Tag Archives: STEM subjects

UTCs: will they survive?

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Recently, the DfE published the accounting details for academies and free schools and their Trusts and Committees for the year September 2020 to August 2021. Academies consolidated annual report and accounts: 2020 to 2021 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are several interesting annexes. One contains 15 pages of Trusts where at least one member of staff was paid more than £150,000 as recorded in the accounts for that year! However, more relevant for the purpose of this post is the list of schools with deficit balances. The list contains 12 identified University Technical Colleges (UTCs) plus a Trust with 4 UTCs in its portfolio of schools three of which appear to have negative balances in the Trust’s 2022 accounts).

This means that possibly 16 out of the 47 UTC could possibly have been in deficit in this accounting year. Home | University Technical Colleges (utcolleges.org) cites 47 colleges.

This means that at least a third of the UTC sector might have been in deficit in the 2020-21 accounting year. I cannot say that I am surprised. Way back in 2017, this blog contained my post Can UTCs survive? | John Howson (wordpress.com) asking whether UTCs could survive.

I am not opposed to the idea of a UTC, but here is part of what I wrote in a 2106 post on the topic.

‘So, might UTCs be set to become the ‘De Lorean’ of the education world; a good idea, but not financially viable? Having visited the Didcot UTC recently, I can see the attraction of the concept as supported by Lord Baker. But, they do run into a number of challenges. Firstly, changing school at 14 isn’t a normal part of the school scene, so the UTCs have to persuade young people and their parents that the change is worthwhile. Secondly, the schools that they are departing from will lose cash for every pupil that transfers. After four years a school losing ten pupils a year could be £200,000 down on income, but still be trying to offer the same curriculum to its remaining pupils. Lose twenty pupils a year and the cash burn become even more concerning. Some schools might fight to keep their pupils or only be interested in losing those that cost more to educate than they generate in revenue.’ W(h)ither UTCs? | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Since then we have had the National Funding Formula covering two years of most UTC’s rolls, with the other two years being funded by the post-16 funding that has never been seen as generous.

Even with increasing pupil numbers in the secondary sector, the fact that most UTCs recruit at age 14 and don’t have free travel probably restricts their ability to grow unless they are in an area of significant housebuilding, as is the Didcot UTC mentioned above. Even there, the issue of loss at 16 to other institutions or apprenticeships can significantly affect the UTC’s income. For many, being science and technology biased in their curriculum, also affects their outgoings, both in resources and in attracting STEM subject teachers.

So, where will the UTC programme go, even with the support of Lord Baker?

STEM subjects ‘late recruiters’?

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Yesterday’s post about the grim news on recruitment onto teacher preparation courses for 2022/23 didn’t mine all the possible information provided in the DfE data published in the monthly update.

One interesting statistic are how the proportion of applicants for secondary subjects has changed over the course of the year. Last December, I wrote a blog post pointing out that nearly half of early applicants came from just three subjects: English, mathematics and physical education.  Half of secondary ITT applicants in just 3 subjects | John Howson (wordpress.com)

As expected, physical education trended lower as the year progressed, and places on courses filled up. The subject ended the year on 19% of total applications – down 5% on December. English also lost ground, down from 13% in December to 8% by September. However, mathematics seemed to be a ‘late attracting subject’, as by September the subject accounted for 18% of applications, up from 12% in December.

Removing these three subjects from the list and comparing the moves among the remaining subjects shows relatively little difference in many subjects in their position in the ranking.

SubjectTotal DecemberPercentage DecemberTotal SeptemberPercentage September% Difference
Art and design3786%24107%1
Biology5529%345710%1
Business studies2835%16014%1
Chemistry5098%405511%3
Classics621%2611%na
Computing3095%22486%1
Design and technology2434%16385%1
Drama3526%14264%-2
Geography3856%24987%1
History105718%453113%-5
Modern foreign languages5689%388011%2
Music1913%11603%0
Other5649%23216%-3
Physics3075%28308%3
Religious education2314%15414%0
5991100%35857100%
When do different subjects recruit?

As might have been predicted, drama and history lost ground once courses filled up. The sciences were the main winners. This suggests that subjects that may have a higher proportion of men may recruit later in the round – we cannot know for certain as the data on gender isn’t published by subject – but it is a plausible hypothesis to discuss in relation to gender and STEM subjects.

The second hypothesis is that subjects where potential teachers know there may be difficulty in securing a place on a teacher preparation course will recruit earlier in the year. These bellwether subjects, such as history, physical education and also the primary sector can provide early warning on what might be to come in the autumn months.

As a piece of history, it was using this second hypothesis in the early 2000s that prompted me to call a recruitment crisis as early as one November and to be warned off by the then Minister’s Private Office in a phone call I took while a passenger in a car travelling down the M5 in Somerset for creating panic. The following March, the training grant was suddenly announced. Perhaps, I have been at this subject for too long.

