Tag Archives: technology

Can UTCs survive?

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Schools Week, the respected education newspaper, is reporting Michael Gove as saying that the UTC programme has failed.  http://schoolsweek.co.uk/michael-gove-utcs-have-failed/ This will be bad news for Lord Baker whose brainchild the idea was in the first place. UTCs were Lord Baker’s second attempt to kick-start a technology sector in schooling in England, after the limited success of his City Technology College programme initiated when he was Secretary of State for Education.

Mr Gove’s comment will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog. A thriving technology sector is probably a good idea for schooling in England, but to create a new type of school for some, but not all, pupils at age 14 was asking for trouble. To compound the recruitment problems facing these new schools by using the market model of either compete and succeed or fail and die was to demonstrate why Tory market economics finds it hard to work in education.

Incidentally, closure is a feature of market economics, as even Waitrose has apparently found out recently, with the announcement of the closure of five of its branches.

So, where does technology education go from here? The easy answer is to let the existing UTCs and their companion Studio Schools limp on, with some making a go of it where there is local support and others failing to recruit sufficient students to be financially viable. A better answer, and one that should be welcomed by the clutch of former accountants currently running the DfE, would be to call in the receivers and see how the assets can be best used for Schools England. Will the current Secretary of State have the courage to take this radical approach? We will see.

With the raising of the learning leaving age to eighteen, the break at fourteen for some pupils was always going to look out of line with the idea of a common curriculum up to the age of sixteen, even with those pupils that would benefit from a fresh start at fourteen. My guess is that the promoters of UTCs and Studio Schools didn’t plan effectively for the type of pupils other schools would encourage to switch in an era where cash rules and pupils come with a price upon their heads.

If UTCs are going to be a short-term feature of our education scene, could the Secretary of State please now pay attention to the fate of Design and Technology in all our schools? Post BREXIT we will need those with the skills and interest in the whole gamut of design and technology to help create our future wealth. Sadly, the subject has been ignored by the DfE for too long and the limp approach to the D&T teacher shortage adopted in the recent Migration Advisory Committee report didn’t receive the rebuke it deserved from the business community.

We need a thriving design and technology sector in our schools, please will someone now come up with a credible plan to help us achieve that aim?

 

My talk to the Merchant Taylors’ Company Education Seminar

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Yesterday, I  was privileged to be able to deliver a talk at a seminar arranged by the Merchant Taylor’s Company. This is one of the Livery Companies and education has always been a key part of their role ever since their foundation many centuries ago.  Below is the text of my talk.

Finding and keeping teachers: Is there an issue?

In the autumn of 2015, the House of Commons Education Select Committee launched an inquiry into the issue of teacher supply. Some 15 months later we still await their report and a lot has happened in the intervening period. For instance, we have had a report on the provision of new teachers from the National Audit Office and an interesting session of the Public Accounts Committee.

I am not sure whether the audience here today are prepared to await the view of the Select Committee or will rather share the NAO’s view that there is indeed an issue in teacher supply and retention?

That is the question I will attempt to deal with today.

Just over 30 years ago I started my study of the leadership labour market in schools. In the early 1990s, I added, firstly, a study of the trends in entry into teaching, and then a full analysis of the labour market for teachers. I regret that during the recession after 2008, I somewhat took my eye of the ball. However, since 2013 I have once again been studying in detail the teacher labour market in some detail.

The remarks in the remainder of my talk are based upon data collected by TeachVac, (the free job board I co-founded in 2013). I suspect some of you use it as a first port of call for mainscale secondary teacher vacancies and for those of you who don’t, we almost certainly collect the vacancies from your web site on a daily basis, assuming you post them there.

So what is the data from TeachVac telling us?

As far as secondary mainscale posts are concerned, subjects fall into three groups;

Group 1 subjects are easy to recruit throughout the year, such as PE and history;

Group 2 subjects become increasingly challenging later in the recruitment round, especially in London and the Home Counties; these include subjects such as English, IT and music.

Group 3 are the difficult to recruit subjects for most schools from quite early in the recruitment round. Subjects include physics, business studies, design and technology and in 2016, geography. However, we don’t expect geography to be a problem in 2017, largely because of improved recruitment into training in September 2016.

You will notice I haven’t mentioned mathematics. Here the overall numbers in training are at a level where most schools should have little problem filling September vacancies, but may struggle when it comes to an unexpected post to fill for January. However, this says nothing about the quality of trainees – a matter of concern that I often hear expressed.

