Tag Archives: teacher training

Happy and successful: Education’s holy grail

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There has been a great deal written about the PISA results, so there is a temptation on my part not to add to the discussion. However, the dataset does represent one of the few international time series views of education performance around the world. The most elusive combination, and perhaps the holy grail of education systems, is performance and happiness. Children in Peru are happy, but don’t yet have a universally high quality education system. In some of the South East Asian entrants to PISA, performance seems to be bought at the price of a reduction in happiness among the young people, and higher levels of anxiety, especially among girls and the study of mathematics.

It is worth noting that the gap between boys and girls in narrower in England than in some other countries. Whether this is because our education system is finally starting to crack the problem of motivating boys or because girls don’t reach their full potential or a combination of both is not clear.

Using the quality assurance model, discussed in earlier posts, policymakers will want to drill down into the data to see where attention needs to be paid if performance is to improve. It seems sad that Blair’s children, those born in 1996/97 that sat the tests in 2012, still faced issues related to deprivation and achievement. The Pupil Premium will only help if head teachers and chairs of governing bodies recognise their responsibility to educate all children using all available resources open to them.

Personally, I would take a serious look at how primary teachers are trained in England. Can we really convert a lawyer in their 30s that hasn’t done any maths for 16 or more years into a fully qualified teacher in 39 weeks, and then offer them a job with a completely different school setup to where they trained, and minimal support during this first few years, and still expect all our pupils to achieve to the best of their abilities? Good teachers can achieve this, but it will be interesting to see as the economy improves, and graduate recruitment becomes more challenging, whether we can still attract these people into teaching.

Finally, as the Prime Minister makes his way home from China he might reflect on why, if our education system is only average, British schools have become a key export industry in their own right. How do we as a nation ensure that educating foreign children isn’t at the expense of not properly educating children in England? And how do we ensure that companies relocating to London don’t recruit too many of our maths and science graduates thus depriving schools of the necessary high quality teachers? Striking that balance won’t be easy, especially with a ban of recruiting teachers from overseas.

As a footnote, it was worth reflecting that across the OECD the class of 2012 seemed less disruptive than their predecessors. Recession’s silver lining for teachers?

Teachers are not born but made

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I want my doctor to stand up every time I enter the surgery; take my blood pressure at every appointment, and write clearly in handwriting I can read. Actually, delete the last requirement since doctors all use word processors these days, and replace it with a requirement to write in language I can understand. This should be part of all their basis training. Now, I would never presume to impose training requirements on doctors, because as a lay person I have views, but not the expertise to do so, but I do expect them to be trained, and GP training can take four years.

In education it is different; perhaps because everyone went to some sort of school, commentators of all descriptions feel free to pronounce not only what training is needed for teachers but that no training is needed at all. Teachers are born they conclude, and don’t require to be made. Speaking from personal experience that view is just plain bunkum. Let me remind you what was said 50 years ago:

“In the primary and secondary modern schools teaching methods and techniques, with all the specialized knowledge that lies behind them, are as essential as mastery of subject matter. The prospect of these schools staffed to an increasing extent by untrained graduates is, in our view, intolerable.”

Now I am perfectly sure that anyone with the appropriate subject knowledge can teach after a fashion in private schools where parents and children want to succeed, and classroom management isn’t an issue. But even in the selective school I attended in the 1950s and 1960s there were untrained graduate teachers that couldn’t control classes. I recall one sixth form teacher prevented from starting a lesson by the ‘A’ level group placing the desks between the window wall and the door so that he was effectively barred from entering the classroom. Insubordination was not uncommon, and often vicious and personal in its manifestation. Untrained teachers often didn’t have any skills to combat this until they learnt them on the job over time; some learnt faster than others; and some never learnt them at all.

