Tag Archives: schools

Home Schooling

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I apologise for not posting much recently, but, like last year, I am busy with elections. This year I am the Lib Dem candidate for Police & Crime Commissioner in the Thames Valley.  This post covers the three areas of Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. The present PCC is a Tory.

If you live in the area or want to know more about my campaign, visit jh4pccblog.wordpress.com where there are my thoughts on the role.

As part of my campaign I am investigating whether there is a growing trend on the part of a few schools to suggest the perfectly legitimate policy of home schooling to parents of a small number of Year 11 students.

Home schooling, where there are the resources and desire to do, so can work effectively. However, I am worried that some schools might see it as an option rather than to exclude a pupil and I want to know whether this is the case?

Could you please let me know if you have come across this happening by leaving a comment? There is no need to name the school, but an indication of the geographical region and whether it is an academy would be helpful.

Thank you for your help.

 

Is there a teacher recruitment crisis?

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I have been asked a lot recently whether there is a teacher recruitment crisis. The answer is, it all depends upon what you mean by a crisis. In the TeachVac evidence to the Select Committee, published on the Committee’s website before Christmas, I attempted to put some numbers to the terms ‘challenge’ and ‘crisis’. So far as I am aware, nobody has offered an alternative scenario. Certainly, nobody has suggested one to me.

Ministers, however, have relied on the November Workforce census vacancies to suggest schools are fully staffed. More recently, during her speech to the NASUWT Conference, the Secretary of State quoted from a TES study that suggested 70% of vacancies were filled within four weeks of being advertised. No bad, but it means that 30% were not filled. As a head teacher I would be worried of around one in three of my vacancies weren’t filled quickly. That figure was presumably the average, so some will have done better, but others worse. Perhaps the DfE can tell schools at what point they should worry? 50% not filled within four weeks; 75%, or should they wait until they reach the position of the Oxford head teacher speaking on the BBC web site whose school attracted no applicants for a number of vacancies advertised?

At TeachVac, the free vacancy web site for schools and teachers, www.teachvac.co.uk we are gearing up for the April vacancy rush. The job market has definitely become more complex and can be divided into a number of different segments. There are probably now three groups of trainees; those on programmes such as Teach First and the School Direct Salaried route that have posts assigned to them and don’t enter the open competition for vacancies; the trainees that sign up with recruitment agencies in the hope of reducing paperwork and securing a better salary. As this group increases, and the government is doing nothing to deter agencies from signing up trainees, or indeed other teachers, and asking schools for a finder’s fee, so the free pool of applicants diminishes. The government’s offer of the DfE’s free website won’t alleviate the drain on school resources by having to pay these fees. However, it might encourage some academy chains and diocese to become more involved in School Direct or SCITTs as part of a ‘grow your own teacher’ scheme.

The third group of trainees form the traditional ‘free pool’ of new entrants competing for the vacancies offered by schools. It is difficult to see how, if the DfE’s Teacher supply model is anywhere near accurate, any substantial under-recruitment into training will not affect the size of this pool to some extent. For that reason, Ministers generalised references to the overall position aren’t helpful. The recent National Audit Office report highlighted the lack of government knowledge of the real position in the teacher labour market nationally, let alone at a sub-national level.

Later this week TeachVac will publish its April newsletters for schools and teachers containing our analysis of the vacancy trends during the first three months of 2016. These are free to subscribers to the TeachVac site.

 

The risk to selective schools in the Chancellor’s announcement

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The Chancellor is putting in place an education system that will make it easier for a future government to end selective state secondary schools. By making all schools academies the government is ending the historic partnership between local authorities and the government at Westminster over the direction of education policy that has lasted for more than a century.

Now this may or may not be the right time to take this step – I personally think primary schools should be a local service supported nationally – but one consequence is that policy, including the rules on admissions and selection, will be firmly set out by Westminster.

Supporters of the academisation, or nationalisation, of schooling will no doubt suggest that Westminster already has the power to act over selection. However, as a weak Labour government found, after it passed the 1976 Education Act requiring all local authorities to provide schemes of non-selective education, the barrier to action presented by dilatory local authorities meant that supporters of selective schools just sat on their hands. For anyone interested in this period of education history, a read of the North Yorkshire court case over re-organisation in Ripon, would be very informative. Not for nothing was the first action of the Thatcher government to pass a short Bill through parliament to repeal the 1976 Act.

