard than is required today. Along the way I resorted to all sorts of interesting control techniques such as Friday afternoon films played backwards through the projector as a reward for good behaviour, and punishing whole classes for the poor behaviour of a few pupils. I noticed that many of the trained teachers made much better progress than I achieved with pupils, but the lure of a salary was too great rather than a return to college for another year.

Interestingly, when I started working in teacher education in the 1980s I found the same lack of training for tutors. There was no training in classroom observation or understanding of how to be an effective trainer of adults as opposed to teacher of children.

Teaching is not an easy profession, not because it is difficult to acquire the subject knowledge, but because it is a challenge to pass that knowledge on to the next generation. Parental pressure to learn may help with some children but except where the school can threaten to remove the pupil that alone is not enough to bolster a graduate armed with subject knowledge and nothing else or to support them in the classroom and in their wider responsibilities for young people across 190 days of the year.

More than 150 years ago this was recognised by those recruiting teachers for elementary schools, and also by Dickens in his novels where teachers and educators receive something of a mixed press. Let me end with a quote from The National Society Annual Report of 1842 about selecting trainee teachers:

It is not every person who can be fitted for the office of schoolteacher. Good temper and good sense, gentleness coupled with firmness, a certain seriousness of character blended with cheerfulness, and even liveliness of disposition and manner; a love of children, and that sympathy with their feelings which experience alone can never supply – such are the moral requirements which we seek in those to whom we commit the education of the young.

This was the criteria from which they wished to add the training, recognising even then that these qualities alone were insufficient to make good teachers. It seems that some will never learn.

Private education, but State Funded?

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As a nation, can we afford private education funded by taxation? For that is surely what Nick Clegg was offering when he said in his keynote speech earlier today:

“But I am totally unapologetic for believing that, as we continue to build a new type of state funded school system – in which parents are presented with a dizzying range of independent, autonomous schools, each with its own different specialism, ethos or mission “

So if you want a school for your child, and are prepared to meet the food standards, follow the National Curriculum, and employ qualified teachers, my Party, the Lib Dems, will fund it even if there is another school down the road. As a result could every humanist is a village with a Church of England primary school have an academy that looks like a typical community school even though both schools will be half empty? I bet the Treasury wouldn’t approve that. But, Nick might, of course, have been talking only about urban areas.

With the huge rise in the pupil population that is occurring over the next decade we will certainly need more school places, as David Laws discussed for two hours yesterday with the Education Select Committee members at Westminster. But, choice, and a funding guarantee for existing schools, plus the Pupil Premium, means any further inflow of pupil numbers from hard-pressed parents currently paying for school fees that now want the State to pay for their child’s education, but on their own terms in respect to ethos and mission, and presumably admission criteria, and who might see this parental guarantee as a good deal, will cost the State money to finance the switch of sectors for these children. In 2002, I calculated that the cost of such a transfer might be more than £2 billion, and it would certainly be more now. It might even bring back many of the former direct grant day schools that left the state system over the issue of comprehensive intakes in the 1970s since they presumably meet most of the criteria set by Mr Clegg.

If this huge influx of new schools happens in the secondary sector over the next few years, then either other services will be less well funded or taxes will have to rise.

Nick’s other big idea, of superheads for failing schools, has been tried before with mixed results. The difference this time is that he seems to expect these new head teachers to take the job for the long-haul rather just until the school improves. But that’s what every chairman says when they appoint a new football manager. If these superheads are to be employed by Whitehall, then it is another nail in the coffin of local authorities’ involvement in education. After all, until recently, Oxfordshire and many other authorities had a pool of primary heads to undertake just this sort of role, and they already knew the school and the area. The money might be better spent identifying what works for schools that are under-performing, and providing local help and support. In some cases it might mean a new head, but in others raising aspirations or dealing with a problem outside the school that is affecting a group of children may be what is needed to raise performance.

Parents not Chains under future Labour?

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There was quite a contrast between Ed Davey and Tristram Hunt on the BBC’s  Andrew Marr show this morning, and it went beyond just sartorial elegance. Ed Davey turned up in a jacket and tie to match the dress code of the show’s presenter whereas Mr Hunt was fashionably open-necked, with hair that was either an expert coiffure or just dishevelled, depending on your point of view.