In January 1971, I embarked on my own career as a teacher by joining the staff of Tottenham School in Haringey. I was an untrained graduate persuaded to fill a casual vacancy by a head desperate to have a full staffroom that January. Frankly, I taught nothing to anyone for the first two terms. I had no skills, but lots of subject knowledge I couldn’t pass on to the pupils. Gradually, over the next five years I acquired the skills so that I believe that I could eventually teach any group of pupils and also manage the other parts of a teacher’s role to the level required in those days; a much lower standard than is required today. Along the way I resorted to all sorts of interesting control techniques such as Friday afternoon films played backwards through the projector as a reward for good behaviour, and punishing whole classes for the poor behaviour of a few pupils. I noticed that many of the trained teachers made much better progress than I achieved with pupils, but the lure of a salary was too great rather than a return to college for another year.

Interestingly, when I started working in teacher education in the 1980s I found the same lack of training for tutors. There was no training in classroom observation or understanding of how to be an effective trainer of adults as opposed to teacher of children.

Teaching is not an easy profession, not because it is difficult to acquire the subject knowledge, but because it is a challenge to pass that knowledge on to the next generation. Parental pressure to learn may help with some children but except where the school can threaten to remove the pupil that alone is not enough to bolster a graduate armed with subject knowledge and nothing else or to support them in the classroom and in their wider responsibilities for young people across 190 days of the year.

More than 150 years ago this was recognised by those recruiting teachers for elementary schools, and also by Dickens in his novels where teachers and educators receive something of a mixed press. Let me end with a quote from The National Society Annual Report of 1842 about selecting trainee teachers:

It is not every person who can be fitted for the office of schoolteacher. Good temper and good sense, gentleness coupled with firmness, a certain seriousness of character blended with cheerfulness, and even liveliness of disposition and manner; a love of children, and that sympathy with their feelings which experience alone can never supply – such are the moral requirements which we seek in those to whom we commit the education of the young.

This was the criteria from which they wished to add the training, recognising even then that these qualities alone were insufficient to make good teachers. It seems that some will never learn.

A lesson in Economics

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Earlier this week Education Ministers were reminded of one of the basic tenants of free market economics, namely that it is price that usually regulates supply and demand. Ministers, facing under-recruitment against the expected need for Mathematics and Physics teachers in the future, raised the price that they were prepared to pay trainees, and also widened the scope of those that would benefit by adding a class of graduates with a relevant degree and a good ‘A’ level. This re-opened the door to those with 3rd Class degrees in Mathematics to once again train as teachers rather than be hired by academies and free schools without the benefit of any training.

Nobody with an interest in the history of teacher supply should be surprised by this move. After all, Mathematics and Physics were the two subjects exempted from the original requirement for all graduates to be trained that was introduced in the late 1970s. The exemption was for the very same reason as now, a shortage of teachers in the subjects. Indeed, it wasn’t until well into Mrs Thatcher’s economic crisis that the rule was changed to bring these two subjects into the training fold. How bad the under-recruitment was this year will become apparent next month when the ITT census is published.

As there are to be no formal control targets for Mathematics and Physics this year, Ministers and officials clearly hope that the new scholarship and bursary arrangements will attract more applicants than for the training round that started this autumn. If it were to do so then, because many trainees will not be guaranteed a teaching job, candidates will need to assess whether the supply of trainees might exceed the ability of schools to offer them teaching posts in 2015. However, judging by my inbox, schools are already finding it a challenge to recruit teachers in these subjects, as I predicted would be the case in the Report I wrote during the summer of 2012 for the Pearson Think Tank.

Now I am sure that the Treasury, as guardians of public spending, won’t be pleased with the need to increase bursaries, and may wonder why more hasn’t been done to increase supply in other ways? The management of Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses has been poor over the past year, with the National College needing to do more to recognise that this is a potentially important route into teaching for many studying applied degree subjects. Indeed, there is a case for the government to be working with Vice-Chancellors in order to offer a constructive two-year course leading to qualified Teacher Status that would allow undergraduates to switch courses into a teacher preparation course at the end of year two of their degree but still be awarded both a foundation degree and a teacher preparation qualification. However, such a move would need to recognise the role that higher education can play in training teachers: not something Ministers are yet prepared to really accept.

Since it is likely that Ministers don’t know why, during the last recruitment round into training, schools generally had a lower success rate at converting applicants into trainees than higher education this is one area where urgent research is needed lest the outcome in 2014 be worse than this year if more places in some subjects are transferred to schools.

