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The inspector: Ofsted is vital – but not its culture of hitting targets at any cost | 2023-03-24 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/24/the-inspector-ofsted-is-vital-but-not-its-culture-of-hitting-targets-at-any-cost | HMIs understand the pressures schools are under but the same can’t be said of Ofsted’s chief and her advisers
A school leader recently asked me: “Do people in Ofsted not understand the pressures schools are under?” Coming after an academic year when Ofsted made little allowance for the impact of Covid in schools, the final straw for many was Ofsted continuing to inspect schools last year in the final week of term despite forecasts of an extreme heatwave.
The school leader’s question was a cri de coeur likely to be echoed by headteachers across England. I responded that his majesty’s inspectors (HMIs) all have school experience and do understand the pressures. It is Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, and her advisers who do not, given their lack of teaching experience coupled with a culture of meeting targets at all costs.
Ofsted is incredibly powerful in the state schools attended by most children. About 85% of schools are graded as at least “good”. For those schools, Ofsted may be an unnecessary burden. The problem is that without inspection, it is impossible to know whether a school is good or not.
A couple of years ago I led an inspection of a secondary school that was previously graded as requiring improvement. The school’s results had improved, and pupils seemed to be getting a good deal. It was only on the second day of the two-day inspection that we uncovered evidence suggesting a less positive picture: a significant number of year 11 pupils were being taken off the school’s roll with nowhere else to go. This made the school’s GCSE results look better, and improved its climate for learning. But there were totally inadequate checks on whether the pupils taken off he roll were safe, or even alive. So an expected “good” grade instead became “inadequate”.
Many people seem under the misconception that Ofsted inspections should replicate exam performance. Although I have criticisms of Ofsted’s policing of what is taught, I can see sense in the chief inspector’s view that we have two school accountability measures. One measure is exam results, while the other is Ofsted inspections. Having the second replicating the first would be pointless.
The balance between results and how they are arrived at has altered significantly. It is a lack of understanding of this, in relation to quality of education judgement, that provokes allegations of Ofsted “hit squads” downgrading schools. While quality of education is the limiting judgment in assessing a school’s effectiveness, Ofsted also makes critical judgments in other areas where expectations have increased in recent years, chiefly pupil safeguarding.
Schools are not generally failed on safeguarding for minor technicalities. Very occasionally, I have visited schools where systems were chaotic and I could not be sure all staff had criminal record checks, or that internal systems were rigorous enough to monitor concerns about individual pupils.
Does Ofsted do enough to ensure inspectors always act professionally? No. Is Ofsted’s focus on a narrow range of subjects and a shallow interpretation of cognitive science helpful? Absolutely not. But most importantly, is inspection a vital champion for parents and especially children? Yes. That is why, despite my criticisms of Ofsted, I still believe in inspection.
Adrian Lyons was an Ofsted HMI from 2005 to 2021, and is now a consultant supporting schools, academy trusts and teacher training providers.
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Less than 3% of artists named in GCSE art exams are Black or south Asian, study finds | 2024-03-05 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/05/less-than-3-per-cent-artists-named-gcse-art-exams-black-south-asian-study | Analysis across four exam boards in England reveals white artists comprise 91.6% of all mentions
Less than 3% of artists named in GCSE art exam papers are from Black or south Asian backgrounds, research has found.
Analysis of GCSE assessment materials from four big exam boards in England – AQA, Eduqas, OCR and Edexcel – showed only 8.4% of artists referenced across the 27 art exam papers were minority ethnic.
In contrast, white artists comprised 91.6% of all exam board mentions, according to a report by the Runnymede Trust thinktank and Freelands Foundation, an arts charity. Of these named artists, only 0.74% were south Asian and 1.54% Black. The smallest group was work by artists of mixed ethnicities, which made up 0.5% of all artwork mentioned.
“Art education offers something special to children and young people, but sadly there is a deficiency in our current provision, meaning that wonderful opportunities for growth and change are missed, and this impacts all students,” the report said.
The lack of standardised guidance in the curriculum means the inclusion of artists from underrepresented backgrounds remains a challenge, with lesson content largely set by teachers and subject leaders, which means students often only have access to a “narrow perspective on the artistic world”, the report says.
At key stage 3, the curriculum says students should learn about “great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the historical and cultural developments of their art forms”, but does not give an explicit definition or names.
The lack of guidance continues to key stage 4, or GCSE level, where art and design is no longer a compulsory subject covered by the national curriculum. At GCSE, subject guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) still does not name artists to be included in course material.
Work by minority ethnic artists is more likely to be mentioned in association with a geographical region such as African ritual sculpture or Persian rugs compared with work by white artists, at 20.1% and 0.4% respectively. This “reinforces … a problematic perception that the most important artists are white artists”, the report said.
Dr Shabna Begum, the interim chief executive of the Runnymede Trust, said: “With representation comes inspiration, it is imperative that our students are able to see and appreciate diversity in their art classes, and secondary education more widely”
The Runnymede Trust and Freelands Foundation are calling for exam boards to commit to a minimum target of 25% representation for minority ethnic artists in GCSE art exam papers for 2025. Pearson and Eduqas have agreed.
A spokesperson for OCR said: “We are committed to making our assessments inclusive and accessible and will use the findings in our work focused on minority ethnic representation in the curriculum.”
The report also proposed exam boards and policymakers establish standards for inclusion and diversity in GCSE assessment materials and improve access to teacher resources that support a diverse curriculum.
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Missouri student loan provider baffled by inclusion in supreme court debt relief challenge | 2023-06-17 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/17/missouri-student-loan-provider-confusion-supreme-court-debt-relief | Emails reveal staff at Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority confused at being centered by lawsuit brought by GOP-led states
Newly released emails obtained by the Student Borrower Protection Center reveal employees at a student loan service provider in Missouri expressed confusion over the state’s attorney general placing the provider at the center of a lawsuit filed to block the Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
The United States supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on a legal challenge to the president’s student debt forgiveness of up to $20,000 in the coming weeks. That challenge – filed by the Missouri attorney general and five other Republican-led states – and another challenge filed by the conservative advocacy organization, Job Creators Network, made it to the supreme court.
The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority – or Mohela – is at the center of the challenge by the GOP-led states, claiming the loan service provider would lose revenue and face negative impacts over its financial obligations to Missouri. Consumer advocates, meanwhile, have pointed out that Mohela stands to gain revenue from Biden’s cancellation plan.
In court hearings on the challenges earlier this year, US supreme court justices questioned why Mohela did not bring its own legal challenges to Biden’s debt cancellation plan and how the Republican-led states could claim harm on their behalf.
Emails released since establish that Mohela employees expressed similar confusion.
“The [Missouri] state AG needed to claim that our borrowers were harmed for standing, so they’re making us look bad by filing this not only with [Missouri] on it, but especially bad because they filed it in [Missouri],” wrote a Mohela employee in September 2022.
Another Mohela employee asked in an October 2022 email: “just out of curiosity, is MOHELA apart of the lawsuit going on to prevent the loan forgiveness? Are we the bad guys?”
A fellow employee responded, “Mohela isn’t technically a part of that lawsuit, the Missouri AG is suing on their behalf. However, it’s all about the [Family Federal Education Loans] stuff, and since they changed the rules, that lawsuit should be ruled as lacking standing.”
Ella Azoulay, a Student Borrower Protection Center research and policy analyst, argued the emails confirmed the “partisan hack job” of Missouri’s lawsuit to block student debt relief.
The legal challenges have paused Biden’s student debt relief plan announced in August 2022. The relief plan would grant up to $20,000 in student debt relief for Pell grant recipients and up to $10,000 in student debt forgiveness for all other borrowers with annual incomes under $125,000. Nearly 26 million Americans had applied for relief under the plan by November 2022.
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England’s ‘free speech tsar’ named in announcement to one newspaper | 2023-06-01 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/01/government-free-speech-tsar-named-arif-ahmed | Government accused of paying ‘lip service’ to free speech as Arif Ahmed is given higher education role
A Cambridge philosophy professor is to become the government’s first “free speech tsar” for higher education in England, it has been revealed, in an announcement made initially only to one newspaper – a move that led critics to accuse ministers of paying “lip service” to free speech.
Arif Ahmed told the Times he hoped to use his role to stand up for “all views”, and that he did not seek to take part in any sort of culture war agenda.
His role, news of which was released to other media a day later, was created by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which was first introduced to the Commons in 2021, but received royal assent only last month.
Overseen by the Office for Students (OFS), Ahmed’s role is potentially controversial, given debate within the higher education sector over whether there is a notable problem of free speech being suppressed in universities.
In brief comments released by the Department for Education, Ahmed said: “Free speech and academic freedom are vital to the core purpose of universities and colleges. They are not partisan values. They are also fundamental to our civilisation. As director, I will defend them using all means available.”
He will oversee a new regime intended to enshrine freedom of speech that could impose fines on higher education providers and student unions if they prevent speakers appearing without good reason.
Ahmed told the Times that, as well as no-platforming external speakers, other potential breaches of the new law could be institutions enforcing “ideological” anti-bias training, whether for staff or students, and disciplining academics for what they say on social media.
While there is regular media coverage about people with rightwing views being barred from speaking on campuses, or academics being made uncomfortable for holding conservative views, there is limited evidence that it is a significant problem.
A 2018 report by the parliamentary human rights committee found that while some worrying examples could be cited, “we did not find the wholesale censorship of debate in universities which media coverage has suggested”.
From 2018 to 2022 the OFS received only 60 complaints about free speech issues. However, the regulator has said the potential scale of the problem was “not just measured through statistics”.
Claire Coutinho, a junior education minister, said the new act and Ahmed’s role were about “ensuring that fear does not undermine the rights of students and academics to debate controversial ideas and securing the right to an open exchange of ideas in universities”.
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The OFS said that, having talked to the Times, Ahmed would not make any further comments to the media until later in the summer.
Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrats’ education spokesperson, said: “I’m sure we would all like to hear the government’s new ‘free speech tsar’ speaking freely – but, apparently, Conservative ministers disagree.
“This is typical of a Conservative government that loves to pay lip service to free speech, while in reality doing everything they can to stop people holding them to account.”
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Dame Patricia Morgan-Webb obituary | 2023-09-01 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/01/dame-patricia-morgan-webb-obituary | My friend and former colleague Dame Patricia Morgan-Webb, who has died aged 79, was the principal of New College Nottingham from 1998 until 2003, and a key figure in the further education sector in Britain.
In 1992, she was one of the first women to be appointed as a college principal, at Clarendon College, Nottingham, with previous experience that meant she was well placed to face the changes implicit in the shift from local education authority control to incorporation.
Small colleges were unlikely to survive the rigours of the new funding regime, and Pat decided to prioritise cooperation above competition. With the support of the Further Education Funding Council for England and the local authority, she created a partnership of colleges that resulted in a four-college merger to create New College, with Pat as its principal.
There was also an international dimension to her work, and she was invited by the post-apartheid South African government to help develop a modern FE system in the country. But, even as her reputation grew, Pat never lost her focus on serving the people of Nottingham – her creation in 1999 of a new campus for New College in Nottingham Lace Market, with a listed mid-Victorian lace factory, the Adams Building, at its core is one such example.
She was made a dame in 2000, the first FE college principal to be so honoured. After her retirement in 2003, New College continued to thrive and is now part of Nottingham College, one of the largest FE colleges in the UK.
The daughter of Evelyn (nee Osland), a shop assistant, and Hector Morgan, a miner, Pat was born in Oakdale, Monmouthshire, a “model” mining village. She attended her local grammar school before graduating from Swansea University with a degree in history and a teaching diploma.
Arriving in the West Midlands in 1965, Pat spent the next few years honing her skills, teaching liberal studies and history at Wulfrun College (now City of Wolverhampton College), and Dudley College, before raising a family. She returned to full-time teaching at Wulfrun College in 1979, when the collapse of traditional industries in the West Midlands meant the time was ripe for innovative and creative leadership.
Pat’s passion, commitment and skills led to a rapid progression through the FE management grades. She took on the role of staff training coordinator then principal lecturer at the Accredited Training Centre in Telford (1983-85), principal lecturer at Bilston College (1985-88), and vice-principal at Hall Green College, Birmingham (1988-92).
In Birmingham, in 1988, Pat met Chris Webb, a college principal, and they married in 1992. In later years they enjoyed widespread travel together, including to a home in Florida that provided the base for further exploration of the US.
Pat is survived by Chris, and by her children, David and Catherine, and granddaughter Grace, from a previous marriage which ended in divorce, and by Chris’s two children and four grandchildren.
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London schools may be mothballed as student numbers fall | 2024-01-29 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/29/london-schools-may-be-mothballed-as-student-numbers-fall | Capital’s councils say they are struggling to keep schools open as pupil funding dries up
London’s councils are preparing to mothball schools to avoid a boom and bust cycle of closures, as the falling birthrate, high housing costs and the aftermath of Brexit and the Covid pandemic drive down the number of children living in the capital.
With some areas of London projected to see the number of primary school-aged children fall by 10% or more by 2028, councils say they are struggling to support schools to stay open as pupil funding dries up.
Instead, the empty schools could be used to host childcare centres or special needs facilities.
London Councils, which represents the city’s boroughs, said that a wave of school closures could cause a permanent “loss of educational assets for future generations”, with closures leading to sell-offs that could not be quickly reversed when the population recovers.
“London’s birth rate has historically ebbed and flowed, and London is likely to become a more popular place to raise a family at some point in the future, leading to renewed demand for school places,” the group said in a report.
“To avoid the Department for Education from having to purchase land and build new schools in the future, it is vital that we are able to keep current educational assets in use for educational purposes, such as nurseries, family hubs [or] special schools, which creates more flexibility going forward.”
Last month, the boroughs of Hackney and Lambeth announced substantial cuts and closures, with Lambeth losing more than 4,000 primary school places. But the shrinking numbers will soon affect secondary schools, with London Councils forecasting that the numbers entering year 7 will drop by 4%, including a 6% fall in inner London boroughs.
Ian Edwards, London Councils’ executive member for children and young people, said significant reductions in the number of pupils starting primary and secondary education had major implications for the future of the city’s schools.
“Unfortunately, some of our schools and local authorities are negotiating a complex balancing act. The drop in demand for places means schools face extremely difficult decisions over how to balance their budgets,” Edwards said.
“London has some of the best schools in the country, with over 90% of all our schools being rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. We are working diligently to ensure that this level of high-quality education is accessible for all children entering schools in the coming years and allow our schools to thrive despite this difficult climate.”
The Department for Education does have a “falling rolls fund” but it will only support schools experiencing a short-term drop in enrolment if they are likely to recover within four years. London Councils said the DfE should make the fund more flexible “in recognition of the need to protect vital education assets” in the capital, as well maintaining choices for parents.
The councils said they were frustrated by their inability to influence the number of pupils enrolled in academies, which are managed by autonomous trusts that set their own admissions policies.
In some cases academies could refuse to trim their intakes, “even when other local good schools are struggling and might need to close if all local schools don’t work together”, the report stated.
The councils want the DfE to ensure that academies are part of local school place planning, to minimise disruption and closures.
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Schools in England send police to homes of absent pupils with threats to jail their parents | 2024-05-19 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/schools-england-police-homes-absent-pupils | ‘Heavy-handed’ crackdown ignores underlying reasons for failure to attend classes, say critics
Some schools in England are sending police to the homes of children who are persistently absent, or warning them their parents may go to prison if their attendance doesn’t improve, the Observer has learned.
Headteachers say they are now under intense pressure from the government to turn around the crisis in attendance, with a record 150,000 children at state schools classed as severely absent in 2022-23. From September, all state schools in England will have to share their attendance records every day with the Department for Education.
But child psychologists and parent groups are warning that the push for full attendance is driving “heavy-handed” crackdowns at some schools, and ignores the issues that often lie behind school refusal, including mental health problems, unmet special educational needs, bereavement or the child being a carer.
Ellie Costello, co-founder of Square Peg, a lobbying and support group for children who don’t fit into the conventional schools model, said: “Parents have told us about very strict schools actually forcing entry to their homes. Schools are turning up with community police. They are shouting up the stairs to highly anxious children, demanding they come into school now.”
The group’s membership has more than doubled to 58,000 since the government published strict new guidelines on enforcing attendance for schools, including higher fines and prosecution for parents. Costello said “unprecedented” numbers of families were now “fighting against a toxic, coercive attendance drive”.
Dr Naomi Fisher, a child psychologist who specialises in trauma and autism, said: “I’ve heard many times from parents about a child being told, ‘If you don’t come in your mum or dad will go to prison’.” She describes this as “the most terrible thing you can say to a child”, and argues that this level of pressure will only increase their fear about school.
Fisher is in contact with many families who have described their child hiding when a school attendance officer, or a council welfare officer, or “sometimes the police” turned up and insisted on talking to the child.
She said: “The children I see tell me that they are so worried about school they aren’t sleeping, or they’ve stopped eating, or they are having nightmares.” She added that if an adult were to report similar feelings about their job, she would advise them to seek support or consider moving rather than insisting they must not miss a single day.
