Tag Archives: Westminster

AI – a reminder from 2018

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Sometimes it is worth repeating an earlier post. This one about AI and education was from as long ago as 2018. The post dealt with a Report by a House of Lords Committee. The most prescient section was; 

“One witness warned the Committee, “that the idealised world represented on social media “leads to many illnesses including eating disorders … and serious mental illnesses”.   The implication being that schools must put in place strategies to prevent such outcomes among future generations exposed to the perils of the modern world.”

You can read the full post at: AI and education – The view of the House of Lords Committee | John Howson

So, way back before Covid, Westminster was being warned about serious mental illnesses- that might impact schools, my highlighting.

Well, post covid, the SEND demand has not been generated by physical needs. The government seems to have largely ignored the warnings and is now trying to put ‘the stopper back in the bottle’, to use a phrase popular with the BBC this week.

Can we save on defence sending if we use some of the education budget to help the next generation work with the developments created by AI?

As Ukraine and The Gulf have shown, the mental capabilities of the armed forces may be more important than the physical attributes in a defensive war. We won’t be fighting imperial wars again – or I hope not – Iraq should have been the last one, if Afghanistan is seen as punishment campaign not a land grab, but without an endgame strategy that the Americans seem so bad at understanding is an essential part of any military operation or war.

I am not sure that the curriculum Review – remember that damp squib – really took on board the changes AI would bring to society. The Microprocessor revolution that changed the 1980s; the internet revolution of the late 1990s and the Jave Enabled smart phone revolution of the second decade of our century each changed children’s lives. AI has already done so, and will continue to do so in ways someone of my age cannot even imagine.

I have found turning a blog post into a webinar in just minutes awesome. Creating a poster from the same text is improving all the time, and its outcomes can now be regularly seen on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

We are a tech savvy nation; but not yet a tech savvy education system. Is it time for bodies like The Royal Society to make their voice known, along with those that represent our creative industries, equally affected by AI.

I wrote in another post that ’the market porter of the early 20th century was replaced by the forklift truck driver. They in turn were replaced by the software engineer creating automated warehouses. Now AI will make most software engineers redundant, in the same way as the forklift truck driver has started to disappear as a role in warehousing.

Radical change is necessary in our education system. Do we need a national conversation around what that change should be, and not just a professional curriculum review?

Falling rolls in London: much worse than the rest of England

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In my last post on this blog, I looked at the worsening of primary PTRs across much of the DfE’s ‘Inner London’ area. Falling Rolls: Is the funding formula making matters worse? | John Howson

This post looks how ‘Inner London boroughs have fare compared with the rest of England over those three years?

I think it is fair to say that London as a whole really has seen a significant downturn in primary pupil numbers. There are 22 local authorities where primary pupil numbers as published by the DfE have reduced by 5% or more between 2023/24 and 2025/26. Of these, 13 are London boroughs, and six – seven if Newham is included – are Inner London boroughs.

Seven of the top 10 places for the largest percentage decline in primary pupil numbers are filled by London boroughs. The other three places are taken by the Isle of Wight, Rutland and Torbay, three of the smallest unitary authorities in England.

Birmingham, Manchester and Leicester are the only large cities in the table. They fill three of the four bottom places for local authorities with a decline in pupil numbers of five per cent or more, along with Hillingdon in West London.

At the other end of the table, there are few London boroughs with less than a two per cent decline in their primary pupil populations.


London boroughs at this end of the table seem to be mostly outer London boroughs on the fringe of the metropolitan area. By contrast, there are seven county councils in the list of lowest declines in pupil numbers. This number increases to eight, if the Staffordshire figure, of an increase in pupil numbers, is correct.

The London boroughs will have the numbers in reception for each year, and will know how much worse the decline is likely to become over the next few years. More school closures look inevitable unless the funding model is changed to protect schools with declining rolls.

