Earlier today, I was appointed as the Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, Education and Youth Services on Oxfordshire County Council. As a result of accepting that position, I will be suspending posts on this blog, only posting in exceptional circumstances.
Thank you all for reading the posts, and your many comments.
Previous posts will still remain available to read.
John Howson
2nd October 2023
The September data on postgraduate ITT curses was published by the DfE yesterday. Initial teacher training application statistics for courses starting in the 2023 to 2024 academic year – Apply for teacher training – GOV.UK (apply-for-teacher-training.service.gov.uk) Sadly, there was no last-minute surge in offers for teaching. Although offers for primary courses should be sufficient to meet the number of places on offer, the same cannot be said for the secondary sector.
Amongst secondary courses, only English, history, geography and physical education seem likely to meet their DfE targets. Offers in mathematics this September are less than 2,000 for the first time in over a decade. In music and religious education, it is necessary to delve further back in the archives to find offer levels of 480 across the two subjects. There will be real issues with the supply of new teachers in these two subjects next year.
Although physics and design and technology have seen better offer levels than in recent years, in neither subject will the DfE’s suggested recruitment level be met. I suspect that the numbers actually starting courses this year will only be above last year’s dismal total for all secondary subjects if those with conditions pending are able to convert these conditions into recruited students, otherwise the total may be little different to the seriously low number recorded last year.
In mathematics, the number ‘recruited this year is just 1,340 compared with 1,482 last year. However, there are 516 applications listed as ‘conditions pending’ compared with only 300 in this category last year. Should these ‘conditions pending’ relate to visas and right to enter the country it is possible that the number that transfer into the ‘recruited’ column may be smaller than wished for.
The number of new graduates aged 24 or younger is considerably down on last year, a worrying sign for future leadership recruitment. Less than 5,00o men have been ‘recruited’ this year despite the total number of applicants being 16,470 compared with 11,819 last year. This means that those ‘recruited’ has dropped from 46% of applicants to just 30% this year. Such a dramatic decline must merit some form of investigation to allow providers to understand the cause of the change.
The answer may lie with ‘rest of the world applicants, where only 6% have been accepted this year, compared with 13% last year.
The final outcome for recruitment that will include Teach first must await the publication of the ITT Census, early in December. Although this may show a small improvement over last year’s total, there will not be enough trainees to allow the government to be able to say that it has hit its target and STEM has now really become STEAM in terms of recruitment into teacher preparation.
These figures are such as to warn schools to think carefully about recruitment for September 2024 and especially January 2025. Retention may become an important watchword in the corridors of power.
Public First have today published an interesting report on the ‘collapse’ in school attendance.
Here are the headline conclusions. ATTENDANCE-REPORT-V02.pdf (publicfirst.co.uk)
“Quite simply, too many children are currently missing school to the extent that it affects the continuity of their learning. Disadvantaged pupils who most need the security, stability and care that good schools offer, are most likely to be persistently absent – and the gap is widening. The current data points to a full-blown national crisis – and this report’s findings help to explain why.
The link between attendance and attainment is well known. Sporadic attendance impacts children’s academic results, mental health and resilience. Those who take an occasional day (or a week, or a fortnight) off school miss building blocks of knowledge. Catching up is a treadmill that becomes unmanageable and so their learning is fractured.”
The most worrying aspect of the report is that “Disadvantaged pupils are most likely to be persistently absent.” This raises a number of questions for policymakers at both national and local levels.
How do we reset the link between education and society so that the disadvantaged see the benefits of schooling, both at the formative stage of a child’s early years and the foundation stage and also later in their approach to adulthood and the world beyond schooling.
I thought the change to patterns of schooling might come with the third wave of the IT revolution, and be driven by middle class attitudes to a pattern of schooling that has changed little over the past half century. However, Public First point to a different picture, and one where urgent action is needed to reconnect with a group in society that seemingly no longer sees the value in schooling.
Government’s have tried the stick, but this group are often impervious to fines, as they don’t have the money to pay them, and it is not worth the costs of chasing them. With a criminal justice service no longer fully functional at a local level, more draconian actions seem like tilting at windmills; a waste of effort. Rather, is it time for a campaign to win hearts and minds. Insert schooling into the most viewed soaps and TV programmes. Find and use the influences of this group in society; footballers, singers; personalities.
