I don't disagree with your view, but I think you should add pre school activities into your mix. Since school readiness is a key variable in school success and Sure Start was defunded over the last 14 years there may be a connection with decreasing improvement.
Having worked in schools for 25 years and seen my own children go through. There has been a fundamental loss of joy as even early years is pulled to become 'start of phonics' and the reversal of what was previously a gentle transition in year 1 from play based learning to more structured curriculum.
At the other end, I am afraid that the Gove reforms had a hideous effect on ks4 curriculum. The loss in state schools of options like IGCSE, Functional Skills and many vocational courses, pushed out by progress 8, and the forced study of English literature however inappropriate for an individual pupil, and English literature being so narrowly focused on 19th century writers. The massive amount of material in history, single sciences -requiring much memorisation. It suits very few young people. It turns too many off school completely.
The purpose of school education is not only to prepare for future careers, but also to impart the cultural foundations of the society we live in -- this is where history and literature comes in. I have come across British born youths in the East End, who have totally neglected these, and are unintegrated into the British society, and feel like outcastes and are full of resentment. I shall not elaborate further in this post, but I have serious concerns about British born youths of of one generation immigrants who pick up culture at madrassas rather than schools.
I agree that is a purpose of education, but then you have to ask what those cultural foundations are, which is always in argument.
There are plenty of adults in Britain who can name the wives of Henry VII and which ones were divorced or executed, but have no idea about the Peterloo Massacre, the Chartist uprising or the Scottish and Irish Civil wars. Or when all men got the vote (except in Northern Ireland).
I’m deeply grateful for my English Literature classes for introducing me to Austen and the Brontë’s, but there is definitely more to English Literature than the C19th. There is a good argument for studying a Zadie Smith or Sally Rooney book, in order to see their similarities to Dickens or Austen. That literature is a living, rather than dead field.
(That it didn’t progress to some final end of incomprehensible modernity with Joyce and Woolf)
And for all Gove’s reforms to the National Curriculum, he was also responsible for the get out clauses that allow independent and free schools to opt out of the curriculum. There was a lot of sympathy from that government towards church led schools, and I recall various controversies over Creationist businessmen in charge of academies. Tackling madrassas would mean also tackling anti-Enlightenment Christianity and Hasidic Judaism.
Perhaps the frequent complaint (especially by primary schools) that they are informally becoming child welfare hubs should be turned around and into policy. A Department for Child Welfare and Education might usefully be created ? There would have to be serious consideration of physical, human and financial resources of course - but, admittedly a long time ago now, there used to be school nurses ("nits" parade, measurements and vaccinations) and school kitchens (probably a left over from WWII) etc. at primary level. And the school buildings and facilities could and should be used out of school hours for the benefit of children without causing insurance or safeguarding problems
I’m surprised you don’t mention the academisation of schools; it’s had a number of negative effects. Schools are much less likely to be embedded in their local community; often they become part of chains where management are overpaid and remote from the realities of classroom experience. They have too much freedom to exclude or off-roll troublesome pupils and seem to respond to difficulties with increasingly draconian behaviour policies, creating a climate of anxiety that isn’t conducive to children being happy and engaged with learning
I too am surprised that Mr Freedman is silent on academisation. I dissent, however, from Ms Waterton's remarks. Contra Mr Freedman's technocratic litany, the evidence is that Academies have played the leading part in raising secondary school standards over the past twenty years, mainly in London, but also elsewhere. They did so by breaking the bond between local authorities and the teaching unions which held back education for the previous forty years. Academies benefit from direct relations with parents, employers, and other educational establishments, unmediated by the burden of local authorities and free of narrowly self-serving unions. Similar arrangements have had similar benefits in other local authority services, eg, roads and sanitation.
The report you cite seeks identifies the SEND scheme inter alia as "an existential threat to local authorities", two of whose associations sponsored the report.. This gives the game away. The authors are all about cherry-picking statistics to big-up local government bodies, consistent with the original reason to wrest secondary schools from their control.
