Tag Archives: schools

Quality Assurance v Quality Control

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One of the interesting features of living in Oxford is that although we are known as a city of learning we also have a thriving car industry. We celebrate 100 years of car production in the city this year. Car production locally has mirrored the fate of the industry nationally. When I arrived in Oxford in the late 1970s the car plant was suffering, along with much of British manufacturing industry, from a range of ills. Nowadays, the Cowley plant is producing the world-beating mini, and once again on top form.

One of the changes in production methods, along with the extensive use of robots and just in time ordering during the past 30 years, has been a change from quality control to quality assurance. At one time a car was checked for defects at the end of the line, and those defects were rectified. It was said that in the worst cases the car had to be virtually rebuilt. This was the quality control approach. In the worst cases what it lacked was any feedback to change procedures. With a quality control approach faults still arise from time to time, but the reason for them is investigated and, if possible, preventative measures are put in place to avoid a re-occurrence. As a result, fewer cars need remediation, and more cars go straight to the consumer rather than back to the factory.

Now, education isn’t a production line, and pupils aren’t components to be bolted and welded together to create an artefact. However, I do think that we can learn from these two approaches. I have been in two different meetings this week where output measures, and specifically, the GCSE output measure, have been discussed. This felt like a quality control approach, with a focus on improving the output.

My preference is to spend more time on what is happening with much younger children. After nearly 150 years of state involvement with five year olds we have a lot of information about those children that fall behind and often why. But, we may need to be more systematic in our approach to what works. Although I am not a fan of synthetic phonics for all because it was a one size fits all approach, it should have persuaded schools and policy-makers to tackle this question of what works. If a pupil arrives at school from a background where the printed word is largely absent, they may well have a different attitude to books and the alphabet than pupils from homes where both the printed and the spoken word are commonplace parts of daily life. If one group is then absent more often than the other we need to work out as educators how we overcome those disadvantages to allow all children to learn effectively. Early failure is costly to the whole education system, and too often results in a ‘cannot do’ rather than a ‘can do’ attitude to learning on both the part of the learner and those responsible for their learning.

So, a quality assurance approach that asks the question, why are this group not learning, and seeks appropriate approaches to overcome this challenge might move us away from the censorial ‘you failed’ view of both the learner and the teacher towards a more challenging but cooperative approach. The move at both the DfE and Ofsted towards looking at progress of all pupils over time is a start, but we still lack a mechanism for communicating what works, and also for schools to ask for help without seeming to be failures. The best Children’s Services, dioceses, and academy chains do provide this support, but one of the problems of the lack of a effective middle tier to support primary schools in particular is that it is less easy to arrange than before. As holders of the purse strings, this is an issue all Schools Forums might like to consider next year when reflecting on budget priorities for their system as a whole.

Teacher Preparation – Allocation for 2014/15 – The direction of travel

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Although the NCTL only published outline figures today for the 2014/15 ITT allocations to allow schools and universities time to confirm that they will be taking up the places offered to them, the direction of travel is clear. Once again there has been over-allocation against need as modelled by the statisticians. The over-allocation is in the order of 18% compared with 13% in 2013/14, and is probably largely in the secondary phase. This over-allocations has allowed 16,200 places to be allocated to universities, although once the likely 9-10,000 primary places have been factored in, the secondary total is likely to be around 6-7,000 places, compared with 9,300 last year. Hence the decimation of courses not rated ‘outstanding’ in some subjects and in some parts of the country. Had the over-allocation not taken place, it seems likely that secondary provision in higher education would have all but disappeared if the real target was around in the 14,000-15,000 range of required places for the secondary sector. We won’t know for sure until the detailed allocations are published sometime in the future. However schools are already advertising their School Direct places on web sites three weeks before the admissions system goes live.

The next issue is whether the guarantee to ‘outstanding’ providers will be repeated in 2014 for the 2015 allocations. If not, and School Direct recruits to target, then higher education will disappear from direct provision in most secondary subjects. Universities will, of course, be free to work with schools as partners in School Direct, and the NCTL notes that 10,800 of the School Direct places are delivered in association with universities. Overall, universities have a hand in the delivery of 82% of the provisional allocations, either directly or in association with schools. However, that percentage is undoubtedly lower for the secondary sector.

