Date updated: Thursday 10th January 2019

Ten Year Plan?

The Chair of the Parliamentary Education Committee has rather daringly proposed that Education needs a 10-Year financial plan similar to the one given to the National Health Service. He described it as “inexplicable and astonishing” that the Health Service could have a ten-year funding and strategic plan but education did not. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there was no comment from the DfE, where he was once a minister, or more importantly, from the Treasury. But the remark has been made and perhaps in the fullness of time we may see it.

Accountability Mechanisms in Difficulties

Ofsted’s concern that there has been too much reliance on test results in judging the effectiveness of schools has been given some support in a number of small but definite problems with current accountability measures. That there have been 600 Sats ‘maladministration’ investigations is concerning. There has also been a massive increase in pupils requiring ‘extra time’ in GCSE examinations. And experts declared that examinations are useless for examining computer studies just as Ofqual has declared it no longer believed that it was possible to use non-exam assessment (NEA) to assess programming skills in a way that was “manageable, reliable and fair”. The increase in entries in Mandarin at A Level has been interpreted as an increase in students’ alertness to the importance of China. However, another factor may have been the increase in the number of native Mandarin users in the schools where Mandarin entries have increased. Finally, Ofqual’s calculations on the reliability of marking gave a probability result of 0.96 for Maths but 0.52 for English in relation to the ‘definitive mark’. These uncertainties are a reminder of the difficulty of producing an infallible accountability system. In the circumstances it is perhaps not quite as concerning as it might be that one third of primary schools judged as ‘outstanding’ in their last inspection (and so immune to inspection for a number of years) were not ‘well above average’ for progress in their SATs scores.

Combustible Cladding

James Dalton, Director of General Insurance Policy at the Association of British Insurers, has questioned the government’s limitation of inflammable cladding to high rise buildings. He said “It doesn’t make sense... for a child to go from their parents’ flat to which the ban applied to attend school in a building that is wrapped in combustible material.” Schools will no doubt have made their own checks in the wake of the Grenfell disaster but this is a reminder that if combustible material has been found, a school needs to have particularly well-thought-out routines and systems that take this into account, even if their building is low rise.

Death by Minibus

For schools (mainly serving rural areas), which have the problem of school buses to contend with, a case towards the end of last year sounds a warning. Bridgend Council were fined £300,000 for the death of a pupil killed by a minibus at the end of the school day while pupils were getting on to buses. The situation was described by one driver as a ‘free for all’ and there had been previous ‘near misses.’ The school now operates a ‘lock-down’ system at the end of school to ensure safe loading. With the increase in sentences for gross negligence, other schools with similar problems might be well-advised to consider similar solutions.

Data Breaches

There were 703 data breaches reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) by schools in 2016-17, compared with 674 in 2015-16 and 571 in 2014-15. One of the most bizarre breaches recently was the pupil who gained access to, and posted, pupils’ data, which he got off a teachers’ computer which he was borrowing. It is easy to see how it could happen; but what training had the teacher received and didn’t s/he know that any child allowed on a computer immediately sets out to find out what is in it? The consequences can be serious for a school in reputational terms and also, potentially in the involvement of the Information Commissioners Office.

Meanwhile a head teacher was fined £700 with £364 costs for loading pupil data from previous schools onto his current school’s server. He was able to provide ‘no valid explanation’ for this. The material had been on a USB stick in his possession, which raises a large number of questions, but also signals a warning for others in a time when it is all too easy to put a variety of material on a memory stick and then absent-mindedly load the whole thing onto another device.

PFI

Another school has been closed with a long term PFI debt. In this case a local authority had to pay £400,000 a year to pay off a £7.6m debt. The building can only be used for educational purposes and the service charges, of course, rise annually in line with the RPI.

Good Work Plan

The government has introduced a ‘Good Work Plan’ which is intended to improve terms and conditions at work in the modern economy, some of which are relevant to some schools. Statutory instruments have been laid to implement parts of the plan which come into force either immediately or in April 2020. These will:

  • Repeal the curiously named  ‘Swedish derogation, which allows organisations to pay agency workers on cheaper rates than permanent staff;
  • Extend to ‘workers’ as well as ‘employees’ (as at present) the right to a written statement of rights from a person’s first day in their job;
  • Confirm ‘workers’ eligibility for sick leave and pay, as well as other types of paid leave including maternity, paternity and shared parental leave;
  • Raise the maximum fines for employers who have shown ‘malice, spite or gross oversight’ from £5,000 to £20,000;
  • Extend the holiday pay reference period from 12 to 52 weeks to ensure that those in seasonal roles are able to take the time off they are entitled to;
  • Lower the threshold required for a request to set up information and consultation arrangements (which lets in trades unions) from 10% of employees to 2%.

Further changes that seem to be likely are:

  • More clarity on employment status (a gig economy provision) with a new test to reflect the “reality of modern working relationships”. It will focus more on the element of control and not on the individual’s right to provide a substitute;
  • A ban on deductions from staff tips;
  • Casual workers (whether zero hour or other variable pattern) to be able to request a more fixed pattern of work, when having worked for 26 weeks continuously;
  • The gap in employment with the same employer that will break continuity of service will increase from one week to four weeks.