Not to protect the school estate in London is to assume that there will never be an upturn in pupil numbers. In cities, closing schools and selling off the site for housing means that in any upturn land may not be available for any new schools needed for the extra pupils. This is where thinking for the longer-term is important. During the last downturn of this size, most schools in London remained open, although some, such as Stamford Hill Infant and Junior School in Haringey, where I attended in the 1950s, did eventually close. Interestingly, the one form entry St Anne’s Church of England Primary School, close to Stamford Hill School that wasn’t actually in Stamford Hill, is still open.

However, this is not the post to discuss whether or not, in a more secular society, faith run schools should be closed where an alternative non-faith school can absorb the pupils. But this is an issue to debate, especially in urban areas.

In villages, the church-run school may still be the only school available, and that raises a much larger question about who should run state funded schooling? As the Wesleyan Methodists put it when faced by the 1902 Act, and decisions on whether to open state-funded secondary schools; are our teachers, teachers of children or teachers of Methodist children?

What Lib Dems want for SEND pupils and their families

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I was delighted to see the Liberal Democrats weighing in on the SEND debate by writing to the Prime minister and setting out five key principles behind any reform of the SEND system. This is what their letter to the Prime minister said:

Our five principles and priorities for SEND reform are as follows:

  1. Putting children and families first Children’s rights to SEND assessment and support must be maintained and the voices of children and young people with SEND and of their families and carers must be at the centre of the reform process.
  2. Boosting specialist capacity and improving mainstream provision Capacity in state special provision must be increased, alongside improvements to inclusive mainstream provision, with investment in both new school buildings and staff training.
  3. Supporting local government Local authorities must be supported better to fund SEND services, including through:
    1. The extension of the profit cap in children’s social care to private SEND provision, where many of the same private equity backed companies are active, and
    2. National government funding to support any child whose assessed needs exceed a specific cost.
  4. Early identification and shorter waiting lists Early identification and intervention must be improved, with waiting times for diagnosis, support and therapies cut.
  5. Fair funding The SEND funding system must properly incentivise schools both to accept SEND pupils and to train their staff in best practice for integrated teaching and pastoral care. Our five principles for SEND reform – Liberal Democrats

These principles come from a motion debated at last year’s Party conference and represent a check list against which specific policies can be measured, such as increasing the supply of educational psychologists to deal with both the annual reviews and initial assessments of EHCPs.

If there is anything missing from the list, it is the role of the NHS, and specifically around mental health and education. This is the area of need where the system has really broken down. Many of the other issues are cost related due to inflation and more young people living longer as well as increased demands from an age range of support than can now reach up to the age of 25. The issue of mental health has swamped the system and the NHS must play a part in helping define what is needed.

With the main opposition at Westminster disinterested in the issues of education that are facing most families, the Lib Dems should be leading from the front. This letter should have been sent at least a week ago.

As my earlier posts of today have shown, the Lib Dems next education campaign can be around securing enough teachers for schools in our more deprived areas. Such a campaign can take on both labour councils and Reform voters to show there is a radical alternative in the Liberal democrats.

Education may not feature very high in polling about issue in elections, but on a day-to-day basis it isn’t far away from the conversations in many households. From mobile phone to AI, funding for school meals to citizenship, Liberal Democrats should be calling the government to account.  

Debate about Oak Academy

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There is to be a short debate in the House of Lords this afternoon, initiated by a Conservative Peer, about the creation of the Oak Academy to provide government funded resources for schools to help teach the curriculum. The House of Lords library has a helpful briefing note ahead of the debate Oak National Academy: Impact on the publishing and educational technology sectors – House of Lords Library (parliament.uk) I find the debate about the Oak Academy interesting in the light of the lack of any concerns about the government’s creation of a recruitment portal and control of the ITT application process.

Clearly, control of the curriculum through a body such as the Oak Academy can have implications for the publishing and technology industries that are both sectors that are large export earners for the education sector. This debate reminds me of when the same sector challenged the BBC over their potential control of education resources in the early days of the internet.

I will be interested to see the arguments put forward on both sides today. I am sure that there will be concerns that Ministers can direct schools to use Oak generated resources, and ensure that the values imbedded in such resources contain values approved by the current government. What might this government and a Labour government have to say about lessons generated by Oak Academy in such circumstances on the issue of industrial relations and the right to withdraw labour in any dispute between employer and their employees in history materials generated by the Academy.