Last week, Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, criticised parents who she claimed were allowing their children to take Friday off school because they were working at home.
But Fisher said the narrative that poor attendance is all about “slack parents” is wrong. She describes the parents she advises as “desperate”. “If your child isn’t at school, it is very hard to live a normal life,” she said.
Oliver Conway, a child protection solicitor at London law firm Oliver Fisher, which is co-hosting a conference with Square Peg this week on the impact of prosecuting parents on attendance, said many poorer parents were unable to pay fines. He asked: “Why aren’t they giving these families proper mental health support and support from social services instead of trying to punish them?”
One “deeply vulnerable” woman came to him in great distress because the local authority was taking her to court for not sending her 14-year-old daughter into school.
“Her daughter wasn’t going in because she was pregnant. She was involved in county lines [drug trafficking] and she was being sexually abused by a drug dealer,” he said.
He said some of his clients struggled because the council was moving them from one temporary address to another much further away, meaning they had to take two or three buses to reach school.
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Ben Davis, headteacher of St Ambrose Barlow RC High in Salford, said: “We need to move away completely from this idea that people are swinging the lead.”
He said it was wrong that the government was trying to “vilify parents” when the vast majority of severe absences involved families who were “really struggling”, often because of issues which stemmed from poverty.
At Davis’s school, a therapist and safeguarding staff try to understand what is causing stress about coming to school and offer children support, as well as a place to escape to if school becomes overwhelming. Issues have included bereavement, family breakdown and criminality.
He said: “We have a girl who is a young carer. At the start of each day, we make sure we say hello to her and she feels seen.” Her low attendance has now increased to over 80%. Attendance rates across the school, especially for disadvantaged students and those with special educational needs, are above the national average.
Davis warned that pressure from government was making it harder for schools to take this sort of gentler approach to absence. “It is an absurd idea that we need to double down on stressed kids with greater robustness and rigour,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said: “We know some children face greater barriers to attendance, like pupils with long-term medical conditions or special educational needs and disabilities.
“That is why we are taking a support-first approach to tackling absence, setting clear expectations that schools and local authorities work closely with families to identify and address the underlying issues.”
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The ex-headteacher: school leaders need support, not punitive Ofsted judgments | 2023-03-24 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/24/the-ex-headteacher-school-leaders-need-support-not-punitive-ofsted-judgments | My colleague describes the buildup to inspection as ‘a form of prolonged torture waiting for public trial and execution’
School conversations have been dominated by one word: Ofsted. And what a range of feelings that word evokes. As a former headteacher who continues to work with school leaders, my feelings are complex.
I believe it is right that anyone in a public sector position is held to account. For those of us in schools, this means proper scrutiny, not only over the standard of education provided but also how we keep young people safe in our care. We need a body such as Ofsted to do this work and to challenge us when provision is not as good as it can be. But I question whether the current inspection model ensures that happens in an appropriate way.
The two days of an Ofsted inspection are fuelled by adrenaline, caffeine and only a few hours sleep. Conversations with inspectors the day before they arrive give a good indication of how the process will go: they have already done a desktop evaluation of your school, and looking up inspectors’ biographies online means you know who you are up against.
The inspections can feel like a clinical process of intensive information gathering – but one in which you need your wits about you to keep making your case when you feel unfair judgments are being formed.
But worse than the inspections, is the time between inspections. A colleague describes it as “a form of prolonged torture waiting for public trial and execution”. Horror stories spread like wildfire among headteachers, local authorities and trusts desperate to avoid the pitfalls that have caught out others. And why wouldn’t they? The framework by which schools are judged is far from perfect, so you would be foolish not to go into battle well armed.
The result of an inspection is a detailed report but if we are honest, all that matters to the community is the summarising grade. A single judgment: outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate – all to describe something so complex.
Regardless of which word is awarded, it is a burden for every headteacher. If the word is negative, you are publicly humiliated and could lose your job. There is also the devastating impact on your school community – a downward spiral of pupils and staff leaving that is difficult to reverse. If it is positive, outstanding even, that is great for now. But woe betide the grade dropping on your watch.
I can understand why headteachers I know would miss funerals and ignore their own medical emergencies to be in their school on inspection day – it is not an experience to delegate. Part of your job as head is to be the shield that enables teachers to get on with theirs. That means putting on a brave public face and dismissing any worries about inspection, while working under intolerable pressure.
Right now, the challenges facing school leaders are enormous. They need supportive words and they also need challenge – but not punitive judgments.
Ruth Luzmore is a former headteacher of a primary school in London
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Prayer rituals in schools remain a divisive issue | Letters | 2024-04-22 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/22/prayer-rituals-in-schools-remain-a-divisive-issue | Readers respond to a news report and an article by Nadeine Asbali on a prayer ban at Michaela community school in London
I was disappointed by the court ruling on Michaela community school’s prayer ban (High court upholds top London school’s ban on prayer rituals, 16 April), and shocked to see the jubilant reaction from several prominent politicians. Children praying in school is not disruptive or threatening, and for Kemi Badenoch to suggest that these pupils are attempting to “impose their views on an entire school community” screams of xenophobia. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. The prayer ban tells Muslim children that their religious and cultural practices are foreign and undesirable, and in doing so forces conformity to a homogeneous British identity.
I attended a Catholic school in Glasgow with a large number of Muslim students. Many wore hijabs and observed Ramadan, and every Friday a lot of my friends would go to a nearby mosque for midday prayers. In a school system where religious education was taught out of a textbook by old white men, having the opportunity to learn about other cultures through discussions with my peers and exposure to their lifestyles and practices was an enriching experience. Surely this environment of diversity, acceptance and understanding is one that our educators and politicians wish to cultivate?Oliver EastwoodGlasgow
Your article about the Michaela case mentions “renewed discussion about whether faith and religion should have any role in the education system”. The primary school options for my granddaughter this year were three faith schools within walking distance or alternative non-faith schools too distant to walk to. If the faith schools had been oversubscribed, they could have rejected her on the basis of her (non-)religion. Only 6% of our population are practising Christians and this figure will be boosted by those desperate for a particular school place, but over a third of primary schools are (Christian) faith schools. As these schools are almost entirely tax-funded, this is absurd.Bill BradburyBolton
Re Nadeine Asbali’s article (Michaela school will keep its prayer ban – but as a Muslim teacher I know it doesn’t have to be this way, 16 April), it’s crucial to distinguish between freedom of belief and the outward practice of those beliefs in an explicitly secular institution.
First, freedom of religion doesn’t equate to unlimited practice. Students can maintain their faith internally, contemplating and praying silently through the day. The school doesn’t restrict core beliefs, only the outward practice. Second, positive experiences with prayer in schools may not be universal. Prayer rituals can create social pressure or division. Third, and most importantly, the accusation of Islamophobia is serious, but unsubstantiated here. The school’s policy applies to all religions. Focusing on prayer rituals doesn’t equate to broader societal prejudice.Mo ShahdlooOxford
The headteacher of Michaela has defined a strategy centred on the removal of all religious affiliations and the school has announced itself as secular. It ensures that everyone who enrols is aware of this before they sign up. The school is focused on results and views this policy as a fundamental part of this. Its educational performance has been rated outstanding and could be viewed as best practice. Even if that is not the case, by giving parents the choice whether this type of education is appropriate for them or not, it is adding to diversity of choice.
It seems that Nadeine Asbali is missing the point and calls for conformity to type rather than diversity of thought. She possibly believes that teachers’ legal requirement to promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of students can only be achieved though a religious forum. I think not. It can be achieved without religion, as shown by the school’s achievements. Also, to allow a student to sign up to an agreement, only to challenge it later to the point of dissent, would break the code of conduct referenced in Nadeine’s article.Andrew JenkinsNeath
I support Nadeine Asbali in her views concerning the ban on Muslim prayers in Michaela school. I am a committed and practising Christian, and I am greatly concerned at the increasing secularisation pervading our society. We are all naturally spiritual beings with a hunger for something other than materialism, and to ban any expression of this is to deny what it is to be human. I believe it is policing religious freedom, and is curbing expression of deeply held beliefs that, as Nadeine says, handled correctly, can actually improve an understanding of each other.
Children need to learn how to share ideas and convictions respectfully and with tolerance. How else will they learn to evaluate truth and form their own opinions? If not interrupting the normal learning routine, Muslim prayer times should not be banned. At the same time, the same freedom should be afforded to other religious expressions, such as discussion groups and Christian prayer times. Hazel ButlerEastbourne, East Sussex
I felt relieved reading Nadeine Asbali’s article on the prayer ban case. When I was a teenager in a mostly white state secondary school, I asked my religious studies teacher if I could pray at the back of her classroom for five minutes at lunch. Though not Muslim, she understood me completely. Sometimes we’d have a brief chat, sometimes she would give me a reassuring nod as she ate her lunch in the office with humanities staff next door while I went in for my five minutes of devotion and peace over the years.
The headteacher probably had no idea, and I can’t see why it matters. It seems that schools promoting independence, diversity and respect are behind us. Now, every moment of a young person’s day is dictated by a new, oddly dogmatic secularism. And people are feeling proud to see the cookie-cutter academic results this churns out. It is nauseating to read everywhere that this is a victory for British schools, and refreshing to see at least one article point out the contradiction in a ban on freedom being in line with liberal values.Sabiha AhmedHigh Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
Nadeine Asbali refers to “young people learning how to get along with people different from themselves”. That is a sentiment I’m sure most of us would fully support. She also takes the view that “an obstinate, French-style secularism is creeping into our classrooms”. Rather than “creeping”, secularism should be actively encouraged in the education system if we are to avoid segregation of communities along religious, racial and economic lines. We learn to accept and get along with others by spending time with people who come from a background different to our own. Faith schools can discriminate against pupils and teachers who do not share the religion of the school. This at odds with to the objective of a cohesive society.
The old adage “Schools are for teaching, not preaching” is more relevant today than at any time in our history.Tony HicksNottingham
Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
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Private school funding increased twice as much as public schools’ in decade after Gonski, data shows | 2023-07-16 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jul/17/gonski-review-government-funding-private-public-schools | Exclusive: government funding since landmark education review released ‘has gone to those least in need’, says national convenor of Save Our Schools
Real government funding to private schools has increased almost twice as much as funding to public schools in the decade since the landmark Gonski review recommended changes designed to fund Australian schools according to need.
From 2012 to 2021, per student funding to independent and Catholic schools rose by 34% and 31% respectively, while funding to public schools increased by just 17%, according to parliamentary library data provided exclusively to Guardian Australia. In Queensland, the growth in government funding to independent schools per student has been nine times greater than to public schools.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (Acara) data shows that 98% of private schools are funded above the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) recommended by Gonski and more than 98% of public schools are funded below it.
“That money has gone to the wrong place,” said Trevor Cobbold, an economist and the national convenor of Save Our Schools. “It has gone to those least in need.”
The Gonski review was hailed as the roadmap to reducing the impact of social disadvantage on educational outcomes. But more than decade later, government policy has had the opposite effect.
Cobbold said the figures showed a “sabotaging” of the plan by successive governments, both state and federal, which has shortchanged students in the public system.
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“The Gonski model wasn’t perfect, there were some flaws,” he said. “But it offered a change in terms of where funding would be directed in terms of the most in need, and that has not happened.”
The Greens education spokesperson, Penny Allman-Payne, said the gap in funding between private and public schools had created one of the most unequal and segregated school systems in the OECD.
A Unicef report in 2018 ranked Australia 30th out of 38 OECD countries in providing equitable access to secondary education.
“It’s clear that the implementation of Gonski has been a failure. By no measure can anyone say, a decade later, that our school funding model is working,” she said.
“It’s a twisted and perverse system that is widening the gap between rich and poor kids and lowering average student performance.”
One of the core recommendations of the Gonski review when it was released in 2011 was implementing the SRS, a needs-based model to provide a baseline education to students, set at $13,060 for primary students and $16,413 for secondary students.
The federal education minister at the time of the Gonski review, Peter Garrett, said the aim was to ensure any student, irrespective of their background, could reach their potential.
“The legislation we put in place meant Australia finally had a genuine needs-based funding system for the first time,” he said. “This required a massive effort to produce significant buy-in from most of the education sector Australia wide.”
But a briefing by the education department prepared for witnesses appearing before Senate estimates and seen by Guardian Australia, estimates that schools in the Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Western Australia will reach only 75% of their SRS this year, with the remaining states and territories also falling short of 100%. On its current trajectory, the Northern Territory will never reach it.
Cobbold said the failure to fund schools according to need could be traced back to key decisions made by successive governments after the Gonski review.
The first kick to its success, he said, was the Gillard government’s edict that “no school would lose a dollar”.
A deal was struck with the Catholic system and other private schools – which were found to be overfunded at the time – to maintain their revenue from government.
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Documents released in June this year through freedom of information laws revealed more than 1,000 private schools – or 40% of Australia’s non-government schools – would be overfunded by $3.2bn over the next six years.
Cobbold pointed to the Abbott government’s 2014 budget, which scrapped the biggest increases in school funding agreed to under the Gonski reforms, planned for 2017 and 2018, the bulk of which would have gone to public schools.
Cobbold said the funding model for public schools was further undermined in 2017, when the Turnbull government introduced an “arbitrary” commonwealth funding cap of 20% for public schools, with the remainder to be covered by state governments. For non-government schools, the caps are the reverse.
The president of the Australian Education Union, Correna Haythorpe, said putting the onus on the states to implement 80% of funding failed to adhere to the Gonski review’s recommendation that the commonwealth should put in more, given its greater capacity to raise revenue.
“What we know is that over the past decade, states have not been held accountable for delivering the full share,” she said.
Former New South Wales National party MP and former state education minister, Prof Adrian Piccoli, said the Turnbull government did cap the funding increase for schools that had reached 100% of the SRS – most of which were in the independent sector – after the Gillard government had promised to increase funding by 3% a year for all schools.
“What the Gillard government did was better than what was there before, what the Turnbull government did was a little better,” he said. “But it was far from perfect.”
Cobbold said the final blow to funding schools according to need came from the Morrison government, which negotiated a $4.6bn increase in funding for Catholic schools over 10 years but no additional money for public schools.
“Morrison basically said it’s up to the state governments [to fund public schools], but the state governments haven’t been delivering either,” Cobbold said.
In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, state government funding in real terms has gone backwards since 2012, falling by 5.6% and 7.75% per student respectively, according to the Acara data.
The overall funding disparities have not been spread equally across the country.
Real government funding per student has increased by more than 16% in metro areas, more than 22% in inner regional areas, and more than 20% in outer regional areas. But in remote and very remote areas it has risen by barely 14% and 10% respectively.
Garrett said the failure of federal governments to fund schools according to their need in the decade since Gonski was an outrage.
“The Coalition trashed that reform and a generation of students in public schools lost the opportunity to shine,” he said.
The federal government is now undertaking a review to inform the next National School Reform Agreement, with the aim to work with state governments to get schools to 100% of their SRS.
The education minister, Jason Clare, agreed there was a gap that needed to be filled.
“Australia has a good education system, but it can be a lot better and a lot fairer,’ he said.
“If you are a child today from a poor background, from the bush or if you are an Indigenous Australian, you are three times more likely to fall behind at school. This is what we need to fix.”
This story is part one of a series exploring how successive governments have failed to make Australia’s education funding fairer. Next: the parents who fled public schools – and those who stayed.
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Stoxbridge? St Andrews tops Guardian UK university guide for second year | 2023-09-09 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/09/stoxbridge-st-andrews-tops-guardian-university-guide-for-second-year-uk | Scottish institution once again finishes ahead of Oxford and Cambridge in the Guardian’s 2024 rankings
St Andrews has cemented its lead as the best university in the country, pulling further away from Oxford and Cambridge in the latest Guardian University Guide.
The Fife university came top of the table for the first time in 2022, after knocking Oxford off the second spot in 2019. This year, the gap between first place and Oxford and Cambridge in second and third place respectively has widened, while St Andrews has claimed top spot in nine of the individual subject rankings, more than ever before.
Prof Dame Sally Mapstone, the St Andrews vice-chancellor, said: “I think everyone associated with St Andrews will be absolutely delighted. To be ranked top last year was very special, to do it two years in succession risks becoming habit-forming. It is a great compliment to our fantastic academic and professional services staff, the university’s longstanding commitment to a very special blend of research-led teaching, and the hard work of our remarkable students.”
She added that St Andrews position at the top confirmed its strength in offering students a good experience, since this is what the Guardian rankings captured.
St Andrews’ consistent success could replace the “Oxbridge” moniker as UK universities’ signifier of prestige with “Stoxbridge”. The Scottish institution is the third-oldest university in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge.Matt Hiely-Rayner, who compiled the guide, said that “St Andrews has consolidated the lead it took last year and has even extended it”.
St Andrews’ improved position is because of higher grades from incoming students, a higher rate of students completing their courses, improved graduate prospects, and a slightly lower staff to student ratio.
Hiely-Rayner added that overall “it has been a relatively stable year, particularly near the top of the rankings. Universities moved around nine places on average, which is comparatively low and is partly due to the methodology remaining consistent.”