The education service must become more welcoming. During the recent hot spell, some school leaders put discipline before compassion and ordered winter uniforms to be worn. Is this a time for such strict action or for a different approach?
Should schools with good attendance records help fund those that need to reengage with parents, and does our fractures system enable best use of resources to meet this challenge of selling education to those that may well benefit the most from what it has to offer?
As a teacher in the 1970s, I know that some children rarely attended school, and were often disruptive when present. I welcomed their absence then. These days, I take a wider view: but forcing children into school without recognising the needs of schools as well as of parents is to deal with only one part of the problem. Please do read Public First’s report
The DfE has recently published some data on the workforce in the further Education sector following a survey of institutions. Further education workforce in England – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) the data was based on the 2020/21 college year.
The majority of those institutions surveyed were either general FE colleges or sixth from colleges. The latter were transferred many years ago from the school sector, but are mainly still offering a school sixth form curriculum that is more biased towards ‘academic’ subjects than the curriculum found in general FE colleges.
Regular monitoring of teacher preparation numbers over the course of the past decade – see frequent posts on this blog – has identified physics as a subject where trainee numbers for the school sector have regularly failed to meet the target set by government through the DfE’s Teacher Supply Model and subsequent allocations to ITT providers. This has produced a teacher shortage in the subject.
In the FE sector, physics accounted for 0.3% of the teaching [sic] workforce, compared with 0.3% lecturing in chemistry and 0.6% in biology. Because of the presence of vocational subjects, staffing percentages for academic subjects would be lower in the FE sector than in the school sector. As this level, physics is ranked alongside philosophy and just above politics and classical studies in the table of staffing percentages. Even just looking at staffing of academic subjects, physics only accounts for 1.5% of staff teaching academic subjects in the FE sector.
Overall, staff with physics lecturing as their main subject, based on the data from this survey, would seem to mean that there were only around 250 lecturers across the whole of England in the FE sector in 2020/21. A significant minority are likely to be found in the 44 Sixth Form Colleges, with the remainder spread between the 187 general FE colleges. If spread out evenly, this would mean every college would have one lead specialist in physics. I assume the remainder of any teaching of physics is carried out either by part-timers or by those with qualifications that contain elements of the subject.
There does seem to be a question about the teaching of physics in the FE sector.
Cumulative percentage outcomes by centre type – grade A and above
Level 5 qualifications
| Centre type – Physics | % achieving grade in 2019 | % achieving grade in 2023 | Difference 2019 and 2023 |
| Other | 19.4% | 25.2% | 5.80% |
| Further education establishment | 18.4% | 17.2% | -1.20% |
| Independent school including city training colleges (CTCs) | 42.4% | 47.2% | 4.80% |
| Secondary comprehensive or middle school | 21.7% | 25.6% | 3.90% |
| Secondary selective school | 25.8% | 29.2% | 3.40% |
| Free schools | 27.8% | 31.2% | 3.40% |
| Sixth form college | 24.3% | 27.0% | 2.70% |
| Academies | 21.1% | 22.6% | 1.50% |
| Secondary modern school/high school | 37.4% | 37.0% | -0.40% |
FE establishments, along with secondary modern schools, both saw smaller percentages of grade A and above in 2023 than in 2019. Could this be down to staffing issues or is it a change in the mix of students enrolled or were their students learning more affected by covid?
The workforce data for the FE sector has provided a source of information that leads to many more possible questions about learning and outcomes in the FE sector.
Ofqual have helpfully provided some data on the 2023 Level 5 results that came out today. Congratulations to all candidates on their achievements, even if they are tempered by the type of referencing system employed to suit the demands of the system.