In reorganising the bursaries Ministers might at least have stuck to their own principles. The absence of anything but a national flat rate for bursaries suggests that recruitment into training is a national problem; it almost certainly, isn’t. Again the Treasury may ask, would it not have been cheaper to pay the extra premium just to those training in London and the South East this year, if that is where the largest amount of under-recruitment has occurred? After all, there can be no difference between a subject variation and a geographical variation in the amounts paid.

Teacher training: The final word until November

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Time for a final word on the teacher training issue until the ITT census is published in November. At the end of June this year I conducted a full review of the availability of places as shown on the School Direct web site. This has led me to consider on this blog the likely outcome for different subjects. I grouped the subjects into three categories:

Those subjects where all places are likely to be taken up in 2013

Primary

Art

Business Studies

Those subjects where there is some risk in one route of not all places being filled

English – both routes

Music – training route

Physical Education – training route

History – training route

Those subjects where there is a substantial risk of a serious shortfall against places available (33%+) in one or both routes

Modern Languages

Biology

Design & Technology

Chemistry

Religious Education

Mathematics

Computer Science

Physics

Geography

So how did I do in my predictions? Well I got one right in the first group. Art met its target. Primary got to 98%, so that was nearly there, although we await any late drop outs after failure in the pre-entry tests. Business Studies only filled 84% of their places, but to be fair to them there was a late increase in the target, so it is not really a strict comparison with my prediction.

In the second group, Music missed its target, but the other three subjects were fine. In the last group, Chemistry was the only subject to meet the target, but the target was lower than in recent years, and well below the published allocation. All the other subjects fell short according to NCTL figures published this week except for Design & Technology that has disappeared into the ‘other’ category for some reason, so the specific outcome isn’t known.

Now, if I could predict this outcome at the end of June, I must assume the NCTL know what was likely in terms of outcomes at the same time, especially as they knew the ‘real’ targets as opposed to the inflated ‘allocations’ the rest of us were using.  It would be legitimate to ask what steps they took at that point to try to improve the situation. Did any provider hear from them about the risk of a shortfall or were they silent until Monday of this week? Why was a DfE spokesperson, helpfully anonymous, quoted by the Daily Mail on the 14th August as saying of my delving into the current teacher training position that there was no teacher shortage, adding: ‘This is scaremongering and based on incomplete evidence.’ This was despite the fact that I hadn’t said that there was going to be a teacher shortage, just that training places were not being filled: not the same thing.

I sincerely hope that we can have more transparency next year. Ministers may not like my message, but I resent being called a ‘scaremonger’ for exposing the real position. I believe in open government, and I am disappointed when Ministers don’t support that view. This was not an issue of national security, but it may well be an issue of national success if we cannot find and train enough teachers over the next few years. I suggest the Minister sets up a review panel to consider the data on a regular basis. He might even invite UCAS to ask the GTTR Advisory Board to perform that function since two of its members appeared in front of the Select Committee this morning to give evidence. They are clearly knowledgeable about the topic.

Select Committee poses challenging questions

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The Education Select Committee spent just over two hours this morning quizzing both a panel of witnesses and the Minister of State, David Laws about School Direct and issues relating to teacher supply more generally. The Minister was accompanied at the table by the head of the National College, with other civil servants sitting in the row behind and occasionally passing notes forward.

As one might expect the Minister’s performance, like that of the Chairman of the Committee, was accomplished. Both were on top of their briefs, and some of the numbers that have appeared in earlier posts on this blog were exchanged during the session. Indeed, this blog even rated a mention in one interchange between the Committee’s Chairman and the Minister.

We learnt a lot about the difference between ‘allocations’ and ‘targets’ during the session, but little about how either is derived. A replacement for the 1998 document on Teacher Supply and Demand Modelling, published after a previous Select Committee Report, now looks overdue, and I hope David Laws isn’t told by the DfE that it would not be helpful to publish it. The veil of secrecy over numbers has been a real issue in hampering effective discussions this year.

If the Minister is correct, and more schools want to take part in School Direct in 2014 then, unless targets are increased, either some schools won’t be allocated places or HE will come under more pressure as more places are removed. The Select Committee didn’t press on this particular point; a pity.

