Should schools re-open next week?

There is probably no ‘certain’ answer at this moment in time to that question, but there is a political decision to be made. By the time the answer is certain, the time for decision will have passed and whether by default or decision there will have been an outcome.

Learning versus transmission seems to be at the heart of the debate. If the new variant of covid hadn’t appeared, then the answer would have been simple: open primary schools and secondary schools for Years 11 and 13, although I think classroom subjects for Year 13 could be taught on-line rather than face to face.

However, with the more transmissible strain now dominant in many areas, the issue is possibly more complex for some. Closing schools will affect learning and create issues for parents in terms of childcare, especially where they cannot work from home. Can we overcome the loss of learning time as a Society, if we put our minds to it? After all, we have created new forms of learning, so ought we not to be able to identify ways of recovering essential learning? Much may depend upon making the learning attractive to the learners. Boring rote learning won’t work. Will we need a National Reading Recovery campaign and a similar one for numeracy once the pandemic is over?

The NHS is always under strain at this time of year and the weather forecasters are suggesting a few weeks of cold weather. The consequences of that sort of weather pattern for hospitals needs to be taken into account, since other ailments haven’t taken a holiday just because of covid. Then there is the backlog of other treatments, especially in-patient treatments that need ICU beds. Do politicians need to take these factors into account when weighing up the issue of schools re-opening?

Now it is clear that mass testing for all pupils won’t be in place next week, whatever was said before Christmas, is it sensible to bring back pupils into setting where transmission is likely to be high either person to person or via surfaces? I would like to know whether the latest variant of covid lingers longer on surfaces. If so, that might be a powerful argument for not re-opening schools, because however often surfaces are cleaned, there as potentially just too many of them, not to mention those encountered on the way to and from schools and colleges.

Personally, based upon the public knowledge available to me, I would not re-open secondary schools and further education colleges for the first two weeks of term while patterns of transmission after Christmas become clear. I would re-open primary schools, but allow pupils living in high risk households not to attend until we know more about transmission rates among different groups. This is where the focus on ‘recovery’ learning will be most important going forward.

Finally, there are the issues of the mental health of young people to be added into the equation along with the physical and mental welfare of all the staff and their families. In the end, any decision is better than none.

Update: 1800 on 30th December. Seems like I was mostly correct, although I didn’t foresee the closure of so many primary schools. Next question: can exams survive?

DfE announces a bit of history

Last week, the DfE published the annual results of revenue related exports and transactional education activity in 2018. That now seems like a different world. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-revenue-from-education-related-exports-and-transnational-education-activity-2018

Still, 2018 was a good year for education experts, with even the Further Education sector reversing the downturn of previous years and experiencing upturns in both fee income and income from living costs: albeit only by small amounts. Still, this was the first upturn in FE exports since 2010, the year when I think the data for the time series was first established.

Overall, across all areas, there was a 10% increase in export activity and a slight fall of 0.8% in transactional education activity in 2018

Higher Education once again earned the lion’s share of the income, accounting for 69% of all exports and transactional education activity in2018.  This was higher education’s largest percentage share, and some 9% more than their share in2010.

Further Education and English Language Training have been the main losers of market share since 2010, although both recorded upturns is 2018. ELT increased its market share by one percent to eight per cent. However, FE still saw its market share remain at one percent in 2018.

Independent schools market share reduced from five to four per cent at the end of 2018, back to their share in 2010. However, this was largely due to the strong showing from the higher education sector during 2018.

Transactional education activity, where the exports are delivered overseas through ventures such as satellite campuses and overseas consultancy lost ground in 2018, falling back to only 9% of total activity.

Among sub-sectors, equipment sales were strong in 2018, but educational publishing failed to maintain the growth witnessed in 2017. Most of the higher education student growth was, perhaps not surprisingly, in the non-EU student sector of the market. The latter remained stable. What will happen to this income stream in 2021 and future years will be interesting to observe, but it might be 2025 before data are published that reveal any trend post Brexit.

These figures may well be the penultimate in a run of good years for exports. There is little reason to believe that 2019 will not have produced further growth, although EU higher education income might have slowed down. Come the 2020 data, the results might be different. Will new income from distance learning have been sufficient to offset losses elsewhere resulting for the covid pandemic affecting the second half of the year?

Perhaps now is the time to remove overseas students from the immigration statistics, at least for those on first degree courses, even if not for sub-degree and postgraduate level courses where monitoring might be more challenging?