The London School of Economics came fourth again and Imperial took fifth place. The only changes to the top 10 were Bath claiming Durham’s sixth place and pushing Durham into seventh, and UCL taking Warwick’s eighth spot, moving Warwick down to ninth.
Oxbridge shone in the subject tables this year, with Oxford increasing its haul of first places to 11, more than any other university, including in economics, politics, geography, computer science, and earth and marine sciences. St Andrews gained top spot for languages and linguistics, business and management and psychology, while Cambridge gained top spot for veterinary science.
The two biggest risers in the rankings were further down the table: Portsmouth, at 33, and Soas, in 52nd place, both climbing 34 places.
The university that has shown the most consistent improvement over the past five years is the University of the Arts London. The institution has progressed from 45th four years ago to 26th, 19th and now 15th, its highest ever.
UAL’s vice-chancellor, James Purnell, credited its success to two factors currently maligned by the government: the creative arts and international students.
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He said that some of the recent headlines from ministers making negative comments about overseas students “were not helpful to the sector”.
“We always try to say, to the public and to government, this is an unbelievable asset for our students and for the UK,” he said.
He added that the government’s emphasis on Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) was a “classic false choice”.
“If we’re going to invent materials for the future it’s going to be at the intersection of science, technology, fashion and design. I can’t think of any problem that doesn’t need a mixture of those skills. We’d love to persuade politicians to shift away from what is a false choice to a recognition that creativity and innovation are ways of solving some of the most intractable problems we face,” he said.
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English universities warned not to over-rely on fees of students from China | 2023-05-17 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/may/18/english-universities-warned-not-to-over-rely-on-fees-of-students-from-china | Higher education regulator asks 23 institutions for contingency plans in case of sudden interruption of income
England’s higher education regulator has warned universities against over-reliance on tuition fees of students from China, as Rishi Sunak backtracked on his earlier pledge to close UK branches of the Beijing-sponsored Confucius Institute.
The Office for Students (OfS) wrote to 23 universities with high numbers of Chinese students on Thursday, asking to see their contingency planning in case of a sudden interruption to overseas recruitment.
“Such interruptions could result from, for example, a changing geopolitical environment which could cause an immediate and significant impact on income,” an OfS report said. “We have written to providers that are particularly exposed to these risks to ask them to share their plans with us.”
Universities have become increasingly dependent on international students as part of their business models because of the significantly higher fees they can charge, which offset the decreasing value of domestic tuition fees that have gone up little since they were introduced in 2012.
China is of particular concern because it sends more students to study in the UK than any other country. Twenty-seven per cent of all non-EU students in UK higher education institutions, or 151,690 pupils, were from China in 2021/22. University College London and Manchester University recruited the highest numbers.
The OfS chief executive, Susan Lapworth, said: “International students bring enormous economic, cultural and educational benefits to higher education in England. But we continue to have concerns that some universities have become too reliant on fee income from international students, with students from one country sometimes a significant part of the financial model.
“Universities must know what they would do if international recruitment fails to meet expectations. We have written to a number of institutions today to ensure they are alert to this risk, and have credible contingency plans in place to protect them from the consequences of a sudden reduction in their income.”
The OfS’s concerns come as the government admitted it had backtracked on the prime minister’s pledge to shut branches of the Confucius Institute (CI), which are attached to universities across the UK.
Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, used her visit to Taiwan to issue a reminder of his pledge during the Conservative party leadership race in July 2022, claiming the institutes promoted Chinese soft power.
She said: “Last summer the now British prime minister described China as the biggest long-term threat to Britain and said the Confucius Institutes should be closed. He was right and we need to see those policies enacted urgently.”
Number 10, however, effectively admitted on Wednesday that Sunak had changed his mind. A spokesperson said: “Like any international body operating in the UK, the CI needs to operate transparently and within the law. We’re taking action to remove all government funding from the CI in the UK, but we currently judge that it would be disproportionate to ban them.”
They also said it was important to note that the government did not directly fund the institute.
A UK charity that last month published a highly critical report about the role of the institutes in Britain will, however, argue on Thursday that the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – which became law last week – empowers regulators to shut them down.
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The act has a specific section on overseas funding, amending previous legislation to oblige the OfS to monitor overseas funding of higher education providers to gauge implications for freedom of speech and academic freedom.
UK-China Transparency found in its report last month that Beijing vetted Chinese people applying to teach at the institutes for their political leaning, ethnicity and ability to comply with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) guidelines for foreign affairs.
Those guidelines require staff to enforce CCP values, leading to claims that universities are in breach of legal responsibilities to protect their students from harassment.
Universities UK (UUK), which speaks for 140 universities, said the sector was well aware of the risks of over-reliance on narrow streams of student applications and had been working to diversify their student base. Student numbers from India, Nigeria and the UAE have all gone up.
UUK highlighted instead the financial risks universities face from fee freezes and increased costs. “Universities need a clear, well thought out and consistent funding model in order to safeguard their work both now and in the future,” a spokesperson said.
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‘It’s an absolute mess’: building work seriously delayed on 33 new special schools in England | 2024-03-09 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/09/building-work-delayed-33-new-special-schools-england-autistic | Promised provision, particularly for autistic children, was announced a year ago but few schools will open on time
Plans to deliver thousands of new special school places by 2026 are falling seriously behind, with experts branding the building programme “a mess”, the Observer can reveal.
The news calls into question the only announcement on schools the chancellor made in last week’s budget – a commitment of £105m towards 15 additional special schools.
Last March, the Department for Education announced that 33 local authorities had been awarded funding to build a new special school, and most of these were expected to open by September 2026.
However, insiders say the procurement process is already very delayed, and they are doubtful that schools will open on time.
The local authorities submitted a list of possible multi-academy trusts to sponsor these schools last September and were told to expect a decision the following month. But the DfE still has not published a list of approved trusts, so in most cases no design or planning could start.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan admitted on Friday that the government “haven’t built enough special educational needs places or schools”. Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders, she admitted that councils were “under pressure because families can’t get the support they need”.
A senior education consultant who has been working closely with one of the local authorities on that DfE list from last year said: “It’s an absolute mess. [Getting a school ready by] September 2026 is now looking like a real push.”
The consultant said that although there was a shortage of special needs school places across the country, the 33 areas had been chosen because they have “a particularly serious, pressing need”. He added: “Waiting for this announcement delays any formal design and construction process. We’ve got contractors asking if they should submit a tender for the school but we have to tell them nothing can happen yet. It’s ridiculous.”
Many of the special schools announced last year will focus on autism, an area of increasing need. Tens of thousands of children are now waiting months or years for help, with referrals for autism assessment rocketing over 300% since Covid, according to a report last month by the Centre for Young Lives and the Child of the North campaign.
Anne Longfield, founder of the Centre for Young Lives and a former children’s commissioner, said ministers needed to give these new autism schools “a rocket boost” to ensure they were built fast: “Every day these young people don’t have an environment in school that is supporting them to flourish is a day their life chances could diminish.”
Sarah Woosey, head of education at law firm Simpson Millar, said: “We are seeing a growing number of disputes where everyone involved agrees that a child needs a special school place but there isn’t one available.
“Teenagers are struggling most. But even at reception age, we are seeing non-verbal children whom everyone agrees need to be in a special school being offered only a mainstream place, which is setting them up for failure.”
Rob Gasson, chief executive of Wave multi-academy trust, which runs special and alternative provision schools in the south-west, said: “I have worked in these sectors for 30 years, and right now demand is off the scale.”
He said he saw children and parents in special schools who had “battled their way through a very adversarial system to secure the support they need and been marked by that battle”. But he added: “I also see many children who have been excluded from mainstream schools with exactly the same needs, but without the support networks to fight the system.”
There is also a cost to such delays. When there are not enough state-run special schools, councils have to pay for a child to go to a privately run special school, which can costs tens of thousands of pounds a year.
Tim Warneford, an academy funding consultant, said: “Schools of all stripes, including special schools and those with Raac, are experiencing a pattern of the DfE not meeting deadlines on building. It is causing no end of anxiety.”
A DfE spokesperson said: “We have never set a September 2026 target to complete these particular special free schools. We are opening more special free schools than ever before and have opened a total of 108 since 2010. With the additional 15 schools confirmed at the budget, we have committed to opening a further 92 in the future.”
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Childcare in England failing and falling behind much of world, charity says | 2024-04-14 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/15/childcare-in-england-failing-and-falling-behind-much-of-world-charity-says | Fawcett Society warns sector is lacking in ambition and delivery and calls for free ‘universal’ hours
England’s childcare system is failing and falling behind those of much of the rest of the world, a UK charity for gender equality and women’s rights has said.
The Fawcett Society said childcare in England was failing on several fronts: affordability, quality and levels of public spending.
The charity looked at early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision in Australia, Canada, Estonia, France, and Ireland – all countries that have recently completed or are undergoing government-led transformation in the sector – and found England’s childcare fell short in ambition and delivery.
The findings echo numerous warnings on the state of childcare in England, with surveys finding that a third of parents with young children say they are struggling to afford childcare, nurseries warning that government plans for free childcare are undeliverable, and about a quarter of a million mothers with young children leaving their jobs because of difficulties with balancing work and childcare.
The most recent change to England’s childcare system, which came into force this month, was an expansion of free hours. The Fawcett Society said that while this was welcome for some families, the narrow focus of the expansion would not help those who are disadvantaged and would not address the wider issues with the system.
The charity argues in its report that the government should offer free “universal” hours of ECEC provision for all children from the end of parental leave until school age.
Jemima Olchawski, the Fawcett Society’s chief executive, said: “Our childcare is some of the most expensive in the world and it isn’t working. Research shows that 85% of mothers struggle to find childcare that fits around their work and one in 10 have quit jobs due to childcare pressures.
“For too long we’ve seen the cracks in our dysfunctional childcare system papered over. We’ve got a patchwork of provision that doesn’t meet the needs of children, parents or the childcare sector. But a broken system isn’t inevitable, as the countries in our research clearly show. We need politicians from all parties to work together and make genuine commitments that last beyond this election – and indeed the next – to reform childcare.
“There are plenty of countries around the world who simply do childcare better and we should be learning from their ambition. As we approach a general election, all parties need to be aware that any credible vision for transforming childcare mustn’t simply offer bolt-ons to a crumbling system. We must be more ambitious, particularly when it has such an impact on both children’s life chances and women’s ability to work.”
The report outlines a plan for long-term reform in England that includes building on and expanding the existing “free hours” to make the offer open to all children, not just those of working parents, with extra subsidies for the poorest to enable them to afford to supplement the universal offer, and fee freezes for everyone.
The report also recommends providing funding to nurseries so they can operate in unprofitable areas, and support inclusion for all children.
Alesha De-Freitas, the director of policy, research and advocacy at the Fawcett Society, said: “Affordability is clearly essential but we’ve got stuck on it. When you look at other countries, you find a richness to the conversations about what is genuinely best for children that is so different to the UK.”
The Fawcett Society report warns that “designing a system which is focused narrowly on [affordability] without strengthening and resourcing the system … may ultimately be counterproductive and unable to meet the demands it has set up”.There is ample international evidence that higher-quality childcare has huge long-term economic and social benefits, it says.
“The early years of a child’s life are so important – the evidence for that is growing all the time,” De-Freitas added. “It really impacts on children’s long-term outcomes and access to education. We should be aiming for so much better than just having somewhere for parents to park their children while they’re at work.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “This government is delivering the largest ever expansion of childcare in England’s history, set to save parents taking up the full 30 hours an average of £6,900 for the new entitlements.
“Working parents on universal credit are also eligible for support with childcare costs no matter how many hours they work, up to £1,015 per month for a single child and £1,739 for two children. England has some of the highest-quality early years provision in the world, with 96% of early years settings rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding as of August 2023 – up from 74% in 2012.”
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Education of children in care in England held back by ‘system failings’ | 2022-07-07 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jul/07/education-of-children-in-care-in-england-held-back-by-system-failings | Report by MPs calls for academies that illegally turn away looked-after children to be punished by Ofsted
A report by MPs has identified “a host of indefensible system failings” behind the educational disadvantage affecting children in care, and called for academies that illegally turn them away to be punished by Ofsted.
The report by the education select committee accused the government of failing to act as a “pushy parent” by placing looked-after children in the best schools available, resulting in children in care “receiving educational experiences that we certainly would not deem acceptable for our own children”.
The MPs highlighted the difficulties that many looked-after children have in accessing good or outstanding schools in England, and detailed how some academies attempt to keep them out despite their high priority for places.
“There must be a clear sanctions mechanism in place for schools who consistently refuse or delay admissions of looked-after children. The lever for this accountability should be the impact on the school’s Ofsted judgment,” the report concluded.
Just 7% of children in care go on to obtain good passes in GCSE maths and English, compared with 40% of others. MPs noted that children in residential care homes often have lower attainment than those placed in foster care.
Robert Halfon, the chair of the committee, said: “The least the system can do is its legal duty to make sure that looked-after children get prioritised for the good and outstanding schools that can cater to their needs, which are often more complex than [for] children living with their parents.
“But many are abdicating even that responsibility, using children’s own circumstances against them with impunity.
“Ofsted ratings should tumble if councils and schools don’t give these children the equal opportunities they deserve.”
The committee supported a clause in the schools bill going through parliament that would give councils greater powers to force academies to admit looked-after children. It said the Department for Education should introduce the new power “without delay”, and collect data on schools that try to block admissions.
The admissions code for England gives top priority for school places to children in care, meaning that they should be admitted before any other pupils. But while a local authority can direct maintained schools to accept looked-after children, it currently has no powers over academies other than through an appeals process that can take months to resolve.
One witness told the committee: “There is no sanction for [academies] having completely refused or blocked an admission to a school when they know that they are in a legally indefensible position. They will keep doing it as long as there is no sanction against that.”
Anntoinette Bramble, the chair of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said: “We want every child in care to be able to go to the best school for their needs, which is why we continue to call for powers for councils to direct academies to take looked after children, as pledged in the schools white paper.”
Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, said the report’s findings matched her own concerns that care provision was “patchy and inconsistent”.
“More needs to be done to support children in care, especially those in unregulated provision, those who move settings regularly, and those without access to good or outstanding schools,” de Souza said.
The committee was also highly critical of the use of unregulated education providers and residential homes, and at the lack of data available to the government or local authorities about how many children receive unregulated provision. The MPs recommended that councils relying on unregulated education should also be sanctioned by Ofsted through its inspections of councils’ children’s services.
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UK pupils’ science and maths scores lowest since 2006 in international tests | 2023-12-05 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/dec/05/uk-pupils-science-and-maths-scores-lowest-since-2006-in-international-tests | Global slump means maths and reading rankings still up slightly in OECD assessment of 15-year-olds, but results vary for UK nations
The UK has suffered a sharp decline in its performance in the latest round of influential international academic tests, wiping out recent progress, as the widespread disruption caused by Covid continued to take its toll on education.
The OECD’s programme for international student assessment (Pisa), which compares educational attainment among 15-year-olds around the world, showed UK schoolchildren achieved their lowest scores in mathematics and science since 2006 – the first year of comparable data.
Reading results were also down, close to the previous minimum in 2009, but other participating countries had even greater declines in attainment, which meant the UK slightly improved its ranking in the global league tables for maths and reading, despite its reduced scores.
About 690,000 pupils from 81 countries and economies took part in the 2022 Pisa assessment, the results of which were published on Tuesday after a year-long delay owing to the global pandemic, which inevitably shaped the latest set of results.
UK maths results slumped by 13 points and reading by 10 compared with the last Pisa round in 2018, while attainment in science, which has been in long-term decline, went down a further five points. The average OECD maths performance, by comparison, dropped by almost 16 points over the same period. Previously such changes have never exceeded four points.
There were marked differences between the four UK nations, with England coming out on top, having achieved a mean Pisa maths score of 492 compared with the OECD average of 472, taking England from 17th in the Pisa rankings for maths in 2018 to 11th in 2022. England also climbed from 14th to 13th position for reading, and remained in 13th for science, according to the Department for Education.
The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, said the latest set of results “cemented” England as one of the top-performing countries for education in the western world. “These results are testament to our incredible teachers, the hard work of students and to the government’s unrelenting drive to raise school standards over the past 13 years,” she said.
“Our teachers, head teachers and support staff should be incredibly proud of their role, day in and day out, transforming education standards in this country and giving our children the platform to build successful careers and compete for the best jobs in world.”
However Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, questioned the reliability of the data as the UK’s response rate fell below the OECD’s official requirements. He said: “This should not be the occasion for a fanfare: England’s schools have been sold short by their government for more than a decade.”
Wales struggled at the bottom of the domestic table with a 21-point drop in its maths score since 2018, while Scotland’s went down by 18 points – roughly equivalent to the loss of a year’s learning, the OECD said.
“The last years haven’t been so great in Scotland,” said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD. The results follow warnings from the Institute for Fiscal Studies last month that Scotland had experienced the largest historic decline in maths performance of the UK nations; it had been the best-performing in 2006.
The Pisa data showed Scotland was now the third-best in the UK behind England and Northern Ireland on maths, with a mean score of 471, leaving it 55th out of 81 countries. Scotland’s decline was also larger than the OECD average of 16 points.