So what can schools do about this recruitment issue? In one sense the government has taken a hand; well perhaps even two hands in “solving” any problem in the state sector.

  • One the one hand, many state funded schools are seeing budgets coming under pressure, despite the additional funds per pupil created by steadily rising rolls for the next few years, the pressures are as a result of government policies, not all of an educational nature, and may damp down demand for teachers.
  • On the other hand, schools have been encouraged to become teacher trainers and grow their own new teachers: Teach First, for schools in challenging circumstances, and School Direct for other schools, and not to overlook the opportunity to create a SCITT (School Based Teacher Training) group that has provided scope for schools to develop their own teachers for nearly a quarter of a century.

This approach to entry into the profession has created a headache for some schools. The DfE controls the total number of training places it is prepared to fund each year. The greater the number taken by schools likely to employ their trainees, the smaller the number remaining for other schools, including the independent sector and Sixth Form Colleges looking to fill a vacancy.

The issue that arises as a consequence is best exemplified in English. This is a subject where many schools find they have vacancies on a regular basis. As a result, it pays to be involved in the training of new teachers. By doing so, the school can obviate the need for an expensive recruitment round with all the inherent risks associated with such a process.

But, if the DfE accepts its responsibility for training for the sector as a whole, then it needs to ensure that its training approach provides for all, not just the schools directly involved in the training process.

In the autumn of 2016 just over 2,200 English graduates were recorded in the DfE’s ITT census as entering training as a teacher across all routes. Of these, a smaller number were left after removing those on Teach First, the School Direct Salaried route and adding an estimate for non-completers.

Even assuming a drop in recorded vacancies in 2017, due to budget pressures not offset by rising rolls, this number may not be enough across the whole of the recruitment cycle.

I don’t think there will be an issue for most schools in finding teachers of English for a September appointment, at least up to the end of the main recruiting season that lasts through into May each year. However, you may not want an unexpected vacancy for a teacher of English for January 2018. Such vacancies may be much harder to fill.

I have used English as a case study, because it is a subject where schools have taken to training the next generation of teachers in significant numbers. As I suggested earlier, there are other subjects, especially in some parts of the country, where schools may struggle to fill vacancies in 2017 and especially for January 2018, even at the present level of school-based training, due to a combination of other reasons.

So, what is to be done? I don’t want to trespass on Alison’s brief, but in an increasingly devolved system of schooling, someone has to take a lead.

  • If you want to treat schools as separate businesses, then each business will have to develop a staffing policy that includes training for new appointments. Such a market will be served by the private sector, but at a cost. That cost takes cash away from teaching and learning, as we have seen with spending on recruitment.
  • The other extreme is a completely managed system. Until the 1970s training, where it was thought necessary, was the responsibility of the employers, whether local authorities or the churches. Robbins, in his famous Report, moved the bulk of teacher training into higher education and pre-entry training became mandatory by the end of the 1970s for teachers in all state-funded schools and not just primary and secondary modern schools.

Well, we don’t have a role for local authorities anymore and the churches have a very different place in society compared with 50 years ago, so do we let schools go it alone on training or find some other model? One solution is for schools to group together in Multi-Academy Trusts that take responsibility for the training for all schools in the Group as one of their functions. After all, a MAT is basically little different to a local authority, unless, of course, you value local democratic accountability.

A local approach does have the merit that it ensures that trainees are roughly in the correct places to meet the demand from schools. After all, what is the point of training new teachers in areas where there are a limited number of vacancies, especially if, as with many career changers into teaching, the new teachers are not mobile.

A second solution, currently being tested by the government, is to improve the skills of the existing workforce, especially in terms of subject knowledge. Whether the current programme for improving the skills of those teaching mathematics and science will be dealt a possibly fatal blow by the recent DfE paper on subject expertise and outcomes, only time will tell. Despite the findings of that Report, I have long been an advocate of ending QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) as a passport to teach anything to anyone at any level. It is only one step better than not needing any preparation for teaching at all.

We have a relatively young teaching force at present and as such professional development should be a key to retaining staff. Perhaps the most worrying DfE statistic of 2016 was the increase in wastage rates, not at the end of the first year of teaching, but after 3-5 years. Where these teachers are going and why, is a key question that needs to be answered. Some may be going overseas, into the rapidly expanding international school market, others may be of an age where they are taking a career break and yet more may be affected by pay, workload and morale, the three defining areas any government needs to pay attention to if it wants to avoid a teacher supply crisis.