Nobody reminded the head of the NCTL that he had said in January at the North of England Conference:

In the future I would like to see local areas deciding on the numbers of teachers they will need each year rather than a fairly arbitrary figure passed down from the Department for Education. I have asked my officials at the TA to work with schools, academy chains and local authorities to help them to devise their own local teacher supply model. I don’t think Whitehall should be deciding that nationally we need 843 geography teachers, when a more accurate figure can be worked out locally.

(DfE, 2103)

However, the Minister did make plain that he saw that there was a responsibility to ensure that there were enough teachers. Sadly, nobody asked him whether that meant it was alright if the extra history and PE teachers recruited above the target set ended up teaching mathematics where there might be a shortfall.

Although the issue whether School Direct was an urban model was mentioned several times, the issue of whether it will work in the primary sector was not really explored properly. Neither did anyone really put the trainee’s needs at the heart of the debate, although the discussion on subject knowledge did make some attempts to go in that direction, but without much success.

The unified portal will do away with many of the issues around admissions that featured in the recruitment process this year, but it was worrying that both school and HE representatives said that the timescales set by UCAS might be too tight; that is a factor that will need watching.

At the end of the day, we still have too few trainees in mathematics, physics and computer science this year, and no statement about what the consequences of this shortfall might be. The next steps will be the census in November and the 2014 allocations and targets. My bet is that 2014 will be even more of a challenge than 2013, however recruitment to ITT is handled. By Easter, we will know whether or not I am right in making that claim.

Clarity ahead of Select Committee – but still not good news

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What has become clear this afternoon is that the DfE may have faced a dilemma last autumn. With the national roll-out of School Direct being enthusiastically taken up by schools, it could either have effectively wiped-out the university-based PGCE courses by meeting the demands of schools or it could have denied schools the places they were asking for in School Direct. The DfE targets for secondary subjects did not allow the third option of satisfying both schools applying for School Direct places and keeping the PGCE going and still keeping within the targets. The extent of the problem can be seen by comparing Table 2b in the underlying data of Statistical Bulletin 32/2013 issued by the DfE on the 13th August and Figure 1 of the School Direct management information published this afternoon by the National College for Teaching and Leadership. In practice, the DfE seems to have chosen a third way by creating inflated ‘allocations’ to try to keep higher education going, but still to satisfy the demands from schools for places. This exercise risked substantial over-recruitment against the real targets.

So what happened? Looking just at the STEM subjects, Chemistry had an allocation of 1,327 in the Statistical Bulletin, but a target of 820 places in Figure 1 of today’s document – a difference of 507. To date, recruitment has been 900 according to Figure 1, so the subject is over-recruited against target, but significantly under-recruited against allocations. School Direct, where bids totalled 422 places last November, and reached around 500 by the time all bids had been collected, apparently recruited just 260 trainees, leaving higher education to recruit the other 640.

Sadly, in Mathematics, Physics, and Biology, despite the target being well below the allocation figure, the target has not been met. In Physics the shortfall is 43% against the target; and in Mathematics, 22%. In Biology it is just 6%. However, these percentages do not reflect the actual numbers who have started courses; that number may be greater or smaller than those released today.

Indeed, in no subject was the allocation met, although in business studies it was missed by just one recruit. However, the target in this subject is apparently higher than the allocation in August, although that may have something to do with classification. Less clear is the Religious Education position where the target is shown as 450, but the allocation in August was 434 for postgraduate courses. Somewhere another 16 places have been added since August when they have been subtracted in most other subjects.

I have suspected for some time that the allocations were above the level required by the DfE’s model, and have hinted as much in earlier posts. More than 40,000 trainees did seem an excessive number to train.

More interesting is how successful School Direct has been.

SUBJECT Target School Direct School Direct % of Target
ENGLISH

1500

850

57%
HIST

540

290

54%
PE

780

350

45%
CHEMISTRY

820

260

32%
MUSIC

390

90

23%
GEOG

620

140

23%
MATHS

2460

510

21%
MFL

1550

320

21%
BIOLOGY

740

150

20%
ART

340

60

18%
OTHER SUBJECTS

1200

200

17%
PHYSICS

990

130

13%
IT/CS

570

70

12%
RE

450

50

11%
BUS STUD

230

20

9%
SOC STUD

180

10

6%

School Direct works in subjects where there are lots of high quality applicants looking to train as a teacher. At the other end of the scale are subjects where either the schools didn’t bid for many places, as in Art & Design or recruitment is a real challenge, as in Physics.

