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Great to see an open debate about ‘examiner feedback’ seminars prompted by the Telegraph expose today.

I’ve spoken to one Chief Examiner, not mentioned in the Telegraph report, who actually runs a private consultancy business on the side training teachers in how to maximise ‘exam technique’. His employer is happy for his to supplement his income giving special advice to certain groups of teachers away from any official channel.

He may not go as far as revealing which questions to study, but it is tricky to see how he cannot give away some non-public information.
The result is an advantage to schools which prioritise budget to send teachers on these courses:

“I’d be very worried if I was a teacher not taking one of these training sessions… it’s very much like a closed club, a cartel, for those that were there.” (Geoff Lucas, former CEO of QCA)

We are not in favour of removing all competition from exam boards, but their pricing power has meant UK schools now spend more money on exam fees than books and quality teaching resources to teach the courses.

Students would be much better served if schools were rewarded for teaching interesting lessons, such as those found on Teachable, rather than obsessing about exam pass rates.

Teachable has pledged its support to help reduce stress and raise standards in the classroom. This radical online social enterprise is allowing teachers to earn extra income from their best lessons – thus providing a financial stress buster in the recession.

Commenting on ‘Raising Ambition and Tackling Failure’ – The Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills 2010/11, Managing director Edward Upton said:

“After parents and carers, children spend the majority of their time in the company of teachers – almost three quarters of the child’s school day. Teachers are amongst the most influential people in society and the effect they can have on our children’s lives is enormous. We need to lessen the everyday stresses that teachers face.

When teachers aren’t busy teaching and managing the class, they are busy planning lessons. Often, these lesson plans can only be recycled once a year or they are just discarded.  One radical answer, we believe, is Teachable.”

Schools Minister Nick Gibb today also welcomed the broad findings of the report but warned that it highlighted significant areas of concern in the school system and said the Government’s reform programme, White Paper and Education Act 2011 would address them.

Nick Gibb states (DfE,2011):

“It’s common sense that where teaching doesn’t engage pupils they can lose attention and disrupt the class. That is why we are raising teaching standards and making sure the new inspection regime focuses explicitly on schools where children switch off because classes are not good enough.

“Effective teaching is central to determining whether or not a pupil succeeds at school. The new streamlined inspection regime will focus far more time on classroom observation and assessing teaching quality, instead of inspectors having to look at too wide range of issues.”

Mr Upton believes this is where Teachable steps in with its way of sharing high quality lesson plans both for the primary and secondary sector, all of which are thoroughly checked by teaching specialists.

The Department for Education plans to raise teaching quality across the board through a recruitment drive of the ‘brightest and best’ by offering bursaries up to £20,000 to attract top-class science, maths and languages graduates.  It has also strengthened entry requirements – only funding training places for graduates with a 2:2 or better and are stopping unlimited re-sits of basic numeracy and literacy tests.

by Stephanie Anderson BEd (Hons)

How much of the education budget gets skimmed off each year before it every goes near a school or teacher? Well now we know – since the government published every expense by the Department for Education from May 2010.

Excluding payments to Local Authorities, direct payments to schools, academies and colleges and to other government departments, the DfE has spent £870m since the election on external services.

We have delved into the detail and found that, on subject specific initiatives, Media Studies (through Mediabox) and Music (through Sign Up) got over £3m each, while Maths only £0.5m. Is that right when Maths is much more critical to future life chances?

One egregious example of waste is the £3m rent paid on the lease of the old MI5 building in Piccadilly, owned by the Sebba Family, which was vacated by the QCDA last year… but the break-clause in the lease was not exercised. How many more services have taxpayers paid for that the Department didn’t even use? There is also £5m paid to ‘Redicent Ltd’, although there is no such company registered at Companies House.

Although some of this £870m is due to be cut from the next financial year, the cuts announced (including Becta and QCDA) amount to only 25% of this largely discretionary spending.

The TDA (taking nearly a third of this budget) looks to be slimming down, but CAFCASS and the National College for School Leadership (costing over £220m annually between them) offer very dubious value to children and have so far escaped cuts.