Before closing, I just want to say a few words about teaching pupils with special needs. I think much has been achieved for such pupils, but in terms of training teachers, especially to work with those pupils with the greater degree of challenge, much still remains to be done. Training for teachers to work and lead our SEN sector seems to me to be far too haphazard at present. I believe such training must come after the acquisition of the basic skills of being a teacher, but in our fragmented, school-based world how that can be funded remains a challenge.

We are on the cusp of an exciting period in education, as we approach the 150th anniversary of state schooling in 2020. For most of the history of education, teaching has meant one teacher to one class. Anyone who has followed the recent debates about driverless cars or watched programmes about the new gadgets at CES in Las Vegas earlier this month will know how pervasive changes in technology are becoming in our lives. It would be irrational to think that in education technology will stop with the inter-active whiteboard. With more processing power in our pockets than ever seemed feasible a decade ago, the very notion of a five-day school week for 40 weeks a year may come into question, along with our accepted notion of one class: one teacher.

Such changes can have profound effects upon the need for labour in our education system. What will the learning team of the future look like? If Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep when Forster passed his Education Act and then woken up today would schools be one of the few places where he might still recognise his surroundings and even feel at home?

In the later 1980s, the City, where we are today, experienced its ‘big bang’: out went the bowler hats and share dealing by ‘open outcry’, and in came computer trading and the end of the trading floor. Might education witness a similar revolution driven by technology and a spirit of entrepreneurship that Britain is so good at?

I don’t know, but I do know that our aspiration must be to achieve the best education for all our young people that is possible in a world where the market porter of the 19th century trundling his barrow or carrying Billingsgate’s fish on his head was replaced by the fork-lift truck driver in the 20th century. In the 21st century it is the software engineer that writes the programmes for the automated warehouse that companies must now recruit.

I may, perhaps, have strayed slightly from my brief, but at heart, I believe we do need to ensure not only sufficient teachers for today, but also for tomorrow’s world.

Thank you for listening.

500th post

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Today is the fourth anniversary of this blog. The first posting was on 25th January 2013. By a coincidence this is also the 500th post. What a lot has happened since my first two posts that January four years ago. We are on our third Secretary of State for Education; academies were going to be the arrangements for all schools and local authorities would relinquish their role in schooling; then academies were not going to be made mandatory; grammar schools became government policy; there is a new though slightly haphazard arrangement for technical schools; a post BREXIT scheme to bring in teachers from Spain that sits oddly with the current rhetoric and a funding formula that  looks likely to create carnage among rural schools if implemented in its present form.

Then there have been curriculum changes and new assessment rules, plus a new Chief inspector and sundry other new heads of different bodies. The NCTL has a Chair, but no obvious Board for him to chair, and teacher preparation programme has drifted towards a school-based system, but without managing to stem concerns about a supply crisis. Pressures on funding may well solve the teacher supply crisis for many schools, as well as eliminating certain subjects from the curriculum. In passing, we have also had a general election and the BREXIT decision with the result of a new Prime Minister. What interesting times.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the 40,000 or so visitors that have generated 76,000 views of this blog. The main theme started, as I explained in the post at the end of 2016, as a means of replacing various columns about numbers in education that had graced various publications since 1997.

Partly because it has been an interest of mine since the early 1980s, and partly because of the development of TeachVac as a free recruitment site that costs schools and teachers nothing to use, the labour market for teachers has featured in a significant number of posts over the last three years (www.teachvac.co.uk). I am proud that TeachVac has the best data on vacancies in the secondary sector and also now tracks primary as well and is building up its database in that sector to allow for comparisons of trends over time.

I have lost count of the number of countries where at least one visitor to the site has been recorded, although Africa and the Middle East still remain the parts of the world with the least visitors and the United States, the EU and Australia the countries, after the United Kingdom, with the most views over the past four years.

My aim for a general post on this blog is to write around 500 words, although there are specific posts that are longer, including various talks I have presented over the past four years.

Thank you for reading and commenting; the next milestone in 100,000 views and 50,000 visitors. I hope to achieve both of these targets in due course.

BREXIT and education

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Apart from the issues regarding students in higher education recruited from the EU and the matter of research funding for our universities, there are also the matter of recruiting teachers and of whether our exit should affect the school curriculum to consider after today’s speech by the Prime Minister.