The OECD figures also raised significant questions about the Scottish government’s attempts to narrow the attainment gap between poor and better-off pupils. It showed that gap was at its greatest in Scotland, at 16 points, compared with 10 for England, 12 for Northern Ireland and 10 for Wales.
Jenny Gilruth, the Scottish education secretary, said Scotland’s performance on reading was stronger, placing it second in the UK, but the overall findings provided the Scottish government and councils with “key learning” on the need for action.
“As is well understood, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on our young people and their experience of learning and teaching,” she said.
The Labour-led Welsh government said the pandemic had “derailed” progress it had been making in literacy and numeracy as it failed by a large margin to hit the Pisa targets it had set itself.
In maths, Wales’s mean score for 2022 was 466 after registering the largest drop in the four nations over the four years. In reading its mean score was also 466 (against 483 in 2018) and in science 473 (488 in 2018), again the worst of the four nations in both.
The Welsh education minister, Jeremy Miles, said: “Before the pandemic, we saw a strong improvement in literacy and numeracy standards in Wales. Sadly, it is clear that the pandemic has derailed some of this improvement.”
As with previous Pisa cycles, the highest-performing education systems were in east Asia, with Singapore outperforming all other education systems in all subjects. Japan, Taiwan, Macau and South Korea were also near the top of the tables in all three subject areas, with Estonia the standout success in Europe once again.
The OECD said there had been an “unprecedented” drop in attainment globally, with mean performance in OECD countries down 11 points in reading and almost 16 in maths – equivalent to three-quarters of a year’s worth of learning.
Some countries managed to maintain and even improve their performance despite Covid, but Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland had some of the most dramatic declines, with a drop of 25 score points or more in maths between 2018 and 2022.
While the pandemic, which closed schools for months at a time in countries across the world and led to remote education, was the most obvious explanation for the decline in results, the OECD said students in countries such as Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic and Sweden had scored lower marks for up to a decade or more.
“This indicates that long-term issues in education systems are also to blame for the drop in performance. It is not just about Covid,” the OECD said.
Natalie Perera, the chief executive of the Education Policy Institute (EPI), said: “Today’s Pisa results confirm that England, alongside many other OECD nations, has experienced considerable learning loss as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, England does remain above the OECD average in all subjects: maths, reading and science.”
Perera also noted that the reported life satisfaction scores of UK students had fallen drastically between 2015 and 2022, to the extent that the UK now has the second-lowest average life satisfaction of 15-year-olds across all OECD countries.
“The government must prioritise education and, in particular, address the urgent teacher recruitment and retention issues that the country is facing. But the challenges for young people span wider than just education,” she said.
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All state schools in England may shut in ‘unprecedented’ coordinated strikes | 2023-04-28 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/apr/28/headteachers-could-join-new-strikes-likely-to-shut-schools-across-england | Four main teaching unions could unite after ‘months of stonewalling’ from education secretary Gillian Keegan
All state schools in England could be closed by “unprecedented” coordinated strikes involving all four teaching unions, after their leaders vowed to increase pressure on the government to improve its pay offer.
In a joint press conference, the leaders of the four major education unions said they wanted to send a message to the education secretary that she needed to resume negotiations over pay and school funding.
“The significance of four union general secretaries being aligned in this way should not be understated. It’s a real demonstration of unity on our part and determination on the part of our members, after weeks, if not months, of stonewalling from the secretary of state [Gillian Keegan],” said Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT.
Roach said Keegan had “gone to ground” and was refusing to meet unions.
“Her haste to strike a deal has seriously backfired and we’re here today because it has galvanised not just us but our members, rank and file classroom teachers and school leaders who are now going to be balloted for industrial action.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the government was “in a parallel universe”, describing the previous pay talks as “bizarre and surreal”.
“The nation’s parents are watching on and saying, why is the government not sorting this out? This is a government that wants education on the cheap. They don’t want to pay teachers,” Barton said.
If the ballots held by the four unions, including the National Education Union and the National Association of Head Teachers, pass the legal threshold, then the leaders said they would coordinate action in the autumn term this year.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, said: “I think with our four unions you would find that every state school in England would be affected by the dispute, and that would put it up to 300-400,000 teachers who would be involved in taking action.”
In March, the government offered teachers a £1,000 one-off payment alongside an average 4.5% pay rise next year after talks. But members of the four unions rejected the pay offer by substantial margins.
On Friday, the National Association of Head Teachers announced that it would again ballot members for strike action. The union held a vote last year but narrowly failed to surpass the 50% participation rate required by law, with union officials blaming the postal strike for members being unable to receive ballots.
“We’ve been on this cliff-edge for too long, and enough is enough,” Paul Whiteman, the NAHT’s general secretary, said at its conference on Friday as delegates voted to endorse a ballot. “When it comes to school funding, the government has attempted to fob off the general public with massaged figures and deceptive statistics, but it doesn’t matter if you’ve been made to study maths until the age of 18 or the age of 180, its sums just don’t add up.”
The NEU gave notice that it would open balloting from Monday for renewed authorisation to hold strikes until the end of the year. So far the NEU has held five days of national and regional strikes in England, with a further national strike planned for Tuesday.
Dr Mary Bousted, the NEU’s joint general secretary, accused Keegan of “washing her hands” over the teachers’ pay dispute by refusing to reopen talks.
“The secretary of state, who remains by some distance the biggest obstacle to getting a sensible resolution, needs to address this issue head on and come to the negotiating table with all the education unions. This wilful lack of engagement will be something that parents and teachers will not forget,” Bousted said.
Keegan has refused to reopen talks, saying she will wait until she receives recommendations from the independent school teachers’ review body for the 2023-24 pay award later this summer.
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Adult education and apprenticeships budget will be 25% down since 2010 | 2022-06-12 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/13/adult-education-and-apprenticeships-budget-will-have-shrunk-25-in-15-years-says-ifs | IFS says cuts and inflation far outweigh £900m promised new spending, undermining levelling up ambitions
Government spending on adult education and apprenticeships in England will be 25% lower in 2025 than in 2010, despite the extra £900m promised in last year’s spending review, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The IFS calculated that the additional funding only partially reverses the 38% fall in overall spending on adult education and apprenticeships over the decade since 2010-11, when the Conservatives entered government, due to austerity and inflation.
“This will make it harder to achieve the government’s high ambitions to improve technical education and adult skills in order to level up poorer areas of the country,” the IFS said, ahead of a new report, Adult education: making it a genuine second chance, published on Monday.
The report found that while there have been increases in the numbers taking more advanced qualifications, such as higher apprenticeships and degrees, the numbers of adults taking more basic qualifications has fallen steeply since 2010-11 – including a 50% fall in those taking qualifications at GCSE level and below.
In November’s spending review, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, stated that “total spending on skills will increase over the parliament by £3.8bn by 2024-25”, equivalent to a 26% increase in real terms compared with five years earlier. But the IFS found that only £900m was additional spending. “Given the size of past cuts, however, this will only bring total spending on adult education and apprenticeships back to around 2015 levels,” it noted.
Imran Tahir, an IFS research economist and one of the report’s authors, said the government’s plans will provide extra help to those who left schools with good GCSEs or equivalent qualifications.
“Yet the main plans set out for helping adults with few qualifications – skills bootcamps and the new [numeracy] programme – are relatively untested and are unlikely to lead to formal qualifications. Providing effective support and training for this group is a significant challenge that will be key to levelling up poorer areas of the country,” Tahir said.
The IFS found that in 2011-12, there were more than 3 million “low level” adult learners taking classroom-based qualifications, but by 2019-20 that number had more than halved. The biggest fall was in adults taking courses below GCSE level.
There has also been a decline in the numbers of adults starting apprenticeships, especially since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy on larger firms in 2017. “As a result, there was little chance of meeting a government target of 3 million new apprenticeship starts between 2015 and 2020,” the report states.
The report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, praised the new lifelong loan entitlement being introduced by the government as “a sensible move” that effectively extends the funding system used for higher education to a number of further education courses.
But it warns that the four-year entitlement for loans is “substantially more restrictive” than the current system of funding, and risks “achieving precisely the opposite of the government’s stated aim by making it harder for people to retrain later in life”.
Toby Perkins, Labour’s shadow minister for further education and skills, said: “The government’s neglect of further education is plain to see in shrinking opportunities and falling numbers of adults taking part in training and reskilling.
“Together with the lowest level of workplace learning in over a generation, it is clear that the Conservatives do not have a plan to tackle skills shortages across our economy.”
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Record numbers of teachers in England quitting profession, figures show | 2023-06-08 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/08/teachers-england-schools-figures-department-education-survey | Department for Education survey finds that 40,000 – almost 9% of workforce – left state schools in 2021-22 before retirement
Teachers in England are abandoning their profession in record numbers, according to official figures, with Labour claiming that “incompetent” government policies were to blame.
The latest workforce survey by the Department for Education (DfE) found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools last year – almost 9% of the teaching workforce, and the highest number since it began publishing the data in 2011 – while a further 4,000 retired.
The survey found that unfilled teaching vacancies were also at a record high, with more than 2,300 empty posts compared with 530 a decade earlier. A further 3,300 posts were filled by supply teachers, 1,000 more than the year before.
Large numbers of teachers were missing because of illness, with more than 3m working days of sick leave taken last year, a rise of more than 50% compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2018-19.
Jack Worth of the National Foundation for Educational Research said it was “hugely concerning” to see so many working-age teachers leaving.
“Addressing teacher retention should be at the heart of dealing with the teacher supply challenge, with further policy action needed to reduce teacher workload and increase the competitiveness of teacher pay,” Worth said.
Teaching unions blamed poor working conditions and the long-term erosion in pay for the exodus, while Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said: “This is yet more evidence that this incompetent Conservative government has created the perfect storm in recruitment and retention of teachers.
“The endless merry-go-round of Conservative prime ministers and education ministers have neglected our schools and our teaching workforce – and it is children who will pay the price.”
However, the DfE said almost 48,000 teachers joined the profession in 2022-23, up 2,800 from the previous year.
Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said: “In today’s competitive job market, it is fantastic to see so many people choosing a rewarding teaching career, with a record number of teachers now working in our schools.
“We know there is more to do, which is why we have generous bursaries to attract new trainees to teach priority subjects and focusing on supporting new teachers from the very start of their journey.”
The number of teachers working in state schools in England reached 468,000, reflecting the continued rise in pupil numbers to 8.45 million this year. In secondary schools, there are now 3.6 million students, an increase of 300,000 over four years.
Meanwhile, a new national survey of behaviour commissioned by the DfE found that 60% of school leaders and teachers said pupil misbehaviour had had a negative impact on their health.
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While 90% of headteachers and senior school leaders rated their school’s behaviour as good, just 64% of classroom teachers and 47% of pupils felt the same. The survey found that teachers lost six minutes of every half hour in lessons as a result of dealing with misbehaviour.
Tom Bennett, the government’s behaviour adviser, said the survey showed that behaviour remained a big problem in many schools, with classroom disruption having a “huge” impact on student success.
“This is a call to arms and a reminder that behaviour is fundamental to learning. And it’s good that the DfE is taking this seriously,” Bennett said.
The DfE’s school census showed that more than 2 million state school pupils qualified for free school meals this year, with 24% or almost one in four pupils eligible, an increase of 122,000 from 2022.
The 2 million figure was 40% higher than in the 2020 survey, as rising levels of household poverty and the government’s transition arrangements for families moving on to universal credit meant more children were eligible.
Pupils are eligible for free school meals if their family is on universal credit with a household income of less than £7,400 a year after tax and any other benefits, or receive other similar benefits.
More than 30% of pupils in the north-east of England were eligible for free school meals, while the figure was just 19% in the south-east and east of England. In London, 25% of pupils were eligible.
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Gloria Jenkins obituary | 2024-01-04 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/04/gloria-jenkins-obituary | My mother, Gloria Jenkins, who has died aged 86, embarked on a career in social work and education in the late 1950s. She first worked as a house mother in children’s homes, then as a childcare officer in Camberwell, south-east London, and Glamorgan, south Wales.
In 1972 Gloria was appointed lecturer in social work at Gwent College of Higher Education and thus embarked on 25 years of social work education and latterly university administration. Just as she had been a professional, skilled and empathic social worker she became an inspirational teacher. As course director for the certificate of qualification in social work she supported hundreds of social workers in their desire to join the profession.
Gloria spent time in the Netherlands, Spain and Israel sharing social work practice. In 1988-89 she was visiting professor of social work at the University of Texas. In 1990, she began the final part of her professional career, as leader of the small team working to gain university status for the South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education (now Cardiff Metropolitan University), which was attained in 1996, the year before her retirement.
The elder daughter of David Moulds, a miner, and his wife, Cassie (nee Morgan), Gloria was born in Blaenllechau, in the south Wales valleys, and attended Ferndale grammar school. She was one of the first to attend university from her community, graduating in 1958 with a degree in English and history from Cardiff University, and marrying a fellow student, Tony Jenkins, in 1960. She later completed the diploma in applied social studies, followed by the certificate of qualification in social work at the university. In 1981 Gloria gained a master’s in education.
Gloria joined the British Association of Social Workers in 1971 and remained an active member until her retirement. She was a member of the Labour party for 60 years, took part in early CND marches and sat in the mud at Greenham Common.
In 2001 Gloria founded the Welsh chapter of Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She attended the very first Pride events in Cardiff, and was one of the first co-chairs of Stonewall Cymru. In 2003 she received an achievement award from Stonewall and in 2017 was delighted to be honoured as part of Pride Cymru’s Icons and Allies exhibition.
Gloria loved the arts. She was an active patron of Welsh National Opera and the Contemporary Arts Society for Wales. In 2006, she completed a degree in the history of art, graduating with first-class honours and became a popular guide for the National Museum of Wales.
Her marriage to Tony ended in 1984. Gloria is survived by three children, Sian, Michael and me, and two grandchildren, Owen and Ieuan.
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Organised crime may be profiting from student loan fraud worth £60m – report | 2024-01-18 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/18/organised-may-be-profiting-from-student-loan-worth-60m-report | Gaps in regulation over franchise university providers leaving funding unprotected, according to National Audit Office
Organised crime could be profiting from student loan fraud involving £60m in funding at unregulated colleges in England because of lax oversight, according to a report by the National Audit Office.
The public spending watchdog said there has been “several instances of potential fraud and abuse” at private higher education providers, which offer courses leading to degrees awarded under franchise by mainstream universities as part of a commercial arrangement.
Some providers are said to enrol students with little or no interest in completing a course but who can apply for government-backed maintenance loans worth up to £13,000. The provider can gain £9,250 in tuition fee loans, part of which is then paid as franchising fee of up to £3,000 per student to the degree-awarding university.
In other cases, agents are offered lucrative commissions to sign up students. Examples of fraud detected by the Student Loans Company (SLC) – which administers the loan system for the government – included the involvement of organised crime, identity theft and false documentation.
The House of Commons’ public accounts committee this week announced it would hold an inquiry into the regulation of franchise providers.
Meg Hillier, the MP who chairs the committee, said in response to the NAO report: “Recent fraud has exposed significant gaps, including no clear responsibility for fraud enforcement across controls designed to protect students and taxpayers’ interests which have been exploited.
“The Department for Education must clarify and strengthen these controls and promote an anti-fraud culture across government.”
Robert Halfon, the higher education minister said: “Franchising can be a good way to support more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education, however I recognise there is more to do to strengthen oversight.”
The NAO report said data analysis by the SLC in 2022 “detected instances of fraud, potentially associated with organised crime”, leading it to a wider investigation that identified “suspicious patterns of activity” involving franchised providers partnered with 10 mainstream universities. After consultation with the DfE, the SLC challenged 3,563 suspicious applications totalling nearly £60m in funding.
Since 2023, the SLC has led a group within the National Crime Agency, including the Serious Fraud Office, to combat student loan fraud committed by organised crime groups.
Chris Larmer, chief executive of the SLC, said his agency routinely monitors applications to detect suspicious activity, as well as requiring confirmation of student registration and attendance from providers before any payments are released.
The NAO said that while franchise students composed just 6% of those receiving loans in England, they accounted for more than half of the total loan fraud uncovered last year by regulators.
The numbers enrolled as full-time franchise students in England has rocketed in recent years, rising from 30,000 in 2018-19 to more than 90,000 in 2022-23, as more mainstream universities entered into franchising agreements to award degrees with commercial alternative providers, which are not regulated by the sector’s watchdog, the Office for Students (OfS).
In one recent case, a university told the OfS of suspected “academic misconduct” involving a majority of the 1,389 students enrolled through one of its franchised providers. As a result the SLC recovered £6m in tuition fees.
The NAO said: “Lead providers have few incentives to detect abuse of the student loans system in franchised providers since they benefit financially from increasing student numbers. Where it has identified weak governance, OfS has not yet named the lead or franchised providers.”
Susan Lapworth, chief executive of the OfS, said: “It is essential that student loan funding provided by taxpayers is properly protected. Higher education institutions have obligations to comply with the rules that underpin the student loans system and to meet the OfS’s wider regulatory requirements.”