Of the five bullet points on page seven relating to outcomes, four report improvements since the SEND scheme was introduced, with weaker outcomes of late coinciding with the COVID epidemic. I do not understand the third bullet point, which seems to start from the premise that overall levels of achievement have declined since 2014/15. This is at odd with the other bullet points on this page and my understanding, but I may be missing a nuance of the authors' reasoning.
To my mind, we should be concerned about the outcome for children, not the maintenance of discredited governmental bodies.
Yes, I am similarly sceptical of the source - given their agenda is to roll back the SEN tribunal system holding them to account, and that in many cases the failure to improve is down to LA failures to implement the 2014 reforms.
(Our LA being found to have significant failings in 2017, and to have been continually found against by SEND tribunal and Local Government Ombudsman)
I would not object to the whole thing being taken out of their hands. It’s also clear from looking at the academic outcomes in the specialist schools, that a far tougher line needs to be taken.
If a mainstream school was taking in children with age-expected attainment at Y6, but only achieving Entry Level qualifications at 16, serious questions would be asked, yet this low level of ambition is considered normal, acceptable and impossible to challenge in the SEN sector.
My point about Academies relates to the statistics around Academies tending to have fewer SEN or EHCP pupils (objective data)
Academies also have higher exclusion rates, and Ofsted have been looking into offrolling (I can’t say if this is or is not higher in academies, as Ofsted admit it is quite difficult to establish where offrolling has occurred, as it is typically masked as a managed move or elective home education).
I don’t see evidence that academisation in the current form has improved SEND outcomes, although that could be down to way the legislation still leaves the LA still responsible for provision.
It was clear to me as a GLC candidate in 1977 that parents who were usually first generation immigrants were determined that their children did their homework and supported teachers who had problems with disciplining a child. Happily this attitude seems to have survived and must be a big contribution to integration over time.
On inner London, where the improvements have indeed been massive, there has been a shift in population - with far more middle class parents and of course a number of second generation immigrants. While I know as a former chair of governors how hard teachers and teaching assistants have worked this must be a factor. It gives rise to a question over what is happening in the inner cities in the rest of the country.
After retiring from Finance, I took a PGCE in Maths, and taught voluntarily in a State School at Camden. Apart from absenteeism -, the behaviour problem was hard for a new teacher. I spent evenings calling parents at home, about absent children and home-work never attempted. The parents, often a divorced low-income mother, living off benefits, was uninterested.
My strong belief is that education is a partnership between the teacher and the parents, between the school and home. Simply pouring in money into the education system will not help, if the encouragement is missing at home.
Culturally, we know of "tiger moms" in Asia, even poor families, who have driven their children's education. We must wake up to understand that in a global sense the British children are competing in a open world against the Chinese student who is working with a kerosene lamp in his small village home -- driven with the desire to learn and progress.
This motivation must be kindled in the youngsters. If (as my experience was) the state school becomes a place to drop-off centre for children during the daytime hours by many parents, the lack of enthusiasm for learning will feed itself in the results. A motivating teacher, important though it is, will not be enough -- nor more and more social spending.
Perhaps, but you mentioned China. Did you know that women in China are denied all maternity benefits available to married women if they have a child while unmarried? Moreover, unmarried women who have been employed before they had a child, once they are mothers, are usually legally let go from their jobs. No doubt, this suppresses the number of children born to single parent mothers, but it is hardly a model that can be followed in the UK.
As an American/Canadian engineer, I am oh so tired of the stereotypes around the education system in China. British and American educated STEM professionals are as good as those that come from China. There is no shortage of well educated competent STEM professionals. Arguably, there may be a shortage of STEM professionals that are willing to work 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, as is expected at companies like Nvidia, and at Foxconn, the maker of the iPhone, but that is another matter.
The model of education in China is not needed, or wanted, in a liberal, democratic society such as that in the UK, Canada and the US.
You are very lucky that you've experienced significant succes in raising standards over the last 30 years and, as such, are to be envied. France has the same problems in the state education system and more. We are still favouring "home-working" for public servants and the bourgeoisie, putting screens into the home and schools encouraing short attention span and concentration difficulties. We are, given behavioural problems in the class, the lowest pay in Western Europe and the "progressive" dominance of the national curriculum, having great difficulty in attracting and retaining teachers.