If we are to become a world-class trading nation, do we need to up our game over the teaching of languages? If so, does the balance between European languages and say Mandarin need to alter? Despite the former administration’s apparent love for the Chinese language, progress has been patchy, with some schools embracing the teaching of Mandarin and others not being so interested.

With most of South America, apart from Brazil, speaking a form of Spanish, should we increase the teaching of that language and reduce say, German. Should Russian return to the group of languages more widely taught in schools? Then there are the languages of the Indian Sub-continent and of anglophile Africa. Do we need to increase speakers of those tongues or rely upon them learning English to allow us to export to them?

Perhaps more importantly do we need to take another look at the EBacc? The creative arts, design and technology and even business studies have seemingly ranked way down the DfE’s list of concerns ever since Mr Gove entered Sanctuary Buildings. Do we need to reassess the importance of certain subjects? Music, in all its forms, has been a key export industry. Do we need to give it a boost in schools or just rely on television talent shows to increase interest in the subject and a desire to practice it in public? If manufacturing is going to be important, should the government pay more attention to design and technology and assess how the subject can be staffed in our schools. In TeachVac we have seen few advertisements for vacancies in either music or design and technology compared with many other subjects both at the end of 2016 and in the first fortnight of 2017. This may suggest schools are not investing in the teaching of these subjects at present.

STEM subjects as a whole are also important, especially where they help develop new technologies. However, developing a spirit of entrepreneurship in our schools may be equally important. In a post some time ago, I noted that more innovators came from independent schools than from state schools. Clearly, post BREXIT, we need a generation of exporters educated in all our schools and this might mean re-evaluating the staffing of business studies. At present, this a subject the DfE largely ignores, despite the past two years of TeachVac data showing how under-staffed it is becoming.

Finally, what happens if we cannot maintain a common travel area with the Irish republic? Although not as great a source of teachers as some would imagine, teachers from Ireland do help swell the ranks of the teaching profession in times of shortage. Will they need visas, along with their Spanish and other EU compatriots, in a few years’ time? On that front, schools must be wondering when the Migration Advisory Committee will report on the tier 2 visa rules for 2017-18.

 

 

 

 

More about Finance

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The well-respected institute for Fiscal Studies has published a document highlighting the effects of the pay freeze on the public sector since the recession hit in 2008. https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/gb/gb2016/gb2016ch6.pdf

In relation to education, the IFS comments that ‘The Department for Education (DfE) is planned to see a budget cut of 1.9% over the period 2015–16 to 2019–20, a smaller cut than planned for most other departments.’ However, over the whole period since 2010–11, the total DfE budget is expected to be cut by 8.5%. This is still low in comparison to the cuts inflicted on some other government departments where results such as the recent jail riots suggest cutting too far can have serious consequences.

One of the issues for education, with this level of public spending, is around pay. After all, education is still a people intensive activity, with relatively low levels of capital expenditure and technology only recently starting to play a significant role in the delivery of learning.

As the IFS makes clear, part of the real-terms cut to public service spending over the last parliament was achieved by holding down public sector pay. Indeed, as the authors of the IFS document remind readers, pay was frozen in cash terms for all but the lowest-paid public sector workers in 2011–12 and 2012–13, and pay awards were limited to 1% across most of the public sector in 2013–14, 2014–15 and 2015–16.

They note that since private sector wages were also growing slowly over this period, such pay restraint did not have a particularly adverse impact on relative wages. By 2014–15, average pay in the public sector was about the same level relative to the private sector as it had been in 2010–11, and still well above its pre-crisis (2007–08) level.

However, the IFS authors anticipate that going forwards, private sector wages are expected to grow more rapidly. The OBR’s latest forecast is that average earnings across the private sector will grow by around 17% (in cash terms) between 2015–16 and 2019–20. The government’s announced 1% limit on annual pay increases for a further four years from 2016–17 is therefore expected to reduce wages in the public sector to their lowest level relative to private sector wages since at least the 1990s. This could result in difficulties for public sector employers trying to recruit, retain and motivate high quality workers, and the IFS suggests, raises the possibility of industrial relations issues.

This confirms what the view this blog has taken ever since the four year deal on a one per cent per annum rise was announced, that where alternative graduate jobs exist in the private sector, teaching looks less enticing as an area of work than in the past. However, with the cuts in budgets, this may matter less if schools cannot afford to offer the same number of jobs.