A spokesperson for Universities UK, which represents university leaders, said: “While universities already have policies in place to ensure that all partnerships are undertaken responsibly, this report shows that there are significant and serious issues still to be addressed.”
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Give teachers in England a deal similar to nurses to avoid strikes, says union | 2023-04-09 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/apr/09/give-teachers-englan-deal-similar-nurses-avoid-strikes-says-union | Patrick Roach of NASUWT calls on education secretary Gillian Keegan to reopen pay talks
Ministers could avoid teachers’ strikes in England this summer if they make an improved pay offer as good as that made to NHS nurses, the leader of one teaching union has proposed.
Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT union, called on the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, to reopen talks to allow pay negotiations to continue, saying strikes were “not inevitable” if a better deal could be reached.
Speaking to journalists at the NASUWT’s annual conference in Glasgow, Roach said he would recommend a pay offer to his members if it was similar to that offered by the government to NHS nurses.
“I’d be prepared to put a positive spin on it – why wouldn’t I?” Roach said. “We’re going into negotiations in good faith and with some integrity. We sit around the table, throw stuff out, and we’re not going to get everything we’re looking for, we understand that.
“But frankly, if we’ve got something which looks good enough and smells good enough, why would I not put that to my members with a positive spin?”
NASUWT members have voted to hold a ballot on industrial action, while the National Education Union (NEU) has announced five more strike days by its members during the summer term, with the first strike scheduled for 27 April.
“The secretary of state could be facing industrial action on a significant scale before the end of the academic year. That will be regrettable,” Roach said. “Our view is that industrial action is not inevitable. While I’ve written to Gillian Keegan to put her on formal notice, it’s not inevitable. If she gets around the table and we can hammer out a deal which can command the support of our members, that’s the end of the story.”
The deal offered by the government to NHS nurses last month includes bonus payments for this year between £1,655 to £3,789 depending on salary band, and a 5% pay rise in 2023-24 for most nurses.
Keegan’s previous offer to teachers was for a £1,000 one-off payment this year and an average pay increase of 4.5% next year.
In response, the Department for Education (DfE) noted that the average salary for a classroom teacher in England was £39,500. In comparison, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) estimates the average nurses salary was £33,400 in 2021, rising to about £35,000 last year.
However, the funding of any teachers’ pay settlement could be a stumbling block given the potential impact on school budgets. The DfE has said that only the one-off payment and 0.5 percentage points of the pay rise would be covered by new funding, with the rest coming from existing budgets.
Keegan’s offer was strongly rejected by NASUWT members in a consultative ballot, 87% voting against accepting it. The deal has also been rejected by the three other teaching unions, including the NEU, the National Association of Head Teachers and the Association of School and College Leaders.
The DfE said: “The offer was funded, including major new investment of over half a billion pounds, and helps tackle issues teachers are facing like workload. NEU, NAHT, ASCL and NASUWT’s decisions to reject this offer will simply result in more disruption for children and less money for teachers today.”
In his speech to the NASUWT conference, Roach said Keegan “hasn’t yet passed her probation” period as education secretary. “And she won’t, unless she pulls her finger out and gives teachers a proper pay rise, fully funded,” Roach told delegates.
Roach said Keegan’s “haste” to reach a deal after just six days of talks “resulted in a contemptuous offer that received the response that it deserved”.
In a message to Keegan, Roach said: “Get back around the table while there’s still time. Negotiate a proper deal, or deal with the consequences.”
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Teachers’ union leader calls for inquiry into misogyny among young men in UK | 2024-04-05 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/05/teachers-union-leader-calls-for-inquiry-into-misogyny-among-young-men-in-uk | Daniel Kebede accuses government of failing to tackle issue of sexism and its spread online among children
The leader of the UK’s largest education union has called for an independent inquiry into the rise of sexism and misogyny among boys and young men, saying it should not be left to parents and schools to police.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said it was “a huge issue” in schools and expressed particular concern about the ease with which pupils are accessing aggressive hardcore pornography on their phones.
He said the government had “completely failed” to tackle the issue, which is affecting boys’ views of women and relationships, and urged ministers to “take on big tech” to ensure that young people cannot access damaging material.
Kebede, who was teaching maths in a secondary pupil referral unit up until his election as general secretary last year, said the problem was widespread. He said he had first-hand experience, having personally worked with female pupils who had been repeated victims of abuse, violence and sexual assault.
Speaking before a debate on the issue on Friday at the NEU’s annual conference in Bournemouth, he said: “It’s very fair to say that there’s a real problem with sexism and misogyny within schools.
“I have my own anecdotes. I’m sure at conference members will be sharing their stories. There is a real problem with what young people can access via their smartphone with real ease.
“It’s not just influencers such as Andrew Tate, but aggressive hardcore pornography which is really easily accessible to young people. This stuff is having a real impact, particularly on young boys and young men and their views of women and relationships.”
Kebede went on: “It’s a problem that I think that government has completely failed to intervene in. There has been no real regulation and it is causing a huge issue in our schools. There’s no doubt about that.
“The problem goes well beyond just Andrew Tate in terms of what young people can access. I think this is going to be a really important debate and actually moving forward government need to take this very seriously.”
Kebede welcomed Labour’s recent announcements on how it plans to help schools develop young male mentors and to teach pupils how to question the material they see on social media from people such as Tate.
Under the proposals, Labour would send “regional improvement teams” into schools to train staff on introducing the peer-to-peer mentoring programme, but Kebede called on government to go further.
“[The government] need to actually take on big tech if we’re being honest. Big tech have to take some responsibility and be regulated, and accept regulation, and ensure that young people can’t access these really aggressive, dangerous things on their phones.
“It’s not enough to just allow schools to police it or parents. It’s just far too widespread. I think there needs to be a real inquiry into this from government which makes some recommendations on some significant reforms essentially.
“I’ve worked with young girls who have been victims of really, really significant acts of misogyny on more than one occasion, who have experienced abuse, violence, sexual assault, and that is being fuelled by a culture of misogyny and sexism that is in turn being fuelled by what young boys and young men can access on their smartphones.”
He said it could not be blamed on parents. “Children and young people are very good at working out technology and how to use it and how to get around any filters and restrictions that are in place.
“We can’t individualise the issue and put it down to problem parenting, failure of parenting. It’s very difficult when every other child has access to a smartphone to be that parent who says no. There has to be regulation on this from government, who in turn supports families in making those decisions.”
Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey, has campaigned for an age limit for smartphone usage and stricter controls on access to social media apps, and earlier this year the government issued new guidance on banning mobile phones in school to improve behaviour.
A government spokesperson said schools should take immediate action against sexual misconduct or harassment, adding: “Through our world-leading Online Safety Act, social media firms will be required to protect children from being exposed to harmful material online.
“We are also reviewing the statutory guidance on relationships, sex and health education and as a part of this, we are considering how our guidance and support to schools on this issue can be strengthened.”
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Minority ethnic Britons’ educational success not reflected in pay, study finds | 2022-11-14 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/nov/14/minority-ethnic-britons-educational-success-not-reflected-pay-study | ‘Clear evidence’ of discrimination in terms of salary and careers despite academic progress, IFS study finds
Most minority ethnic groups in the UK have made remarkable progress in educational achievement but “clear evidence” of discrimination remains in their pay and careers, according to a study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The IFS report found that most of the largest minority ethnic groups obtain English and maths exam results at least as good or better than those achieved by white British students in England, and are more likely than white teenagers to go on to university.
But that educational success “has not yet translated into better, or even equal, success when it comes to earnings”, according to the IFS, with fewer minority ethnic students admitted into the most prestigious universities or obtaining degree results as good as their white counterparts.
Prof Heidi Safia Mirza of the University College London Institute of Education, a co-author of the study, said: “The picture is neither universally positive nor universally gloomy. Most ethnic minority groups in the UK are doing better than they were, and are doing particularly well in education.
“On the other hand, most continue to earn less than their white British counterparts, and all earn less on average than we would expect given their education, background and occupation. Evidence of discrimination in the labour market is clear, and wealth inequalities are likely to prove especially hard to shift.
“Policymakers need to understand and acknowledge all these nuances and complexities if we are to make further progress in tackling remaining inequalities.”
The study highlights the “remarkable” change in educational performance by some groups in England. Just 15 years ago Bangladeshi pupils were 10 percentage points less likely than white British pupils to obtain good maths and English GCSE results – but now they are five percentage points more likely to get good grades.
But the IFS said there was “no single story of advantage or disadvantage”, so that while Black African and Pakistani pupils have closed the educational attainment gap, Black Caribbean pupils “have, if anything, fallen further behind”.
And while Bangladeshi students are 27 percentage points more likely to attend higher education than white students, they still remain less likely to be admitted to universities that demand top A-level grades, although the gap has narrowed in recent years.
The study notes that some minority ethnic groups gain far more in terms of improved income as graduates than others, including their white British counterparts, because of the very low earnings by non-graduates within their same ethnic group. Pakistani women and men, in particular, gain the highest financial returns from going to university, despite their average earnings being lower than any other group of graduates.
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The report published on Monday is part of the IFS’s Deaton review of inequalities in the 21st century. It comes as the Trades Union Congress warns that the number of adults taking education courses has plummeted, especially among learners from poor backgrounds or living in the most deprived areas.
The TUC said that since 2016 the number of adults taking courses from the most deprived parts of Britain has fallen from 705,000 to 447,000. Adult education funding has been slashed by 40% since 2010, with fees introduced for adults wanting to gain new qualifications.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said: “The government must reverse its self-defeating cuts and work with unions and other providers to upskill the nation. Rishi Sunak must put his money where his mouth is and invest properly in training and skills.”
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‘Desperate neglect’: teachers washing clothes and finding beds as poverty grips England’s schools | 2024-03-16 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/16/desperate-neglect-teachers-washing-clothes-and-finding-beds-as-poverty-grips-englands-schools | Schools risk being overwhelmed by hungry, exhausted children from freezing homes, headteachers and campaigners warn
‘If a child is hungry, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bloody good teacher’
Schools are finding beds, providing showers for pupils and washing uniforms as child poverty spirals out of control, headteachers from across England have told the Observer.
School leaders said that as well as hunger they were now trying to mitigate exhaustion, with increasing numbers of children living in homes without enough beds or unable to sleep because they were cold. They warned that “desperate” poverty was driving problems with behaviour, persistent absence and mental health.
The head of a primary school in a deprived area in north-west England, speaking anonymously to avoid identifying vulnerable children, said: “We have a child who we put in the shower a couple of times a week.” He described the family’s bathroom as “disgusting” and said they couldn’t afford to buy cleaning products.
His school routinely washed uniforms for children whose families didn’t have a washing machine.
The school recently stepped in to help after discovering a pupil begging outside a supermarket and its free breakfast club was “really needed”. But lack of sleep had become another big symptom of poverty – and a barrier to learning.
“We’ve got a lot of kids in homes with not enough beds or a mum sleeping with two or three children,” the head said. Support staff would often take children out of class who weren’t coping because of exhaustion to let them sleep for an hour or two. “Some children are falling asleep in lessons, and not just the little ones,” he said.
The school had many children living in “desperate neglect”. “Kids are sleeping on sofas, in homes with smashed windows, no curtains, or mice,” he said. “I come out of some of these properties and get really upset.”
A report published on Friday by the Child of the North campaign, led by eight leading northern universities, and the Centre for Young Lives thinktank, warned that after decades of cuts to public services, schools were now the “frontline of the battle against child poverty”, and at risk of being “overwhelmed”. It called on the government to increase funding to help schools support the more than 4 million children now living in poverty in the UK.
Anne Longfield, founder of the Centre for Young Lives and the government’s former children’s commissioner, said: “The government has dismantled public services over the past decade and schools are the last people standing. They need proper support to tackle child poverty.”
Katrina Morley, chief executive of Tees Valley Education trust, which runs four primary academies and one special school, all with exceptionally high numbers of children on free school meals, described sleep as “a real issue”. “We have children without beds or they might have to share with siblings,” she said. “Some don’t have enough bedding and no heating so they can’t sleep because they are cold.”
The trust works with local charities to provide families with support on issues like finding beds, and has also discreetly donated blankets over the winter.
A teacher at a primary school in the south-east who works with children at risk of exclusion, 90% of whom are from working families relying on food banks, said children were vaping and buying cheap energy drinks “to suppress their hunger”. Their behaviour was “erratic” as a result. “Every child I deal with is fighting issues that would keep us off work,” he added. “We can’t just teach in a bubble and ignore that.”
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Jonny Uttley, chief executive of the the Education Alliance, which runs 11 schools in Hull and East Yorkshire, said hunger or an inability to replace or wash uniforms were the most overt signs of poverty they saw. Some of their schools now provided some children with PE kits and washed them between lessons.
“We’ve got families who can’t afford the electricity to run a washing machine, or it’s broken and they can’t replace it,” he said. “Or parents are simply struggling to cope.”
But in secondary school, where teachers didn’t see parents at the school gate and many young people felt ashamed to admit their family was suddenly on the edge, working out how to step in could be harder, he said. His trust relied on pastoral staff who keep in touch with families, but Uttley warned that although “poverty is in every school in the country now” many cash-strapped schools were being forced to cut pastoral staff just when they were needed most.
Ben Davis, head of St Ambrose Barlow RC high in Salford, said: “There is this simplistic, romantic idea that education lifts people out of poverty, but you have to do something to mitigate the impacts of poverty or children can’t learn.”
His school employs a full-time therapist, and she encounters many young people who feel ashamed of growing up in poverty. Davis said this made them vulnerable to criminal exploitation. “We feel if we don’t try to help, who else will?” he added.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We understand the pressures many households are under, which is why we have extended eligibility for free school meals more than any government in the past half a century – doubling the number of children receiving them since 2010.”
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There are lessons to be learned on nursery schools | Letters | 2023-07-07 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jul/07/there-are-lessons-to-be-learned-on-nursery-schools | Carolyn Meggitt, Lise Bosher and Sally Cheseldine respond to Labour’s plans for education for the under-fours
I broadly welcome plans by Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, to improve education for the under-fours (Labour wants graduate-led nurseries to fight equality, p1, 3 July). However, I feel that the emphasis she places on graduate teachers in the early years is misplaced. We also need a well-trained and educated workforce to provide the holistic care and education promise.
Having worked in nursery care and education for many years, and co-written textbooks for students, I believe that those entering the sector already receive a firm grounding in all aspects of early years education. The main emphasis in all these programmes is children learning through play.
Reintroducing the Sure Start scheme would be a better way to commit money and resources, rather than trying to attract graduate teachers. Sure Start, launched by Labour in 1998, went a long way to ensuring that the most disadvantaged children were given opportunities to thrive. The scheme aimed to improve social development by supporting the early relationships between parents and children, and – crucially – offered the early identification and support of children with emotional, learning or behavioural difficulties.Carolyn MeggittHampton Hill, London
Oh dear. Nurseries, the last bastions of whole-child education, are to be given over to teachers trained under the unimaginative, inflexible, Ofsted-type tick-box system of education. Abandon hope, humanity. Why do people not in nurseries imagine that there is no expertise within the nursery already?
As a primary school teacher, I was constantly amazed at the opportunities lost for language development by other teachers who focused on national curriculum lesson planning that would satisfy Ofsted and Sats. They wasted the real-life opportunities offered by drama, making things, foreign language learning and play (there is an almost complete lack of understanding of the value of well-enabled play by those with influence in education).
Of course, my fellow teachers were exhausted (or managing their energies and efforts in order not to burn out) and dancing to the tune of Ofsted, Sats and frequent observations by senior staff lacking the experience and expertise to understand the value of quality play. This is so wrong an approach for so many reasons.Lise BosherOxford
Planning for early years care and nursery education is complex. Yes, the overall aim is to have happy, competent children who have equal opportunities. Children also need the warmth and love that can build confidence in the outside world. Sometimes that is best achieved by home-teaching, with the support of playgroups and other activities. Sometimes by full-time nursery education. The parents have needs too. Many models of childcare can achieve this.
As someone who used wonderful childminders, I’m not sure a university degree could have enhanced the day-to-day experience. Scotland was an early provider of school-linked nursery education, but the short-term, limited hours were of little use to parents working full-time.
The recent experience of our granddaughter in England, whose primary school-run, all-year nursery closed with just three weeks’ notice, suggested that proper levels of pay for staff and flexibility in their working hours might be more important than who has a degree.
Has recruitment and retention of NHS nurses improved by making them all get degrees? Closer to home, we know of senior nursery staff who would leave rather than meet the expensive, time‑consuming and daunting prospect of having to acquire a degree after decades in their job.
Let’s hope that Labour looks at what already works well, and builds on this.Sally CheseldineBalerno, Edinburgh
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School summer holidays in England should be cut to four weeks, report says | 2024-02-26 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/26/school-summer-holidays-half-term-england-calendar-nuffield-foundation-report | Experts to also recommend longer half-term breaks in proposed overhaul of school calendar ‘in place since Victorian times’
England should ditch its school calendar “stuck in place since Victorian times” and replace it with shorter summer holidays and longer half-term breaks to improve the lives of pupils and teachers, according to a new report.