In the past, I have looked at the A and A* percentages in Physics and Media/Film/TV Studies as an interesting contrast. This year it is also possible to look at the percentages of such grades in both 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year) and 2023. Outcomes by centre type (ofqual.gov.uk)
Cumulative percentage outcomes by centre type – grade A and above
Level 5 qualifications
| Centre type – Physics | % achieving grade in 2019 | % achieving grade in 2023 | Difference 2019 and 2023 |
| Other | 19.4% | 25.2% | 5.80% |
| Further education establishment | 18.4% | 17.2% | -1.20% |
| Independent school including city training colleges (CTCs) | 42.4% | 47.2% | 4.80% |
| Secondary comprehensive or middle school | 21.7% | 25.6% | 3.90% |
| Secondary selective school | 25.8% | 29.2% | 3.40% |
| Free schools | 27.8% | 31.2% | 3.40% |
| Sixth form college | 24.3% | 27.0% | 2.70% |
| Academies | 21.1% | 22.6% | 1.50% |
| Secondary modern school/high school | 37.4% | 37.0% | -0.40% |
Normally, I would ask you to work out which table was the Physics and which Media/Fil/TV Studies, but this year have added the subject titles because not all centres are represented in the Media/Film/TV Studies subject group table by the types of centres.
| Centre type – Media/Film/TV Studies | % achieving grade in 2019 | % achieving grade in 2023 | Difference 2019 and 2023 |
| Independent school including city training colleges (CTCs) | 27.7% | 26.8% | -0.9% |
| Further education establishment | 10.0% | 9.4% | -0.6% |
| Academies | 11.6% | 12.6% | 1.0% |
| Sixth form college | 11.7% | 13.3% | 1.6% |
| Secondary comprehensive or middle school | 9.7% | 12.2% | 2.5% |
| Secondary selective school | 21.7% | 30.4% | 8.7% |
Generally, despite the shortage of teachers of physics, the percentage of grades A and above is higher than in Media/Film/TV Studies (MFTVS) and often higher in 2023 than in 2019 except in the FE sector and secondary modern schools. This highlights the risk of using data in an uncontextualized manner.
My suspicion is that in physics it is only those likely to do well that are entered, whereas the entry policy for MFTVS may be wider, and hence there are more lower grades.
It will be necessary to investigate candidate numbers to see whether the increase in A and above grades in MFTVS in the selective schools is down to either a more selective entry policy or some other factor?
I find some of the groupings a bit odd as well. Should ‘city training colleges’ actually be ‘city technology colleges’ and why are ‘high schools’ included with secondary modern as a group when they could be any type of school? The inclusion of ‘middle schools’ in Level 5 qualifications for physics is even more odd.
So, an interesting set of statistics that not a great deal can be read into, except that there are generally more higher grades in physics than in MFTVS. Is the shortage of teachers of physics having an effect, especially in the FE sector? I cannot be sure, but as further education colleges have a lower percentage in 2023 than in 2019, there might be a case to answer, especially as the recent DfE workforce in further education study suggests that there might be fewer than 250 leading physics lecturers across the whole of the FE sector.
But perhaps outcomes might just be down to who is enrolled?
(an earlier version of this post contained a mistake in the table and the post has been corrected and updated)
In my experience, editors usually have September, and the national annual ‘return to school’ event, as a time to ask journalists to look for a school centred story. This follows on from the useful two-week period in August when there are examination results to cover in the month when there is often little news from the political scene.
This year, editors and their journalists didn’t have to work very hard, if at all, for their ‘return to school’ story. RAAC, and the school buildings saga, was a gift send. Would the story have topped the bill at any other time of year? Who knows, as it is an important issue, but more important say that a reshuffle?
What is clear, is that by focussing just on the school buildings issue, editors are missing the opportunity to take a wider look at the health of our schools. Had there not been RAAC, and the still largely hidden asbestos issue, might the staffing of our schools have been the main story this September?
This is a much more difficult story to sell, as except in rare cases such as a special school reported to the DfE in the summer, schools don’t send children home for a lack of teachers. Instead, they cut subjects from the curriculum – I have been told of a school that is no longer offering languages in the sixth from this September; increase class sizes; reduce non-contact time for teachers and, most commonly, employ what might be considered as under-qualified teachers to teach some groups.
Because anyone with Qualified Teacher Status can teach anything on the curriculum, it isn’t easy to identify the problem, as schools, quite rightly, don’t advertise any shortcomings in the staffing of their timetable. However, extrapolating from the last School Workforce Census that provided a baseline, and adding in the results of new entrants being below the targets set by the DfE through the Teacher Supply Model, it seems clear that some schools are not properly staff this September.