Their mastery of the questioning also revealed a Minister who has been in post for a year and a shadow spokesperson with less than a week in the job. Tristram Hunt was tempted by Mr Marr into the higher education debate, despite it presumably not being within his brief. It was difficult to square his enthusiasm for polytechnics with his reluctance to expand higher education provision. How could polytechnics be created by Labour? One way would be to re-brand some existing universities, if they would agree. Another would be to re-grade some colleges of further education as polys. But, that would mean either depriving existing universities of places or increasing the number of degree places available, something Mr Hunt didn’t appear to think a good idea. Clearly, it is work in progress somewhere in the Labour team.

On schools, I welcome his attention to the need for qualified teachers, although he wasn’t pressed on what this might mean, except in the area of national pay where his answer didn’t reveal anything about Labour policy, just that most schools still follow the national norms: would Labour make them do so? Parent led free schools – why don’t we just call them academies and have done with the confusion – seems like a bit of a –U- turn in more ways than one. Brown Labour under Ed Balls favoured sponsored academies, and the formation of chains, so separate schools, but only where there is a need, suggests more primary schools but few secondary schools would be approved under Labour. So how would Mr Hunt get more of the UTC or Studio schools he extolled when talking about the JCB Academy, a school that is supported and named after the company run by the Tory peer. Such schools are unlikely to be founded by parents and, anyway, for the next few years we won’t need many new secondary schools, even if we need more vocational courses. Where local authorities fit into the picture, if indeed they do under Labour, wasn’t mentioned at all.

Primary education didn’t rate a mention either which was a shame given the importance of the sector. Overall, there didn’t seem much of a leftward drift, more a ‘don’t frighten the horses’ approach. The content of the recent OECD Report was batted away, although the subsequent discussion did seem to reveal that 16-18 education might feature in Labour’s thinking. Will they return the FE sector to the education department, or at least full responsibility for 16-19 education and training, now that the participation age has been raised? Both Labour and the Tories seem confused about where this sector of education policy should sit in government, and both might do well to study the Lib Dems detailed policy paper ‘Learning for Life’ http://www.libdems.org.uk/siteFiles/resources/docs/conference/2013%20Autumn/Policy/110%20-%20Learning%20for%20Life.pdf that formed the basis for the conference motion passed in September 2013 at Glasgow.

Overall, the parent run academy approach isn’t startlingly new since Labour re-invented the academy principle of Westminster-funded schools despite having abolished the former Tory created Grant Maintained Schools after the 1997 election. What is new is who will be allowed to run them. Labour at Westminster seems happy to fund ‘private schools on the rates’. Whether it will appeal to the wider Party only time will tell.

Finally, as I have mentioned in a previous blog, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Report entitled ‘Half our Future’ that dealt with those pupils then largely being educated in secondary modern schools. As a historian Mr Hunt might have gained some kudos for recognising the importance of that report as well as the failure of the Atlee Government to properly implement both the technical schools and ‘county colleges’ of the 1944 Education Act.

Consensus: but on whose terms?

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When advisers to Ministers write long extended essays you wonder how they have the time on their hands to do so, and whether they are looking for a role once they leave the sanctuary of the Minister’s entourage.

Here are extracts from some of the claims about education in an essay by the education secretary’s adviser Dominic Cummings[1]

The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre. A tiny number, less than 1 percent, are educated in the basics of how the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ provides the ‘language of nature’ and a foundation for our scientific civilisation and  only a small subset of that <1% then study trans-disciplinary issues concerning the understanding, prediction and control of complex nonlinear systems. Unavoidably, the level of one’s mathematical understanding imposes limits on the depth to which one can explore many subjects. For example, it is impossible to follow academic debates about IQ unless one knows roughly what ‘normal distribution’ and ‘standard deviation’ mean, and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability. Only a few aspects of this problem will be mentioned.

There is widespread dishonesty about standards in English schools, low aspiration even for the brightest children, and a common view that only a small fraction of the population, a subset of the most able, should be given a reasonably advanced mathematical and scientific education, while many other able pupils leave school with little more than basic numeracy and some scattered,

soon-forgotten facts. A reasonable overall conclusion from international comparisons, many studies, and how universities have behaved, is that overall standards have roughly stagnated over the past thirty years (at best), there are fewer awful schools, the sharp rises in GCSE results reflect easier exams rather than real educational improvements, and the skills expected of the top 20 percent of the ability range studying core A Level subjects significantly declined (while private schools continued to teach beyond A Levels), hence private schools have continued to dominate Oxbridge entry while even the best universities have had to change degree courses substantially.