With all schools financed and managed from London, a future government with a majority at Westminster that was so minded could either direct Regional Commissioners to create selective forms of education across all areas or alternatively remove all existing selective schools. I am sure that neither option is in the Chancellor’s mind as he makes his announcement today.

His other announcement of what seems like a job creation scheme for unemployed art, PE and drama teachers is small beer in the £40 billion spent on schooling. However, £500 million a year is a sizeable amount if divided among 1,000 secondary schools, but decreases rapidly if the number of schools able to benefit increases significantly. Whether the money might have been better used to fund the overall growth in pupil numbers won’t be known until the second part of the consultation on the national funding formula takes place, when winners and losers will become clear. Indeed, the announcement already calls into question the national formula approach.

One consequence of this new fund might be that those school that have relied on PE teachers to teach Key Stage 3 science may now need to start looking for a new source of science teachers if they will now all running after school activities. But, until the details are made clear we won’t know whether it is possible for them to do both.

Will the Chancellor say anything about the National Teaching Service? One wonder what is happening on that front.

Finally, I am always suspicious when Chancellors start announcing plans for spending departments. History tells us it is often because they want to draw attention away from the Treasury side of the budget. This year, it may be the effects of the slowdown since the enthusiastic Autumn Statement. Still, the slowdown in the wider economy may help recruitment into teaching so it’s an ill wind …

Farewell to local authorities

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The BBC is now reporting that the government wants every school to become an academy. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35814215  This has been an open secret for some time. The only real surprise is that they didn’t amend the recent legislation on its passage through parliament to remove the word ‘coasting’ and replace it will ‘all schools not currently an academy’.

The interesting question is whether there is enough unity in the Conservative Party at Westminster to agree to ditch their chums in local government and fully nationalise the school system. Local government won’t enjoy being left with schools places, annual admissions and transport plus, presumably, special needs.

As I have pointed out in previous posts it is difficult to see how a fully academy structure built around MATs can save the government money to spend on the front-line. It is also an open question whether there is enough leadership capacity to staff such a system. I predicted this outcome way back in a post in February 2013 https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/02/ when I wrote that:

“a National School Service is quietly emerging, with Whitehall connecting directly to schools. Localism it may be, but not democratically elected localism. A national funding formula, administered by schools where the Secretary of State determines who will be able to be a governor, and whether or not new schools are needed, and who will operate them, seems more like a NHS model than a local school system.”

Now it seems it is to finally emerge. Will the Chancellor say something in the budget tomorrow or will the announcement be left to the Secretary of State for Education?

I am old enough to mourn the passing of the local government involvement in education policy. After all, my second ever academic article was about local authority variations in funding on education.

Politically, the issue is should education remain a local service accountable to locally elected councillors or, like health, a national service run from Whitehall – or more likely Coventry – with the aim of creating uniform outcomes across the country? You decide. I certainly think primary schools and pre-schools are a local function as most children go to a school close to where they live and if councils must still provide the places then they should also manage the way schools operate.

With a national school system can come saving on issues like recruitment. May be the National Teaching Service will arise to become more than a press release and blossom into reality.

However, after the Sunday trading defeat and with, post June, disgruntled Tory MPs of one or other view on Europe it will be interesting to see whether the government can command a majority in parliament for the nationalisation move.

What it will mean is that the old phrases of a ‘partnership’ or a ‘national service locally administered’ will finally be confined to the history books or websites and future commentators will have to see whether the Education Secretary has learnt anything from the actions of successive politicians that have run the Health Service.

Ebacc and ‘well-being’

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Country Life isn’t a magazine that receives many mentions in this blog, indeed, this may be the first time it has appeared here. However, I did note that it has increased its sales over the past four years and that their Christmas 2015 issue recorded bumper sales. The BBC are also running a three part series about the editor and life in the countryside. Last week’s episode had a moving story of the farmer facing bovine TB in his herd of milking cows.

Anyway, this blog isn’t here to sell magazines, but to note that Country Life recently ran an interview with the newly appointed head teacher of one of the country’s private schools; Wellington College. In the course of that interview the new head teacher talked about what are coming to be known as ‘well-being’ lessons. He clearly saw them as an important part of a rounded curriculum. I also recently heard a presentation by a head of department at Dulwich College – another private school – with responsibility for well-being in the curriculum. At that school they also regard well-being as important for the staff members as well as their students.