What is clear is that the divide between secondary and primary phase training is now sharper than at any time in the past 50 years. It seems likely that universities with large primary numbers, especially undergraduate numbers, can continue to cope with a mixture of smaller secondary allocations and association with schools through provision of School Direct training. Those universities with no primary provision plus secondary courses with fewer than 150 places must be at a genuine risk of exiting teacher preparation as their programme will probably not be financially viable.

The long-term challenge for the government is to ensure a stable and high quality secondary teacher preparation programme that will be able to deliver the number of trainees needed when the secondary school population rises sharply towards the end of this decade, and on into the first half of the 2020s. The immediate challenge is to ensure the new and untried admission system works effectively, and that as many trainees as are needed are recruited in the 2013/14 round. That will be no small challenge.

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.

What does a ‘Qualified Teacher’ mean to Mr Clegg?

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What does being a ‘qualified teacher’ mean in Nick Clegg’s mind and how far will his guarantee go? Will he go further than the need for just a teaching qualification and guarantee parents that he will work towards a profession where teachers are not only qualified in teaching, but also qualified in what they are teaching?

To be a successful teacher requires a range of different qualities but, at least in the secondary sector, there ought to be a minimum level of subject knowledge equivalent to two years of an honours degree. Anyone without this basic level of knowledge should be offered Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses to allow them to acquire sufficient knowledge before they complete their teacher preparation experience. Even those with the requite degree may still lack expertise in areas of the school curriculum in their subject, and ways should be found to allow them to continue to acquire such additional knowledge. Any programme leading to Qualified Teacher Status should be restricted to preparation for specific subjects and phases rather than continue to be generic as at present, where a teacher with QTS can teach anything to anyone at any level of schooling. The fact that more than 20% of those teaching some Mathematics in our schools do not have a qualification above ‘A’ level in the subject may explain why many children neither enjoy the subject nor do well in it.

Qualified Teacher Status should be restricted in the subjects and phases where teachers are allowed to practice.

 However, it is in preparing teachers for the primary sector that I believe that most attention needs to be paid. The present post-graduate course attempts to cram the equivalent of a quart into a pint pot. Many curriculum areas receive scant attention, and there is no guarantee that the time in school will effectively dovetail in developing the time spent on the programmes outside the classroom. It is time for a thorough overhaul of how primary teachers are prepared. In the first instance, the undergraduate training route should be replaced by a wider first degree programme that would prepare graduates to work in a range of services including youth and social work as well as teaching. The specific training to be a teacher would be entirely postgraduate. Such a new degree would prevent undue early specialisation among those entering university straight from school.  It would also avoid the bizarre situation created by the Coalition whereby graduates wanting to become a teacher are subject to a minimum degree standard, except in Mathematics and Physics, but no such standard is imposed on undergraduates. As with the secondary sector, where there are already virtually no undergraduate teacher preparation courses, graduates of the new courses would not be licensed to teach at any level in the primary school, but would be certificated to teach at a particular Key Stage.

Overall, graduate training would be on a two year model leading to a Masters degree with the possibility of appropriate credit against the subject components of secondary subject training for those with appropriate honours degrees.

Teacher Training, and especially training for primary teachers, needs a radical overhaul. All teachers should be expected to study to a Masters level.

For too long the nation has under-invested in its teacher preparation programmes because politicians have never really been convinced of the need for such courses. If this is the first step on the road to a fundamental reappraisal of what we want form qualified teachers, then it is a welcome move. But, if Mr Clegg is just embarking on a bit of marketing then it will be an opportunity lost.

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.

Leadership: the key to successful schools

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Yesterday afternoon I attended a service of celebration for the life of William Morris, First viscount Nuffield, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death in 1963. Morris was a very influential figure in the development of Oxford, where I live, and also where I serve a part of the city as a county councillor. His Foundation’s support for the Nuffield Science and Mathematics in our schools in the years after the start of the space race in the 1960s affected the learning of a whole generation.

