Tag Archives: primary

Message to schools: please don’t close down teacher training yet

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I don’t normally pay as much attention to the state of primary intakes to teacher training as perhaps I should. This is because the main focus has been on shortages in secondary. However, the latest National College newsletter for those involved in School Direct – is there such as publication for other routes – contains the following:

‘If you have filled, or are close to filling, your allocation in English, and you have evidence from your application data that you have sufficient demand to take on more trainees, you can now request additional places. Additionally, if you have filled your primary cohort, then you can now request additional primary places.

We can also confirm that we are accepting requests for new courses (where there was no initial allocation) in all subjects apart from English, primary, PE and history.’

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-direct-bulletin/initial-teacher-training-itt-recruitment-bulletin-april-2015 Publication date 19th May 2015

This seems to suggest that there are still primary places available as well as places in English. The second paragraph doesn’t make it clear whether the new courses can be for 2015 entry or are in anticipation of 2016 allocations. If the former, then some higher education providers will no doubt be asking whether they can also open new courses.

Of interest, is whether the places available are as a result of schools returning allocated School Direct places and, if so, whether they are salaried or training places? With so many vacancies located in and around London I am not sure of the wisdom of spending money re-allocating places from that part of the country to say either the North West or South West where, at least in the secondary sector, vacancies for main scale teachers are at a much lower level.

Elsewhere in this bulletin the National College acknowledges that schools may close down the application process as early as the end of May and reminds those schools to let UCAS know so that others can handle any late applications. The implications are that the system lost some of the 2,000 plus applicants arriving over the summer last year because they applied to schools that had stopped recruiting but handn’t made that fact clear. Personally, as we need as many applicants as possible, I believe that the funding agreement for School Direct should require schools to recruit throughout the summer, as higher education courses have always sought to do when there are unfilled places.

In a period of teacher shortage those operating teacher preparation programmes should all be doing everything possible to fill as many of the available places as possible, especially when these places are in areas of high need for teachers. The alternative will be to deepen the teacher recruitment crisis in 2016; surely that cannot be government policy?

The UCAS web site should also identify separately courses closed because they are full and those courses closed because the provider has decided not to accept any more applications, but has places still available. It may be that this information is already available to Ministers, but it should also be available to others so that the use of public money can be scrutinised.

Careless Talk

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The Secretary of State’s first media outing of this parliament might not have had the outcome planned. A visit to the Andrew Marr shown and an article in the Sunday Times guaranteed plenty of media exposure, plus comment elsewhere. Tackling coasting schools may play well with the Tory faithful, but might be guaranteed to upset the teacher associations, even were it to be a valid argument.

Just imagine a company with 20,000 branches that announces on national television that every branch where sales don’t increase by the national average will be taken over by a manager working in a branch with above average sales. Now the branch in leafy Surrey where the fall in sales is due to customers switching to the internet to make their purchases rather than driving to the shop might still find plenty of people wanting to be a manager. But, the branch in a rundown shopping mall in an area of relatively high unemployment might seem less attractive, especially if it was finding it difficult to recruit staff despite the high unemployment. Of course, the company could offer incentives to relocate staff as it is one big organisation and any employee keen for promotion would recognise the need to relocate.

Schooling in England isn’t yet like that. It suffers from a chronic lack of attention to governance and management that sees local authorities clinging on to their remnants of their former power in some areas; more successfully in some places than others. Then there are the churches, with lots of schools, but for too long no obvious plan for improving standards across all their schools, but a loyal workforce. Since many teachers, especially primary school teachers, train in their local area and aim to work there for their whole careers, the idea of a mobile leadership force, especially in the primary sector is quite possibly fanciful. Indeed, one wonders if the DfE has undertaken any research into the mobility of the teaching force and its leadership, let alone into how many school leaders would need to relocate to tackle the coasting school issue. If none, then the Secretary of State really was guilty of careless talk.

Perhaps it was just a shot across the bows. After all both Nick Clegg and David Laws had proposed plans when in government to create a national cadre of school leaders – see previous posts discussing the idea – so may be this was just an extension of those ideas, but less well articulated. For there are schools that need encouragement to do better, if not for all their pupils, but for some groups whether the least able or the middle attainers or even the most able if their results are being supported by the parents that pay for private tuition and revision classes.