Still, let’s congratulate a successful export drive in 2018, and hope that covid and Brexit between them create new opportunities rather than decimate an otherwise successful sector of the British economy, since these are UK numbers and not just for England.

Pay Freeze: more churn?

As expected, the main teacher associations acted with condemnation when faced with the Secretary of State’s remit letter to the STRB, the Pay and conditions of Service Review Body for the teaching profession.  In a joint statement from ACSL NAHT and NEU they said that;

The narrow remit issued to the STRB excludes the crucial and central issue of teacher and school leader pay, reflecting the Government’s unacceptable pay freeze policy.  Teachers and school leaders are key workers who have already seen their pay cut significantly since 2010.  With inflation expected to increase in 2021, they know that they face another significant real terms pay cut. 

How might their members react in 2021? We can expect a range of reactions. Some will say, there is no point in staying with no pay rise in sight – after all will the freeze really be just for one year? Head teachers at the top of their pay band, and having endured the prospect of two disrupted school years might well throw in the towel and take their pension as that presumably won’t be frozen in the same way; at least at present. We will look at that prospect and its consequences in more detail in a later blog.

Some teachers will seek promotion to secure a pay rise, and others a more appealing post either in a different school or in the private sector where there are no requirements for a pay freeze for teachers. Yet others may look overseas or to the tutoring market that will grow to support the increase in home schooling, especially if the government looks to regulation to ensure a minimum standard of education for all children regardless of how parents arrange to provide it. All these factors could increase ‘churn’.

With a profession dominated by women, at least at the level of the classroom teacher, how they and often also their partners view job security and new opportunities will also affect the rate of ‘churn’ if there is job movement around the country.

I actually think, at least in the first few months of 2021, there will be caution, and a desire to stay put and see what happens. With a labour market in teaching heavily skewed towards the first five months of the year, we could see fewer vacancies than normal in the early months of 2021. This will impact especially severely on two group of teachers: new entrants and would-be returners to the profession.

I well recall a Radio 5 Live interview in 2011, when callers were blaming each groups for taking jobs from the other. In reality, both groups were finding it more of a challenge to secure a teaching post, especially in some parts of England.

So, how hard will it be? We don’t know yet, so this is speculation based upon past trends, but I think some teachers will really struggle to secure a post in 2021.

Now might well be the time to revive ideas of a single application form for teaching, at least for personal details. This would leave just the free text statement to be written specifically for each vacancy being sought. The DfE should consider whether sponsoring that idea from those examples currently in development and on offer might be a better use of funds than continuing with their vacancy site that one person described to me in unflattering terms earlier this week.

In the next post, I will describe a new service from TeachVac to help teachers and schools assess the market and where vacancies might be found in 2021.  

Another Greenwich Judgement avoided

Greenwich in South East London already features in education law history for the ‘Greenwich Judgement’ on school choice. Today, it seemingly avoided the possibly of creating a second precedent by accepting that it would not be in the interest of local people to spend money defending any legal action by the DfE on closing schools.

As usual, there are pros and cons to both the Council’s position and that of the government at Westminster. What is lacking is a clear understanding of guidelines that fit a changing set of circumstances. The BBC’s World at One programme interviewed the Leader of Basildon Council – a Tory – where several schools are closed because of very high rates of infection. He defended that situation.

Generally, opinion is that education is a ‘good thing’ and leaving parents to arrange childcare at short notice can cause problems that should be avoided if at all possible. All the current issues were foreseeable, and the present situation demonstrates the lack of cooperative planning that is the hallmark of the present administration, and might yet be its downfall.

The issues are the same, where infection leads to transmission to higher risks groups from lower risks groups there is a danger, but within lower risks groups it is less of an issue. This appears to be the case with university students that remain in a group and don’t interact with the wider community. Schools are different, by their very community nature.

Low income, multi-generational households, especially in the non-White community, remain at very high risk from the pandemic and it is understandable that schools can play a part in the chain of transmission. But low income families have less space for on-line learning even if they have access to the technology.

So, no easy answer. But a set of criteria

Local public health officials can assess the trends and liaise with schools and education officers. Where more than a certain level of infections are present, local officials should notify the DfE of intending closure of a group of schools and provide the evidence in the same as a single school would use and there shouldn’t be an issue.

Where it becomes complicated is the notion of a ‘preventative closure’ to try to stop a spike happening. Surely, by now, we have enough evidence to set some criteria for where it is appropriate to close schools, and where it is better to keep them open?

Even with the vaccination programme, it seems likely that next term is going to be a challenging one for schools, their pupils and for parents. The clearer the agreed guidelines the better.