This set me to wondering whether the DfE sees well-being as an important part of the curriculum in schools funded by the government. My guess is, with the current emphasis on the EBacc subjects, Ministers haven’t really grasped the wider responsibilities of schools in helping young people take key steps along life’s increasingly complicated journey. You cannot train to be a teacher of ‘well-being’, and government has steadfastly refused to make PSHE a compulsory part of the curriculum.

Now, it may be that government thinks this is entirely the role of parents and, while those either with enough cash to pay for private education or able to win scholarships can ask for this as part of the package they are paying for, it isn’t the duty of the State to provide it as part of their education offering. Such a position flies in the face of an education system where pastoral care has always been seen as an important part of education, at least for as long as I have been involved with education.

If government isn’t interested in the well-being of those it educates, it should be interested and involved in the well-being of those that deliver education. Among the many statistics the government doesn’t collect is, I suspect, is one about the trends in occupational health of the school workforce and especially of trends in mental health referrals, as opposed to just days lost through absence. Surely, any good employer ought to know what is happening, at least in the academies and free schools it directly funds.

The obvious starting place for action is the teachers’ workload and especially the twin areas of marking and preparation. An understanding of what is necessary and what is just fear of Ofsted might be a useful place for Ministers to start, rather than concentrating civil servant time and energy on deciding when and where it is appropriate to use an exclamation mark.

Funding and equality

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In the good old days Cabinet office guidelines recommended 13 weeks for a public consultation by a government department. The stage one consultation on the ‘Schools national funding formula’ was published on the 7th March and closes on the 17th April. This is but five weeks including Easter. The closing day is a Sunday. (There might have been an exclamation mark here, but I am trying to conform to the new DfE guidelines).

The interesting feature for me of the proposals centres on the attempt by the government to marry together two different notions of equality. The first of these is the notion that everyone should have the same funding. In essence it is the argument of the F40 Group of authorities that felt they were short-changed when the current rules were introduced. The second notion is that of equal outcomes. If every child is to achieve the maximum possible from their education some will need more resources than others. This principle has long been accepted in relation to SEN and with the Pupil Premium the issue of the need for other forms of additional support was formalised at a national rate. The Pupil Premium will remain for the lifetime of this parliament, but no guarantee has been given for after 2020. The consultation identifies three categories of additional needs.

Without fully worked examples, it is difficult to do more than comment on the building blocks of the new formula. I suspect the one that will worry schools that might be potential losers under a new formula is the area cost adjustment. The level this is set at will need to be able to compensate for areas where salaries are higher because of high cost of living and working in the area. However, if it doesn’t recognise the high cost of housing in some areas outside London, it won’t help schools in those areas attract and retain staff. This is important because, as the consultation recognises, staffing costs are the major part of any school’s budget. Ever since the introduction of Local Management of Schools in the early 1990s, the decision to fund on ‘average salaries’ rather than actual salary bills has benefitted schools with a relatively young staff profile and eaten up more of the budget of those schools with a high proportion of staff at the top of the Upper Pay Band. The new formula won’t change that. Indeed, it might see the end of scales and move towards a single point or a first year starting salary and then the same basic salary for all with additions for responsibilities and other reasons depending on what the school could afford.

The notion of support for exceptional circumstance such as split sites, sparsity and business rates, not to mention the PfI payments from the Building Schools for the Future programme, is welcome news, assuming the funding is enough to cover all current needs.

And here lies the issue. With more pupils to educate, how much more cash will there be in real terms? Personally, I would also want to see modelling of outcomes when the current pupil numbers currently going through primary schools move into the secondary sector. What will be the effects on primary schools, especially small primary schools, when secondary numbers are rising and primary numbers are static or again falling? The nature of the formula will especially affect small rural primary schools. Does a Conservative government want to design a formula that might lead to their wholesale closure or will the sparsity factor balance off against the area cost adjustment? This will, I am sure, worry some of the more rural areas of England, not least Northumberland where, according to the DfE website, Holy Island Church of England First School currently has a per pupil expenditure or more than £27,000. I am not sure whether the statutory walking distance to the nearest schools works in cases like that but it might be another factor to add to the list of exceptions that can be covered through additional funding.

This just goes to show how much work DfE officials have done on trying to create a fair formula, but how complex the issue remains until there is agreement on what a fair formula is. What it isn’t is just allocating the same amount to every pupil.