As mentioned in earlier posts, what happens to the numbers leaving the profession will be the key to whether the recruitment crisis of recent years either eases or remains a problem in a range of subjects across much of the country? I expect English to be the subject to provide an early steer as the free pool of trainees is relatively smaller as a proportion of overall trainee numbers than in many subjects, so schools not involved in training new teachers may struggle to recruit in 2017.

We all do phonics now

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An understanding of the place of phonics in early teaching seems to have become accepted practice among teachers. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/phonics-screening-check-and-key-stage-1-assessments-england-2016

The latest DfE publication of outcomes of phonic testing reveals that;

More than 4 in 5 (81%) pupils met the expected phonics standard in year 1 (6 year olds) in 2016, a 4 percentage point increase from 2015 when 77% of pupils achieved the expected standard. By the end of year 2 (age 7), more than 9 in 10 pupils (91%) met the standard in 2016, a 1 percentage point increase from 2015.

At the same time, under the new teacher assessment rules, there has been a fall in reported outcomes for the skill of writing. I suspect over the next few years there will be a real debate about the place of writing in early education. There is a role in helping to form and understand letters and also to develop the skill of communication. Will that last for the first ‘tablet’ generation? I suspect that children don’t see writing as an essential tool any more. It isn’t a skill they often see demonstrated in the home. Apart from writing your signature, when, reader, did you last pen a piece of script: possibly on your Christmas cards? This leads me to wonder about the future for written examinations? Not only will the memory test part be of less value, but if the handwriting skill isn’t seen as useful, what Twenty First century skills are we trying to test?

According to the DfE figures for England as a whole, being in small class at KS1 may help with reading, doesn’t seem to help with writing and makes no difference in mathematics skills achieved. Of course, none of this allows for parental help and the support of siblings. However, all the other features we know from past experience are repeated in the 2016 outcomes. Girls achieve higher scores overall than boys; pupils on free school meals achieve lower scores than other pupils, as do pupils with identified special needs at KS1. At this stage, those with English as a second language don’t do as well as native speakers, although we know that they can outperform as a group by later key stages.

The small sliver of good news for boys is that among pupils outperforming the expected standard in mathematics, boys outperform girls, but by a smaller margin than girls outperform boys in reading and writing. The other good news is that the gap between pupils on free school meals and other pupils continues to close, but at a slow rate of around a percentage point a year. With the living wage and assuming unemployment remains low, the number of children assessed at KS1 on free meals may well fall, making further reductions in the gap more of a challenge.

But, back to phonics. The gap between the best and worst local authorities, by end of year 2, is just eight percentage, points compared at a gap of 25% between the best and worst in writing. Sadly, Oxford, where I live, continues to perform badly, this despite five years of various interventions. The fact that these less well performing schools in Oxford will for the most part receive more funding under the new formula can only be good news, but not is the funds come from robbing cash from rural primary schools.

 

 

 

 

Is Design & Technology dying by default?

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Over the past few years Design & Technology has consistently failed to recruit into training the number of teachers identified as being needed to staff our schools. The DfE uses the Teacher Supply Model to calculate an annual training number. Recent figures showing the following pattern of recruitment are in the Table.

courses starting in Number Recruited TSM Number Shortfall
2016 423 1034 611
2015 526 1279 753
2014 450 1030 580
2013 391 870 479
2012 710 825 115
2011 1970 1880 -90
2010 2940 2560 -380
2009 3100 2700 -400
10510 12178 1668

The over-recruitment (minus number in final column) of the period 2009-2011, a period when the economy was deeply mired in recession, has been replaced by five years of failure to recruit to what have been much lower targets. Indeed, the total number of new trainees recruited between 2012 and 2016 are in total less than were recruited in either 2009 or 2010.

Now it can be assumed that with falling rolls in secondary schools and a reluctance to cut back on training numbers during the period of the Labour government, too many Design & Technology teachers were probably being trained in 2009 and 2010. That cannot be said to be the case today. Demand, as measured by TeachVac, has outstripped the supply of teachers of Design & Technology in both 2015 and 2016, more notably in 2015 when the numbers in training were lower than were looking for teaching posts in 2016. The fact that the number of trainees recruited in 2016, as measured by the ITT census, is the lowest recorded since 2013 doesn’t bode well for schools looking to recruit Design & Technology teachers for September 2017 and January 2018.