ICO still monitoring the DfE

The update issued by the Office of the Information Commissioner on their compulsory audit of the DfE passed me by when it appeared in October this year. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2020/10/statement-on-the-outcome-of-the-ico-s-compulsory-audit-of-the-department-for-education/ The executive summary of the original audit report had appeared in February 2020 and didn’t read like a ‘good news’ story for the Department.

It is good to know that the ICO is able to state in October that throughout the audit process the DfE engaged with the ICO and showed a willingness to learn from and address the issues identified and that the Department accepted all the audit recommendations and is making the necessary changes.

However, it appears that the ICO continues to monitor the DfE, reviewing improvements against pre agreed timescales and that the ICO warns that enforcement action will follow if progress falls behind the schedule.

The ICO carried out the compulsory audit following complaints received in 2019 regarding the National Pupil Database.

According to the Executive Summary in the Report, an Assessment Notice was issued to the Department for Education (DfE) on 19 December 2019. The audit field work was undertaken between 24 February and 4 March [sic]. The full report doesn’t seem to be available on the ICO website.

As with Ofsted inspections, key areas for improvement are identified for the DfE to consider and if necessary act upon. These included but were not limited to;

• There is no formal proactive oversight of any function of information governance, including data protection, records management, risk management, data sharing and information security within the DfE which along with a lack of formal documentation means the DfE cannot demonstrate accountability to the GDPR. Although the Data Directorate have been assigned overall responsibility for compliance actual operational responsibility is fragmented throughout all groups, directorates, divisions and teams which implement policy services and projects involving personal data. Limited reporting lines, monitoring activity and reporting means there is no central oversight of data processing activities. As a result there are no controls in place to provide assurance that all personal data processing activities are carried out in line with legislative requirements.
• Internal cultural barriers and attitudes are preventing the DfE from implementing an effective system of information governance, which properly considers the rights and freedoms of data subjects against their own requirements for processing personal data to ensure data is processed in line with the principles of the GDPR.
• The Commercial department do not have appropriate controls in place to protect personal data being processed on behalf of the DfE by data processors. Which means there is no assurance that it is being processed in line with statutory requirements particularly where processing contracts are of low enough value to not be subject to formal procurement procedures. Processor and third party due diligence does not always consider whether appropriate organisational and security measures are in place to provide the DfE with assurance that personal data will be processed in line with statutory requirements.
• There is an over reliance on using public task as the lawful basis for sharing which is not always appropriate and supported by identified legislation. Legitimate interest has also been used as a lawful basis in some applications however there is limited understanding of the requirements of legitimate interest and to assess the application and legalities of it prior to sharing taking place how it should be applied to ensure the use of this lawful basis is appropriate and considers the requirements set out in Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR.

In all, 15 areas for improvement were listed in the report. This is both a comprehensive and very depressing list. No doubt since February, and despite the covid-19 concerns that have taken up the time of the Department, procedures have been tightened up. Perhaps this is behind the nature of some of the data requests regarding the monitoring of the pandemic in schools.

Unlike Ofsted, the ICO doesn’t award grades to its audits. Without sight of the whole report it would be invidious to offer a suggested grade of the ofsted type, but it clearly wasn’t a ‘clean bill of health’ for the DfE.

Thank a Teacher or perhaps not?

When is a holiday for teachers not a holiday? Perhaps when announced by a government Minister. In my book, an in-service day is not a holiday. The Schools Minister’s announcement of an extra day before Christmas to allow teachers to have a “proper break” from working with test and trace to identify Covid cases doesn’t seem like a real holiday to me. More of a political announcement where a Minister hopes that nobody will read beyond the headline.

Apparently Mr Gibb told the Education Select Committee earlier this week that: “We are about to announce that ‘inset days’ can be used on Friday December 18, even if an inset day had not been originally scheduled for that day.

“We want there to be a clear six days so that, by the time we reach Christmas Eve, staff can have a proper break without having to engage in the track and trace issues.”

How seriously will school leaders take the additional opportunity for in-service training? Hopefully, they will suggest training at home rather than requiring attendance at the school site. Of course, some supply teachers stand to lose a possible day’s pay as a result of this announcement.  

With the looming pay freeze for next year facing teachers, I wonder how teachers will receive this badly wrapped present. A pay freeze may send some teachers overseas next year and others looking for promotion, so ‘churn’ may increase next year. At TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk we also expect more leadership vacancies than in recent years, especially in the primary sector, as leaders decide they have had enough of muddle and mixed messages about the handling of the pandemic.