Similar arguments were current when the Education Reform Bill in the 1980s mandated a National Curriculum. The concerns were around the powers of any Secretary of State to dictate to teachers what to teach and how to teach it. Of course, since then, we have seen Ministers dictate on phonics and multiplication tables, and schools being forced to follow the ministerial line even when authorities question its validity.

The Oak Academy started with good intentions during the covid pandemic, and removing the profit element, could produce materials at a lower cost than the private sector. Lower costs would be helpful to schools, but there does need to be effective oversight of materials being produced. There is also the issue of whether schools should be compelled to use Oak Generated materials? I am sure that these and other issues will be raised in today’s debate at Westminster.

As the chair of TeachVac, www.teachvac.co.uk the job board for teachers established before the DfE vacancy site was even considered, I can see the concerns of the industry about the loss of income from a lucrative sector that always needs new resources. However, there is a need for a wider debate about the role of government in state-funded education in a democracy, and that debate is more important than just the possible loss of business to existing providers. We cannot ignore the fact that ‘values’ are implicit in much of what we both choose to teach and how we then teach it.

Marking time between PMs

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The current political turmoil at Westminster has led commentators and journalists to suggest that the Schools Bill is now effectively dead in the water. The Bill had been struggling ever since it was introduced into the House of Lords and then received a right mauling, such as Upper House can sometimes deliver. Even Tory members of the ‘revising chamber’ seemed unimpressed by their own government’s attempts at reform. The strongest support at that point in time seemed to come from the bench of the Lords Spiritual in the form of the Church of England Bishop with the speaking rights for their schools.  

So, while the DfE also waits to see whether kit Malthouse joins the ranks of those passing through Sanctuary buildings or will be allowed to stay on in post as Secretary of State by the next prime minster, what might civil servants do with their time if the Bill has effectively been dropped?

Personally, I would like to see the regulations for in-year admissions updated to provide more power provided for local authorities, especially with regard to children in care and those with an EHCP that move into a new area. These are some of our most vulnerable children, and the present system of opt-out by academies for in-year admissions sometimes doesn’t help their education.

I have called this a need for a Jacob’s Law to change this situation, but in reality, it doesn’t need a law, just a change in regulations and secondary legislation.

For those that want to read the history behind the need for a Jacob’s Law, see  Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com) It is now 5 years since Jacob returned to Oxfordshire and started his period of 22 months without a school accepting him on roll. We must not let this happen again.

The last two White Papers have both contained references to returning control of in-year admissions to local authorities and the government has confirmed that to do so doesn’t need primary legislation.

The loss of the Schools Bill also puts at risk the idea of a register of young people of school age. Such a list would allow movement of young people to be tracked and make it harder for children to disappear off the radar. Not impossible, because parents can take drastic action such as disappearing overseas, but at least it might help policymaker understand the extent of home schooling and encourage debate about the rights of children and their parents to education and what that term actually means in the modern age?

The 25-49 age group that contains most parents of school-age children was one of the groups least supportive of the Conservatives in the latest polling of the public, even putting the Party behind the Lib Dems nationally among this age-group! PeoplePolling / GB News Survey Results

What is the role of a school in its community?

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For everyone interested in either the role of a middle tier in our school system in England or in how pupil place planning and support for vulnerable children is handled in the current shambles around the arrangements for schools in England, this is an important report to read. Local authority provision for school places and support for vulnerable children – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) The recent White Paper on Education was the second one to pledge to change in-year Admissions and this Report indicates why Ministers should act swiftly to make the necessary changes to the current system.

At the heart of the debate about the middle tier is the role of local authorities and the role of academies and the Trusts that run them. The following two quotes from the report sum up current situation nicely in relation to these important issues for the management of our schooling system:

‘Nevertheless, our research also suggested that there are two ways in which academisation can affect local education systems. First, because there are different processes for making decisions and resolving disputes about place-planning and placements of vulnerable pupils for academies and maintained schools, where an “isolationist” school is an academy, it can be more difficult, complex, and time-consuming to resolve issues. Second, while not generalising, school, trust and LA leaders and parents/carers reported that, among the minority of schools that took an “isolationist” approach, these were more likely to be schools that were part of larger regional or national academy trusts.’