However, until we have an understanding of the shape and lines of control of our school system and whether it is a collaborative or competitive system, it is difficult to see how parachuting leaders into schools on the basis of external assessments will bring improvement to the system as a whole.

Indeed, it might make matters worse if it both dissuades teachers from taking on leadership roles and makes teaching look an unattractive career to new entrants, where the rewards don’t match the risks. We need to get the best from those that work in schools, Michael Gove didn’t, and it is unlikely Nicky Morgan will if she doesn’t balance the waved stick with some sensible use of the carrot.

Was Professor Halsey right after all?

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Educational Priority Areas grew out of the desire in the 1960s to improve the quality of education for those children living in the most deprived parts of the country. Now over half a century later we find the government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission that is chaired by a Labour politician and includes a former Tory Secretary of State for Education among its members recommending paying teachers 25% more to work in the most deprived schools as an experiment in improving outcomes for disadvantaged children. Well that sounds very like the Schools of Exceptional difficulty payments introduced under Margaret Thatcher’s regime when she was Edward Heath’s Education Secretary. This idea along with the instruction to Teach First to extend to certain coastal fringe areas this seems like another step in the move away from a free-market economics of education solution to a more planned and directed outcome to a problem that has be-devilled this country; the gaps in attainment between different social classes.

The Commission’s idea that the Pay Review Body might designate a new pay category that was non-geographical and thus unlike the present arrangements is really a challenge to the free market and comes remarkably swiftly after the abolition of national pay scales by the previous Secretary of State. The Commission noted that few academies had made use of the powers over pay that had been available to them in the past and this seems to have been one of the reasons for them advocating a more interventionist approach. Elsewhere, the Commission seem to have a somewhat fanciful notion of what local authorities can now achieve. It is all very well using the example of the London Challenge, but that was developed in a timeframe before the wholesale introduction of academies and free schools decimated local authority education departments. Realistically, the Commission needs to pay more attention to how far the complexity of running today’s school system may be adding to the very issue that they are trying to solve. As regular reads know, I would prefer local democratic involvement, especially in the primary school sector, but even more I would prefer a coherent management and leadership regime for the whole system that is dedicated to raising standards for all.

The Commission also discuss parental involvement and the poor quality of career advice that is often linked to low expectations. More must be done to encourage parents that the education system failed not to let the same thing happen with the next generation. Breaking the cycle of hopelessness is a vital component to raising standards as the Commission acknowledges. How to disseminate best practice rather than ritual nods to devolving training to schools and Teach First might have allowed for discussion about the content of both initial training and professional development of teachers.

Where I do agree with the Commission is in the vital role played by primary schools and the need to focus more attention on success in the early years. Regular attendance and strategies to help pupils that miss school are important moves in helping all pupils achieve success as last week’s publication of the EYFS profiles showed.

For anyone interested in the issue of social mobility this is an important but at times challenging and even depressing Report to read. It can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/364979/State_of_the_Nation_Final.pdf

 

 

 

 

Pay primary teachers more?

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Should we pay primary teachers more than their secondary colleagues? Figures published today by the DfE show that the average primary class, mostly taught by one teacher, but often with assistance from a teaching assistant, is now 26.9 pupils in size, up from 26.3 in 2006; an increase of 3.6 pupils per teacher over the period. During the same time period the average class faced by a secondary teacher declined in size from 21.5 to 20.1; a reduction of 1.4 pupils per teacher. Thus, overall, primary teachers on average face classes 6.8 pupils larger than their secondary colleagues. Put another way, in July a Year 6 teacher has around a third more pupils to cope with than a Year 7 teacher with the same children the following September.

Of course, older children demand more attention, have more behaviour issues with adults, require teachers with more specialist knowledge, sometimes have a longer teaching week, and there are no doubt a whole host of other reasons that could be advanced why secondary teachers should be paid the same as their primary counterparts despite teaching smaller classes. However, on sheer productivity grounds, the average primary teacher now has far more contact with pupils than their secondary colleagues even allowing for non-contact time during the school week.