Also yesterday, the BBC reported that Annaliese Briggs had resigned as head of a free school only weeks after the school had opened. Press reports concentrated on her age, just 27 on appointment, and a lack of teaching experience.

The contrasting fortunes of these two individuals set me thinking about the elusive nature of leadership, and the relationship between risk taking and the other skills necessary to be successful, whether in business or education. When William Morris started making his first cars a century ago he didn’t have much knowledge to draw upon as the technology of the combustion engine driven car was still relatively new. There were others starting in the car making business at that time whose businesses didn’t thrive in the way that Morris managed to achieve. Now I am sure that Ms Briggs will go on to achieve great things in the future. Like Morris in 1913, she was starting on a new venture with a vision, but little experience. In this case perhaps that alone was not enough. No doubt when shall know more when the full reasons for her departure become known. The skills learnt making cycles in Oxford undoubtedly helped Morris understand the application of similar production line processes to car making.

Should we applaud the academy chain that took the risk of appointing someone with no formal experience in education as a head teacher or condemn them for rash decision-making? The main question is perhaps: how much risk should we allow in the leadership of schools funded by the State?

Whenever I have been asked by journalists whether anyone can become a head teacher, even with no teaching experience, I always ask the rhetorical question; can I be your editor? If a journalist responds that they always want another journalist running their paper, as they usually do, then they can see the point of my reply. But, I say, what about the period of rapid technological change we have been through during the past twenty years. Did you want an editor with more appreciation of the internet or a nose for a good story? The answer is usually that they want someone with both sets of skills. The editors should have the ability to relate to the current job in hand, but also the foresight to see how it is changing.

I do sometimes wonder how we balance this dichotomy in the education sphere. Fifty years ago middle schools were very fashionable: based on the work of those such as Alec Clegg in West Yorkshire, Roy Mason in Leicestershire, and North in Buckinghamshire. They took risks with the education system, as did the early pioneers of comprehensive education, and a generation earlier those who created the secondary modern schools from the all-age elementary schools.

The leadership for these innovations came very often from within the education establishment, whereas the pressure for change today comes from those emerging challengers to the current orthodoxy. In the past, change in education was also grounded on a sold understanding of the nature and purpose of education. Finding and preparing for leadership those who can blend experience and innovation together with an understanding of the nature of risk in public service is a key task for the National College, and a constant worry for those on the lookout for leaders for all our schools. But perhaps the change that education as a whole has yet to grasp is that from a nineteenth century ideology of schools and classrooms to a twenty-first century increasingly based upon the primacy of the individual. Now that is a topic for another post.

Dunkirk was a defeat, but it didn’t stop the ultimate victory

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Two new reports appeared today, and both were essentially negative about aspects of the school system in England. The Report by the charity Save the Children looked at the 2012 KS1 results, and concluded that the poorest pupils are less likely to have made good progress than their better-off peers. Almost a quarter (24%) of children eligible for free meals did not reach the expected level in Reading in 2012, compared with only 10% of children from better-off families.

Another Report from the OECD stated that young adults in England scored among the lowest results in the industrialised world in international literacy and numeracy tests. Now these 18-24 year olds started their education during the 1990s in the early days of the National Curriculum. From one perspective they were the group of pupils that started school during the transition from the ancient regime of post-war consensus to the new regime that followed the Education Reform Act, but their early schooling was before the focus on numeracy and literacy really took hold.

The outcomes for pupils on Free School Meals in the Save the Children Report uses much more up to date data, and shows how far we may still have to go in delivering our understanding of the notion of equality. There are many purposes of education, but one is to prove all pupils with the basic skills to thrive as adults. Reading and numeracy are two of these skills. Some pupils require more help to achieve these goals, and that is the recognised purpose of programmes such as the Pupil Premium. However, it is for individual schools to identify how each pupils’ needs can be met in order to allow them to attain the required standards to become functional readers and competent in their use of numbers.