 

Talk up teaching

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According to the Mail on Sunday, not a newspaper I usually read, but whose reporting of the Secretary of State’s remarks to the ASCL Conference have been brought to my attention, we need to be positive about what a great career teaching is. Apparently, according to the Mail on Sunday, Mrs Morgan told ASCL delegates:

That a number of schools are struggling to recruit good teachers but that talk of a “crisis” in recruitment may deter people from the sector. She said that, “While the headline data shows a sustained low, national vacancy rate, the reality on the ground for many heads is that they are struggling to attract the brightest and the best.” She acknowledged the cost of recruiting can be a burden when schools have “other, better things to be spending money on,” On fears that highlighting recruitment issues may put people off of becoming a teacher, the Education Secretary said: “Let’s focus on commenting to the outside world on what a great profession teaching is, how rewarding it can be and what good teachers have the power to do.”

In questions there was apparently talk of the need for a national database of vacancies: TeachVac your time has surely come.

In case the Secretary of State has been shielded from TeachVac by her officials I am sending her a letter outlining the advantages of the free service we have been providing for more than a year now. I agree with the heads asking why spend millions of pounds on advertising when it can be done for free?

Heads, teachers, local politicians, governors and others responsible for recruitment might ask why they haven’t tried TeachVac if it is free. Wasting money through inertia is not acceptable when everyone is complaining about the effects of austerity.

Let me re-iterate, TeachVac is free for everyone, to schools to post vacancies and to teachers, trainees and returners to post requests to be told when a vacancy meeting requirements is posted.

If you know someone involved in recruiting teachers and leadership staff in schools, do please tell them to visit www.teachvac.co.uk and watch the demonstration videos. Signing up takes no time at all, but a school does need to know its URN – available via Edubase – as a security check.

As to the Secretary of State’s thesis about talking up teaching, I agree it is a great job, but surely she could have offered something on the workload front that would have allowed an even more positive message to have emerged from her speech. I hope by Easter, she will have something more eye catching to say to the other teacher conferences. She could even announce that the DfE is investigating free initiatives on recruitment advertising and job matching such as TeachVac. Such a move wouldn’t cost a penny, but would show the government is keen that the cash she has for schools isn’t being spend on private sector profits.

If anyone wants to know more about TeachVac, please do contact me and I will be happy to answer your queries.

 

 

TeachVac is ahead of the game

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Should schools be allowed to appoint staff as a result of vacancies advertised only internally; should MATs or diocese as employers be allowed to appoint staff to a new post anywhere in their organisation without an external advert? The BiS Department in Whitehall is currently carrying out a consultation on this topic entitled. CLOSED RECRUITMENT PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR.

The consultation poses a number of questions about the process that might affect schools, but one that interested me the most was:

Under this option, the Government would ensure that all public sector employers published information on the levels of internal-only recruitment used within their organisation. This might include the number of staff brought in under internal recruitment, and the proportion of all recruitment that took place as a result of internal-only recruitment. This information would be publicly available, and would allow scrutiny and debate over the extent of internal recruitment.

If accepted, this idea would require schools to publish details of the number and percentage of internal appointments. Now TeachVac is ahead of the game here because it provides schools with a list of vacancies advertised and we could easily extend that to include whether it was an internal or external advertisement.

As with other TeachVac recruitment services, this would be free to registered schools and would require only one extra keystroke at time of entry. Posts marked internal only would not be matched with candidates in the TeachVac database but we could provide data on their numbers to help schools justify internal advertising as the best way forward.

An extreme outcome of the consultation would be for the government to require all schools to advertise all vacancies. This might prove interesting in relation to say, the School Direct salaried route if those trainees had to compete with others on alternative routes.

The cost of advertising if schools do not use TeachVac’s free service is another issue. Does the government really want to divert resources into advertising and away from teaching and learning when the school has a perfectly good candidate or must we always be seen to being open with public money? TeachVac allows both options, at no cost to schools

I well recall in an earlier age a vacancy being advertised in a Saturday newspaper because nobody other than the internal candidate would be likely to read it. Such measures are within the rule but not the spirit of open advertising.

Any rule change would apply not only to teaching posts but also to all other vacancies. Schools that hired contractors would not be affected, and the contractors could do what they wished unless their contract specified the schools would only accept staff appointed after an open recruitment competition.

It would certainly make unlikely those cases that crop up from time to time of senior staff employing their relatives. That was something, I seem to recall, worried MPs at one time about who was employed in their own offices.

Should politicians lead by example?