Of course, Design & Technology is a portmanteau subject which, as the footnote in the ITT census explains, ’includes food’. By this, I think they mean teachers of food technology, the former home economics that emerged from the historical domestic science term used for those that taught ‘cooking and needlecraft’ in schools. Sadly, it looks as if there is no record of either the demand for teachers of the different aspects of Design & Technology or of the numbers entering training with the different backgrounds and skill sets. Perhaps there are enough trainees in food technology, but not in resistant materials? Perhaps, the position is the other way around.

Since starting this blog post, it has been pointed out to me that the numbers in Table 1a of the ITT census don’t seem to add up. There are 169 trainees shown as in higher education; 66 on courses in SCITTs and 117 on School Direct Fee courses. The numbers on the School Direct salaried route and Teach First are each hidden behind an asterisk. This normally means too few to report, so we can assume not more than 20 across both routes. By my mathematics this makes between 352 and 372 trainees and not the 423 reported in the census. The other 71 might be on undergraduate courses, but that column isn’t shown by subject in the Table, only an overall total of 243 undergraduates across all subjects. Looking back at 2014 undergraduate numbers, an assuming a three year degree course, entrants were 32 to Design & Technology undergraduate courses in 2014. Thus if all remained, an unlikely outcome, the number entering the labour market in 2017 will be 352 postgraduates (minus any that don’t complete the course – let’s say 30), so 322 postgraduates plus 32 undergraduates to a maximum of 354, the lowest number for many years.

Such numbers, and the trend over recent years does leave one to wonder why trainees in Design & Technology with a 2:2 degree don’t receive a bursary whereas those in Biology (a subject that over-recruited this year) will receive £10,000 in 2017, and those that started courses this September with a 2:2 in biology received £15,000.

But, then the distribution of bursaries has always been a mystery to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the value of the EBacc in the curriculum compared with Design & Technology.

Don’t tax renewables

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There is a device in the House of Commons called an Early Day Motion whereby  MPs can express a view on a particular topic relating to any subject you can think of and probably a few that wouldn’t ever have occurred to you, such as Carnwath Primary School’s lottery grant and local newspapers in South London. However, some EDMs are important and deserve to garner support from a large number of our elected representatives in order to show the strength of feeling on a topic.

One such that has all-party support is EDM 491 on business rates and solar power. The gist of the EDM is that the supporters of the EDM;

expresses deep concern at the changes to the rateable value of rooftop photovoltaic solar panels being proposed by the Valuation Office Agency, which may result in a six to eight-fold increase in the business rate charges to businesses, community groups and schools for the use of their own rooftop solar across the UK; notes the popularity, importance and affordability of solar power; and calls on the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department for Communities and Local Government and HM Treasury to take action to prevent unexpected and extreme business rate rises for solar… 

It does seem odd that schools trying to keep down costs and perhaps generate a small amount of feed-in tariff should have to contemplate turning off their PV panels because it might cost them more to operate them than to either turn them off or even remove them.

According to a video from Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, the situation is even more ludicrous as she states in the video that private schools would not pay the additional tax – presumably where they are charities? If this is the case, then why not exempt all non-income generating public buildings such as schools from any change to business rates. However, I would go further and support the ban on any form of tax on renewables anywhere as counterproductive to their essential purpose to help reduce greenhouses gases and the use of Carbon Dioxide.

If you agree, please email you local MP and ask them to either sign the EDM or explain why they think it is a good idea to tax renewable energy sources in schools? You might ask your professional association what stance they take on the EDM.

I am also interested in the use of asphalt covered playgrounds as a source of ground source heat generation. After all, these open spaces are probably left uncovered for 99% of the year. Providing a low cost form of installation can be devised playgrounds should offer a good potential source of low-level heat generation. Perhaps a university School of Education could team up with one of the science departments in the university to devise a viable scheme that could be installed over a summer holiday period?

 

 

 

Geopolitics and macroeconomics

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Whether the world is a more dangerous place this January isn’t for me to say. However, to balance my short-term views about teacher supply problems I thought it worth thinking about what the combined effects of a downturn in China; tensions in the Middle East; falling oil prices and the possibility of rising interest rates might do to the longer-term teacher supply position.