The report on tackling post-pandemic education inequalities, part of a project funded by the Nuffield Foundation to be published next month, is to recommend an overhaul of the school calendar that could see summer holidays in state schools reduced from six weeks to four, while half-term breaks in autumn and winter could each be extended from one week to two.
The summary of the report says it is “time to consider reforms to a school calendar that has been stuck in place since Victorian times”.
Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter and one of the report’s authors, said reforming the academic calendar in England would be an effective and low-cost way of tackling the educational divides that have grown since the pandemic.
“Spreading school holidays more evenly across the year makes complete educational sense: improving the wellbeing of pupils and the working lives of teachers at no extra cost, balancing out childcare costs for parents, and potentially boosting academic results for many children,” Major said.
“Reducing the summer holidays from six weeks to four weeks would still provide adequate time for teachers to recuperate, while two-week breaks during the February and October half-terms would give much-needed time off during the most gruelling parts of the academic year.”
The report says that calls to reduce the length of holidays often centre around potential learning loss over the summer. Some pupils, especially those from financially disadvantaged backgrounds and those with additional learning needs, find it difficult to get back to learning after long summer holidays. This results in the autumn term being devoted to revision rather than advancing learning. Teachers also report more behavioural and wellbeing issues after the summer break.
The call for changes follows proposals by the Welsh government for changes to its school year starting in 2025-26, initially cutting the summer break to five weeks with a longer half-term in autumn. That could be followed by more radical measures, such as a further reduction to four weeks’ holiday in summer, and adjusting the timing of the Easter holidays.
The report notes that several school trusts and local authorities in England have already introduced a two-week autumn half-term break, or have incorporated staff training days into one week instead of being spread across the year.
Unity Schools Partnership, a multi-academy trust, said its experiment with a longer half-term last autumn saw absences fall sharply among pupils and teachers, but that some parents objected because of childcare difficulties.
Recent polling by the Teacher Tapp app found teachers were divided over whether the summer holidays should be shortened and by how much. While 33% backed keeping the summer break at six weeks, 35% wanted it shortened to five weeks and 29% preferred a reduction to four.
Calls to change the school calendar have been made repeatedly by policymakers. In 2013, the then education secretary, Michael Gove, urged changes, saying: “We can’t afford to have an education system that was essentially set in the 19th century.”
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Under Gove, free schools and academies were given more freedom to set their own calendars. But those adopting more radical timetables soon gave up in the face of opposition from parents and an inability to coordinate term dates with other schools.
Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Changing the length of the summer holiday is an idea that has been posited for many years and inevitably there are a range of different views.
“There is some evidence that suggests changes could be beneficial to pupils and parents, but other research has been far less conclusive. It’s important that the impact of any changes are properly considered and must not be rushed into.
“The report identifies some very real issues, including the growing mental health crisis and the disparity between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. It’s possible that changes to the school calendar could ameliorate these problems to some extent. But it could also prove a huge energy-sapping distraction from the most pressing issues of recruitment and retention, special-needs provision and funding for education.”
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Ministers confirm plan to ban use of mobile phones in schools in England | 2024-02-19 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/19/ministers-confirm-plan-to-ban-use-of-mobile-phones-in-schools-in-england | Teaching unions say guidance includes practices already adopted and most schools already have policies in place
Ministers have confirmed plans to ban the use of mobile phones in English schools, releasing guidance for headteachers that some unions said included practices that had already been widely adopted.
However, one headteacher welcomed the Department for Education (DfE) plan, saying it would help give schools the confidence to make a change that would benefit pupils but could meet resistance from parents.
The guidance is not statutory, and offers schools a variety of ways to implement the ban, ranging from an order to leave all phones at home, to handing them in on arrival or keeping them in inaccessible lockers, or allowing students to keep them on condition they are not used or heard.
The proliferation of smartphones in schools – Ofcom data says 97% of children have one by the age of 12 – has brought concerns about not just distraction but the potential for bullying or other social pressure.
In interviews on Monday about the plan, Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said the DfE had consulted headteachers and believed the guidance would “empower” those yet to fully ban phones, and “would send a clear message about consistency”.
“You go to school, you go to learn, you go to create those friendships, you go to speak to people and socialise and you go to get educated – you don’t go to sit on your mobile phone or to send messages whilst you could actually talk to somebody,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
There is also wider concern about phone use by children and the harmful content they can access. Esther Ghey, mother of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey, has called for tech companies to do more on this, and for under-16s to be stopped from accessing social media.
Ghey has also argued for phone manufacturers to make specific products for under-16s that prevent them from accessing harmful content, after it emerged that her daughter’s killers viewed violent material before the murder.
Keegan told Today that while ministers would discuss the idea with Ghey, “it’s not something that we have actually looked at or considered and those conversations will take place”.
The 13-page DfE guidance says the policy on phones should be clearly communicated to pupils, with the reasons for it also explained. It adds that teachers should not be seen in schools using a phone except when necessary for work.
Parents also needed to be involved in the ban, it says, with a reminder that they should contact students via the school office rather than directly.
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Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while the amount of time some children spend on phones was a worry, the new guidance was “a non-policy for a non-problem”.
He said: “This compulsive use of these devices is not something that is happening in schools – where robust polices are already in place – but while children are out of school. Most schools already forbid the use of mobile phones during the school day or allow their use only in limited and stipulated circumstances.”
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “As most schools already have policies in place to deal with the problems of mobile phone use this guidance will make little difference and is a distraction from the many problems facing education.”
However, Vic Goddard, the executive principal of two schools in Esssex, including Passmores academy in Harlow, which featured in Channel 4’s Educating Essex series, said Passmores had recently imposed a complete ban on phones, which he said had been transformative, with a positive response from parents and students.
“We had very few parental issues, when we thought we would,” he said. “The students felt the social pressure had been removed from them. Without a doubt this guidance will help schools. The problem we have is that anything which might put us in conflict with parents is always going to be challenging.
“We have a generation of parents who weren’t born with phones. We thought that giving children a phone was keeping them safe, when the reality was it was opening them to a world of online harm and pressure.”
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Was Euan Blair’s MBE for services to education or self-enrichment? | Letters | 2022-06-03 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/03/was-euan-blairs-mbe-for-services-to-education-or-self-enrichment | John Holford says he had always imagined that education was about service, not business
Is our honours system a little wonky? Euan Blair gets an MBE for “services to education” (Euan Blair: from PM’s son to £700m business and an MBE, 1 June). Doubtless he’s a fine fellow. I’ve been doing “services to education” for more years than he’s been alive (I was at Oxford with his dad).
I’ve done – if I say so myself – a few good things; I like to think that I’ve helped people make their lives better. Education, I imagined, was about service – not business.
I never sought to make shedloads of money out of it; an adequate salary has been plenty. My perfectly nice house isn’t worth £22m. I didn’t endow my children with elite networks or startup capital. My dad didn’t start an illegal war. I’ve never had an honour. QED? Unworthy thoughts? Probably; but many others have equal grounds for cynicism.John HolfordNottingham
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Some comprehensive schools ‘more socially selective than grammars’ | 2024-01-11 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/11/some-comprehensive-schools-more-socially-selective-than-grammars | Research by Sutton Trust finds disadvantaged students less likely to get into top performing schools in England than their peers
Some comprehensive schools are more “socially selective” than grammar schools, according to new research which has called on the government to review the admissions code in England to improve access for poorer pupils.
While grammars are inherently selective, as admission is based on passing an 11-plus examination, comprehensive secondary schools admit local children, regardless of academic ability or social background, based on a school’s admissions policy.
However, research by the Sutton Trust, a charity that specialises in social mobility through education, has identified more than 150 state-maintained comprehensives that it says are more socially selective than the average grammar school.
The trust’s Selective Comprehensives 2024 report found disadvantaged students – as measured by their eligibility for free school meals (FSM) – are less likely to get into a top performing comprehensive than their peers, even if there is one in their local area.
Its research covers a three-year time period – 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22. The situation has not improved since 2016 and there are some indications that it has got worse, the report says.
The study looked at the top 500 comprehensives schools in England, ranked by both pupil progress (known as the Progress 8 score) and GCSE exam results (the attainment 8 measure).
While the intake of the average comprehensive included 22% of students eligible for FSM, for the top 500 schools ranked by progress this was just 17.1%. Ranked by exam grades, it was even lower at just 13.3%.
The research also found the FSM intake rate in comprehensives with the best progress score was 4.3 percentage points lower than the overall FSM rate in the catchment area. And in schools with the highest attainment, it was 5.8 percentage points lower.
Grammar schools, meanwhile, accepted on average 9.2 percentage points fewer FSM pupils than lived in the areas they drew pupils from, though the Sutton Trust identified 155 comprehensives with gaps of 9.2 percentage points or higher, making them “less representative of their catchment areas than the average grammar school”.
Levels of social selection vary widely across the country, the research found. The north east has the most socially selective top comprehensives in the country – it also has the highest proportion of FSM pupils, overtaking London in recent years, where the highest attaining schools were the least selective.
The report also found that religious schools are “the most socially exclusive”. All but one of the top 20 most socially selective schools are faith schools, the Sutton Trust said, and Catholic schools are “the least representative of their catchments among top performing schools”.
“This report finds little evidence to suggest that comprehensive schools are becoming less socially selective, strong evidence that things have not improved since 2017 and some clear evidence pointing to increasing levels of social selection in comprehensive admissions in some parts of the system,” it concluded.
One factor may be the continuing transition from local authority maintained schools to academies, which control their own admissions.
Sutton Trust founder Sir Peter Lampl said: “The levels of social segregation across the school system are unacceptable.
“The government should review the school admissions code to ensure all state schools take a mix of pupils which reflects their local community, and provide disadvantaged pupils with a fair chance to access top performing schools.
“Alongside this, extra funding and resources, particularly targeted at the most deprived areas, will help to raise the quality of education where it’s most needed.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said fairer access was not just about admissions practices.
“It is also about ensuring that all schools have the support and resources they need to provide a high-quality education wherever they are and whatever their context,” he said.
Paul Barber, Catholic Education Service director, said: “Catholic schools take in 50% more pupils from the most deprived backgrounds than the state sector. Just under a fifth of all pupils in Catholic statutory education meet the highest income deprivation affecting children index (IDACI) criteria, compared to a 12.8% England average. Similarly, fewer pupils from the more affluent areas attend Catholic schools”.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “The school admissions code requires admission arrangements to be fair, clear and objective, and no child should be unfairly disadvantaged.
“Admission authorities can choose to prioritise children eligible for the pupil premium when they are over their published admission number according to the need of their local area.”
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As Caversham parents, Ruth Perry’s death has opened our eyes to the realities of Ofsted inspections | Chris Cutmore | 2023-03-24 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/24/caversham-primary-school-parents-ruth-perry-death-realities-ofsted-inspections | Parents don’t want a ‘summary judgment’ on schools – we just want to know teachers truly care. And it’s impossible to imagine someone more dedicated to their school than Mrs Perry was
When my daughter had finished her final day at nursery in Reading last summer we strolled home through the park, my wife and I blinking through quiet tears. We were sad because we knew it was the end of our children’s most innocent infancy but as we sat and gazed over the deep valley of leaves and redbrick houses we could see a reason to be equally happy too. Down below was Caversham primary school, which was where our daughter would very soon begin the next stage of her young life, and we knew she would be entering an outstanding school.
We knew it was outstanding because Ofsted had told us so. More importantly, we knew it was outstanding because our son was already attending the school, and he loves it there. He is thriving academically but more importantly he is happy and is growing into a warm, kind little person who respects others and seeks to understand the world around him.
These are the values he is exposed to on a daily basis at Caversham primary. They were the values clearly expressed and driven by the headteacher, Ruth Perry. When deciding which school we would most like him to attend, Mrs Perry’s love for her school was a powerful influence. She had attended Caversham primary as a child and then dedicated her professional career to the school, and the passion in her voice when she spoke about it told us that she was totally committed to ensuring its new generation of pupils had the same wonderful start in life that she felt she had been gifted there. It seemed impossible to comprehend a teacher more dedicated to their school, more invested in its success, more caring for its children, and we were delighted to secure a place for our son and then our daughter.
Five months after that bittersweet day in the park, Ruth Perry was dead. We were in utter disbelief when we heard the news. We had seen her just days before, quietly observing as she always did, while the children cheerfully drifted out of the playground despite the cold and dark of January. Just a few weeks earlier, she had applauded the end of the reception class’s nativity play, heartily congratulating the tiny shepherds and reindeers with the same mixture of pride and amusement that we parents felt. But now she was gone. Dead, at the age of just 53. How on earth was this possible?
When no cause of death was announced we started to fear the worst. Rumours inevitably began. There was a date on the calendar that was surely just a coincidence but yet niggled somehow. It was only an Ofsted inspection. It was the school’s first in 13 years and we hadn’t yet had the result, which did seem strange. Perhaps it had gone badly. But surely that would not be enough to drive someone to suicide?
And yet, it was. This week we learned the horrific, unimaginable truth. Ofsted had downgraded the school from “outstanding” to “inadequate”, purely on what its inspectors judged to be failures in relation to safeguarding. The report made abundantly clear that this was the responsibility, and failure, of the senior leadership. That, of course, meant Mrs Perry. This destruction of her professional reputation in one word had broken her – put her under “intolerable pressure”, according to her sister, Julia.
As parents, when told by the government’s schools inspectorate that there are “serious” safeguarding concerns, we must take such a judgment seriously. Yet, as parents, our eyes have also now been opened to the realities of Ofsted inspections, and the dreadful toll they take on hardworking, dedicated, caring teachers all over the country.
The outpouring of grief, and of despair and fury from teachers on social media, has been staggering. These aren’t just teachers, of course – they are people, and so many of them have suffered mental torment because of the stresses of Ofsted. And if you think that’s weak, well, you’ve clearly never had to spend much time looking after young children. These are strong, resilient people who take on the burden of one of society’s toughest and most valuable services.
Most of these teachers welcome constructive inspection and scrutiny of their work, but not adversarial inspectors and inconsistent reports. How, for example, can Caversham – and Mrs Perry’s leadership – be graded “inadequate” when the majority of the report hails the high educational standards of the school? How can its children’s behaviour be widely praised yet one playground incident be used to denigrate the school’s entire reputation? How can inspectors cite a child doing the wholly innocent “floss” dance, popularised by computer games and footballers, as evidence of the sexualisation of children in the school, as allegedly was the case at Caversham? And how can a school be accurately judged based on the events of just one day in its complex life?
I can’t lie: Ofsted’s inspection verdict of outstanding was an attraction for us to send our children to Caversham. As parents we must also be honest and ask ourselves whether if Mrs Perry were still here today we would be angry about the report suggesting there have been serious lapses in the school’s safeguarding procedures. The answer is almost certainly yes. No doubt some would be very vocal about it too. The emerging consensus seems to be, however, that most of these lapses are easily remedied and many have already been dealt with. Some seem to come down to just a few missing pieces of paper.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, the former chief inspector of schools in England and head of Ofsted, said parents “want a summary judgment” on whether “they are sending their children to a good school”.
He is wrong. What most parents want to know is this: that teachers truly care about their children and their school, that they are talented and dedicated to giving a high standard of education, that they are committed to helping children become responsible, happy members of society with bright, unlimited futures.
Caversham primary had all of these things in Ruth Perry.
Most parents also want to know that when there are problems, such as those flagged in this Ofsted report, they are highlighted and then resolved by constructive collaboration between the relevant authorities and talented, dedicated teachers.
On the day it was announced that Mrs Perry had died, the children wandered slowly out into the playground, shock and incomprehension written on all of their faces. All instantly relayed the dreadful news to their parents and carers, but in wildly different ways. Some were solemn and quiet, some were loud and frantic. My daughter laughed out of confusion.
Ruth Perry was once just like her, a little girl in that same school playground, learning how to navigate the world. We are all heartbroken.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
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Professors’ union sanctions Florida college over ‘political’ DeSantis takeover | 2024-02-27 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/27/professor-union-sanction-florida-new-college-desantis | Vote to sanction New College follows investigation into governor’s ‘politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks’
A national university professors union has voted to sanction New College of Florida, the former liberal arts school where Ron DeSantis orchestrated an unprecedented “aggressively ideological and politically motivated” takeover by a group of ultra-conservative cronies.
The vote to sanction New College came after an investigation by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which has placed only 12 other universities on its sanctioned list since 1995.
The AAUP created a special committee to investigate the “apparent pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education” by DeSantis, the far-right Florida governor who waged war on so-called “wokeness” at schools and colleges after his resounding re-election in 2022.
The investigation was launched in January 2023 after DeSantis appointed six allies to the school’s board of trustees, which at breakneck speed restructured academic courses without meaningful faculty involvement, eliminated the gender studies major, and cancelled a slew of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including canceling meals during Ramadan, the holy month of daytime fasting for Muslims.
The new board imposed the sweeping reforms after ousting the president and inserting a confidant of DeSantis – at double the predecessor’s previous annual salary.