The child with English as a second language is now widely recognised as requiring help. What of the child with irregular attendance habits whose parents or parent doesn’t bother to attend school events and avoids discussing their progress, perhaps because they themselves failed at school, and don’t want to admit that they cannot read. The extra resources must break this cycle to prevent the creation of another generation of adults who are functionally illiterate. As the Save the Children Report reminds us, if a child drops off the normal learning curve by age seven they are unlikely ever to recover to become effective learners despite the £50,000 or so the State will spend on their remaining education.

The recognition recently by the government that children in care need even more help with their education than other children is another sign that the Coalition is not just concerned with the well-off in society. A decade ago, when the TES ran their campaign about the need to improve schooling for this group, they were the castoffs of the education system with few to champion their needs. It is good to see that the turnaround that started under the last government has continued. Now every child should receive extra help with their education from the day that they enter care. However, this will only really work if the schools recognise the needs of these and other children the system has failed in the past. For that to bear fruit the research evidence of what works needs to be widely shared. This is not an area where schools should work in isolation. And in some schools and Ofsted inspectors it may require a fundamental change in attitude.

Physics crisis looms?

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Yesterday the GTTR revealed that only 757 people had applied to train as Physics teachers across England, Wales and Scotland through the GTTR Scheme by the 26th August. Last year, at the same time, the number was 995, or some 24% more than this year. Given the well documented problems with School Direct, or at least well-documented on this blog, the number of new Physics teachers likely to exit training next year may well be substantially fewer than at any point since the sciences were split into separate component subjects some years ago.

Assuming a 75% conversion from application to acceptance, based upon past history from GTTR Annual Reports, that would mean around 550 Physics trainees across the UK against an allocation of just over 600 places in England alone. As there are 495 places available through School Direct in the recent DfE Statistical Bulletin, and early in August School Direct still had more than 350 of these places shown as available, we may be looking at a shortfall of at least a quarter and possibly a third in the number of trainees against the allocation in England alone. Of course, the DfE may have over-allocated this year on the assumption that the first year of School Direct would be challenging as the Scheme coped with handling nearly 10,000 places out of the close on 40,000 total training places available across England.

What might the government have done differently? The main issue probably centres on the Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses. In recent years, as the range of degree subjects has expanded in higher education, candidates for teaching have frequently come forward with some but not sufficient subject knowledge. The Enhancement courses provided a valuable route to increase a candidate’s subject knowledge to a point where they could be accepted for training. Whether the DfE thought that there was a reservoir of suitably knowledgeable candidates waiting to train through School Direct or just wanted the cash for other purposes the scheme has been allowed to wither on the vine: it should be re-started with immediate effect.

Should the government have increased the bursary? There is a danger in doing so that trainees take a dip in earning when entering the profession if the bursary is too high compared with the starting salary for new teachers working outside of London. However, abandoning national pay scales may well see starting salaries increase next summer in ‘shortage’ subjects as schools compete in the market for scarce resources.

How will the government react next year if those schools that failed to recruit through School Direct go looking for a new Physics teacher? Should such schools have equal parity in the market with schools that didn’t participate in School Direct? Should the DfE introduce some form of rationing, as the former Ministry of Education did for teachers emerging from training in the immediate post-war years through the annual Circular Number One?

How are we going to create a world-class education system without sufficient teachers? And, if you think there is a problem in Physics try looking at Design & Technology and Religious Education, neither of which are subjects where Schools have shown much interest in becoming involved in the training process.

Headlines ignore the real story on English and maths

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Between the summer of 1963 and January 1966 I took my GCE English five times, eventually passing two Boards at the same time in January 1966 at the sixth attempt. As a result I read today’s story about the need to continue English and maths beyond the age of sixteen with more than a passing interest.