The National Education Union has published a useful set of maps showing how covid-19 cases have ebbed and flowed for primary age pupils and the 10-14 age-group during the course of the autumn term between September to the first week in December. It is not clear what moves the government has taken to ensure vulnerable staff are properly protected. Looking back over this blog, I notice I made a suggestion about identifying possible staff ‘at risk’ and ensuring that they weren’t in contact with pupils. Figures for the cost of supply staff suggests that this wasn’t taken up as an idea.

Certainly my idea of employing NQTs without a teaching post as supernumerary staff wasn’t acted upon. I wonder whether this would have been a cheaper option than boosting the profits of the supply agencies.

Finally, I was struck by this paragraph from the report of an Ofsted virtual visit to a secondary school in early November

Teachers have checked what pupils remember and used this knowledge to help them plan lessons. Overall, they have found that the areas pupils needed help with before lockdown are even more of a priority now. For example, pupils who previously found reading tricky now need extra help. You are using some of the COVID-19 catch-up premium to address this by employing extra staff and purchasing additional resources.

Recovering the damage done by covid-19 to children’s education is going to be a key task for 2021 and beyond.

Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons

In this post, I look at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and The TES. Now this is not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, it might be regarded as an advertisement, so treat it in that way if you read on.

TeachVac is in the process of filing its accounts for the year to June 2020 with Companies House. The DfE doesn’t file accounts, and the TES has filed accounts up to the end of August 2019, with a forward comment about the possible effects of the covid pandemic in the year to August 2020.

All three sites cost teachers nothing to use during the last year. However, the DfE site only offers vacancies in state schools, and only a proportion of those schools. TeachVac estimates that in 2020 the DfE proportion of vacancies for teaching posts never rose above 40% of the vacancies open to teachers across both state and private schools. So, the DfE is worthwhile if you only want a job in a state-funded school. Both TeachVac and the TES offer vacancies in state and private schools, although TeachVac doesn’t cover all private schools with pupils below the age of eleven. The TES coverage depends upon those prepared to pay to advertise vacancies on their platform.

Both TeachVac and the DfE site have no direct financial cost to schools. However, the DfE site does require schools to input vacancies into the site. This is optional for TeachVac, and most schools are happy to rely upon the automatic vacancy collection process operated by TeachVac. The TES has a number of options, all require schools to pay for their vacancies to appear on the TES job site and be matched with teachers.

TeachVac also offers users a monthly newsletter on the state of the market for teachers.

The operating cost for TeachVac in 2019/20 was just £1.10 per vacancy processed. Neither the DfE nor The TES publishes a similar figure, but the TES accounts would suggest their cost per vacancy is much higher than that of TeachVac. To find out the cost of the DfE site would need a parliamentary question.

So, are teacher associations, governors and school business managers and those responsible for local authorities, diocese and MATs recommending TeachVac as the most cost effective means of displaying and matching vacancies? Of course not.

Are they recommending teachers to use Teachvac, some are, others aren’t. Course leaders preparing teachers are now recommending TeachVac as a place for trainees to look for their first vacancy. Those trainees are sticking with TeachVac to find subsequent jobs and promotion opportunities.

I am proud of the achievements of the TeachVac team in driving down costs of vacancy advertising. Next the team will start to look at other parts of the recruitment journey to see if there are saving to be made in other areas as well.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to sponsor the TeachVac site, my investors are always open to discussions.

Employment based routes hit new lows

In a year when recruitment to teacher preparation courses was on the increase, any aim the government might have had to increase the share of school-based preparation courses has stalled. The government issued the annual census of trainees on teacher preparation courses today.https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-trainee-number-census-2020-to-2021

I am not a great fan of the new way of presenting statistics, and especially of the challenges it present when trying to create specific tables. However that aside, the key points are that as expected: trainee numbers are up, but that not all subjects met the Teacher Supply Model number for the year. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised by that fact as I had predicted that would be the case, despite the increase in applications in the March to September period.

Higher Education, no doubt helped by the offer of both undergraduate and postgraduate places, increased its share of the market from 38% to 41%. Still way off its former levels, but no longer on a downward trend. School Direct Salaried route, the classic employment based route, was the big faller; down from 7% to 5% this year. Teach First took 4% against 5% last year. SCITTs held steady at 12% as did the Fee-based School Direct route at 23% of the total.

Some tables produced today by the DfE may include the small number of trainees forecast to join courses after the census date, but the differences are small.