Disaggregated by Key Stage, the figures look even worse; with Key Stage 1 teachers faced with an average of 27.4 pupils compared with 25.6 pupils in 2006; and Key Stage 2 teachers facing an average of 27.2; actually down on the 27.3 of 2006. These figures are taken from the DfE’s Schools and their Pupils Statistical Bulletin https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2014 that clearly show the pressure primary schools are under as rolls rise while their secondary colleagues enjoy the final years of declining numbers before the avalanche of rising rolls hits them in a couple of year time.

As the Teachers’ Pay Review body Report referred to in my previous post on this blog makes clear, the issue of how to calculate pay for teachers is complicated. However, for many years it has been agreed that the same basic scale applies to both primary and secondary teachers. Now pay is open to a free for all should this basic tenet of pay over the past three quarters of a century be open to discussion? With pupil numbers being a key component of a school’s funding, many primary teachers will no doubt want to know where the £15-£20,000 extra per class implied by the increase in class sizes since 2006 have gone in the school budget? For those schools that have just added to their reserves, there might be some challenging questions for the head and governing body to answer from their class teachers.

Leaders to pick the qualities needed of their successors

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The Prime Minister may consider England a Christian country, but one wonders whether his Education Secretary, of Scottish heritage, agrees with his leader on this point. His recent announcement of a review of leadership standards for head teachers, a term now generally concatenated in to a single word, is singularly light on expertise in leading faith run primary schools; Christian or otherwise, despite their importance to the school system. But then the review group also lacks any obvious member from higher education, despite the work of staff at the London Institute, Cambridge university, and Roehampton University, to mention but a few of the many universities that have worked in this area for many years. Presumably, the government places higher value on practitioners rather than on thinkers and researchers, especially in the education field. Even Roy Blatchford, a member of the group and possibly a key adviser to David Laws, even though he isn’t known to be a Liberal Democrat, was a former head teacher.

At least the special school sector is represented on the group, but it is questionable why, if this complex sector needs but one representative, the more straightforward tasks of running primary and secondary schools need so many more leaders to discuss the standards required of their successors. Fortunately, the token governor comes from a community school to balance the three representative from academies, whether convertor of as part of chains. The apparent omission of anyone from a free school or the new breed of 14-18 technical schools may mean that the debate is not as wide ranging as it perhaps ought to be, but we shall see.

How radical the group will be at this end of a parliament when, unless their suggestions can be introduced by ministerial fiat, there won’t be time for legislation to alter existing rules will be interesting. Will they stray into territory more appropriately the ground of the School Teachers’ Review Body, currently in search of a new Chair following the current incumbents move to another Quango after just two years in office.

One area that really does need review is the nature and purpose of Executive Heads, and where headship ceases and a different sort of leadership takes over. The Americans have this line delineated between Principals and Superintendants, and historically here it was between heads and Education Officers. But, with many heads now earning more than Directors of Children’s Services despite many fewer responsibilities the present system is clearly in need of an overhaul.

At least the gender balance of the review group has been weighted in the right direction, although one might have welcomed the presence of a middle leader juggling a young family and a career to be able to talk about current pressures on career development, especially for late entrants to the profession.

After the abolition of the mandatory NPQH the group might start by asking the Secretary of State whether he actually believes in national standards of performance assessment and recruitment, and if so whether that is for all qualified staff or just leaders of schools, however defined. Headship is not a task for the faint hearted, and the group might ponder what might make recruitment, especially in primary schools, easier than it traditionally has been. However, without an obvious Roman Catholic on the group, it is doubtful whether they will reach a helpful answer.

Why all schools must be good

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For some parents this Easter will be a time for celebration as the results of ‘destiny day’ – the day when children starting formal schooling were told which school they will be attending in September – is celebrated. For other parents, whose children have been assigned their second or third choice of school; or in some cases none of those they asked for, the mood will be no doubt be more downbeat. I can sympathise. As I have mentioned before, in 1952 my brother and I failed to secure places at the first choice school identified by our parents, a small one form entry Church of England primary school, and instead went to a four form entry infant school that was admittedly nearer to where we lived.

So, parents of children born in years when the population is growing in an area are always going to struggle to secure a place at the school of their choice, especially as it doesn’t make good sense to have too many places standing empty when they are not needed, even though a reservoir of places to cope with peaks in demand is sensible.