There is hostility to treating education as a field for objective scientific research to identify what different methods and resources might achieve for different sorts of pupils. The quality of much education research is poor. Randomised control trials (RCTs) are rarely used to evaluate programmes costing huge amounts of money. They were resisted by the medical community for decades (‘don’t challenge my expertise with data’) and this attitude still pervades education. There are many ‘studies’ that one cannot rely on and which have not been replicated. Methods are often based on technological constraints of centuries ago, such as lectures. Square wheels are repeatedly reinvented despite the availability of exceptional materials and subject experts are routinely ignored by professional ‘educationalists’. There is approximately zero connection between a) debates in Westminster and the media about education and b) relevant science, and little desire to make such connections or build the systems necessary; almost everybody prefers the current approach despite occasional talk of ‘evidence-based policy’. The political implications of discussing the effects of evolutionary influences on the variance of various characteristics (such as intelligence (‘g’) and conscientiousness) and the gaps between work done by natural scientists and much ‘social science’ commentary have also prevented rational public discussion.

Now Mr Cummings goes on to make many other claims in his 250 page essay, many of which I disagree with. However, I do think that many politicians have spent too much of the last half century dealing with issues about the organisation of education, and other relatively less important matters, while too often letting the big questions go unanswered, and sometimes even ignoring them completely.

I sense from his essay that Mr Cummings may be a deeply frustrated man after his period advising the Secretary of State, and I can sympathise with him. Those who made education a political football in the 1970s, mostly over the issue of non-selective secondary schooling, meant that I have spent my adult life in an environment that all too often thought if one side championed a policy it was obviously wrong, and should be reserved. It would be better if, we could create a new consensus so that as a country we can identify the key issues for change in our education system, and work towards improving them. Locally, all political parties have worked to improve standards in primary schools, but not together. For whatever Mr Cummings has to say about the secondary schools and higher education, it is in the primary schools that the foundations of learning are developed. Hopefully, this takes place alongside the child’s home and the work done within the family, but we have yet to tackle successive generational failure in this area. This is an aspect of schooling where focussed research should help by harnessing the benefits of those that achieve success with this group.

Mr Cummings has the wisdom of youth. I am reminded of that passage from Acts Chapter 2 where the writer says in the words of Mr Gove’s beloved King James translation:  ‘the young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’.  Sentiment similar to that found the words of the Old Testament prophet Joel.  Visions are necessary to replenish what we as humans strive for in the future. Personally, despite my no doubt qualifying for the title ‘old man’ in the mind of the writers of those Bible passages, I still have a vision of an improved primary school system based upon better teacher preparation and higher status for those that teach our young children. To achieve just that would be a major step forward.

Now Mr Cummings is keen on the importance mathematics, and also an understanding of statistics, so I offer him the following equation about education that I first wrote about in 2007 in a chapter I contributed to a book called ‘Reinventing the State’. My equation went as follows:

Performance = Pounds (for resources) + People (Sufficiently appropriately trained staff) + Premises (School buildings fit for purpose) + Pedagogy (An appropriate curriculum and learning methods).

To the original algorithm I added a fifth ‘P’ for Parents since, as I have already acknowledged, their role is vital. Now of course we can discuss the relative weighting of each element, but Mr Cummings is right to look for research evidence to drive success forward.

I have ignored the headline grabbing part of Mr Cummings’ essay about nature v nurture and the possible ‘showers of blood’ because others will focus on those aspects of the essay. However, the Select Committee is currently exploring the lack of achievement by White Working class boys in our school system, as this is a factor holding back a large group in society from future achievement in life, so perhaps Mr Cummings will let them know what he believes will work.

Not a transport of delight

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As a teenager 50 years ago I used to listen to the BBC’s Round Britain Quiz and puzzle over the cryptic questions set for the teams. So I thought that I would set one of my own for this blog. What links together the representation of Downton Abbey, the RAF, and a school established over 600 years ago? And how might the Prime Minster have needed to keep an eye on the outcome?