The headlines seem to suggest that those who don’t pass at sixteen drop both subjects. Now I am sure that is true in some cases, but it certainly isn’t for all. The DfE has good evidence of what is happening, and shared it with us in March 2013 as part of Statistical Bulletin 13/2013.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/221793/sfr13-2013.pdf

These results may come as a surprise to those reading the BBC and other headlines that seem to suggest everyone who doesn’t pass immediately drops any further study of these subjects. That clearly isn’t the case. Although in 2012 there was a small drop, for the first time in some years, in the percentage achieving both English and maths post-sixteen, it was still around one in six of those without a Level 2 at sixteen, and higher for those young people without special educational needs. As the Bulletin writer observed: ‘The gap in attainment at age 19 between young people with a Statement of Special Educational Needs (SEN) and those with no SEN continued to widen at each of Level 2, Level 2 with English and maths, and Level 3.’

The failure rate also seemed to be higher in the FE and apprenticeship sectors than in schools; with academies posting a small improvement, although it may not be statistically significant. Perhaps this ought to have been a BiS story rather than a DfE one. One might also ask how well those 16-18 year olds in the care of the Ministry of Justice have fared in improving their literacy and numeracy levels: but that’s another story entirely.

One of the most interesting stories lies in the ethnicity figures. The Bulletin writer states that: ‘The change in the relative performance of the Black summary ethnic group between 16 and 19 at Level 2 is notable. In the [age] 19 in 2012 cohort, attainment of Level 2 in the Black group was 4.6 percentage points lower than the average for all known ethnic groups at age 16, but by age 19 it was 3.1 percentage points above the average.’ Maybe some young people come to recognise the value of education later than others. The challenge now is to work with this group to persuade them of the value of schooling before sixteen.

So, overall, there is still more to be done to achieve better outcomes in the key basic subjects of English and maths for all pupils, but for some this is already a good news story rather than story of a failure of our schools.

Perhaps the real story, and it has become mangled somewhere between the idea and its execution, is those who pass English and maths at Level 2 by sixteen but then drop the subjects for ever. Should we be providing a means for them to continue to enhance their knowledge and understanding, or is GCSE enough? I think not.

The transfer window and teachers’ pay

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The football transfer window closes tomorrow. This is not something that directly affects schools, but it does raise two questions in my mind. Firstly, could all this money be better used tackling (sorry for the pun) youth unemployment. It does seem somewhat obscene that a football club in Spain may well pay a world record fee for a player while youth unemployment in that country is devastating a whole generation. UK clubs have spent lavishly this summer and, although our unemployment rate isn’t as high as in Spain, I do wonder whether that cash could have been better employed in other ways. The rich are happy to indulge in buying and selling football players and indeed whole clubs while leaving many young graduates with nothing more to do than stay at home and watch an endless succession of matches from around the word. If you read the history of Liverpool and Everton football clubs you will find the suggestions that they grew out of church teams. Now the church is no longer the force it once was in society, but if we could find a way into diverting some of the transfer cash into job creation schemes it might surely do a bit more good for society. How about a transfer tax for youth job creation?

The second question is closer to home. Will the ending of the teachers’ national pay scales, like the ending of fixed wages in football all those years ago, have any effect on teachers’ pay? Perhaps the Secretary of State hopes it will depress wages, but, as I have suggested before, it might just have the opposite effect.

Even now there could well be the educational equivalent of player’s agents plotting how they will get a group of mathematics teachers together in a hotel early in 2014, and sign them up. The agent would then approach schools asking if they wanted a mathematics teacher, and how much they would pay for them. They could point out that advertising a job, and going through the recruitment and selection procedure, is both risky and expensive, and this is a cheaper option at say 5% of salaries. Perhaps Universities might see it as a way of attracting trainees to their courses, and away from School Direct by saying, ‘don’t be tied down too soon to one school’. ‘We will offer you a wider range of training and negotiate the best salary for you at the end of your training.’ It would be interesting to see how Teach First would react to such an outcome. Even those, such as history teachers, whose skills are traditionally not in short-supply might benefit from a bit of group action on pay.

The first step is discovering how supply and demand across the country might affect opportunities. Anyone interested the answer to that question might start by looking at the Report I did for the Pearson think tank almost exactly a year ago. For the position since then, you would have to contact me directly.