On top of the growing difficulties in controlling classroom and schoolyard behaviour (ie decapitating, strangling, slapping, insulting and knifing teachers, absenteeism, islamic ideological interference, harassement driving bullied pupils to suicide) in many communities, we have a vacillating government playing the 3 wise monkey's in most areas concerning security, health, justice and education. The "monkey in the woodpile" is the massive increase in first and second-generation legal and illegal immigrants (echos of UK in early 70s leading to the "Blood in the streets speech) and radical left wing parties pandering to radical islam which they see as a replacement audience for the working people who now vote elsewhere. The leverage creating this chaos in schools, on the street and in Parliament turns around the fear of being called "racist" or "islamophobic" by those looking to destroy France and its culture.
Newly built schools in "difficult" areas, and there are many, tend to get burned down every time there is a gang riot after the police nab a local drug dealer of scooter thief.
The result is a steadily increasing flow of pupils to private schools and universities when the parents can pay and where the academic results most often put the state system to shame.
I rarely see good reports of OFSTED in the press, or indeed positive views about the metrics against which schools are measured. In a recent article, the suggestion that NHS Trusts should be assessed similarly to schools was dismissed precisely because 'everyone sees the failure in education'. So it is interesting to hear that English school standards have increased significantly and that the monitoring systems in place may be partly responsible. As a parent, certainly I read the OFSTED reports and checked their grades. It influenced where we chose to live and to send our daughters to school. I would probably be interested in knowing the relative outcomes of surgeries etc. but maybe it would be harder to 'choose' a hospital for procedures.
If the issue is the impact of the covid lockdown, does that mean that we'll see a wave of problems chasing the generation most impacted followed by a return to 'normal' or has there been a step-change in the relationship between parent and teacher that cannot be pulled back? How much of this could be mitigated by SureStart programmes and similar, the re-introduction of funding for social and sports clubs for pre-teens and young teens? If the 'problems' are spread across multiple central government, would it be further weight towards decentralising education and moving responsibility back towards local government?
I do wonder how much certain trends in how some Primary Schools treat SATs (indeed, SATs themselves) have an impact.
Like, it was a contributor to my step-brother's mental health issues (he eventually did get back into school, with good attendance, but it probably cost him at least a few grades at GCSE), and I know teachers at Secondary who have noticed a real 'neediness' in Year 7 now.
Plus, that controversy over the Reading SATs last year, where if children were _that_ upset, you wonder whether the importance of SATs _for them, personally_ has been exaggerated by their primary schools. Certainly, parental quotes also give that impression, too. (and teachers being shocked and appalled that students have to show reading comprehension skills in a reading comprehension test isn't a great sign for anything).
If a student's first experience of a 'high-stakes' exam is being traumatised in Year 6, that probably doesn't help when they're looking ahead to GCSEs (which, separately, I think do need a little bit to be taken in January of Year 11, to provide a resilience baseline that is actually workable on an individual level (the current resilience measures aren't quite suitable there) - the bulk being at the end of the qualification is fine, but there does need to be something before for cases of illness).
Anyway, it's tough, because if Primary schools are run by the kinds of people who do that sort of thing, they absolutely need external checks (or, at the very least, removing them now will be disastrous), but there needs to be some sort of move away from something that can be 'gamed' like that.
We have, in the past, had explicit Ministers (and I think Departments?) for Children and Families, rather than only Education or Schools - has this been a helpful lens to consider the interaction of all these things?
From the home education point of view, many of these impacts are still live (mostly especially CAMHS and general social support issues), but all efforts to address them seem to be focused on schools alone. That creates distortions - primarily where being outside of schools is seen as cutting off from support and intervention services (and to some extent that's also true, but that's a policy decision not an inherent truth).
Bridget Phillipson has already moved one junior post from health to education.
It’s clear to me, as someone whose day job is analysing systems, that having CAHMS under NHS trusts under NHS England means there is limited ability to align goals between local NHS and local education.