‘Furthermore, there was broad agreement among school, trust and LA leaders and parents/carers that LAs were uniquely placed to play this role [place planning]. (In relation to place-planning, a minority of trust leaders and national stakeholders argued that the RSC should be wholly or partially responsible for delivering place-planning.) Whichever way roles and responsibilities are configured, there was consensus about the need for clarity, alignment of responsibilities and decision-making authority, for reciprocal expectations of schools, trusts and LAs around participating in local partnership-based approaches to place-planning and support for vulnerable pupils, and a renewed, more collaborative relationship between local and central government.’

The situation is summed up by a quote from a local authority officer:

‘Nobody wants to roll back the clock. But if we have MATs not working for the best interests of young people in the community, we don’t have any direct levers. We would have to go through the RSC, and not sure they have many levers. A lot of accountability sits with the LA, but the responsibility of delivery sits with schools. Doesn’t feel appropriate. We need some accountabilities placed on academy trusts and schools to deliver expectations [for vulnerable children].’ (LA officer page 106)

We need a system that works for the children seeking an education, and not primarily for those that provide that schooling. This is especially true for our most vulnerable young people and I hope that Ministers will spend time over easter reading this report and then acting upon its findings. State schooling is a public service and must be managed as such.

History and headship

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Sometimes when searching the web for something another link is thrown up. Today, I rediscovered this piece I wrote for the Education Select Committee way back in 1998, nearly a quarter of a century ago.

I have only included just the first part here, but the whole piece can be read at House of Commons – Education and Employment – Report (parliament.uk) and reveals how useful a good archive policy is for future historians. Worth noting that even in 1998 I was already using the term Chair not Chairman.

Memorandum from Mr John Howson, Education Data Surveys Ltd

THE ROLE OF HEADTEACHERS

LEADERS MUST BE ABLE TO MANAGE, BUT NOT ALL MANAGERS ARE LEADERS

  1. The intention of the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Employment to consider the role of headteachers is welcomed.

The impact of headteachers on their schools

  2. There is no doubting the important role that a headteacher plays in the life of a school. As the leading professional, the headteacher has a strategic role to play in the success of the school. Just as successful companies, hospitals, regiments and governments function more effectively with strong leadership, so the same is true of schools.

  2.1 Academic studies both here and elsewhere suggest that successful leadership is a combination of situational and personal leadership skills. That is matching the abilities of the individual to the task in hand. One issue with heads is that, as they are generally appointed for an indefinite period, a change in the situation a school faces may require a change in the skill mix needed. This may result in the current head of the school under performing. This problem can also be observed in the corporate sector. Fixed term renewable contracts would offer a solution to this problem but would come with a price tag attached. The loss of tenure would require additional rewards for the additional risks to be accepted.

  2.2 In the early work of the National Education Assessment Centre, a joint venture between Oxford Brookes University and the Secondary Heads Association, it became clear that successful heads need a clear set of educational values. The values should underpin their work and heads must also recognise how to put their values in to practice. For instance, timetabling is not a mechanical “value free” activity. The classes a newly qualified teacher is asked to teach may determine how long they stay in the profession.

The nature of the head’s task

  3.1 There is a popular belief that any competent manager could run a school just as they could any other business. This view muddles up the requirement for professional knowledge with the need for operational support and strategic direction. It is particularly important to understand this issues as the nature of the head’s role has changed during the past decade. It has been transformed from that of just a leading professional to a multi-functional role encompassing the management of education service delivery within a highly fragmented marketplace.