Future blogs will explore the data in more details, but arts and humanities, and some subjects that have recruited poorly in recent years, have done well, even if in the case of Design and Technology and Physics and Chemistry, mathematics and Modern Languages they still did not meet the Teacher Supply Model number for the year.

The increase in Physics from 42% to 45% of the TSM number was especially disappointing, but not surprising.

Of more concern to those on courses and HM Treasury must be the over-recruitment in history –up from 115% to 175% of target and Physical Education, up from 105% to 135%. In these subjects, all trainees will struggle to find teaching posts in England in 2021 and it would be ironic if the government is funding teacher preparation for teachers forced to work overseas to practice their professional skills due to a lack of teaching posts in England.

Primary courses also over-recruited to target, and some may struggle in some parts of the country to find teaching posts for September or at the end of undergraduate courses if the decline in school rolls continues.

Head Teacher Vacancies increase this autumn

More head teachers are quitting this autumn. TeachVac, the national free vacancy service for the education market in England reported a 20% increase in advertised vacancies for primary head teachers in the three month from September to end of November 2020 compared with the same period in 2019.

The figures recorded by TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk were:

2019       276

2020       329

There was no such corresponding increase in secondary school headship vacancies. However, that might be down to the greater number of academies in the secondary sector, and a different attitude to filling in-year vacancies by such Trusts..

This increase comes during what is normally a quiet period for recruitment at the start of a school-year.’

The concern must be that this is an early warning sign of a large outflow of head teachers at the end of the summer term next year. Are there deputies willing to step up to the top job? The pressure of head teachers during the past year has been immense, with some having had little or no time away from school since the start of the pandemic.

Over the year to the end of November TeachVac recorded 1,383 vacancies for primary head teachers compared with 1,315 during the same period in 2019. So far, in2020, there have been 355 recorded vacancies secondary school head teachers, compared with 342 in the period between January and the end of November 2019.

Recorded vacancies for assistant head teachers and deputy head teachers have fallen so far in 2020 when compared with 2019. In the secondary sector, there has been a small increase in vacancies at both grades during 2020.

The three months between January and the end of March normally constitutes the main recruiting season for new leadership appointments. Approximately half of all such vacancies are advertised during these three months.

Little or Large?

The DfE is once again showing signs of wanting to progress its review of the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) market, first announced nearly two years ago as a part of a Recruitment and Retention Strategy, if an article in SchoolsWeek is to be believed. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-to-reboot-itt-market-review-to-slim-down-sector/.

Does it make sense to slim down the teacher preparation market sector to a smaller number of providers? Well, certainly, those providers that shut up shop at the end of June and leave the heavy lifting of recruitment over the summer to others might be considered as not fully participating in ensuring that all places on teacher preparation courses are filled.

With the DfE aiming to take over the application process, it may also make sense to have to interact with fewer larger providers in order to more easily manage the market.

On the other hand, as NASBITT has pointed out, the ITT sector is performing exceptionally well. Ofsted inspections have 99% of providers rated good or better. On this basis, it seems odd that any DfE officials should think too much provision is of poor quality, especially without providing the evidence for that judgement.

As NASBTT makes clear, smaller SCITT providers very often serve a very specific need in recruitment cold-spots and rural/coastal communities. Often, in the past, larger central providers did not manage to service the needs of schools in these areas, which is often why the smaller providers emerged in the first place in order to to fill the gap.

Smaller local providers can also meet the needs of career switchers that are unwilling to move long distances to undertake their course to become a teacher. This was, after all, the thinking behind the School Direct Salaried Scheme and its predecessor Employment-based routes of the past thirty years.

Large providers in the wrong place don’t meet the needs of the market and the DfE has always wrestled with the need for both quality provision and the recruitment of around 35,000 trainees each year that are willing to train to meet the needs of all schools.

Perhaps, any review might focus on those schools that find recruiting NQTs a challenge and explore how within a market system of recruitment, schools can recruit their fair share of NQTs?

A compromise might be for the DfE to engage with a few larger providers – perhaps NASBTT could even be one of them and UCET another – and these wholesalers of places would then handle the smaller units actually undertaking the training. There are some examples of national providers in the past, of which The Open University was perhaps the most well-known. Indeed, might this be an opportune moment for that University to reconsider returning to providing initial teacher preparation courses across England?

What the DfE must not do is undermine recruitment to the profession at this extremely sensitive moment in time. The ITT core content framework has only just been rolled out, as have the expectations under the new ITE inspection framework. As NASBTT point out, providers need time to embed and consolidate this before any further changes are thrust upon them. If it isn’t broke, be careful about how you fix it.