There is also a clear reluctance to ever say that Home Ed / EOTAS might actually be the best thing for a child, even though it’s clear in many cases that home Ed achieves better outcomes that state SEN settings.
This is obviously because it would open a can of worms around having to pay parents told by the state to become educators, and what that would mean for those electively opting out for other reasons.
As a newly appointed FE College Chair I would be very interested in a similar overview of the position for FE. It’s a new world for me and the salary differentiation with 6th Form is startling to say the least. presumably there is Ofsted analysis of this available?
You say re missions "changes to Number 10 staff and structures have raised questions as to whether it’s still a model they’re interested in". Can you say a bit more about that?
I think there's a danger here that you are conflating measures of improvement with more substantive indicators of improvement. As someone teaching in higher education, what I have seen happen over the last 20 years which I arribute to the effects of Ofsted, is the increasing effects of students being spoon fed in schools so that they rely on being told how to think and what to write. The attendance problems is endemic in universities now and the pandemic certainly accelerated this tendency but I'm not convinced better policy will improve this situation. There are so many complex factors feed into this they can't be captured with a standardized policy response.
Is it possible that the increase in EHCPs is caused by an inadvertent alignment between parents and the school where both see a benefit in claiming the need for a EHCP for a child? The parents get a diagnosis which removes any guilt or blame they may feel while the school can claim additional resources.
Guilt or blame for what, though? I don’t feel guilty for having an autistic child.
Last month I was called in to collect my 12 year old from secondary as they were in a meltdown and had regressed to a non-verbal state - it took 20 minutes of calmly being present and saying nothing to get them back into a calm state.
When they returned to school, the deputy head looked surprised when I said I hadn’t seen anything like that since they were 8.
At this point, it struck me that the school think what they are seeing is their normal behaviour - rather than the reaction of an autistic child in the wrong environment.
In terms of an EHCP - it’s 100% necessary to get anything beyond the most minimal support. Schools are supposed to provide a level of ‘ordinarily available’ support, as is the NHS, but the reality is that schools use the EHCP money for things that should be ‘ordinarily available’ and also for things that should be delivered through CAHMS (ie we are finally getting some anxiety therapy in school, while we have been on CAHMS waiting list since primary).
There is a level of guilt - that we can’t afford the private therapy some parents can, or for one of us to quit work and home educate - watching a friend’s 14 year old home educated autistic child sitting their first GCSEs this summer, while your own is heading towards failure in the mainstream system is certainly guilt inducing.
It’s also frustrating being in a system that is publicly insistent that ‘the child is the centre of every decision’ and ‘ambitious for every child’ when it’s so clearly based around gatekeeping limited resources, and therefore trapped in a loop of late response.
(There are parents further along from us who have only been able to get CAHMS attention when ‘normal’ self harm and suicidal ideation has progressed to actual suicide attempts)
Given that the situation is so complex and no one really knows, surely one answer is to decentralise education so it's not driven by dictat from Whitehall. Allow local regions to try different things and see what works.
If, as Sam says, a number of the possible issues will have to be dealt with by different Whitehall departments and given that Whitehall is so dysfunctional (copyright S. Freedman Failed State) it surely makes sense to devolve the powers and allow experiments. Unlike with Scotland and Wales which have been one party states (although the Welsh reforms were pushed through a Lib Dem minister) you'd get a wide range of different ideas as different parties will be in charge.
Great piece Sam, it's complex. But whatever the direction of the causal relationship on behaviour, it doesn't seem right to say it isn't necessarily about funding by reference to schools have been hammered less than FE ! Costs, in terms of time and resource are being needed in schools that weren't (at these levels) before.
I don't disagree with your view, but I think you should add pre school activities into your mix. Since school readiness is a key variable in school success and Sure Start was defunded over the last 14 years there may be a connection with decreasing improvement.
Having worked in schools for 25 years and seen my own children go through. There has been a fundamental loss of joy as even early years is pulled to become 'start of phonics' and the reversal of what was previously a gentle transition in year 1 from play based learning to more structured curriculum.