  3.2 Whilst schools are about learning it is right that they should be led by a chief executive with an understanding of the practice of education and a vision to promote the development of the school. It is also right that the head should be expected to justify the direction the school is taking and account for its improvement to non-educationalists. The governing body and particularly its chair serve as the first point in the chain of accountability. In that sense the often discussed comparison between the head as a managing director and the chair of governors as a non-executive Chair of the Board has some merit as an exemplar. In the most recent edition of “Management Today”, the journal of the British Institute of Management, an editorial headed “Yes, the public sector does manage” suggests that “it was time conventional businesses looked again at the abilities of those managers whose skills have been forged in the glare of the public sector”.

  3.3 There are, however, unfortunate side effects of carrying any industrial metaphor too far. Western management theory for too long was based upon scientific principles that resulted in hierarchical structures. These may have been appropriate for a factory environment but were not suitable to professional organisations where rigid structures make team working difficult. The introduction of newer management theories during the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in a fresh look at organisational theory. Teamwork is acceptable with the leading professional being seen as “primus inter pares” with their colleagues rather than at the top of a pyramid. The term “Senior Management team” is now common in the educational leadership literature and normal in adverts for senior staff posts. This approach is not without its risks since it does not remove the need for a leadership function; it just changes the manner in which it operates.

  3.4 The STRB workload survey in 1996 reported on the extent to which heads are able to teach. Conventional wisdom is that the larger the school the less a head will be able to teach. Overall the Study (Table A2) showed primary school headteachers either teaching or undertaking associated tasks such as marking and lesson preparation for an average of 10.6 hours a week. Secondary heads spent on average 6.8 hours a week on such tasks. As a percentage of their working weeks this represented 18.9 per cent of the primary school head’s weeks and 11.1 per cent of the secondary head’s week. However, both heads had longer working weeks than did most other teachers. Primary heads worked on average 55.7 hours a week and secondary heads 61.7 hours. These totals compared with primary classroom teachers who worked 50.8 hours and secondary classroom teachers who worked 48.8 hours. When compared with a similar 1994 study also conducted by the STRB both primary and secondary heads seemed to be working longer hours; up from 55.4 to 55.7 for primary heads and up from 61.1 to 61.7 for secondary heads.

  3.5 The nature of the task of headship must be set against the context that schools operate in. For much of the past thirty years schools have been faced with a period of constant change. During most of the past decade a declining resource base has accompanied this change. DfEE statistics show the average unit of funding per full-time secondary pupil fell from £2,400 in 1990-91 to £2,290 in 1995-96 based on adjusted figures (DfEE Education and Training Statistics for the UK 1997—Table 1.3). In the same period funding per full-time primary pupil rose slightly from £1,590 to £1,690.

Baroness Williams of Crosby

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I am saddened to hear of the death earlier today of Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby.

Baroness Williams was one of the founders of the SDP and had previously been an education secretary during the Labour government of the late 1970s. Created a Life peer in 1993, Baroness Williams played an important background role in education for the Party in her role as a senior politician of wide experience. Her great speaking ability motivated many audiences in both the conference hall and at fringe meetings during many Liberal Democrat conferences over the years. She finally retired from the House of Lords in 2016, but remained an inspiring figure for many in the Liberal Democrats.

In a blog post when another Liberal Democrats stalwart of the House of Lords, Baroness Sharp of Guildford retired, I paid tribute to these two Peers along with Annette Brooke the former MP. All were important for the Liberal Democrats in the field of education, from early years to higher education.

I first encountered Shirley Williams when she was Secretary of State for Education. She initiated The Great Debate in Education on the back of the Prime minister’s famous Ruskin College speech. This was the start of the shift from a national service locally administered to a nationally driven education service that we now have in England. I had achieved some notoriety after appearing in the national press and was invited to several media events where Shirley Williams was the speaker. I especially recall one such event in the Royal Institution where she was opposed Norman St John Stevas, possibly one of the best Secretaries of State we never had.

It was Shirley William’s misfortune to be secretary of State when the government of Jim Callaghan was teetering on the edge of collapse. She had to endure the ‘winter of discontent’ and during that period she failed to stop the caretaker’s strike in Haringey that lead to several weeks of school closures.