£35m was spent on management consultants and professional services, with PA Consulting, Ecorys and Serco being the biggest beneficiaries.

What particularly annoys us at Teachable is that the DfE has already spent £10m this year marketing to the schools workforce; much of this is just a distraction to teachers, and a waste of paper. Promotion on Teachers TV will have to stop, but there is still over £3m on other advertising, half a million on event organisation and £0.3m supporting Teacher magazine and its falling readership.

If you can spot any more obvious potential for cost savings, please add a comment.

Back in June we speculated on what radical spending cuts would mean for the various public bodies funded by the Department for Education. A new list leaked to the BBC today shows exactly where the thinking is currently at. However, there is still room for some last minute petitioning ahead of next month’s spending review

Safe (but with substantial reform)

• Ofsted
• Ofqual
• School Teachers’ Review Body
• School Food Trust (changed to an independent charity)

Not Safe

• The Office of the Children’s Commissioner
• National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services
• Partnership for Schools Children’s Workforce Development Council
• Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA)
• Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service
• Young People’s Learning Agency

Abolished

• QCDA
• BECTA
• Teachers TV Board
• General Teaching Council for England
• Independent Advisory Group on Teenage Pregnancy
• School Support Staff Negotiating Body

By Scott Benson, Teachable intern and Politics student

Under the UN Convention on the Security of the Child (UNCSC) education is compulsory. School is not.

It is the right of the parent to determine the means of education in accordance with their philosophical and religious beliefs. So state interference is severely limited. But it is also the responsibility of the parent, under the UNCSC, to ensure that their child receives a ‘suitable’ education.

The government has an obligation to look after the rights of its citizens, including the right of the child to a ‘suitable’ education. In practice regulation is much more difficult to justify.

According to statistics collected for the Department for Children, Schools and Families under the previous government, most children who are educated outside of school do receive a suitable or full time education. At a time of painful budget cuts for schools why would the government spend limited resources on regulating a sector which is, for the most part, successful and self-sufficient?

Without trying to sound too much like Jeremy Kyle, the interests of the child must always come first. One key area of contention between government and home educators is illustrated by the case of Khyra Ishaq, a girl who was pulled out of school and subsequently starved to death by her mother. Home education was NOT found to be a reason for the girl’s death – social services missed many opportunities to identify abuse while Khyra was still at school. The case of Khyra Ishaq does not entitle the government to regulate home education but merely to ensure that all children are safe from abuse.

Another criticism of Home Education is that it isolates children from their peers. This is simply untrue. Firstly, there are plenty of other opportunities in local communities and in youth groups for children to make friends outside of school. Secondly, an increasing number of local support groups have sprung up for parents and children involved in home education. Often these groups organise meetings, visits and events all of which contribute to a child’s ‘social education’. Thirdly, it is worth pointing out that the social environment at school is not always positive and can be very detrimental to some children.

At the moment it doesn’t seem to be in the public’s interest to waste resources interfering with home education when cuts to schools are being made. In most cases, HE forms a viable, alternative form of education at little or no cost to public sector funds. But are the new government and home educators able or willing to co-operate with one another to support a ‘suitable’ education.

Can this be done without encroaching on the libertarian principles which underpin HE? And can this be done without undermining parents and guardians who do provide their children with an excellent home education?

A social historian looking back on 20th century education in the West might identify two major themes that ebb and flow through the decades. One is authoritarianism vs individuality – a pretty consistent shift from the former to the latter – and the other is an emphasis on teaching facts vs teaching ideas and techniques.

Giving children the tools to find knowledge for themselves has some sound pedagogy; the days of rote learning (and corporal punishment for that matter) are well behind us. But the extreme opposite essentially holds that we don’t need to know facts at all in an age when limitless information is only a click away on Google. The Battle of Bannockburn and the phyla of Nematodes are equally irrelevant to a modern student with Wikipedia to hand, so goes the theory.

It is in this climate that the new Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was developed since 2002. Consultation and committees have produced something that replaces a specific and important historical battle with

I can discuss the motives of those involved in a significant turning point in the past and assess the consequences it had then and since

and learning about worms with

I can report and comment on current scientific news items to develop my knowledge and understanding of topical science.