An analysis of data over the past fifty years suggests teacher supply problems ease when the economy is subdued or in recession. Whether there is a direct link between these two facts may be arguable, but while there is a need to educate children there will be a need for teachers. Again, over the past fifty years, there have been massive strides in technology since the famous BBC programme of the late 1970s ‘The chips are down’ about the microprocessor revolution. Classrooms have adapted to make use of the new technology, but there has been no seismic shift away from traditional patterns of pupil teacher numbers. Indeed, in secondary schools over the past decade, pupil-teacher ratios have even improved, according to DfE data.

The recently reported growth in home schooling may be the first signs of a coming revolution, driven by parents no longer satisfied with the current model of schooling. Tablets, TVs and computers can provide more learning power than any school library of a couple of decades ago. What is needed is the means of instruction and the method of motivation to keep youngsters on task. How much more likely is that in a home environment than when youngsters are faced with the distractions caused by 25 or 30 other children: could learning me more focused and take less time in the home than the classroom?

No doubt, parents would still want children to socialise in order to learn team games, sing together and undertake risky science experiments under the control of a qualified person. However, that might mean only sending your child to school for a couple of days a week. Such a shift might also boost the market for tutors as parents just buy in specific skills where their offspring are facing issues with learning.

As the BBC recently highlighted, the spirit of enterprise is abroad in Britain at the present time. I am sure that there are many developers in both large companies and small start-ups eying what could be a lucrative market that has world-wide potential; some of which will be on display at BETT.

Such a shift in technology from a labour intensive to a technology driven learning process could have a profound effect on both the need for teachers and the spending by the State on education. However, in the short-term, the geopolitical and macroeconomic signals might suggest that if a downturn is coming then teaching might benefit from renewed interest as a career choice.

As I have said at several conferences recently, I am one of the only people that might see benefits from a slowdown in China, even if it only reduces the inflow to that country of UK teachers to work in the growing international school market.

However, with the allocations for 2016 entry into teacher preparation courses set and fewer places available on non-EBacc subjects than in 2015, none of this will matter before 2017 unless, as in 2009, any downturn in the world’s economy bring back greater numbers of returners into teaching: such an effect could dramatically alter the picture of teacher supply, even for 2016, were it to come about.

MOOCs mark technology shift

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MOOCS or Massive Open access On line Courses, to spell the initials out in full, are a recent phenomenon. In one sense they are higher education’s answer to the social media age. For a sector that took over 500 years to recognise that cheap printing had made the lecture a redundant form of knowledge transfer the adaptation of UK higher education to the digital age in just 20 years is nothing short of a miracle.

In the mid-1990s Oxford Brookes University held an alternative learning term based around the theme of new technology. One of the events was version of the ‘hypothetical’ popular at the time where a panel of experts was quizzed by an experienced host, in this case the University’s Chancellor Helena Kennedy QC, about how the future use of technology in higher education might unfold. At that time librarians were still wedded to fixed hours and building more shelves and nobody bothered about power points, plagiarism or even the number of PCs available. The fax machine was high tech and the OHP the height of sophistication, even if few lecturers knew how to use it properly.

What is known as ‘clicks and mortar’ universities were the only option, except for those mature students who decided to travel down the Open University route. Now on-line study for free, is big business. However, like other new technology someone will eventually need to find a means of making money out of the technology if it is to survive. What starts as a means of drawing potential students towards degree courses inevitably develops a life of its own. However, the demand for high quality degree courses, probably taught in English, and with the cache that comes with association with a university known throughout the world, will undoubtedly provide a head start for some institutions.

For me, one of the key questions is when and how this technology revolution in mass knowledge transfer will spread to more basic learning? There must be a defined number of issues with learning even a highly complex language such as English, and if we can use technology to help unlock those blockages perhaps we can really start to think about abolishing illiteracy. Even now, the child who is off school with a cold could join the lessons by web cam if they wanted to, with no worries over spreading germs around the classroom.

Technology also allows for new methods of learning based upon approaches not grounded in the limitations of the printed page. One method has been called the Turing approach after Alan Turing’s pioneer work on computing. I don’t know much about it, but am interested to find out more.

What is clear is that the knowledge revolution is beginning to pick up speed and much of UK higher education is determined not to be left behind in the same manner is it was when it took the decision to create the JANET network. For schools, perhaps it is time for Mr Gove to go back to BETT and announce a Minister for Educational Technology. Closing down BECTA may not have been a mistake, but failing to recognise the importance of what it stood for certainly would be.