BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Tim Clark will present his fifth, non-political, school improvement report at Mansion House on Friday 26th October. The link to the report is at the bottom of this article.
Does England have a world-class school system? Sadly, the answer is a resounding “no”. The purpose of this report is not to be negative nor to apportion blame, but if we are to genuinely improve schools, we must be honest. What is the evidence? Previous ministers will applaud the most recent international comparative assessments, PISA and PIRLS. England’s PISA results, however, are barely worth the paper on which they are written: the DfE’s own official analysis clearly admits that the sample of pupils used in England was academically brighter than the national average, meaning that any attempt to compare England’s inflated results with those of other countries is simply worthless.
Despite this skewed, academically brighter sample, however, some of the performance data is shocking: in science, for example, England’s actual results have dropped every year (although our international ranking has improved). Interestingly, former ministers always focus on “ranking” but, crucially, there is no link between comparative ranking and real terms performance. In maths for example, our ranking has improved over time, but our actual performance was higher in 2006. We now live in a country where less than one half of 10-year-olds feel confident in reading (it used to be more than half) – the very key to accessing the rest of the curriculum – and less than a third now actually like reading. And what of non-academic performance – are we producing resilient, ambitious, hardworking and law-abiding young adults? Almost one in five pupils is still “persistently absent” [truant] and exclusions and suspensions, especially for persistent disruptive behaviour and violence, remain at an all-time high. Recent DfE figures suggest that behaviour is poor in 20% of schools and very poor in 7% (pre-COVID figures were 4% and 1% respectively). None of this is evidence of a world-class school system.
So, what is the answer? More academies or a return to local authority control? More big MATS or stand-alone academies? More grammar schools or more comprehensive schools? More modern or traditional teaching methods? Raising or lowering the school starting or finishing age? All may have an impact, but in the grand scheme of things, all are largely irrelevant. The real answer is much simpler: (1) We need an adequate supply of highly trained, highly motivated, effective classroom teachers and (2) we need a school environment in which teachers, and therefore pupils, can flourish. The mantra must be to “empower teachers to teach and pupils to learn”, ie strong discipline, strong school leadership and a curriculum that is suitable for all. Other factors such as the role of parents, early years education (as opposed to childcare) and inspection are all crucially important but get these two fundamental ingredients right and any type of school can flourish; get them wrong, and any type of school (academy or local authority, grammar or comprehensive, state or private) will fail.
So what is the problem? It is the ongoing teacher recruitment and retention crisis. Last year, over 40,000 teachers, more than 9% of the profession, quit for reasons other than retirement while, at the same time, only 50% of teach training places were filled. This is simply unsustainable and the current government’s promise to create 6,500 new teachers is simply a drop in the ocean. (How and from where these new teachers are to be found has not yet been explained, despite fourteen years in opposition to come up with solutions.) The growing recruitment and retention problem is nothing new: it has been highlighted for almost twenty years but, despite various ineffective attempts, no government has seriously seized the issue by the roots and resolved it. This is criminal, especially as the answers are fairly obvious and relatively easy to implement, without massive expenditure on the part of the taxpayer.
The party/government that embraces the concept of “empowering teachers to teach and pupils to learn” and focuses on simple policies [highlighted in the report] which make it a reality, will be the government that finally gives this country a world-class school system.