The real issue for teachers is that assessing whether students have achieved the required levels of the new curriculum is much harder than some factual test. Does the ability to ‘comment on current scientific news items’ require the incoherence of your average YouTube comment, or the erudition of Stephen Pinker?

And ironically all that delay involved in consulting the community has meant the Secondary school CfE launch comes at a time when the tide is turning back towards learning facts. The Core Knowledge curriculum, adopted by many US states, now looks to be the favoured route for Primary curriculum change in England. Core Knowledge’s popularity stems from its clarity, not modernity – it was devised in the early 1970s, at the height of the relativist revolt against facts. It really does get specific: for year 8, students must know that ‘At room temperature, sound travels through air at about 340 meters per second’ and that the Latin for year is ‘annus’.

Teachers know what they have to teach, and precisely what should be imparted when. While the prescribed books for English may not prove to everyone’s taste, the maths and science content is uncontroversially what students need to know. Far from stifling creativity, the focus of innovation (as with Teachable’s content) is then on the how to teach and engage.

Parents can also follow their child’s progress more easily when topics are prescribed. Plus for a teaching resource library, such as Teachable, it is SO much easier for people to find materials linked to commonly known topics and events than abstract concepts.

Curriculum for Excellence might be the very latest, but in the broad sweep of educational history I suspect it will be seen as the last hurrah for ‘develop curiosity and understanding’ versus teaching identifiable facts.

So Becta are officially gone in the autumn: by closing the quango the government hopes to save £80m.

And beyond that the education department’s budget will be cut by another £590m. The Chancellor has said that schools’ funding, the Sure Start programme and spending on education for 16-19-year-olds will be protected. But that leaves a lot of the Education budget protected:

1. Sure Start: £1.8bn
2. General Schools Spending: £31.7bn
3. Teachers’ pension scheme: £10.7bn
4. Young People’s Learning Agency (the 16-19 part of Learning and Skills Council): £6.5bn
5. Academies and Specialist Schools: £1.1bn

That means only £9bn out of a total £61bn Education budget that can be cut. So that £590m will be a 7% cut of everything else.

If you assume that the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme will continue in some form (or at least that many contracts have already been signed and won’t be reneged on), then there is only £5bn left unprotected – and 13% of that will be cut.

If you work in a quango or agency (or a supplier company) that gets publicly funded outside of these protected areas, I would be pretty worried right now!

The unknown part is how much of what these quangos do is seen as really essential, and will just be reabsorbed in a re-organised Department of Education (i.e. Becta employees become DfE employees) and how much will just be cut loose.

And let’s be honest; the government will need to reduce spending again by double the amount next year, so by the end of 2011 over 40% of those ‘non-core’ activities of the Education department could have ended.

As the full text of the Tory-Lib coalition policy framework was announced this afternoon we noticed some subtle shifts from the Tory manifesto on education. Yet the headline is that, out of a 3,000 word document only 60 words (2%) are devoted to schools policy; it seems that there are many other areas the parties can agree on more easily than education, and that it may take a back seat for the first year.

Schools
We will fund a significant premium for disadvantaged pupils from outside the schools budget by reductions in spending elsewhere.

We agree to promote the reform of schools in order to ensure:

• that new providers can enter the state school system in response to parental demand;
• that all schools have greater freedom over curriculum;
• and, that all schools are held properly accountable.

With a Tory education secretary in Michael Gove, his pet policy of independently run state schools is likely to go ahead, but there is no detail on what terms these would be run. The move to more school budgetary and curriculum independence is likely to increase, but without major overhauls.

Although money ‘from outside the schools budget’ is promised, this doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be cuts within it. There is certainly no commitment to spending increases.

Ben Barton, who advised the Tory party on aspects of their schools policy, has found in the finer analysis that there are many areas for broad agreement. The clearest of these are to promote Separate Sciences and MFL at GCSE, expand Teach First and give Head Teachers more control over pay.