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This blog starts with not one but two ethical issues. Firstly, should we discuss politician’s children and specifically their education and secondly, should politicians send their children to state funded schools? These questions arise after media speculation that the Prime Minister is to send his son to a private school, thus saving the State several thousands of pounds a year on his education.

I would normally regard this as a private matter and fully support the right of parents to educate their children as they see fit. However, the Prime Minister has form in this regard since the discussions as to where his daughter would go to secondary school were all over the media in 2014. Indeed, according to the Daily Mail on line, in October 2014 he was in favour of the state sector. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2796964/cameron-set-tory-pm-send-children-state-secondary-viewing-three-four-schools-wife-samantha.html Part of the headline read: No one should need to go to a private school, says Eton-educated PM.

The article went on to say

In an interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, the Prime Minister suggested the Government’s education reforms were designed to make private education redundant.

‘If you pay your taxes you shouldn’t have to pay all over again. There is no reason why our state schools can’t be among the best in the world, and some of them are,’ he said.

‘What is exciting is there this change not only in practice but also in culture which is all about excellence and wanting to be the best and wanting to get the best out of every child, and you are now seeing that in more and more schools.
Well that seemed pretty clear. So perhaps he can tell us why he has changed his mind? It cannot be as a result of the social mobility index the government published yesterday, as that rates London very highly for social mobility compared with say many seaside resorts. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/496103/Social_Mobility_Index.pdf

If the Prime Minister does opt out of state education for his son, what does this say about the government’s own academy programme?

Is it a slap in the face for hardworking teachers and other staff in our state schools that the person leading our public services doesn’t want to use them for his own family? Of course, London state schools might lose out under the funding review coming up shortly and their performance, which has improved dramatically over the last few years, might deteriorate over the next few years, especially if they have difficulty recruiting staff due to the pay cap in the public sector. We these the factors that help change Mr Cameron’s mind from eighteen months ago? We don’t know and, as I said, at the beginning, all parents have the right to decide how to educate their children. The State is the default position if you don’t, won’t or cannot take a decision yourself. But one cannot help but feel that leading by example is good for the morale of those that work in the public sector.

A matter of trust

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The school system in England, and presumably across the rest of the United Kingdom, is essentially based upon trust. Parents trust schools to educate their offspring and schools trust parents to make sure those attending school know the difference between the basics of right and wrong. Is this trust in danger of breaking down?

The Report today from ATL, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, about violence towards teachers and others working in schools makes for uncomfortable reading, at least at the headline level. I wasn’t able to find the details of the report on ATL’s website when I came to write this blog, so cannot comment further on say, the proportions kicked against those shoved around by their pupils.

The implications are that many of the pupils come from homes where parents have not set appropriate boundaries. Are these clustered in specific areas or spread widely across the country; were they primary and secondary pupils or mostly just antagonistic adolescents?

The concerns over metal health are especially worrying. I think it is clear that a high proportion of long-term mental health issues develop during the time a young person should be in education. The cuts to CAMS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services) must be reversed and such services must be adequately resourced for an increasing number of young people in the at risk age-groups. Many readers know that I write this having personally experienced violence in a classroom, albeit many years ago now.

The need for schools to have good working behaviour policies is vital if we are to aid retention of teachers in our classrooms. It isn’t about metal detectors at the doors, but about sensible timetabling, vigilant staff from the senior leadership to the contract cleaners and a policy that is enforced.

At the same time, parents and society in general must trust schools are able to find ways of educating everyone in society. Before the ATL Report appeared I was going to write of my concern that some schools seem to be exploiting the fact that schooling is a voluntary activity by asking parents of disruptive Year 11 pupils to withdraw them from school and, as is their right, state that they are educating them at home or otherwise than at school. With a Year 11 student, it is highly likely that nobody is going to investigate what is actually happening and there is a risk that they can fall into anti-social behaviour and even sexual exploitation.

If I tie all this back to the report earlier this week on Regional School Commissioners it is only to make the point that without coherent planning across the whole sector issues such as the development of special education and support services risk becoming fractured and like CAMS unable to deal with the problems thrown at them despite the very high quality of staff working to tackle everything thrown at them.

In the 1990s the Lib Dems recognised that tax cutting had gone too far under the Conservatives and called for a penny on income tax for education. Perhaps we are reaching that point again. Putting up the regressive Council Tax isn’t an answer: putting up the fairest of the taxes we have may be; the trouble is it is also the most visible.