Knowing this sort of information about recruitment trends can make the use of expensive TV marketing more precise. Is the present TV campaign a good use of money or would it be better aimed at STEM subjects in the spring?

Teaching is a wonderful career

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The DfE has today announced the 2022 summer programme for interns in certain subjects that want to consider teaching as a possible career. It is interesting that to the obvious STEM subjects has been added Modern Languages. However, other subjects with significant shortages such as design and technology and business studies still don’t feature in the list. The bias towards an academic curriculum still seems firmly planted in the minds of Ministers. However, at least IT is included, so there is a nod to the future.

In reality not all STEM subjects are included. As the DfE notice makes clear, the aim of the internship programme is to enable undergraduates studying for a degree in STEM-related subjects the opportunity to experience teaching maths, physics, computing or modern foreign languages before they commit to it as a career.

The programme is school-led. Only school-led partnerships can apply for funding. School partnerships can choose to collaborate with an accredited Initial Teacher Training (ITT) provider to develop and deliver their programme.

The partnership lead should submit the application as they will have overall responsibility for the budget. However, they should work in collaboration with partners to develop the proposal.

DfE welcome applications from school-led partnerships across England, however especially welcomes applications from schools in geographic areas where there have previously been gaps in provision, including:

  • Bristol
  • Cornwall
  • Cumbria and north Lancashire
  • Devon
  • East Anglia
  • London
  • Merseyside
  • Oxfordshire

Applications must be for a minimum of 5 participants. Teaching internship programme: summer 2022 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The DfE has also announced that the ITT Census of current trainees will be published on the 2nd December. This will allow schools to understand what the supply of new entrants into the labour market for next September will look like in each subject.

Interestingly, the number of vacancies being advertised by secondary schools this November is much higher than in recent years, with more than 700 new vacancies listed last week alone. Early data from today suggests there is no let up in the trend to advertise vacancies in what is normally a relatively quiet month. Normally, the most distinguishing factor about vacancies in November is the high number of those that result from a teacher taking maternity leave.

Maybe we are seeing the early signs of the increase in departures of school leaders that have borne the brunt of the handling of the pandemic in schools over the past 18 months. TeachVac will track that trend and report in its annual round up of trends in leadership vacancies.

The DfE is now handing applications for the 2022 entry into teacher preparation courses and the first data from that source that has replaced the monthly UCAS data of past years will provide an interesting insight on how teaching is viewed as a career at this stage of the pandemic.

At the same time rumours abound that the DfE is reviewing how it will handle the vacancy web site it created a couple of years ago and also that the tes is once again might possibly be seeking another new owner.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I wonder why schools continue to pay millions of pounds to a private American owned company instead of investing a few thousand in creating a low-cost site that is jointly owned by the profession and the government.

But then the talk of scare resources is often an easier approach than the actions necessary to overcome the conviction that the status quo must always be funded.

With 7 million hits this year and 50,000+ vacancies at no cost to either the public purse of teachers, TeachVac has shown what can be achieved.

Education and climate change

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Today is education day at COP-26. This blog first mentioned climate change in a post on 17th September 2019 and most recently did so in a post about school buildings Zero Carbon Schools | John Howson (wordpress.com) a couple of months ago.

I am delighted to say that the issue of school playgrounds as a possible resource for renewable energy is being taken forward by a multi-national company. Their idea is to inset PV tiles into the surface rather than have extending panels that was my suggestion. Any change to the surface must be safe for children in any weather conditions and must not become contaminated with anything that would reduce the effectiveness of the tiles as a source of energy. The process must also be cost effective.

However, with the roll out of 5G leading to the end of copper phone cables and no guarantee of phone services in a power cut as a result, some local generation and storage capacity in rural areas might well be another reason at looking into the wider role of schools and their buildings in serving local communities.

Today at COP-26 will no doubt be mostly centred around the curriculum as that is where governments can make promises that cost little to implement compared with changes to buildings already in use and setting standards for new construction.

There will also be a new award announced by the Secretary of State to encourage young people to take action against climate change, as if encouragement was needed. As I wrote in an earlier post on this blog, young people can start by conducting an audit of their school’s current actions relating to climate change and suggest some simple steps to start with. In the light of COP-26, will every governing body have an item about climate change on their agenda for this term’s final meeting?

School transport and especially the use of parent’s cars to take children to and from school can be a major source of both pollution and energy consumption. The move towards electric vehicles will help with the former and can encourage better use of the latter if the power to drive the vehicles is created from renewable energy.

So, today is a day for some celebration, much reflection and a desire to move forward. However, actions will speak louder than words in the next few years.