Anyone who sat through the Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet meeting yesterday afternoon will have had no difficulty answering the question set above. But, for everyone else, I have added an explanation at the end of this piece.

Home to school transport has always proved a contentious issue in time of government spending cuts, as the rules, although seemingly simple, are often challenging to enforce fairly. Basically, the principle established many years ago is that children under eight don’t have any access to free transport if the distance to school is less than two miles unless the route is unsafe. For those between the ages of 8 and 16 the distance increases to three miles by a safe route. Changes to existing policy can have significant implications for those who live in rural counties such as Oxfordshire. Since the passing of the 1980 Education Act the issue of parental choice, and the ‘duty’ of authorities to do their best to meet parental preferences, has caused significant issues as it has made the status of ‘catchment areas’ or ‘designated schools’ much less rigid in meaning. Additionally, local authorities are still charged to do nothing that is ‘prejudicial to the efficient use of resources’.

After the county elections this May, Oxfordshire County Council embarked on a consultation to change their present travel arrangements. The consequence of that process came to a head at the cabinet meeting yesterday where the decision was taken to start the whole process again in the autumn after the level of opposition from schools, parents, and the community proved overwhelming. The actual reason given was that the DfE, who had placed new ‘guidance’ on their web site in March – and thus triggered the local review and consultation, had announced a –U- turn and dumped the March guidance and returned to the status quo ante by restoring the 2007 guidance. Interestingly, nobody challenged whether the 2007 guidance affected the consultation in any way, but I suspect that there was great relief among the ruling Conservative and Independent Alliance Group or CIA that currently governs Oxfordshire.

Much of the challenge to the consultation is centred on a small number of schools, many within the Prime Minister’s own constituency, where one secondary school was in favour and another against the changes. There are certainly anomalies that have grown up over the years across the county, and it will be interesting to see whether the new consultation goes back to first principles or tries to bury the problem.

Looming in the background is the issue of how the County deals with free schools, academies, studio schools and UTCs. I am reminded that the 2007 Guidance said:

The Secretary of State expects that local authorities may wish to exercise this discretionary power to ensure that pupils whose parents had expressed a preference for a vocational education at a 14-19 vocational academy were not denied the opportunity to do so by the lack of, or the cost of transport arrangements to such a school. Local authorities should use this power to facilitate attendance at a vocational academy where the school’s catchment area included all, or part of the local authority’s area. Where such pupils were from low income backgrounds, then such arrangements should be free of charge.

This part of the guidance has implications for the cost of transport to the new UTC in Didcot and the Studio School in Banbury, and may cause other schools to ponder whether it might affect their post 14 numbers if free transport was offered.

Perhaps, with the raising of the statutory learning age to 18, it is time for central government to review the whole set of principles behind home to school transport in an age of parental and even student choice. What worked in the uncomplicated state school system of the Nineteenth Century may not be appropriate for the Twenty First. Perhaps, travelling costs could be free for all, as in London, or be added to tax credits of Child Benefit? There is certainly, time for a wider debate than just what happens in Oxfordshire.

The answer to the question set above. Bampton features as the village in the TV series Downton Abbey. Many families from the RAF at Brize Norton send their children to secondary school in either Carterton or Burford. The secondary school in Burford traces its history back many centuries. All these towns are in the Prime minister’s Witney constituency. And the school bus from Bampton effectively goes past Carterton Secondary School on its way to Burford School. The former is an 11-16 school; the latter an 11-18 school. One or other might be affected depending on whether Oxfordshire changes the rules or not.

How to make a profit out of education

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Yesterday Nick Clegg quite rightly slapped down the idea that state-funded schools could be run for profit. It is doubtful whether any Liberal Democrat would go along with the idea of mainstream schooling as a business venture based on government funding. That’s not to say that you cannot make money out of schools. Of course you can, as textbook suppliers, purveyors of examinations, facilities companies, bus and coach operators, and a myriad of other service providers including in these days of academy conversions lawyers, accountants and insurance brokers, not to mention those architects who designed the ‘Schools for the Future’ under the Blair government, have all demonstrated. But, as a society we bulk at anyone operating the essential learning experience as a profit-making enterprise.

