Education Bulletin Brief Alerts - November 2018

Exclusions - New Legislation/New Demands to Come?

Exclusions are beginning to look as if they may be an area for change in the future. A survey has suggested that drug gangs target excluded pupils. There has been a plaintive request for consistency in a local authority where Ofsted has asked why there are so many fixed term exclusions on the one hand while praising the school that is responsible for a high proportion of them for its firm discipline on the other.

At the same time there is pressure to prevent off-rolling in the Sixth Form and a complaint from an ‘inclusive’ school that the government insisted on including in its performance tables children who were in jail or sectioned under the Mental Health Act. SEN advocates say that off-rolling pupils with special educational needs is making schools less inclusive and Ofsted’s response to the Commons report “Forgotten Children’ somewhat ambiguously states it would welcome “any measure” that identifies schools where leaders’ inclusive practice has a positive impact on pupils’ outcomes. The Secretary of State has said that he does not rule out legislation to make schools responsible for the pupils they exclude. One Local Authority is seeking agreement from its schools to impose a levy of £5000 on schools for every permanently-excluded pupil.

The Timpson Review, that reports in the New Year,  may mark a major shift from the Gove era’s insistence on supporting discipline in schools. Meanwhile a report suggests that 4/10 teachers have difficulty in managing children in school - a significant increase over last year - and that they believe they receive inadequate support from senior staff. We will be keeping a close eye on this and publish information and guidance to new developments as they become available.

North East Boost?

Damian Hinds announced last week the government will divert £24 million of funding for school improvement and teacher training to the north east, following increasing criticism that none of the opportunity areas are located in the region.

Conviction for Unregistered School

Ofsted succeeded for the first time in gaining a conviction for running an unregistered school. The ‘study centre for home-schooled pupils’ had a head, charged fees of £250 a month, set homework and was attended by large numbers of young people for between 18 and 25 hours a week. The penalty for conviction in a magistrate’s court was relatively light but it is still a criminal conviction and may act as deterrent to others. Ofsted has identified 420 suspected unregistered schools, visited 274 of these and issued 63 warning notices in the past two and half years.

Cuts

A local authority has been taken to judicial review in respect of cuts to special needs transport provision. This is one of several such actions. The grounds for judicial review of local authority decisions are narrow, and the basis for this one is essentially to be lack of proper consultation.

Obesity

The issue of how far a school has an obligation to combat obesity came up when a school found itself in the middle of a controversy for sending home a commendation on the contents of a child’s lunchbox. Further discussion revealed that in the USA 19 states do expect schools to send letters home about obesity, one has legislated to forbid children’s BMI scores to be collected.

Teacher Regulation

A sudden flurry of cases of high profile heads being investigated or sent to the Teaching Regulation Agency may have obscured the case of the teacher struck off for an arranged marriage with a 13-year-old girl. He claimed he had been deceived by the girl’s family as to her age. An extraordinary story in a respected publication suggested that male teachers were putting themselves at risk (leave aside the damage they were causing by their actions) by imitating their pupils and sending on-line images of their genitals to female colleagues. In a criminal court a former deputy head was sentenced to 19 years imprisonment for ‘systematically and brazenly sexually abusing young girls and beating , humiliating and demeaning young boys’ . The judge told him “You have now been found by two separate juries to have made a career of being perverted and sadistic, almost in equal measure.” The court had heard that classically he often abused children in plain sight but away from the gaze of colleagues as he covered the windows and door of his class with sugar paper.

The worst aspect of the case, perhaps, was that he served under two headteachers who the Judge described as "appeared completely ineffective" in stopping his offending as complainants were “fobbed off” and one pupil was even punished for daring to challenge a senior and "well respected" member of staff. The cases dated back to the 19702s and 1980s and it is to be hoped that none of the features of this case would occur today. Meanwhile the former teacher accused of ‘sex-in-an-aircraft-toilet’ was acquitted. She had said that she had allowed the relationship to become unprofessional because she felt she was on her own with no one close to her. She had already been barred from the profession before the criminal trial. All these case suggest that it is not only teachers in past times who have put themselves and their pupils at risk and that schools should be more alert to vulnerability of both students and, in some cases, young teachers.

Race Pay Gap

The government has indicated that it believes that employers should be legally obliged to analyse and publish the pay gap between employees of different ethnic groups in addition to the gender pay gap.

Catchment Areas

A freedom of information request revealed that in Birmingham, a school’s effective catchment area can vary from 4 miles to 50 yards. The massive increase in pupil number, now approaching secondary schools will doubtless produce even more extreme situations.

Textbooks and content

A scheme is being suggested for widening the scope of government approval of textbooks. This raises a range of issues, highlighted by the controversy over an ‘approved’ sociology textbook which has been severely criticised for stereotyping ethnic minorities. The whole issue of government and political control of the curriculum has been raised by the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders which opens up an entirely new front in the discussion of curriculum started by Ofsted.

Salary cutoff

An independent school raised eyebrows by linking pay to the recruitment of pupils. ‘Be aware that pay can go down as well as up.’

Eton ban

Eton College has joined the French ban on mobile phones in school. It is reported that other schools with a wealthy clientele have found that their students can afford to run two phones: one to hand in and one to use. Doubtless Eton College staff are on to this.

Budget

The budget gave schools capital funding of £10,000 (for primary schools) and £50,000 for secondary schools. The conflict of statistics over whether schools are receiving record revenue funding (HM Treasury) and therefore need no revenue increase or real cuts (other informed opinion) suggests that standards of Mathematics Education might not have been as high in the past as the proclaimers of educational decline suggest. #Benjamin Disraeli.

And finally...

A school found itself in all the wrong newspapers for for all the wrong reasons when its pupils were found to be setting up their year book with a survey that included ‘best bum.’ 

...and Pepper the robot met a Commons Select Committee to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Predictably, a member of the committee told the robot, “I just want say you’re better than some of the ministers we have had before us.” However, a respected legal site recently seriously advertised discussion on ‘the future of robo-lawyers....’

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