In the summer of 2024, I was asked to lecture on the future of education. Two years on, it is interesting to see how even more relevant today the content of the talk is. Sadly, there are still no answers to many of the questions posed in my talk.
Thank you for inviting me to talk to you this evening. I arrived in Oxfordshire some 45 years ago, about the same time as the late Sir Tim Brighouse. This was only a couple of years after Prime Minister Sir Jim Callagham’s visit to Oxford, and his famous Ruskin College speech that started The Great Debate about education and schooling in England. A debate that has ultimately led us to where we are today.
Starting this talk with a look back at history reminds me that if this were a sermon, I would start with a text. Perhaps, ‘Acts Chapter 2 Verse 17’. I won’t read it out, as those that want to know what it says can look it up on their phones.
However, what I want to talk briefly about this evening is RATS -I have to say that thankfully you are spared the PowerPoint picture at this point.
However, RATS stands for:
Responsibility
Accountability
Technology
And
Schooling
RATs or ARTS is better, even if the order is wrong.
First Responsibility
Who is responsible for what in education
People still cheerfully talk of ‘Oxfordshire’s schools’ but in reality, as cabinet member, I deal with only a limited number of functions these days:
-Admissions to school, but not in-year admissions to academies
-Transport to school, but not for over 16s, as this is discretionary and there is no cash, despite raising the learning leaving age to 18, except for SEND pupils where we still support those where we can. So, a young person can receive free transport from Years 7-11 and then nothing.
-School building – we have built more new schools in the past decade than the previous 50 years. But as ever this area is highly regulated.
HR for maintained schools – this means small primary schools have to pay the Apprenticeship Levy – a tax by any other name.
School Improvement – although the £400,000 annual DfE grant ends this month and next year we are funding it from Council Tax.
-SEND – and we will spend £20 million more than the government provides us with funds in this area and end this financial year some £60 million overspent.
That overspend lead me nicely into considering Accountability
If there is confusion over responsibility, is there any clarity over accountability for our school system?
As I mentioned, Oxfordshire has overspent on SEND and by 2026 this may be as much as £140 million
Schools receive their budgets calculated on formulas where Oxfordshire as a local authority has no vote, and merely acts as the banker. Schools may end the year in surplus or in deficit
If you look at academy chains in Oxfordshire, several have schools with balances of £1 million and other have deficits nearing the same figure.
Who is accountable for these outcomes and how will they be dealt with?
If the RSD is prepared to accept academies in deficit that they add to each year, why should Oxfordshire as a local authority wipe out deficits on schools transferring to become an academy: perhaps we will explore issuing an IOU to be paid when there are no deficits in the academy sector.
Last year, council tax payer transferred £200,000 for a school becoming an academy to wipe out is deficit: that’s a lot of potholes we could have filled. At the end of this month, I expect deficits in maintained schools to top the £3 million mark: enough to mend most of our roads.
Let’s consider some other accountability issues:
Who is responsible for ensuring there are enough teachers for Oxfordshire schools? Is it schools; MATs and the dioceses; the LA or the government at Westminster?
Who is responsible for school improvement, so when ofsted comes knocking a school can be judged outstanding, as a primary school in the north of the county has been recently.
Who will deal with the digital divide?
This last question is one that that neatly brings me onto the third theme for this evening:
Technology
Since I came to Oxfordshire at the end of the 1970s there have been three waves of new technology
The microprocessor revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s that brough BBC B, turtles, and eventually the Apple/PC dominance of our interface with IT. Indeed, my MSc thesis in 1980 was the first produced on a word processer for any course at Norham Gardens.
The second technology revolution started in the early 1990s, and became part of our lives in the first decade of this century when we all embraced the internet and started exchanging emails.
This revolution had a second phase when the phones in our pockets suddenly became mini computers in their own right, and a whole new set of challenges opened up for education. This saw the surge in new social media platforms, and the current heads-down culture that pervades so much of society these days. I won’t ask how many have already googled my suggested text for this talk.
Although schools have made adaptations to accommodate these changes in technology over the past 5 decades, we still rely upon a teaching and learning strategy that has many elements that would be familiar when state education began more than 150 years ago.
In passing, I am sorry that the covid pandemic didn’t allow us to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the 1870 Education Act in a manner that I think would have been fitting.
The 2x4x8 model of learning may not be as rigid as it once was, but secondary school ‘timetablers’ are great fans of it as a strategy.
Anyway, so much for the first two waves of technological change: what of the third and developing wave, currently described by many as the AI revolution?
Does a knowledge rich curriculum meet the needs of a generation that started school last September and possibly won’t retire from employment until the last decade of this century. Those that started school 100 years ago, around the time of the birth of the BBC and radio, retired just as the internet was becoming a viable communication strategy: what will the class of 2024 experience in their lifetimes, and how will we prepare them for adult life?
This is not to decry the role of knowledge in schooling, and especially the building blocks of literacy and numeracy. Technology has almost made handwriting redundant, except as an art form. Can technology help us deal with the learning gap at Key Stage 1 between children on Free School Meals and those whose parents have a higher degree?
If so, to return to my themes of accountability and responsibility, where does the impetus for change lie? At school or Trust level; at local authority level or nationally?
We have seen initiatives such as the Oak Academy created nationally post-covid. We also saw how Oxfordshire as a local authority dealt with covid in acting as a conduit for information.
How will the system take change forward. Who has the vision.
Perhaps parents will dictate change for us as educators?
Home schooling has increased significantly: a passing phase or signs of a new order?
I saw this week suggestions that teachers will need to be paid more if they have to work a five-day week when four days becomes the norm. It is worth noting that teachers, as a group have seen no change in their holiday entitlement over the past 50 years while all other workers have benefitted from increased time off.
So let me conclude by asking whether one might one view a model where technology, and indeed any other approach to teaching and learning, is like a table top resting on the twin legs of responsibility and accountability.
Wobbly legs can mean an insecure platform for learning, and certainly for the development in an orderly manner of how technology can change the landscape of education.
I started with the term ARTS, so my final word must be about schools.
It is right that schools and their staff must be at the heart of the landscape, but the challenge that is currently keeping me awake at night is the relationship between a national funding formula created during a period of increasing school rolls, and the current situation of falling rolls faced by many primary schools.
How will hard decisions on whether all schools survive be taken, if pupil numbers continue to decline? For instance, who decides on whether we keep primary schools in local communities or face competition between schools for pupils to keep their own school open?
What part can technology play in solving this dilemma? I don’t know, but I do know the relationship between falling rolls and school funding is not one we can duck going forward.
But let me finish on a brighter note. This week, I met with three young entrepreneurs interested in working with schools on drone technology. Indeed, they have started a series of books that might be the 21st century version of Thomas the tank engine.
Let me introduce you to Ruby Rescue and the big fire – a tale from Drone City and possible future firefighting techniques.
I started my teaching career in Tottenham with the stewardship of 16 mm projectors; reel to reel tape recorders; an epidiascope, and little other technology but in a certain landscape for schooling.
I don’t want to dream of a past, but rather to challenge us all to set out a vision for the future landscape of education that can work for the good of all.
Thak you for listening.
John Howson 