Tag Archives: reform

School Funding heads for the long grass?

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Efficiency saving all round are being used to camouflage the lack of significant extra cash for schools during a period of rising school rolls. The Secretary of State’s statement to parliament, made earlier this afternoon, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/justine-greening-statement-to-parliament-on-school-funding has to be read very carefully to disentangle the rhetoric from the reality.

There will be a national funding formula, but not fully until post 2019-20 when a new spending round will be in place. Until then there will be the following;

  • Increase the basic amount that every pupil will attract in 2018-19 and 2019-20;
  • For the next two years, provide for up to 3% gains a year per pupil for underfunded schools, and a 0.5% a year per pupil cash increase for every school;
  • Continue to protect funding for pupils with additional needs, as we proposed in December.

So, 0.5% will be the basic increase per pupil; will it even cover inflation? What are underfunded schools? Will the increases be enough to offset the inevitable pay increase that will be necessary at some point to stop the loss of teachers from the profession and under-recruitment of new entrants into training? Why set a minimum of £4,800 for secondary school pupils, but no minimum for primary schools? What will this mean for small rural primary schools, are they to be abandoned to their fate?

In their manifesto the Conservatives said no school would lose out as had been proposed in the national funding formula, but it is not clear if the final decision on that point is now being handed to local School Forums and whether this manifesto pledge is being honoured in terms of the primary sector other than through the 0.5% per pupil increase and the up to 3% for under-funded schools? Since there might have been an expectation of a cost of living increase anyway has the 0.5% replaced the cost of living increase? Is it 0.5% per year or across the two years? Some winner now don’t look like seeing the gains that they had expected.

However, primary schools are to receive more cash through their PE and sports premium funding. This may be good news for unemployed PE teachers in some parts of the country, but not for secondary schools that might want to have employed them as maths or science teachers.

The Secretary of State made clear that the £1.3 billion additional investment in core schools funding which she announced today will be funded in full from efficiencies and savings She said,  ‘I have identified from within my Department’s existing budget, rather than higher taxes or more debt’. By making savings and efficiencies, the Secretary of State said that she is ‘maximising the proportion of my Department’s budget which is allocated directly to frontline head teachers – who can then use their professional expertise to ensure that it is spent where it will have the greatest possible impact.’

At TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk we are happy to help by promoting the free national job board that costs schools nothing to place adverts for teachers. We will even extend it to handle support staff for a relatively small further investment.

A wise Secretary of State would have established a joint commission with the teacher associations to work on these central efficiency gains and in doing so help to neutralise the inevitable complaints from those who projects are being cut, especially if they include spending on professional development. Will, I wonder, the £10 million tender to recruit overseas teachers still go ahead and what will happen to the campaigns to encourage new entrants into teaching?

Finally, I am interested to read that one group of consultants will be retained; those to trawl over the budgets of schools in deficit.

Tear down the ring fence?

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The Think Tank Reform today published a report about spending on schools. http://www.reform.co.uk/resources/0000/0765/Must_do_better_Spending_on_schools.pdf

As a right of centre think tank it might be accused of having arranged some of the data to make the most of its thesis that spending on schooling has increased without an associated rise in outcomes. Taking the period from 1999-2000 as a base for some of the analysis means the analysis started from the end of a period when government spending had been depressed during the Major government and the first two years of the Blair government, so some recovery in spending on schooling as a proportion of GDP might have been expected.

The overall thesis is that the ring fence on school spending should be removed, and the same degree of efficiency imposed on schools as on other public services. Now the issue of funding of schools has featured in several earlier posts on this blog. Interestingly, I cannot find any reference in the Reform pamphlet to the growth in school reserves. This issue, the subject of the first column in this blog, is one that has disturbed me for some time. In an age of austerity why are schools taking cash from taxpayers and putting it in their bank accounts rather than spending it? Why, indeed are some schools sitting on balances of over £1 million pounds: the number of schools with deficit budgets was at an historic low in 2012.