Does this matter? Like the lack of a schools’ database on building issues, we don’t know whether some young people are missing grades in those public examinations we celebrate each August because of staffing issues last year or even earlier in their school lives.
This blog has charted re-advertisements of teaching post against free school meal rates in schools. I wrote a blog on this issue last month, just before the exam results season started Are we levelling up? | John Howson (wordpress.com) I won’t bother to repeat what I said then, but it would be interesting to look at examination results in specific subjects at different centres with different levels of staff turnover for a period of three to five years, to see if there is any measurable effect of staff turnover on outcomes, including entry policies.
My hunch is that it is difficult to create a ‘normal’ distribution curve for results subjects such as ‘A’ level physics if many schools cannot offer the subject, and those that do only enter those likely to be successful candidates.
Editors might like to pencil in a story for January 2024, when secondary schools facing unexpected vacancies will find recruitment even more of a challenge than for this September. What might be the effects on their results in Summer 2024 of an unexpected vacancy, especially if they started the school year this September with both a RAAC and a staffing crisis?
School building is an important, but not usually politically interesting, subject. As a result, it is an area of policy often overlooked when policy changes such as academisation are introduced. However, schools do need buildings, and a prudent government would ensure that those building were fit for purpose. For those that follow education, the present crisis has been brewing for some time, and RAAC is only one part of a much bigger issue.
The National Audit office report on Capital Funding for Schools, published in February 2017, had an interesting comment that is germane to the present debate about RAAC concrete and school building. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Capital-funding-for-schools.pdf
Para 15 In seeking to increase choice, introduce innovation and raise standards free schools often meet a demographic need for new school places, but they are also creating spare capacity, which may have implications for schools’ financial sustainability. By September 2016 the Department had opened 429 new free schools, and plans to open 883 in total by September 2020. The Free Schools Programme aims to give parents more choice and increase competition between schools, and thereby improve the quality of education. Free schools also have a role in meeting local need for new school places. There can be an inherent tension in the extent to which they can meet these aims cost-effectively. The Department estimates that some of the places in 83% of the mainstream free schools approved since September 2013 address a need for more school places. It also estimates that 57,500 of 113,500 new places in mainstream free schools opening between 2015 and 2021 will create spare capacity in some free schools’ immediate area. Spare capacity can affect pupil numbers, and therefore funding, in neighbouring schools. The Department’s data indicate that spare places in 52 free schools opening in 2015 could have a moderate or high impact on the funding of any of 282 neighbouring schools. The financial sustainability of free schools themselves may also be affected if a significant number of their places are not filled. The Department assesses financial viability as part of the process of approving free school applications. It has also sought to assess whether creating free schools is having the intended effect of improving educational standards through competition but the sample size is currently too small to draw meaningful conclusions.
Even more telling is this paragraph a little later in the Report
Para 2.22 The Department expects the condition of the school estate will worsen as it cannot fund all the maintenance and improvement work required. The way the system works adds to the risk that the Department may not achieve its aim of preventing buildings that are in reasonable condition from deteriorating. (bold added by me).
There is no denying that capital project funding in the school sector is complicated, and that the demise of a middle-tier knocked away some of the props underpinning the operation of our schools. The DfE has been warned on many occasions that the academy programme meant that it would be running schools in manner it had never previously experienced. Such operational oversight included the capital programmes of which there are three.
New build – covered well in paragraph 15 of the NAO report. The government appeared to prioritise spare places and parental choice over cash for other purposes
Replacement of existing stock – successive governments have ducked this issue, except during periods of falling rolls when new places are not required. A combination of increased house building and a significant upturn in the secondary school population, plus the extension of the learning leaving age to eighteen all during the last decade of conservative government can explain the pressure on the replacement budget, but cans kicked down the road don’t disappear for ever, as the government is now discovering.
New or replacement build out of revenue reserves – some school buildings have been built by schools underspending their annual revenue income and capitalising the cash into a new building. I have long deprecated this approach. My view has always been that revenue income is for spending on today’s children and not for saving up for future generations and new buildings: not a view all accept.
One implication of this practice is that the DfE may not know which of these building constructed from revenue funding contain RAAC, especially if built by Grant Maintained Schools and academies free from local authority oversight.