Although successful in taking North Yorkshire County Council to court over the need to create non-selective education in Ripon, it was too late in the parliament and the life of the Labour government for any action to be taken on the result that backed the government’s view of the 1976 Education Act, and so, along with the other selective schools that she tried to convert to comprehensive education, selective education still remains in that part of Yorkshire, helped by Mrs thatcher’s prompt repealing of the 1976 Act as one of her first actions as Prime Minister.  

Shirley Williams was an inspiring orator and a joy to listen to when speaking at Liberal Democrat events, either extempore or from a prepared speech. She was not a good timekeeper and was often late, but nobody ever seemed to mind. She was also a great European and had the courage to from a new political party. Along with many other, I will miss her.

Trade Unionist honoured by Labour

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Education will have a new voice in the House of Lords following the announcement of the creation of Christine Blower, the former head of the NUT, as a peer in the dissolution honours list announced today. Christine was proposed by the Labour Party, and will join a distinguished bench of Labour peers with a deep understanding of the state education system. Sadly, the same cannot be said for either of the other two main parties, and there are not enough cross-bench peers with an education background.

The House of Lords has always had more to say about universities and higher education than schools or further education, although some peers have sat on the governing bodies of both colleges and schools.

The Lib Dems Education team in the upper Chamber has been fronted in recent years by Mike Story, an ex-headteacher from Liverpool. Lord Storey has done an excellent job in difficult conditions. Indeed, over the years, despite the Lib Dems being strong on education as a policy area right back to the ’Penny on income Tax’ in the 1990s and the work of Don Foster, Phil Willis, David Laws in government and even Ed Davey for a short period of time, the Party has never had an large team in the Lords. However, for a long while it did have Baroness Williams with her experience as a former Secretary of State, and Margaret Sharp to speak on higher education.

No doubt Baroness Blower will want to address the government’s announcement of the wish to create more free schools, a policy that doesn’t solve the pupil place problem many local authorities are facing and seem more ideological than practical in its nature.

Education matters

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Last evening saw the termly meeting of the APPG (All Party Parliamentary Group) on the Teaching Profession at Westminster. Chris Waterman has continued to do sterling work with this Group that morphed out of a previous ad hoc gathering, primarily established to discuss issues surrounding the teacher labour market as the country moved from surplus to shortage. No doubt those that attended had to ensure they dodged the TV cameras as they made their way through Central Lobby to the committee room for the meeting.

As I had other duties in Oxford, I was unable to attend last evening’s meeting, but did provide Chris will some extracts from recent relevant posts on this blog to distribute to those that were able to attend.

For those with even longer memories that stretch back beyond the creation of SATTAG by Chris and myself, they will recall that this blog started soon after I stopped writing a weekly column for the then TES, now branded as tes. After more than a decade of writing for that paper, I was suffering withdrawal symptoms, and a blog seem a good way to relieve them in a manner that didn’t take up much time.

Of course, the big concern at this present time must be about where the candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party stand on Education? For selection at eleven; complete academisation; more pay for teachers; cash for Children’s Centres? We all have a list of what we would want to ask our next Prime Minister, but are only likely to be able to do so through the professional associations taking a lead and quizzing the eventual finalist on behalf of the profession.

From the candidates’ point of view, they might want to reflect that being too radical can affect what will happen in the real world. Make teaching look too unattractive, and the present teacher supply problem could become even worse, especially if the exodus from the profession were to accelerate. With insufficient numbers entering the profession, losing those already in service at an even greater rate than at present wouldn’t just be unfortunate, but could be disastrous for both our society and the future of the economy.

Teaching is now a global activity and teachers trained in England are able to secure posts in many other countries in the ever-growing private school market of ‘international’ schools, increasingly run by those with the bottom line in mind. With UK higher education an attractive draw for many overseas students and their parents, being taught by teachers that understand the system here can be a help when it is time to apply to university.

So, my key question for Tory Candidates’ is, what support will you provide for your Secretary of State for Education and what will be the key priorities you will ask that person to address? If they don’t mention all of Further Education; funding levels and staffing then education will clearly not be a significant priority for them in the word post October 31st.