Reform also seem to neglect to note that during the period 1999-2003, before spending on schooling increased significantly, there was a teacher supply crisis. They don’t model anything about labour costs in detail. A failure to staff schools does lead to poor performance, and one reason I expect the next PISA results to be better is because schools have been better staffed during the past decade than at any time during my adult life. My anxiety is that an end is now in sight to that period of full staffing unless the government is very careful.

One issue the Reform report does note in passing is the difference between spending on primary and secondary schooling. According to the figures used by Reform, secondary schools accounted for 46% of spending in 2011-12, whereas primary accounted for only 27%; or 33% if under-fives spending was included. In my own view targeted spending on primary pupils who fail to achieve where they could do so might produce the best return on investment within the school system. The Pupil Premium has the capability to achieve this end, providing schools fully understand its purpose.

Indeed, adopting the suggestions in the Reform Report, and abandoning the ring fence on school spending while still aiming to improve educational outcomes and pupil attainment, might affect more affluent areas more than the less well off parts of England. Reform’s supporters might well reflect that it was David Blunkett as Secretary of State who imposed a maximum class size of 30 at Key Stage One. The major beneficiaries of his policy were mostly schools in Tory authorities where large class of over 30 were more frequently to be found at that time. Removing the funding cap might cause a return to that situation. It might also sound the death knell for small and expensive post-16 provision in some schools that is already under threat from other government actions such as the introduction of studio schools and UTCs. Reform’s authors should be careful about what they wish for.

Is School Direct working?

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How much of a mess is teacher supply in at the moment? And are we heading for another teacher shortage? Might such a shortage pit Michael Gove against the Home Secretary in demanding more immigration to allow those teachers from America and the Commonwealth that he granted QTS last year and the ability to take up vacancies not filled by UK trained teachers?

There are certainly straws in the wind pointing to challenges that might be looming. A head contacting Canada to source teachers; concern from the media in Kent that the county is having difficulty recruiting enough teachers; a rise of around 16% in vacancies for secondary school teachers advertised during the first two months of 2013 when compared to 2012. These all point to, at the very least, a tightening of the labour market. Add to this the fact that I haven’t heard as many stories about last year’s crop of NQTs being reduced to stacking shelves in supermarkets because they couldn’t find work as teachers, and we have the situation were the pointer is certainly swinging away from ‘over supply’ and towards ‘in balance’, even if it has yet to cross into the ‘shortage’ zone.

For all these reasons it is vital that the 2013 training round works both efficiently and effectively. Data from the Graduate Teacher Training Registry that manages applications to graduate teacher preparation courses in universities shows that apart from Modern Languages many subjects are experiencing a lower level of applications in the current round compared with the same time last year. Some of this may be because would-be applicants have diverted to apply for the new School Direct scheme that not only replaced the former employment based schemes, such as the Graduate Teacher Programme, but also took some of the training numbers formerly allocated to universities in previous rounds. With more than half of the application period before courses start now passed, it is interesting to review how School Direct is faring?

For the purposes of this blog I reviewed the data provided on the DfE web site regarding the total number of places, and how many remained available at the middle of March in two subjects. Physics was chosen because it has traditionally been a ‘shortage’ subject, and even those not offered a salary can claim relatively generous bursaries. By contrast, history has not been regarded as a shortage subject, and those not on the salaried scheme may find little by way of financial support to help them through their training.

The results when I looked on the 15th March were that only 4% of the ‘salaried’ School Direct places for Physics were shown as ‘unavailable’, as were just 6% of the ‘non-salaried’ Physics ‘Training’ places. That’s a total of 29 places out of 572 on offer for Physics shown as ‘unavailable’, and presumably, therefore, filled. In history, the position was better, with a quarter of the 336 places shown as ‘unavailable’, and presumably filled.

Now it is too early to be sounding alarm bells but, with the Easter holiday fast approaching, schools probably won’t be holding many more interviews until sometime in April. By the end of that month there will be just four months before the new school year when the School Direct candidates will be expected to start their training. By now Teach First has usually closed its book to new applicants, but this year even that programme is still accepting applications in the sciences, mathematics, computer science/ICT and English.