AAUP sanctions have no regulatory consequence, but they are published on the union’s website “for the purpose of informing association members, the profession at large, and the public that unsatisfactory conditions of academic government exist at the institutions in question”. Sanctions can also be removed.
In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times, a New College spokesperson, Nathan March, said the union “lacks the authority” to issue sanctions and called the announcement “a headline grab, echoing the sensationalistic tone of their report”.
DeSantis, in conjunction with Republican-controlled state legislatures, targeted K-12 and college level education in the run-up to his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination, dismantling DEI initiatives and disciplines that offended ultra Christian rights groups.
According to the AAUP’s final report, the assault by the state government “reflects not only a blatant disregard for academic standards of governance and academic freedom but also a discriminatory and biased assault on the rights of racial minorities and LGBTQ communities”.
“It represents a throwback to Florida’s darker past that must be repudiated,” the report said.
“What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror,” LeRoy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M Law, told the inquiry. “There is a tremendous sense of dread right now, not just among faculty; it’s tangible among students and staff as well. People are intellectually and physically scared. We are being named an enemy of the state.”
Another faculty member and union leader said: “The human toll in Florida is catastrophic. We are tired of being demonized by our government. Many of us are looking to leave Florida, and if we don’t, we will leave academia, and nobody wants our jobs. Faculty are suffering. And when we leave, our communities, our students, families – they will all suffer. So, when we fight for faculty, we are also fighting for the people in our communities.”
The AAUP report also found that “academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history, which, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with dire implications for the entire country”.
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‘A disgrace’: headteachers attack Hunt’s failure to provide money for schools in autumn statement | 2023-11-25 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/nov/25/a-disgrace-headteachers-attack-hunts-failure-to-provide-money-for-schools-in-autumn-statement | No new investment in staffing and buildings in England and Wales, despite Rishi Sunak’s funding pledge
Headteachers have called the government’s failure to invest in school staff and crumbling buildings in the autumn statement “an absolute disgrace”.
Unions said this weekend that the government had now lost any vestiges of credibility among teachers after the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, failed to announce any new investment for schools on Wednesday – despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge at last month’s Conservative party conference that education would be his “main funding priority”.
With education unions determined to make staff shortages an election issue, parents can now search the newly relaunched School Cuts website to see whether their local school may be forced to shed teaching staff next year. The unions warn that 99 per cent of state secondary schools and 91 per cent of primaries will have to make cuts to survive in 2024.
Garry Ratcliffe, chief executive of the Golden Thread Alliance, which runs nine primary academy schools in Dartford and Gravesend in Kent, told the Observer: “Especially with support staff, when someone leaves for a better paid position in a supermarket, most schools are now asking: ‘Can we afford to replace them?’”
Ratcliffe’s schools are now focusing on helping struggling families with food and cheap presents for Christmas, despite fighting to cope with rising costs themselves. He added: “People in schools have given up hope that this government will suddenly start to invest in children’s education.”
A primary school head in a deprived area of north-west England, who asked not to be named to avoid alarming parents, said the potentially dangerous reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) recently discovered in his school’s roof was far from the only problem. “The list is endless: asbestos, flooding, damp, cracked windows,” the head explained.
“And we need urgent safety upgrades to our school entrance and car park which have been delayed because of Raac. The fact that education spending is going to be flat is an absolute disgrace.”
The head said he had had to “really fight” to get the Department for Education to approve a temporary “crash deck” to make the school usable after it joined the growing list of schools deemed unsafe due to Raac. However, the department is refusing to provide any timetable for a decision on what to do to make the school safe permanently, or whether it will need to be demolished.
Tim Warneford, a consultant who advises academies on their buildings, said the autumn statement would lead to “further deterioration” of thousands of schools as they faced another winter with serious issues including Raac, leaking roofs, broken boilers and asbestos.
He said: “This has to be another reason for poor attendance. Why would you want to come in if your school isn’t safe or warm or dry? What message does that send to children about how much they are valued?”
A damning parliamentary inquiry into the school estate found that 700,000 pupils are learning in classrooms that need a major rebuild or refurbishment, but many schools have no hope of an overhaul because of the Raac crisis.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “Teaching assistants and support staff will probably be the first roles to go as schools try to make savings, and of course that will hit the most vulnerable children who need extra support that won’t be there.”
He added that after the autumn statement, the government has “completely lost the trust of the teaching profession”.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of Schools and College Leaders union, said: “On current funding levels, schools will only be able to afford a 1% pay award for staff next year – and this is in the midst of the worst recruitment and retention crisis in living memory.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Our school rebuilding programme is transforming 500 schools over the next decade, with the first 400 projects selected ahead of schedule. The education secretary has already confirmed we will fully fund the removal of Raac from our schools – either through grant funding or through the school rebuilding programme.”
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Teacher vacancies in England 93% higher than pre-pandemic, study finds | 2023-03-23 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/23/teacher-vacancies-in-england-93-higher-than-pre-pandemic-study-finds | Headteachers forced to use non-specialists as turnover continues, education research body reports
Teacher vacancies in England have virtually doubled since before Covid, with school leaders increasingly forced to use non-specialist teachers, which threatens to drive down pupil attainment, according to research.
A report by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that teacher vacancies posted by schools were 93% higher in the academic year up to February 2023 than at the same point in the year before the start of the pandemic.
The findings indicate staff turnover is still rising, with vacancies in schools in England up 37% compared with 2021/22. “This likely indicates that teachers who may have put off the decision to leave teaching during the pandemic are leaving now that the labour market is recovering,” the report said.
The NFER, which describes itself as the leading independent provider of education research, calls on the government to agree a long-term strategy on teacher pay to try to halt the growing school workforce crisis.
The NFER’s annual report on the teacher labour market in England was published on Thursday, after a series of damaging teacher strikes by members of the National Education Union. They are demanding a fully funded, above-inflation pay rise, which they say will help make the profession more appealing to graduates. The government is currently in talks with unions to try to reach a settlement.
“Schools are being forced to stumble from budget to budget and strike to strike without the help of a clear strategy designed to address a worsening recruitment and retention crisis,” said Jack Worth, NFER school workforce lead and co-author of the report. “School leaders are increasingly resorting to the use of non-specialist teachers to plug gaps which will ultimately affect pupil attainment outcomes.”
As well as the crisis in retaining teachers, the study highlights recruitment problems into the profession, with initial teacher training numbers for 2023/4 significantly below target.
Even initial teacher training recruitment to primary schools, which historically has been more secure than secondary, is expected to be 20% or more below target. The same shortfall applies to nine out of 17 secondary subjects, including physics, modern foreign languages, computing, design and technology, business studies and religious education. English, maths, chemistry and geography are also at risk of under-recruiting this year.
The NFER says falling retention and “historically low” recruitment figures are linked to a lack of competitiveness in the teaching profession, compared with other occupations. On salaries, median teacher pay in 2021/2 was 12% lower in real terms than a decade earlier as a result of below-inflation pay awards and the 2021 pay freeze. Crucially, the report says teacher pay is 11 percentage points lower than for similar graduates, a gap that has widened since the pandemic.
While teachers’ working hours and workload have decreased in recent years, the report says they are still higher than for similar graduates. Another possible deterrent, the report says, is the lack of opportunity to work from home as a teacher, while other professions are accommodating remote or hybrid ways of working since the pandemic.
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Niamh Sweeney, NEU deputy general secretary, said: “The latest NFER report shows what many of us in the education sector have long feared about the state of teacher recruitment and retention: this crisis is entrenched, and it cuts deep and hard. Expecting teachers to teach subjects for which they are not qualified also adds to teacher and leader stress.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, added: “Teacher shortages have been a problem for many years, but the situation has sunk to a new low in the wake of the pandemic. It seems some existing teachers took stock of their careers and decided on jobs that were better paid, less pressured, and offered hybrid working, while graduates are less attracted to teaching for the same reasons.”
The Department for Education has been approached for comment.
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Universities must overcome ‘echo chamber’ and self-censorship, says Reading VC | 2024-02-27 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/27/universities-must-overcome-echo-chamber-and-self-censorship-says-reading-vc | Robert Van de Noort says vice-chancellors must be bold in protecting academic freedom and promoting diversity of thought
Universities risk becoming “uniformities” of rigid ideas and self-censorship, according to the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, who accused the government and his fellow university leaders of creating echo chambers on campus.
Robert Van de Noort told a seminar at the Houses of Parliament that vice-chancellors needed “to be more courageous themselves, and actively and explicitly promote a culture of diversity of thought” to overcome an “echo chamber” of academics amplifying identity politics and the government’s accountability measures which rewarded conformity over innovation.
Van de Noort said the “fundamental threat” to academic freedom was not that the higher education sector “occasionally” cancelled an external speaker on campus. “Rather, it has everything to do with a broader higher education world that seems to have become one in which one increasingly encounters beliefs or opinions that coincide with one’s own, so that existing views are reinforced, and alternative ideas are not considered,” he said.
“I am not the only vice-chancellor who has noted that colleagues far too often self-censor their views. Because, coming out as being the divergent voice in the echo chamber can feel like a career-limiting move.”
Van de Noort also attacked the government’s use of accountability measures that punished deviation in academic approaches by cutting off access to research funding.
“The desire to do well in official assessments is so important to status and funding that managers have a clear incentive to appoint and promote candidates who show a high degree of conformity and consistency with existing research paradigms, or mainstream pedagogy, rather than seeking out and appointing candidates with divergent views and opinions,” he said.
He claimed that government-backed assessments of economics were renowned for favouring researchers using neo-classical economics “to the exclusion of other theoretical approaches such as feminist or development economics”.
But Van de Noort, speaking at the seminar organised by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), also accused the University and College Union (UCU) of making staff uncomfortable by focusing more on political issues – such as boycotting Israel or transgender rights – than on its members’ interests.
“Yes, there is a need to ensure high standards of teaching and research, give taxpayers and students value for money, and make universities welcoming for everyone. But we must guard against turning our universities into ‘uniformities’,” said Van de Noort, a professor of archaeology who has led Reading since 2018.
“We need to be bold when protecting academic freedom and we need to tread lightly when entering current debates. If we do not, universities risk becoming less universal and more homogenous, and that’s a big risk to society.”
Nick Hillman, Hepi’s chief executive, said it was notable that vice-chancellors had stopped denying that threats to freedom of speech on campus were a problem, and were now looking to respond.
“What matters most is supporting the academic freedom of university staff and the free speech of students while avoiding the well-laid traps of those who would relish more culture wars and who want nothing more than to embarrass universities as a fraught election approaches,” he said.
With universities about to face new responsibilities on freedom of speech following recent legislation, Hillman warned that some vice-chancellors “could get a shock” if they didn’t adapt quickly.
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House Republicans subpoena Harvard brass in campus antisemitism inquiry | 2024-02-16 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/16/house-republicans-subpoena-harvard-brass-campus-antisemitism-inquiry | Request comes six weeks after lawmakers grilled school president Claudine Gay, who lost her job in aftermath of contentious hearing
Republicans in Congress have escalated their fight with Harvard University by issuing subpoenas to university leaders, six weeks after hearings into antisemitism on campus set in motion the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.
Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina who heads the House education and workforce committee that held hearings into the issue last year, ordered Harvard’s trustees to produce documents related to the issue.
Foxx accused the Ivy League university of failing to treat the inquiry into antisemitism with “appropriate seriousness” and of failing to satisfy previous requests for information.
“I will not tolerate delay and defiance of our investigation while Harvard’s Jewish students continue to endure the firestorm of antisemitism that has engulfed its campus,” she wrote.
“Given Harvard’s vast resources and the urgency with which it should be addressing the scourge of antisemitism, the evidence suggests that the school is obstructing this investigation and is willing to tolerate the proliferation of antisemitism on its campus.”
According to Bloomberg, subpoenas for information were issued to Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber; board of trustees chair Penny Pritzker; and Narv Narvekar, CEO of Harvard’s $51bn endowment.
In a statement, Harvard said it had already responded “extensively and in good faith” to congressional demands, including by submitting 3,500 pages of documents. Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Swain wrote that a subpoena was “unwarranted” but said Harvard “remains committed to cooperating with the Committee”.
A separate inquiry by House Republicans is looking into whether failures to condemn antisemitism could affect the tax-exempt status of Harvard and other universities.
The issue flared up in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, when a number of student bodies at Harvard and other universities appeared to condemn Israel without acknowledging the attack.
According to the Harvard Crimson, the subpoenas seek documents and communications regarding Harvard’s response to a controversial pro-Palestine letter signed by more than 30 student groups, the Harvard Palestinian Solidarity Committee’s “Israeli Apartheid Week”, and an altercation at an 18 October “die-in” at Harvard Business School.
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Those led to claims that university heads were allowing free speech and protest rights on campus to become entangled with antisemitism, and triggered a subsequent revolt by some powerful Harvard donors as well as the appearance of “doxing” trucks on campus, calling out students who signed the pro-Palestinian letters.
At congressional hearings in December, Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Liz Magill, were accused by some of failing to denounce antisemitism clearly enough and of equivocating over “context”. The resulting outrage led first to Magill resigning and then Gay, after a firestorm of plagiarism allegations against her.
Many academics voiced resistance to the committee’s demands. Paul Reville, a professor of education policy and administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said in a January interview with the Harvard newspaper that the Republican-led requests “in the view of some people border on harassment from Congress and other sources who clearly have an agenda to undermine universities like Harvard”.
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School exams: a major flaw in the UK’s education system | Letters | 2022-05-01 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/01/school-exams-a-major-flaw-in-the-uks-education-system | Look to Finland for a more equitable education system, writes Chris Sinha, while Michael Symonds says regurgitating information in exams doesn’t help in life and Derrick Joad accuses the government of punishing independent thinking
Full marks to George Monbiot for his critique of the English school exam system (England’s punitive exam system is only good at one thing: preserving privilege, 27 April). He asks what would a fair, rounded 21st-century education look like.
One answer would be to look at Finland, where there are no exams before school leaving and no league tables. All assessment is teacher-based, geared to guiding further learning. Teachers enjoy high professional autonomy, grounded in their own education to master’s level. The Finnish system is avowedly egalitarian, with the aim of minimising social inequalities. All students receive free school meals. And guess what? Finland outperforms the UK not only in terms of wellbeing and life satisfaction of 15-year-olds, but also in their performance in the OECD Pisa tests, based on reading, mathematics and science.
The English education system is based on three Cs: competition, coercion and cramming. The Finnish system rests on three different Cs: collaboration, communication and conceptualisation. Finnish education is not perfect, and it is not the only route to high Pisa performance. But the OECD is in no doubt what a 21st-century education requires: “When teachers feel a sense of ownership over their classrooms, when students feel a sense of ownership over their learning, that is when learning for the ... information age can take place.” There is an alternative, if we so choose.Chris Sinha Honorary professor, University of East Anglia
Once again, George Monbiot has highlighted a major flaw in UK society and the role exams play in preserving privilege. It is, of course, possible to bypass the system, as my own experience has shown. Having left state school at age 17 without any A-levels, I then managed to re-enter higher education by gaining workplace qualifications to gain a BSc and PhD, and became a professor at the University of Nottingham.
The challenge of regurgitating information in exams in no way helped me. But having a more rounded education provided me with a much more supportive attitude in teaching students, hopefully helping many to fully reach their potential, beyond the normal criteria of exam grades. Dr Michael Symonds Sutton Bonington, Nottinghamshire
There are reasons other than those George Monbiot mentions that explain the government’s desire for introducing a Gradgrind education system. Reducing the curriculum to easily quantifiable elements makes it easy for the government to control education and to ensure educational deviancy is eliminated. Good schools are those that match up to criteria determined by the government.
Margaret Thatcher’s distress at the wrong sort of people controlling our children’s education is no longer a problem. Curriculum and teaching methods are determined by ministers. Any school that doesn’t meet the imposed criteria will be deemed failing and closed. Educational deviancy, or more correctly, independent thinking, is eliminated from the system.
This system also provides plenty of “red meat” to be thrown to the media. An arbitrary change in the rules makes it easy to find schools that are failing. There is nothing more likely to thrill the rightwing media than a tough minister cracking down on errant schools. Derrick Joad Leeds
Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.
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Ofsted school inspections to restart on 22 January after mental health training | 2024-01-06 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/06/ofsted-school-inspections-restart-22-january-after-mental-health-training-ruth-perry | Watchdog’s chief inspector ordered pause for extra training after death of headteacher Ruth Perry
Ofsted will resume inspecting schools in England on 22 January after a pause for its staff to receive better training on the mental health challenges involved following the death of the headteacher Ruth Perry.
Sir Martyn Oliver, the new chief inspector of Ofsted, had suspended inspections to allow for the extra work after Ofsted was strongly criticised for insensitivity and intimidation by a coroner investigating Perry’s death by suicide.
Oliver announced the restart date after meetings with union leaders and Prof Julia Waters, Perry’s sister.
Ofsted’s 3,000 inspectors working in schools, further education, social care and childcare facilities are to attend two training sessions, starting from next week, with the initial session to be led by Oliver and shared publicly. The training is expected to be completed by all inspectors by the end of March.