Warning to Hoaxers and Texters

It may be useful assembly material and material for lessons in future, that a teenager who sent thousands of hoax bomb threats to schools and triggered an American airline security scare was recently jailed for three years. Fulfilling the stereotype of the lone wolf internet criminal, George Duke-Cohan, 19 caused inconvenience and a transatlantic investigation from the bedroom of his home in Watford, making hoax bomb threats to1,700 schools, colleges and nurseries across the UK. Hundreds of the schools were evacuated. He was arrested almost immediately, which may be a surprise to some young people, but then sent another batch of hoax emails to schools in the US and UK. Clearly a slow learner, while on bail for the bomb hoaxes, he made a fake report of a hijacked US-bound plane.

Another cautionary tale emerged when the High Court rejected a teenage boy’s attempt to force the police to delete the details of allegations made against him that he ‘sexted’ girls at his school. He was never convicted of a crime and did not receive a police caution. He was 14 and 15 at the time of the incidents and it may be worth pointing out to young people that, as a result of the ruling, details of the incidents can be disclosed to his potential employers under an enhanced criminal record check for an indefinite period in the future.

Claw Back

Councils are being urged to claw back cash from schools holding “excess” surpluses. While more than three in ten secondary schools are now in deficit; the average deficit posted by secondary schools last year increased by nearly £70,000, to £484,000; and the value of deficits across all council schools totalling £200 million; figures also show that the total amount stored away by cash-rich schools was nearly £600 million. The value of what may be described as the “excess surplus” which is defined as anything above five per cent of a secondary school’s total income or eight per cent for primaries, was £580 million.

Government guidance states councils are able to claw back any excess surpluses, which then goes back into the main school-funding pot. This is subject to the approval of an authority’s schools forum and has been used with a certain amount of caution by councils, possibly afraid of schools becoming standalone academies and taking their surpluses with them. MATs, of course, control all the funding in their organisation.

Section 128

Academies are warned that their Single Central Record must include a check of Section 128 notices, including the check on new governors introduced in September 2018.

Christmas Quiz

Our authors were:

‘Our present system (of education) is a deplorable failure....the larger number leave school...altogether content with their own astonishing and consummate ignorance.’
Dean Farrar ‘Defects in Public School Education’ 1867

‘There’s modern education for you. Even when he was a child he was allowed to do as he liked.’
Leo Tolstoy ‘War and Peace’ - 1869

The People consists of idiots.’
Emmanuel Kant - 1724 – 1804

‘In all bureaucracies there are three infallible spirits - self-perpetuation, expansion, and an incessant demand for more power.’
Herbert Hoover USA President - 1930’s

‘...such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart.’
John Manningham - ‘The Puritan’ 1602

‘There are three things against which the human mind struggles in vain: bureaucracy, stupidity and catch words.’
General Von Seekt - Commander in Chief German Army 1920-1926

‘A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement.’
Clement Attlee - 1883 – 1967

‘The only class for which... technical education is never proposed is the class for which it is most necessary - I mean our rulers.’
Lord Rosebery - 1847 – 1929

‘The future ain’t what it used to be.’
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra - baseball coach 1925 – 2015

‘He was one of those men, more common in Victorian times...who sought personal power through buffoonery.’
Anthony Powell - ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’

And in the New Year...

Pay

To meet the teacher recruitment problem the DfE has eased increased bursaries for teachers training in more shortage subjects and scrapped the variation between bursaries payed according to class of degree. The Secretary of State has said that any pay rise for teachers in next year’s pay round must be “affordable”.Scottish teachers have been offered a 5% pay rise.

Sex Education

The government will publish their sex education guidance. The consultative document was savaged in a number of quarters for being ‘squeamish’; age limited; failing to address sexual orientation and transexuality; and encouraging a ‘blame the victim’ culture. It will be interesting to see whether any of these responses is addressed in the final guidance.

Outstanding School Exemption

It is likely that the ‘outstanding schools exemption’ which has left some schools uninspected for a decade will be eroded and ‘got round’ even if not formally abolished. This will particularly apply to schools which do not get ‘outstanding’ results.

The New Framework

Ofsted will introduce their new framework (operational from September 2019). However, Ofsted’s National Director of Education has urged schools not to pay “snake-oil” salesman for training on the watchdog’s new inspection framework before it comes out. They don’t know what is in it; and neither do we; and we won’t guess.

“Schools should...”

In case you feel the curriculum is too content-light, the group Parents and Teachers for Excellence have collected over 200 proposals for action by schools made by concerned individuals in 2018. The full list can be found here but it includes proposals to insert a range of topics into the curriculum including every child learning: 10 healthy recipes; Muslim and feminist views of Jesus; litter picking; the concept of intellectual property; how to get pregnant; first aid; How to Fail (as a preliminary to success); architecture; how to be funny; gardening; avoiding dog bites; toothbrushing; and the National Anthem.

So this New Year...

In that charming American phrase “Have a good one!”