Taken together, the fact that the three leading routes used for preparing teachers are finding this a challenging recruitment round means that the government must take notice, and, if necessary, action.

Now it may be that School Direct partners are just slow in notifying the DfE that they have accepted candidates. It may also be that they are used to recruiting teachers for September largely between March and May and don’t appreciate the fact that training places have generally been organised earlier in the year than that. Schools may also be expecting a higher standard from potential applicants than higher education has sometimes been able to demand. Whatever the reasons, we will not produce a world-class education system unless we have enough teachers.

Perhaps Mr Gove ought to send David Laws, his Minister of State, to open preliminary negotiations with Mrs May about visas for teachers in the future. He also needs to ensure that the Teaching Agency is managing the situation effectively. And with fees around the £9,000 level it may be time to review how we fund those who want to train as teachers before we reach crisis levels.

Who is in charge of our schools?

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A slightly amended version of this article appeared in the Oxford Times on 31st January 2013

Who is responsible for schools in Oxfordshire? This innocuous question reaches to the heart of the current debate about publicly funded schooling in England. Historically, there were three levels of responsibility: individual schools; local authorities, in our case Oxfordshire County Council; and the government at Westminster. Interestingly, this year, sees the 25th anniversary of the passing of the Education Reform Act. That legislation, by introducing local management of schools, started the process of delivering autonomy to individual schools while at the same time reserving power over the curriculum to the government at Westminster. During the following 25 years local authorities have steadily lost control of their local education service. New types of schools have been developed, ranging from Kenneth Baker’s City Technology Colleges through the grant maintained schools of the 1990s to the more recent sponsored academies of the Labour government, and finally the new converter academies, free schools and university technology colleges all managed from Westminster.

Of course, a range of different bodies running schools is not a new concept. The major churches have been a part of the education landscape since compulsory elementary education was introduced in 1870, and more recently these schools have been joined by those from other faiths. What needs to be resolved now is the chain of responsibility and accountability for publicly funded schools, and whether, as I believe they should, elected local authorities still have a central place in the organisation of schooling?

Since the funding for schools is now largely determined at Westminster, with little room for local political discretion, as is when and where new schools may open, councils have been left with responsibilities, but often no funds or powers to implement them.

The rhetoric from Whitehall has been that chains of academies are the way forward. Local authorities are nowadays pale shadows of such chains, without many of the powers conferred on these private sector chains by the Labour government that invented them. One solution is that councils become just a watch dog, with questions about school performance solved by Whitehall mandarins. This might work for the secondary sector, but with more than 18,000 primary schools across England the chain of command between each school and Whitehall is just too long. Last summer the RSA suggested unelected School Commissioners, along the lines of the Police & Crime Commissioners. That is a possible solution, but it takes away democratic control from a key publicly funded institution, and would create a system for schooling more akin to the NHS.

While the debate about who is responsible for our schools remains unresolved, the present system, especially for the primary sector, risks heading towards a complete collapse. Already, professional development services for schools, effective planning of school places, admission arrangements, and provision of services to children with special educational needs are either under threat or have been severely curtailed.

There is a ray of hope locally in the way that both the County and Oxford City responded when I revealed in November 2011 that KS1 results in the City were the worst for any district council in England. But, it shouldn’t have been up to me to start that debate.

I support local democratic responsibility for schools, directly so for the publically funded primary sector, regardless of who actually operates the schools, and as a watchdog for both the secondary and further education sectors where performance can be the key to the success of local communities. However, what really matters is that the government takes swift action to deal with the present lack of a viable control structure for our school system.

Professor John Howson is the director of dataforeducation.info and holds a visiting professorship at Oxford Brookes University and a visiting senior research fellowship at Oxford University’s Department of Education and has lived in Oxford for more than 30 years. He is a lifelong Liberal Democrat, and Vice President of the Liberal Democrat Education Association. These are his personal views