Sessions with small groups of inspectors will also be held “to help them understand and recognise any mental health issues they may encounter on inspection”, according to Ofsted.
Oliver said: “Inspection plays a vital role in making sure that children and learners are getting the education and care they need and deserve. So we need to get back to that work as quickly as we can.
“But I’ve also been very clear that we must reflect on the findings of the coroner, learn from the tragic events of last year and emerge as a better and more effective inspectorate. That means being trusted by parents and respected by the education and social care professionals we work with.
“This mental health awareness training is a first step – but for me a critical first step – in reassuring the sectors we work with that we are serious about change.”
Oliver, a former headteacher, said he had a “constructive” meeting with Waters, and told her the training on 8 January would include a minute’s silence in memory of Perry on the first anniversary of her death.
The meeting was the first between Ofsted and Perry’s family. Last month Reading’s senior coroner issued a “prevention of future deaths” report that listed a series of recommendations for Ofsted and the Department for Education.
Waters said she had been “cautiously reassured” by her meeting with Oliver. “What Sir Martyn has said, and what we have been pushing for, is there needs to be really radical change, systemic change, cultural change at Ofsted – and this training is just the start,” she told the BBC.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
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Maureen Hattey obituary | 2023-06-26 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/26/maureen-hattey-obituary | My mother, Maureen Hattey, who has died aged 78, was an advocate and progressive educator for special needs children whose work brought the school into the community and the community into the school.
Having initially worked in mainstream education as a primary school teacher, Maureen joined the child development centre at Charing Cross hospital in 1979. Working with the paediatrician Hugh Jolly, she gained first-hand experience of a new way of supporting children with disabilities. Jolly’s approach centred on listening to and working with children and their parents to provide tailored treatment and care. It was revolutionary at the time.
Maureen applied this ethos to teaching at the Ridgeway community school in Farnham, Surrey, a school catering for pupils aged two to 19 with severe and profound multiple learning difficulties. She became a senior teacher specialising in the creative and performing arts in 1989, and head in 1997. There, she dedicated herself to ensuring her students had the breadth of opportunity their peers in mainstream education received. The creative and performing arts were at the heart of many of Maureen’s initiatives to integrate the school and the community, and saw students putting on performances with mainstream schools during the “creative arts week” she established.
At this time, the new Labour government was pursuing a vision of collaboration between mainstream and special schools, and Maureen had inherited some serious challenges, which an Ofsted inspection highlighted. With the school in special measures, Maureen led a transformation programme, becoming a guinea pig for the government’s new approach to special needs education. Along with the construction of better facilities, she pioneered collaborations between the Ridgeway and other educational institutions in the local area; the school’s nursery was relocated to a mainstream setting and its older students were integrated into the local sixth form. The school emerged from special measures within just 18 months.
Maureen was born in Oxford to Sybil (nee Benbow) and Norman Langford, who both worked in the City of London in accountancy and conveyancing. She attended Barnet secondary modern in north-west London and Hatfield Technical College (now the University of Hertfordshire), before studying teacher training at Southlands College in Wimbledon and taking a BA (1978) and a master’s (1993) in education at the Open University.
She retired from Ridgeway in 2005, and spent her time travelling with her partner Will Warner, a builder, whom she had known for many years, until his death in 2015.
Maureen is survived by her children, Nicola, Ross and me, from her 1968 marriage to Gus Hattey, which ended in divorce in 1983, and her grandchildren, Ella, Louis, Jools, Sophia and Noel.
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Gill Stoker obituary | 2024-04-16 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/16/gill-stoker-obituary | My friend Gill Stoker, who has died aged 69 of a brain tumour, became one of the internet’s most popular teachers of English as a second language, attracting 2 million subscribers to her YouTube channel and reaching 31m views, so far, with her most popular lesson.
Her clear, uncomplicated style, allied to a deep understanding of her audience and a gentle authority, helped to make Gill’s lessons popular – and she never tried to be funny or ironic, so there were no distractions from the learning.
She began to teach on the internet in 2013, having spent 20 years as a tutor at colleges in south London, at the Open University and with private clients at her home.
Gill was born in Derby to Kenneth Watson, a local council clerk of works, and his wife, Martha (nee Davey). After leaving Homelands grammar school for girls at 18, she spent two years at secretarial college in Derby before moving to London in 1974. She had auditioned unsuccessfully at the Royal College of Music but resolved nevertheless to make her home in the capital.
After a year as a secretary at the quartz manufacturer Roditi International, she became office manager at the computer firm Sperry Univac, where she worked for a decade. In 1985 she took up a post as office manager at the Royal Opera House, until in 1988 she moved to become project administrator at the Essential Drugs Project, a charitable initiative to support better use of medicines across the developing world.
While working full-time she gained a degree in English (1982-86) followed by a master’s in English and American literature (1986-88) and a PhD in English and art history (1988-94), all at Birkbeck, University of London.
She then moved into part-time lecturing in adult education, teaching at Greenwich Community College and Lewisham College of Further Education throughout the 1990s. In 1999 she also became part-time data manager at the Mary Evans Picture Library, where she and I met, and where she came up with the idea of commissioning poets to submit poems inspired by images from its collection of 3m pictures. It became the most popular section on the library’s website.
Gill was also then a part-time associate lecturer at the Open University, and in 2006 she moved into teaching English as a foreign language. In 2013 she hooked up with Joshua Kostka of the teaching website engvid.com, and he launched her YouTube channel in 2015.
She was a member of the choir of All Souls, Langham Place, enjoyed creative writing, and appeared as a bit-part actor in a number of films. In 2004 she wrote a one-woman play, Essentially Ethel, about the composer Ethel Smyth, which she performed herself at venues around England.
Gill’s first marriage, to Timothy Cox, ended in divorce in 1983. Her second husband, the composer Richard Stoker, whom she married in 1986, died in 2021, and she established the Richard Stoker Trust in his memory, to support young musicians.
She is survived by her sister Vivien and three nieces, Caroline, Lynne and Beverley.
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Government to fund school ‘attendance mentors’ in worst-hit areas of England | 2024-01-05 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/05/government-fund-school-attendance-mentors-worst-hit-areas-england | Latest attempt to tackle pupil absences criticised as failing to tackle the magnitude of the problem
The government is to make a new effort to repair sagging school attendance figures in England, with the education secretary to announce funding for “attendance mentors” in some of the worst-affected areas.
Pupil absences remain stubbornly higher than before the Covid pandemic, and during a visit to Liverpool on Monday Gillian Keegan is expected to announce plans for caseworkers to offer one-to-one support for pupils in 10 areas including Blackpool and Walsall, where rates of unauthorised absences remain far above national levels.
But critics said the government was failing to tackle the magnitude of the problem after an estimated 1.5 million pupils missed 10% or more of their scheduled classes in autumn and spring last year.
A pilot involving attendance mentors is already being run in five areas by the children’s charity Barnardo’s, including in Middlesbrough, Stoke-on-Trent and Knowsley, with Keegan’s announcement expanding the programme to groups of schools in 15 “priority education investment areas”.
A £15m tender by the Department for Education (DfE) last year estimated that the recruited mentors would work with 3,600 children for one year initially, in addition to the 1,600 children to be mentored in the pilots run by Barnardo’s over three years.
A Labour source said: “This is a laughably poor response to the biggest challenge facing schools today. One in five kids are regularly missing school – Gillian Keegan’s answer is akin to putting out a raging inferno with a water pistol.
“It’s another crushing reminder that the conveyor belt of useless Tory education secretaries have nothing to offer when it comes to improving children’s life chances.
“Only Bridget Phillipson [the shadow education secretary] and Labour have a long-term plan to tackle absence – that starts with mental health counsellors in every secondary school, mental health hubs for young people in every community and breakfast clubs for every primary school pupil to boost attendance.”
Phillipson is expected to announce her own plans to improve attendance next week.
Jessica Prestidge, the deputy policy director for the Centre for Social Justice thinktank, said: “We have been saying that the government should make the attendance mentor programme a national one as soon as possible, because the problem is of a different scale to the solution the government is putting forward.
“We’re talking here about 140,000 children who are missing [from school] at least 50% of the time, according to the latest data, and the government’s programme is only going to reach a tiny fraction of them. This is a real problem with lasting consequences and we don’t think the government is doing enough about it.”
A spokesperson for Barnardo’s said its mentors were able to do valuable work by making connections with individual children and overcoming barriers that were stopping them from attending school regularly.
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In one case, a mentor found a girl was not attending school because she had to share her only pair of shoes with her mother – meaning she could not go to school if her mother needed to wear shoes that day.
Lynn Perry, Barnardo’s chief executive, said: “Our attendance mentoring pilot scheme shows that one of the best ways to improve attendance is working individually with children, building trust and listening to their concerns.
“Our mentors encourage children to talk openly about issues such as family finances, bullying, or mental health worries – anything they feel may be preventing them from going to school.
“In Middlesbrough, 82% of the children we have worked with improved their attendance through one-on-one support from an attendance mentor, with almost two-thirds of the children saying their mental health also improved.”
Keegan said last year “there is still more work to be done” to improve attendance but the most recent figures published by the DfE showed unauthorised absences in secondary schools, as well as absences involving illness, were still far higher than before the pandemic.
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NEU threatens huge Manchester protest during Tory conference | 2023-04-06 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/apr/06/neu-manchester-demo-during-tory-conference | National Education Union says government is ‘rattled’ after delegates vote for summer strikes in England
The National Education Union’s leadership has threatened to organise a huge protest during the Conservative party conference, accusing Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, of being deluded about teachers’ pay and staff shortages.
The NEU’s joint general secretary Kevin Courtney told delegates at the union’s annual conference: “If you need to, you will organise the biggest demo Manchester has seen for decades on 2 October, you’ll carry on a campaign right into the general election year. And you will win.
“The government is so rattled by our campaign, so rattled that it is reacting foolishly.”
The NEU’s delegates voted for five days of strikes at schools in England during the summer term, as well as holding a new members’ ballot that would authorise further industrial action until the start of 2024.
Pay talks with the government are at an impasse after three teaching unions including the NEU decisively rejected the government’s pay offer, with Keegan responding that negotiations had ended for this year.
Mary Bousted, the NEU’s other joint general secretary, said Keegan was “airily unconcerned” about low pay and staff shortages in schools. “When we show her the evidence of teacher flight from the profession, she dismissed it with a wave of her hand,” she said.
“Gillian, I have to tell you: you are deluded. You are living in a fantasy world. Gillian, you are secretary of state for education – it’s your job to ensure that there are enough teachers and leaders and support staff in our schools.
“It’s your job to make the strongest case to the Treasury that education needs funding so that our schools can recruit and retain teachers and support staff … And it’s your job to make the working lives of teachers and leaders better, so that they are willing to stay in the profession.
“So I say to you, Gillian: do your job.”
Bousted said teacher vacancies in England were far higher than before the start of the Covid pandemic, and a third higher than just a year ago.
She said: “So many schools are running on skeleton staff, unable to recruit. When they advertise for teaching posts there are no candidates applying, losing support staff because they can earn more stacking shelves in a supermarket.”
Bousted also made a plea for school leaders to refuse to work as part-time Ofsted inspectors, since what she called “the untimely and tragic death” of headteacher Ruth Perry after a punitive inspection report.
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“I ask them to stop it. Concentrate on your school. Refuse to be part of an inspection team until we have an inspectorate which commands respect, which supports schools to improve,” Bousted said.
The NEU conference on Wednesday voted for a campaign to abolish Ofsted and replace school inspections and gradings with a more collaborative system.
The conference in Harrogate was the last to be addressed by Bousted and Courtney, who have led the NEU since 2017 when it was formed by the merger of the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.
Students in higher education also face disruption to their end-of-year exams that could potentially delay graduations, after the University and College Union announced its members would boycott marking after Easter.
The UCU general secretary, Jo Grady, told members: “From Thursday 20 April we are asking you to cease undertaking all summative marking and associated assessment activities/duties. The boycott also covers assessment-related work such as exam invigilation and the processing of marks.”
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Tell us your experience of prayer at school | 2024-04-17 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/17/tell-us-your-experience-of-prayer-at-school | We would like to hear from Muslims in the UK about theirs or their children’s experiences of prayer at school
A Muslim pupil has lost their high court appeal against Michaela community school in Brent, north-west London, over its ban on prayer rituals. The pupil had claimed the ban was discriminatory and breached her right to religious freedom.
We would like to hear from Muslims in the UK about their experiences of prayer when they were at school. We’re particularly interested in hearing from Muslims aged 18 or over who were able to pray at school in the UK and parents who are comfortable with sharing their children’s experiences.
Were you allowed to pray at school and was it made accessible to do so? What impact did this have on your wellbeing and education?
You can see the article that included respondents to this callout here.
You can contribute to open Community callouts here or Share a story here.
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Starmer under pressure to commit to universal free school meals in England | 2023-04-18 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/apr/18/starmer-under-pressure-to-commit-to-universal-free-school-meals-in-england | Exclusive: National Education Union includes call in submission to forum that will determine Labour’s general election manifesto
Keir Starmer is facing mounting calls to extend free school meals to every child in England if Labour makes it into power, to help families struggling with the cost of living and close the educational attainment gap.
The National Education Union has also called for long-term funding for the holiday activities and food programme fronted by the England footballer Marcus Rashford, offering free places to children on universal credit (UC), in its policy submission to the party.
The Labour leader has come under pressure to adopt the free meals policy nationally since the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced free school meals for all primary pupils across the capital for a year from September.
A number of local Labour constituency parties are understood to have made similar calls. The Scottish and Welsh governments are also introducing universal free school meals, which are currently only available for all children up to year 2 in England.
There is understood to be a meeting of Labour’s policy commission that deals with public services on Tuesday, but the Guardian has been told the paper up for discussion makes no commitments on free school meals or other NEU demands.
There are 3.9 million children in the UK – or eight pupils in every class of 30 – growing up in poverty, and teachers see the impact it has on pupils’ educational experience and outcomes in school first hand.
An NEU source said: “While it is right that the government is coming under pressure to extend free school meals, we are also very clearly asking Labour to adopt it as part of the party’s manifesto process.
“As Labour develops its policy agenda over the summer we want to see this as a plank of its programme for education, alongside other priorities of importance to educators such as workload, assessment, pay, accountability and sustainable funding for schools.”
In its written submission to Labour’s national policy consultation, seen by the Guardian, the NEU calls for a clear child-poverty strategy at the next election, reforming UC by reducing punitive deductions, scrapping the benefits cap and ending the two-child limit.
The union wants a Labour government to provide free household internet access for children and young people in households on UC, after the pandemic laid bare the digital divide between the wealthiest families and those struggling to get by.
The NEU document raises concerns over workload, with teachers embroiled in a dispute with the government over pay and conditions. It urges Labour to immediately abolish Ofsted’s grading system and announce a review of school inspection if elected.
Intense workload and poor pay has aggravated problems of recruitment and retention, highlighted this week when Rishi Sunak was forced to admit his plans for pupils to learn maths until 18 would need time for more teachers to be recruited.
The government has missed its secondary school teacher recruitment target by 41% this year, with one in four leaving the profession within three years of qualification, and a third within five.
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The NEU also highlights the issue of pay, after its members decisively rejected the government’s offer of a £1,000 one-off payment and a 4.3% rise for most teachers earlier this month, urging Labour to correct the real-terms decline.
It also calls for a review of the curriculum and assessment in English primary and secondary schools as a priority, amid concerns they are struggling to provide the mental health support needed by pupils, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.
“The emphasis placed on preparing pupils for high-stakes tests and exams has narrowed what is taught and learned,” it says. “Statutory assessment and public examinations reinforce the government’s antiquated curriculum preferences.”
The NEU submission calls for a Labour pledge to scrap the ambition to move all schools into multi-academy trusts, and allow local authorities to open new schools, amid concerns that existing ones admit relatively few disadvantaged children. Councils should also be given powers over admissions and exclusions, it says.
Labour’s national policy forum meets in July to thrash out plans for government, before announcing key policies at party conference this autumn and in next year’s general election manifesto.
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The superiority complex of grammar schools is misplaced | Letter | 2023-03-19 | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/19/the-superiority-complex-of-grammar-schools-is-misplaced | Vocational and academic education should be valued equally, says Yvonne Williams
Lola Okolosie makes a powerful argument for abolishing grammar schools (The Tories keep bottling their push for more grammar schools. Is it because they know they don’t work?, 16 March). But one problem with focusing on the abolition of such schools is that it requires people to subscribe to the view that everything about them is immeasurably superior; that those failing the 11-plus missed out on the greatest opportunity of their lives. Other provision is inevitably seen as second class. And if you were unsuccessful, you’re second class – which is the psychological fallout that you never quite overcome, whatever your later achievements.
My experience of my secondary bilateral school was outstanding. The teaching was dynamic and the ethos was supportive and strict. It ensured that when I entered the grammar school sixth form, the transition was seamless.
What needs to change is the elitist view. Yes, having more comprehensive schooling is part of the solution. But we should value equally the whole range of education – both vocational and academic. Yvonne Williams Ryde, Isle of Wight
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