The government is currently trying to contain the size of the problem by focusing on RAAC, but asbestos and other issues mean, as the NAO identified in 2017, our school estate is not in good shape. The kicker has caught up with the can, and cannot easily kick it any further away.
The interview that former Permanent Secretary at the DfE, Jonathan Slater gave to the BBC’s today programme this morning was both revealing and disturbing. Replacing school buildings rather than providing new schools to meet ‘rooves over heads’, where pupils don’t have a school, has long been the policy of the DfE and its predecessors.
Mr Slater’s revelation of the role of HM Treasury in funding school buildings should not come as a surprise, since the DfE doesn’t have income to pay for education, it is always reliant upon the Chancelor and the team at the Treasury and their policies.
The past decade has seen an upswing in the pupil population, so it is not surprising that new schools for new housing estates and other areas of substantial population growth have headed the school building list, leaving little cash for replacement schools, especially where developers can be persuaded to pay for the new school through the planning procedures.
As Mr Stalter said, the determination to push through the Free Schools policy may also have reduced interest on the part of Ministers in rebuilding our maintained schools, as that task didn’t fit the political narrative of the day. Interestingly, the capital expenditure brief currently lies with the DfE’s Minister in the house of Lords, Baroness Barran. Perhaps this shows where the thinking about the importance of capital investment lies in the pecking order within the DfE?
In 2017 the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) conducted an inquiry into school building. Here is an extract from their published report
2Condition of school buildings
The state of the estate
19.Between 2012 and 2014 the Department for Education (the Department) carried out a property data survey to examine the condition of school buildings. Based on the survey, the Department estimated that it would cost £6.7 billion to return all school buildings to satisfactory or better condition, and a further £7.1 billion to bring parts of school buildings from satisfactory to good condition.37 Common defects include problems with electrics and external walls, windows and doors. The survey was limited to assessing the condition of buildings and did not assess their safety or suitability.38
20.Some 60% of the school estate was built before 1976.39 The Chairman of EBDOG noted that ‘“system” buildings (a method of construction that uses prefabricated components) from this period were definitely coming to the end of their useful lives.40 The Department said that it had some concerns about these types of school buildings and so had started “destructive testing” as it knocked down buildings to assess how much life similar buildings had left.41 It expects that the cost of dealing with major defects will double between 2015–16 and 2020–21, even with current levels of investment, as many buildings near the end of their useful lives.42 The Chairman of EBDOG illustrated the scale of the challenge by telling us that his own local authority, Hampshire, needed £370 million to repair its school buildings but received only £18 million from the Department each year.43 (indication of references numbers retained) Capital funding for schools – Committee of Public Accounts – House of Commons (parliament.uk)
Here were two of the PAC recommendations:
Recommendation: The Department should set out a plan by December 2017 for how it will fill gaps in its knowledge about the school estate in areas not covered by the property data survey. Specifically it needs to understand the prevalence, condition and management of asbestos, and know more about the general suitability and safety of school buildings.
Recommendation: The Department should use information, including from the property data survey, to develop a robust approach for holding local authorities and academy trusts to account for maintaining their school buildings, including how it will intervene if they are not doing so effectively. It should also assess whether schools can afford the level of maintenance necessary given the real-terms reductions in funding per pupil.
At that time, it was asbestos in school buildings that was the main concern, and possibly still should be in terms of how widespread the issue in schools might be. However, it would be interesting to know whether RAAC concrete was included in the ‘destructive testing’ mentioned in paragraph 19 of the PAC’s report?
Perhaps more should have been done to follow up the Department’s progress on school building replacement through the scrutiny process, especially with the warning that ‘many buildings near the end of their useful lives’. Should this have produced a Red RAG rating somewhere on a risk register?
In July 2023, the PAC started an inquiry into school buildings. The responses to Questions 6-9 from the current Permanent Secretary at the DfE are worth a look for what was said about RAAC. committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/13508/pdf/ However, even in that session asbestos as an issue seemed to be regarded are more of a concern than RAAC by many. Is that still a ticking time bomb waiting to explode?