What may worry parents more these days is if the expansion of places to meet growing demand isn’t always in the best performing schools. Now I am aware that Ofsted judgements are moveable feasts; and school can and do improve, as well as in some cases perform less well over time. Also, some new schools haven’t even been inspected by Ofsted. However, the DfE has recently published a Basic Need Scorecard with interesting data about the distribution and cost of new places in each local authority.

Some 25 local authorities were coded red in the DfE dashboard as the percentage of new places in school deemed ‘good’ or better by Ofsted up to 2103 was seen as concerning. Many of the authorities in the code red group were small unitary of other urban authorities. Interestingly, only three were London boroughs where the most noise about this issue seems to be generated in the press. Only one authority, Westminster, was an inner London borough. By contrast, there were eight shire counties in the group, ranging from Shropshire to Essex, and from North Yorkshire to Wiltshire. I suspect that if we were able to find the individual schools in these counties where places been increased, even though Ofsted was less then complimentary about aspects of the school, we would find them concentrated in the market towns and larger settlements within the counties rather than in the more rural areas. Answering that question might make an interesting research study for someone to conduct.

When the report on the admissions process is compiled by the Adjudicator, it will be interesting to see whether any other authorities than Oxfordshire, where I am a county councillor, raise concerns about academies not being willing to cooperate over placing pupils even where they have spare capacity. It would be a real irony if choice, meant choice by school as to how many pupils to take, but also an outcome resulting in more cost to rural authorities in additional school transport expenditure because some schools weren’t willing to help accommodate the growing number of pupils.

Concerning, but with some good features

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The latest data for applications to postgraduate teacher preparation courses in England was published earlier today. As expected, the rate of applications has slowed over the month from mid-February to mid-March when compared with the previous month. The increase in applications for Primary courses was around 12%, and for Secondary courses, 14%; with School Direct faring better than higher education courses, although the actual numbers were smaller than for higher education. As courses have begun to fill, future applications will be targeted on the remaining providers with places.

Regionally, applications for courses offered by providers in London have held up strongly, registering a 17% increase over last month compared with just a 10% increase for providers in the North East. The national average was a 13% increase. As might be expected at this time of year, applications from older career changers rose faster than from those applicants still at university. Indeed, there was only a 7% increase from those aged 21 or under compared with a 16% increase from those aged over 40. The percentage of older applicants presumably reflected the fact that many final year undergraduates are now concentring on their final assessment examinations, dissertations and coursework rather than making applications for teacher preparation courses.

Applications for Primary courses have now topped the 18,000 mark, similar to the level seen at this point last year for the GTTR Scheme. However, once the School Direct applications are taken into account (there was a separate application scheme for those places last year) then applications are probably still behind where they were at this point last year.

By these set of figures, around 10,300 of the 15,000 or so primary places have been the subject of an offer, although only 940 of these were unconditional offers. The majority of conditional offers will no doubt be subject to the passing of the Skills Tests. Assuming even a modest margin for unsuitable candidates, there will be the need for at least 20,000 applicants to fill all the places on offer. That is around another 4,000 applicants, or probably some 1,000 a month, so the rate of application would need to halve from the level of the past month before worry might turn to concern. Even so, 20,000 applicants require a 75% acceptance rate. Assuming the current 2,000 per month last for the next five months, the maximum time possible that would generate would be some 28,000 applicants. The conversion rate would then reduce down to a healthier figure in the 50-60% range.

Outcomes for secondary subjects remain challenging to determine from the data as published. However, it seems likely that at least some of the subjects that failed to fill all their places last year are heading in the same direction this year as well. Physics and design & technology are the two subjects where there must be the most concern, whereas history and physical education will again be over-subscribed; possibly significantly. In the middle are a range of subjects where the outcome on these figures is too difficult to tell. Some will recruit sufficient trainees; others might not.  Much will depend upon how the schools offering School Direct places respond to the applications they receive. By the next set of data in May the position will be much clearer, but there will be little time to take any action to deal with a shortfall.

More financial pressures for DfE

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In the week that the Minister of State at the DfE announced the final figures for the Pupil Premium in 2013-14, with a £53 Christmas bonus for primary school pupils receiving the cash this year, and an increase to £1,300 for primary age pupils in 2014-15, the government also announced the latest thinking on school rolls until the early 2020s.