Today the Conservatives launched their manifesto for the upcoming UK election, and I thought i’d unpack what we think this means for our teacher members. Here are some extracts (the bolding is our addition):

Restore discipline and order to the classroom … We will abolish the legal requirement of 24 hours’ notice for detentions; reform the exclusion process; and give headteachers the power to ban, search for, and confiscate any items they think may cause violence or disruption.

Sounds sensible, although it is not a major shift in power to the teacher. Savvy pupils will still have their ‘human rights’ and ‘Items they think may cause … disruption’ could mean anything from a games console to a lads mag, so it will be interesting to see how that is worded!

Raise the status of the teaching profession. Move to a high quality system of teacher recruitment and training by raising entry requirements, expanding Teach First and incentivising top maths and science graduates.

Teachable strongly believes in raising the status of the profession, but the only good way of ‘incentivising’ those top graduates, and retaining the talented teachers we already have is to pay more. Until we have more graduates wanting to become teachers there is no chance of raising the bar.

We love that they have mentioned our friends at Teach First specifically – it’s a great programme – but similar schemes are needed in other areas of the UK and for primary schools.

We will reform the National Curriculum, remove political interference from GCSEs and A-levels, and allow state schools to do the same high quality exams as private schools.

‘Political interference from GCSEs’ implies there is a big conspiracy to inflate grades. Of course there isn’t. It’s just that modular courses, coursework, teaching to the test and exam boards falling over themselves to offer the easiest course have meant it is a lot harder to do badly than 15 years ago. Schools also have every incentive to make sure their pupils get top grades.

Those ‘high quality exams’ (International Baccalaureate, IGCSE and Pre-U, rather that the not-so-favoured Diplomas) might be subject to same kind of grade inflation if the exam league table obsession of secondary schools isn’t tempered. That should be the priority.

We will replace Key Stage 1 Sats with a simple reading test, reform Key Stage 2 Sats, and make Ofsted report on schools’ setting policies and reading schemes.

Reforming Sats for primary schools is not exactly controversial, but making Ofsted report on anything extra isn’t going to help the Tories’ general focus on reducing bureaucracy.

A Conservative government will give every child the kind of education that is currently available only to the well-off: safe classrooms, talented and specialist teachers, access to the best curriculum and exams, and smaller schools with smaller classes and teachers who know the children’s names.

The most controversial of the lot. Education has implicitly been left out of the Tories’ funding commitments, which means funding will have to be cut in real terms over the parliament. But hang on – smaller classes = more teachers = more salaries. Surely. So unless they literally mean cramming the same number of pupils into a smaller room, this can’t possibly be a funded commitment.

There is every indication that the average pupil does better in a small class in a small school, but that costs real money that this country does not have currently. Rewarding and retaining great teachers would be our priority, assuming no more overall funding. That can be achieved by making schools a better place to work: attacking the target-led quangocracy that has grown up over the last 10 years, and is so sapping of school management and teaching time, would be a good place to start.

There’s lots in the news today picking up a survey by the Local Government Association showing a shortage of state school places, supposedly because the recession is forcing privately-educated pupils into the state sector.

We don’t think that’s true.

The reality, and contrary to what we predicted last autumn, is that private schools in the UK are doing OK. An Economist report pointed out that numbers of pupils at independent schools is steady this year. Parents try hard not to change schools if they possibly can … but may think twice about starting pre-school children in a fee-paying school. So, in the 1990s, the number of independent school places didn’t drop until 3 years AFTER the recession, and then only by around 3%.

What is happening is that the demographics of the UK are changing. Only one fifth of councils in the LGA survey reported a shortage of places, and these are likely to be in central London. More immigration of young adults into London over the last 10 years had lead to a boom in pre-school children, which will rapidly increase inner-city demand for primary places. Visa versa, schools in Merseyside have up to 25% surplus places as the population ages and young families move out the area.

The upshot is that more provision needs to be made for schools to expand and grow in areas of demand (London and the South East), and merge and shrink in areas of lower demand. This may mean some disruption for teachers, but the alternative is unacceptably high class sizes in already crowded schools in the inner-cities.