If you don’t pass the 11+, you probably won’t study Physics as a subject by KS4

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Last week the DfE published a whole raft of data about the outcomes for GCSE and other examinations taken at Key Stage 4. Most commentators have looked at outcomes. However, there is also some interesting data in the tables about entries by different types of school and the subjects that their students are entered for at the end of KS4. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/gcse-and-equivalent-results-2017-to-2018-provisional (and in particular the subject tables and within that file, tables S8 and S9.)

GCSE entries in selected subjects of pupils at the end of key stage 4 by school admission basis of state-funded mainstream schools (as a percentage of pupils at the end of key stage 4 in each school type) Selective schools Non-selective schools in highly selective areas Other non-selective schools
English, Mathematics & Science 100 98 98
Combined Science   18 80 71
Computer Science   20 12 13
Any Design & Technology   24 17 21
Information Technology     4   6   9
Business Studies   17 12 14
Geography   56 42 43
History   51 43 46
Any Modern Language   89 35 46
Art and Design   22 29 27
Music   11   4   6
Physical Education   16 13 16
Religious Studies   47 35 39

As might be expected, almost all pupils study English, mathematics and some form of science to the end of KS4. The type of science differs between schools, with selective schools highly likely to put the majority of their students in for separate sciences, whereas non-selective schools are much more likely to opt for combined science. Indeed, in Physics, the figures are 82% for pupils in selective schools; 26% for pupils in non-selective systems and just 18% for pupils in nonselective schools in areas with selective schools. Much of this disparity may be due to the lack of teachers of Physics with sufficient subject knowledge to sustain examination groups at KS4. This lack of Physics in non-selective schools no doubt has an impact on ’A’ level numbers and thus university entrants.

There is also a disparity in modern languages between the percentage studying the subject at the end of KS4 in selective schools and non-selective schools. French still remains the most popular language although Spanish is not far behind. The teaching of German at this level now seems largely confined to selective schools in the state sector.

Although non-selective schools produce higher percentages of candidates in art than do selective schools, the same is not the case with music, where selective schools have a higher percentage still taking the subject at the end of KS4. Selective schools also have higher percentages studying business studies and design and technology than non-selective schools.

There must be a suspicion that pupils in selective schools study more subjects than their counterparts in many non-selective schools.

How far it is easier for selective schools to recruit staff in the subjects where training numbers don’t meet DfE projections cannot be determined from these percentages. However, it might be a fair assumption that selective schools may generally find recruitment less of a challenge even in high costs areas. Such schools may also find retention of staff less of an issue.

 

Tuition Fees rethink

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One of the most spectacular policy announcements of the recent general election campaign was Labour’s offer to scrap tuition fees for new students and abolish outstanding repayments for graduates. There was no attempt to link this to the NHS and social care funding crisis as the other great funding need. There was also no real vision for how this would sit alongside the need to remove the cap on public sector pay. However, it seems to have worked, like most much announcements, in this case attracting many young voters that would benefit from any removal of fees.

I notice that the Tory press has taken to blaming the Lib Dems for the present university student fee levels, this despite the fact that it was a decision of the coalition government, albeit taken by a Tory minister and presumably approved by both a Lib Dem Secretary of State and the Cabinet as a whole.

One of things that riled me at the time of the fee hike was the lack of any discussion on why classroom subjects should be assumed to cost the same as laboratory and practical subjects? I wonder if ministers thought the market would drive down prices but, as I have pointed out before, with demand far exceeding supply, there was no incentive for any university to anything other than tinker at the edges with the £9,000 fee levels.

So, are such fees justified for arts and humanities subjects? Well, much depends upon the size of the group and the number of hours taught. Fees at this level should allow for minority subjects cross-subsidised by more popular courses and lots of options within courses, even if only 25% of the fee income goes directly to teaching and the rest to legitimate university and departmental overheads. Of course the level of salary and the mix of experience of teaching staff also play a part, as they do in school finances. One cannot help feeling that universities are possibly also possibly funding future capital programmes and increasing their surplus funds from the fees being paid by current students. Both seem to me good reasons for re-assessing the balance between the price paid by students and the eventual cost to government.

I think university accounts should be much more transparent on how fee income is spent, especially between different types of course. Many years ago, I conducted research into the funding of teacher education courses and it was clear that at the £3,000 fee level universities that paid a fee to schools could not cover their costs and had them written off each year by the central administration. It would be interesting to repeat that exercise on the £9,000 fee level.

Personally, I think that there is a case for fees to be in the £6,000 range, to allow for funding of free nursery education that might be a casualty if fees were to be abolished, with a direct government top-up for specified STEM and other more expensive subjects that universities might need encouragement to develop. I certainly don’t want undergraduates subsidising either the summer conference trade or in most cases either research programmes or postgraduate taught courses.