At the present time, there is still no end in sight to the growth in the primary school population that will increase from a low point in 2009 of 3.9 million pupils to a predicted 4.8 million by 2022. That is a rise of nearly 850,000 pupils, or an increase in the primary school population of more than a fifth in thirteen years. The secondary school population in years 7-11 is still on schedule to bottom out in 2015, at just over 2.7 million pupils, before recovering to just over 3.0 million by 2022, with more increases to come in the rest of that decade.

An extra million or so pupils by 2022 will place considerable strain on education finances that currently cost the nation £27 billion just for the remaining local authority maintained schools, with the costs of academies in addition. (Academies have a different financial year to local authority schools thus making comparisons almost impossible.) In 2012-13 the average cost of a primary school pupil in a maintained school was £4,193, up from £4,099 the previous year. On that basis, the additional 600,000 pupils expected in the primary sector by 2022 will cost £2.5 billion by 2022, even without the compounding effects of inflation during the intervening years. It is difficult to see how the government will be able to protect school budgets throughout the whole of that period since an economic recovery rarely lasts for a decade, and a more likely scenario is that the economy will have traversed through another whole economic cycle during that period. Hopefully, the downturn will not be of the same magnitude as was inflicted on the economy during the Labour government under Gordon Brown’s stewardship.

With around half of primary school expenditure going on teaching staff, and recruitment pressures already emerging, according to the teacher associations, sorting out the wages bill may become even more important in the future if expenditure is not to spiral out of control. However, after so many years of pay restraint that may be easier said than done. The imposition of any national funding formula for schools in 2015 that doesn’t take account of differing labour market pressures is probably doomed to failure, with some potentially dramatic repercussions if the government miscalculates. It will not be enough to say that the decision can be left to schools, as they are too diverse a group to be able to manage any substantial pressures on what amounts to half their budgets.

Mr Gove has not shown himself very good with numbers, but he will surely not want his legacy to be a school system not prepared for the financial challenges that lie ahead.

Too late by five: the challenge facing educators

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Summer born pupils have a lower outcome score on the early learning goals according to new DfE statistics released last week. Boys also do less well than girls and pupils on free school meals less well than other pupils. Pupils from some ethnic groups performed less well than others and the largest attainment gaps was between pupils with special needs already identified at that age and those with no identified special needs. The evidence can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/eyfsp-attainment-by-pupil-characteristics-2013

Many years ago I worked with a sociologist who was of the view that boys did better at nursery school because they were more demanding. They may still be both more demanding and boisterous, but they don’t do better according to this data. According to the DfE, 49% of all pupils achieve at least the expected level in all early learning goals, but that masks the gap between girls achieving 58% as a group, and boys at 41%. The widest gaps between boys and girls are in writing and exploring and using media where the gap is 16% point. The narrowest gap is in technology, at just one percentage point in favour of girls. In reading the gap is 11 percentage points.

The data are interesting on the term in which a pupil was born.  Some 60% of autumn born children achieved at least the expected level in all early learning goals. This compared with just 38% of summer born children.   Resolving this issue is essential if summer born children are not to be left behind throughout their schooling. How it can be resolved is a matter of judgement. In the first instance it might be interesting to see the outcome of these goals if administered after the same degree of exposure to schooling by children born at different times of year. If a middle class child girl in the autumn significantly outperforms boys on free school meals born in the summer then there is clearly a quality assurance issue that cannot be resolved by holding back the children that perform better. This is especially an issue in school-based activities, since the difference in attainment in writing is a 22% gap, and in numbers the attainment gap between autumn and summer born children overall was 20%. If these figures become widely known they might have an impact on maternity services if families chose to have more autumn born babies and less summer born children.

Perhaps not surprisingly, children where English was not their first language performed less well than native speakers of English, with the widest attainment gap being in speaking at 19% points, and the narrowest in moving and handling where it was just 2%, perhaps because this requires little language knowledge, except presumably to understand the task.

There is much debate about testing children too early in life, but some form of teacher assessment as a baseline seems a sensible approach if we are ever to make progress at removing the inequalities between different groups in society. These figures show the depth of inequality that is already in place by the time children enter formal schooling.

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.