But that isn’t the experience everywhere. Especially in locations such as The Gulf, where schooling isn’t provided by the State for the children of expatriate workers, there is a flourishing and profit-making private sector in education. No doubt in many cases you pay for what you get. And, this is where the defining line is drawn. In Britain the State has determined both the price and the expected standard of schooling it wants. The fact that thinking is muddled about both these points doesn’t obscure the view that as the investor in education the State doesn’t expect anyone who hasn’t taken a risk to benefit from the spending on education.

Now there is nothing to stop anyone setting up a private school that makes a profit, and there have been examples through history of such schools, especially in the vocational and training fields. Since State Education is not compulsory in England, and is only the default position, any parent can elect to pay a private company to teach their children. Indeed, it can be argued that many do by paying for both tutoring services and for revision classes ahead of GCSE and ‘A’ level examinations. In practice nobody knows how much of any schools exam performance is down to parental spend on such activities. Indeed, it might be worth Osfted asking parents about the steps they take to supplement the school’s own efforts at educating their offspring. In some areas something of a mixed economy might emerge.

There have long been questions about the different cost per pupil of services provided under different arrangements between schools and their suppliers and, as academies in their many different guises proliferate, this is an area that will need tightening up if governments are to achieve value for money with taxpayers’ funds. I don’t expect schools to be the next ‘expenses scandal’ because there are too many potential whistle-blowers around, but a canny Minister might establish a Value for Money Unit at Sanctuary Buildings that can review funding agreements ahead of the creation of a national schools funding formula before the Public Accounts Committee tells him to after uncovering some excesses.

More interesting in its outcome than the debate about ‘for profit’ schools will probably be the effects of the de-regulation of teachers’ pay. Anyone who has read the conclusions in the 22nd Report from the School Teachers’ Review Body may well decide that making this change at a point where the wider economy seems to be reviving, and demand for graduates is increasing, especially in London and South East, might have the opposite effect to what Minsters may have intended, by increasing pay not cutting it.

Good schools for all or just for some?

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Should society concentrate on making entry to good schools fairer rather than trying to expand the number of good schools? The Sutton Trust Report published earlier today about eligibility for free school meals at the top state schools seemingly opts for supporting the former approach. That’s not surprising since it paints a dismal picture where in the top 500 comprehensive schools the overall rate of pupils eligible for free school meals is half the national average, and only 40 of the 500 top comprehensive schools have higher free school meals than the national average. Indeed, since the Sutton Trust first looked at the issue of the number of pupils on free school meals in top performing schools little has changed, except that more pupils are entitled to free school meals as a result of the recession.

Top State Schools            Local Area of school       National Average

2005 Study          3%                                          12.3%                                    14.3%  Mostly selective schools

2006 Study          5.6%                                      13.7%                                    14.3%  200 comprehensive schools

2013 Study          7.6%                                      15.2%                                    16.5%  500 comprehensive schools

Schools in the top 500 are, according to the Sutton Trust study, more likely to be faith schools; single sex schools; converter academies; voluntary aided schools. Some schools may fall into more than one of these categories. All of these types of schools control their own admissions policies.

The alternative approach, making all schools good schools, is the driver that underpins the coalition’s Pupil Premium policy of adding extra revenue support to pupils on free school meals. The top 500 comprehensive schools won’t see much of this money. The Pupil Premium policy tackles the issue of where children are now, not where the authors of the Sutton Trust study might like them to be. Interestingly, the study is silent about what would happen to pupils displaced from the top 500 schools by those on free school meals? Is it assumed that their parents would lead the drive to improve the schools their offspring ended up at?

Ever since the attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to create a rational secondary school system to replace a system designed for an age when the majority of pupils left school at 14 to join the workforce, secondary schooling has all too often been about social segregation in the urban areas, rather than a force for greater social cohesion. The philosophy inherent in the Sutton Trust report seems to be that of offering an escape route to better education for the deserving poor rather than accepting the view that being poor should not mean having to accept a lower standard of schooling from the State for your children.

A good school for all has always been the standard I want our education system to strive for. Looking at what has happened in London over the past decade shows what can be done. I believe it starts with good quality primary schools for all. As a nation we aren’t there yet, and indeed we are often too fixated about the secondary sector. I firmly believe that good primary education will mean more good secondary schools, and ease the debate about admissions policy. After all, those children who live in really rural areas generally have no choice in the matter about where they go to school: they deserve to go to a top school as much as any other child.