This blog has celebrated that period between 1968-1972, when the then Ministry had a plan to replace pre-1906 primary schools. Many are still in use, and with the concerns about RAAC and asbestos seem likely to head towards their second century serving the nation’s children in many places.
Would the panic about RAAC and the abrupt closure of schools just before term starts have been handled better in the days when local authorities managed education, and the Ministry in London had a thriving Architects and Building Branch?
Who know? What is certain is that this isn’t the first issue with school buildings. I recall in the 1970s leaving school at 4pm one afternoon with colleagues to go for an early meal before returning to attend a parents’ evening. When we returned, the school was cordoned off because the head had noticed a panel on the CLASP built building that was little more than a decade old had started to become detached from its fastening.
The parents’ evening was cancelled, and the staff spent the next two days in the sixth form block while students stayed at home while the repairs we made, and the rest of the building was checked.
The present crisis seems to have been flagged up well in advance, and one is left wondering why the decision to take action has been delayed for so long? The same could be said of the issue of asbestos in schools. Regular readers of this blog may also recall the debate some years ago about not installing sprinkler systems in schools to deal with fires.
School Buildings are all too often it seems only of interest to Ministers when they can go and open new ones. I suspect that oversight of this type of activity, a routine and mundane task, hasn’t been on the agenda of how to deal with issues under a mixed academy/free-school and local authority economy? Another casualty of the failure to create a working middle tier for all education activities.
I also wonder whether there are any private schools facing issues with RAAC? Perhaps their insurers require regular inspections of property and the issue has already been identified and dealt with?
Governing is about doing the daily tasks well as well as about creating new policy. If a government cannot do the former well, it doesn’t deserve to be in office. Should the Secretary of State take the blame for the handling of the issue if it becomes clear that something should have been done sooner to prevent chaos for the start of term?
Despite today being a bank holiday, the DfE obligingly published the monthly ITT data on applications and offers for postgraduate courses. Initial teacher training application statistics for courses starting in the 2023 to 2024 academic year – Apply for teacher training – GOV.UK (apply-for-teacher-training.service.gov.uk)
Perhaps not surprisingly, little has changed since the last set of figures published at the end of July. With courses about to start in a matter of weeks, there are likely to be few more surprises left in this round. On the basis of the data, secondary subjects can be grouped into three sets: those subjects with higher offers this year than at any time since 2019/2020, or in the case of physics, since 2015/16; those subjects where ‘offers’ this year are above the number at this point in 2022, and those subjects where the offers this year are below the number in August 2022.
In the first category are: physics -the subject has recorded 729 offers, the highest August number since the 840 of August 2016. However, this is still not a high enough number, even if all those offered actually turn up, to meet the DfE’s target. Also, in this group of subjects are; geography, design and technology and biology. The offers in design and technology will still not be sufficient to come anywhere near meeting the DfE’s target.
In the middle group, of subjects better than last year, but worse than 2021, are: mathematics, English, computing and chemistry.
In the group where this year’s offers are below last year are: art and design, religious education, physical education, music, history and business studies – in this case almost the same as last August.
In the case of music, the 232 recorded offers are the lowest recorded in recent years. This is despite a high conversion rate of 21% of applications into offers. In religious education, the 259 recorded offers are also the lowest level of offers in recent years in this subject. In both these subjects, this level of offers will not be enough to satisfy the demand for teachers in a normal recruitment round. By comparison, only eight per cent of physics applications have been converted into offers, and in biology the percentage is 13%.
Compared with last year, most of the increase in candidate numbers has come from those age 24 or above. The youngest age groupings of 21-23, have seen an increase of 400 from 10,116 to 10517. By contrast, the 40-44 age grouping alone has increased from 2,477 to 3,621, an increase of more than 1,100 applicants.
As reported previously, when compared with two years ago, the largest increase in candidates is the group applying from ‘the rest of the world’, up from 3,216 to 8,406, an increase of more than 5,000. By contrast, the East of England number two years ago was 3,495 and this year it is 3,440. The South East numbers are: 4,651 two years ago, and 4,825 this year: a meagre increase.
This data suggests that schools will find recruitment in some subjects that they have not been concerned about in the past, may well become difficult during the 2024/2025 recruitment round unless the consequences arising from the pay settlement depress demand below that seen in the past two years.
John Howson 