These are the subjects where School Direct faces it greatest challenges for 2014, and where the DfE/NCSL seemingly still cannot do without higher education.

What is also clear is that the DfE cannot repeat this same exercise this autumn for 2014 recruitment. It will have to make it clear how many trainees are needed according to the model. Otherwise students will be paying £9,000 in fees without knowing whether they are a target or an allocation, and totally uncertain about their chance of securing a teaching post. That won’t attract many takers in an improving graduate job market as the risks are too high.

More news on teacher supply

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Shortfalls in graduate recruitment to teacher training courses have been reported today. Figures released this morning by the GTTR arm of UCAS when compared against government allocations for teacher training released in August show a likely undershoot in almost all subjects. The worst subjects, where the shortfall may well be around 50%. are Computer Science and Design & Technology both subjects largely shunned by the schools participating in the government’s alternative School Direct Scheme for training teachers. Even in key subjects, such as Mathematics, the shortfall is likely to be in the order of 20%. In Physics it is potentially around 30%.

If the new government School Direct Scheme has also experienced challenges in recruitment we could be looking at the worst outcome for teacher supply for more than a decade. It is time for the DfE to publish the data on acceptances through the School Direct Scheme so the Select Committee can have the full picture when it meets on Wednesday.’

These figures do not include any ‘no shows’ when courses start because candidates are holding places on more than one route or as a result of those who fail the pre-entry literacy and numeracy tests.   The actual figures may be even worse when the DfE takes its census in November.

The UCAS data can be found at:

http://www.gttr.ac.uk/documents/stats/2013_gttr_applicant_figures_october_to_august_exceptional_england.pdf

OUTCOME
SUBJECT Shortfall against target
ART

13
BIOLOGY

-27
BUS STUD

17
CHEMISTRY

-148
CITIZEN

-8
D&T

-260
DRAMA

48
ENGLISH

-158
GEOG

-75
HIST

3
IT/CS

-321
MATHS

-384
MUSIC

-18
PE

-21
PHYSICS

-191
PHY WITH MATHS

0
RE

-39
SOC STUD

-18
MFL

-12

The DfE allocations for 2013 can be found in DfE Statistical Bulletin 32.2103 issued on 13th August in Table 2b of underlying data.

More from the land of the White Rabbit

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Yesterday The Guardian newspaper published some figures about recruitment to teacher training for this September. I am not sure whether this was based upon a leak or data provided by the DfE but given solely to The Guardian newspaper as I have not been able to locate the figures anywhere on the DfE web site. Either way the numbers, as they appeared in the newspaper, are a challenge to interpret.

Take the total shown as accepted for Physics, the subject of a recent post on this blog. According to The Guardian some 560 people have been accepted to study as Physics teachers. This it is claimed fills 57% of the target of 990 places. Eagle eyed readers will already be wondering about the use of the term target as the DfE has recently been using the alternative word ‘allocation’ to account for the number of training places available. Anyway, leaving that matter aside, according to the Statistical Bulletin published by the DfE on the 13th August, there were 1,143 Physics places issued to providers. That’s 153 more than the number quoted in The Guardian. So is the real number 560 of 1,143? This would be 49% filled, not 57% as quoted in the paper. Either way it is a big fall from the 925 Physics and Physics with Mathematics entrants recorded in the ITT census last November.

There are similar issues with the numbers quoted in other subjects. Mathematics is cited as having 1,910 accepted candidates for 2,460 places when the DfE Statistical Bulletin showed 3,054 places or 2,929 if undergraduate numbers are excluded. Last November, 2,635 trainees were recruited, so we have apparently lost 700 possible Mathematics teachers in one year; that’s about one for every five schools.

The claim that 90% of secondary places have been filled is dubious in the extreme. I am very curious that Chemistry apparently has a bumper crop of applicants as that is not what I am hearing. Even in primary, where there should be no issue in filling places, word is reaching me of anxiety in some quarters about the outcome of the pre-entry tests. It is to be hoped that the Select Committee will be able to sort the numbers issue out on Wednesday when they quiz the Minister. But, the definitive point of reference will be the ITT Census in November. By then we will also know how enthusiastic schools are about taking up all the places in School Direct for 2014.

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.

Allocation of a target

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Civil servants don’t use words by accident. So, when the recent Statistical Bulletin (DfE, 32/2013) was headed ITT- Allocations, you can be certain that they aren’t ITT targets in the way they used to be. The last ITT census of 2012 foreshadowed the change by containing ‘targets’ for most subjects, but  ‘maximum permitted allocations’ in four subjects – ICT, Design & Technology, Business Studies and Citizenship. This change has now seemingly been adopted for all subjects.

The Statistical Bulletin helpfully defines the allocation of ITT places as setting the limits on training availability to ensure the appropriate supply of newly qualified teachers. The Bulletin’s text continues with the clarification that ‘Sufficient numbers are allocated to ensure enough teachers are trained, but avoiding excessive provision which may lead to employment difficulties and over-burden public finances.’ However, according to the Bulletin these allocations are then set as ‘targets’ by subject – and presumably phase – by the DfE and NCSL, and these targets are then allocated to particular courses and schools after bids and informed by the Teacher Supply Model (TSM) operated by DfE statisticians, and generally not shared outside the Department. The TSM determines the optimum number of ITT places in England in order to match future teacher supply with future teacher demand as closely as possible. The Bulletin notes that whilst allocations are guided by the TSM outputs, they have to address variable recruitment patterns, viable provision issues and regional differences. New policy decision may also lead to new allocations of places.

How often the TSM is run, and what smoothing of output is currently taking place, isn’t generally shared with the wider community. More than twenty years ago I suggested that the TSM be made public in the same manner as the Treasury shared the economic models it used to forecast future trends in various indicators such as inflation and interest rates. Since then much has happened to economic debate, but little has happened with sharing the TSM except for a couple of papers in response to Select Committee Reports. However, before the appearance of the Statistical Bulletin, one might be forgiven for thinking that this really didn’t matter now. After all, the head of the NCSL told the North of England conference in January 2013 that:

In the future I would like to see local areas deciding on the numbers of teachers they will need each year rather than a fairly arbitrary figure passed down from the Department for Education. I have asked my officials at the TA to work with schools, academy chains and local authorities to help them to devise their own local teacher supply model. I don’t think Whitehall should be deciding that nationally we need 843 geography teachers, when a more accurate figure can be worked out locally.

So either the Statistical Bulletin is correct and the DfE is still setting allocations nationally, if not targets, and Mr Taylor’s approach has been rejected by Ministers or the Bulletin is a last manifestation of a system to be replaced by local decision-making.

The middle way between the two, and the most likely, is that the DfE and the Treasury set the overall national number based upon the TSM output, and how much the Treasury is prepared to allow in student loans and bursaries, and this global total is bid for by schools, with HEIs and others taking up what left after this process has happened. However, this begs a lot of questions, not least what happens to the places schools return during the recruitment rounds, as happened this year. And, who is responsible for managing any overall shortfall in recruitment into training under such a devolved system?

By way of example, take what has happened to global allocations between November 2012 and August 2013, History places have increased from 686 to 811, whereas Computer Science numbers have declined from 853 to 780. Why has it been necessary to smooth the global targets in these subjects; what policy changes have taken place demanding more history teachers but fewer computer science teachers? The rationale for these and other changes in global allocations haven’t been made clear to those I have asked about them. Overall, as the Bulletin observes, 1,199 extra places have been added to the ITT total between November 2012 and August 2013, making a total of 38,902 places plus Teach First, or more than 40,000 overall for 2013-14. That’s probably a record for England alone. Whether all 40,000 trainees will find a teaching post only time will tell. What worries me most is that many who had taken on the burden of an extra £9,000 in tuition fees may be at the back of the queue when jobs are being advertised next spring.