At the other end, I am afraid that the Gove reforms had a hideous effect on ks4 curriculum. The loss in state schools of options like IGCSE, Functional Skills and many vocational courses, pushed out by progress 8, and the forced study of English literature however inappropriate for an individual pupil, and English literature being so narrowly focused on 19th century writers. The massive amount of material in history, single sciences -requiring much memorisation. It suits very few young people. It turns too many off school completely.
It makes me weep.
The purpose of school education is not only to prepare for future careers, but also to impart the cultural foundations of the society we live in -- this is where history and literature comes in. I have come across British born youths in the East End, who have totally neglected these, and are unintegrated into the British society, and feel like outcastes and are full of resentment. I shall not elaborate further in this post, but I have serious concerns about British born youths of of one generation immigrants who pick up culture at madrassas rather than schools.
I agree that is a purpose of education, but then you have to ask what those cultural foundations are, which is always in argument.
There are plenty of adults in Britain who can name the wives of Henry VII and which ones were divorced or executed, but have no idea about the Peterloo Massacre, the Chartist uprising or the Scottish and Irish Civil wars. Or when all men got the vote (except in Northern Ireland).
I’m deeply grateful for my English Literature classes for introducing me to Austen and the Brontë’s, but there is definitely more to English Literature than the C19th. There is a good argument for studying a Zadie Smith or Sally Rooney book, in order to see their similarities to Dickens or Austen. That literature is a living, rather than dead field.
(That it didn’t progress to some final end of incomprehensible modernity with Joyce and Woolf)
And for all Gove’s reforms to the National Curriculum, he was also responsible for the get out clauses that allow independent and free schools to opt out of the curriculum. There was a lot of sympathy from that government towards church led schools, and I recall various controversies over Creationist businessmen in charge of academies. Tackling madrassas would mean also tackling anti-Enlightenment Christianity and Hasidic Judaism.
Perhaps the frequent complaint (especially by primary schools) that they are informally becoming child welfare hubs should be turned around and into policy. A Department for Child Welfare and Education might usefully be created ? There would have to be serious consideration of physical, human and financial resources of course - but, admittedly a long time ago now, there used to be school nurses ("nits" parade, measurements and vaccinations) and school kitchens (probably a left over from WWII) etc. at primary level. And the school buildings and facilities could and should be used out of school hours for the benefit of children without causing insurance or safeguarding problems
I’m surprised you don’t mention the academisation of schools; it’s had a number of negative effects. Schools are much less likely to be embedded in their local community; often they become part of chains where management are overpaid and remote from the realities of classroom experience. They have too much freedom to exclude or off-roll troublesome pupils and seem to respond to difficulties with increasingly draconian behaviour policies, creating a climate of anxiety that isn’t conducive to children being happy and engaged with learning
I too am surprised that Mr Freedman is silent on academisation. I dissent, however, from Ms Waterton's remarks. Contra Mr Freedman's technocratic litany, the evidence is that Academies have played the leading part in raising secondary school standards over the past twenty years, mainly in London, but also elsewhere. They did so by breaking the bond between local authorities and the teaching unions which held back education for the previous forty years. Academies benefit from direct relations with parents, employers, and other educational establishments, unmediated by the burden of local authorities and free of narrowly self-serving unions. Similar arrangements have had similar benefits in other local authority services, eg, roads and sanitation.
And for the troublesome / SEN pupils where achievement has objectively gone backwards?
1. I'm glad we agree that academies work for the 90% of non-troublesome/SEN pupils.
2. Otherwise, it's hard to comment on your assertion: do you have supporting stats?
Page 7 of the executive summary of the ISOS report commissioned by the LGA and CCN
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ce55a5ad4c5c500016855ee/t/669fcedacd1a1f608546f52b/1721749338168/SEND+report.pdf
The report you cite seeks identifies the SEND scheme inter alia as "an existential threat to local authorities", two of whose associations sponsored the report.. This gives the game away. The authors are all about cherry-picking statistics to big-up local government bodies, consistent with the original reason to wrest secondary schools from their control.
Of the five bullet points on page seven relating to outcomes, four report improvements since the SEND scheme was introduced, with weaker outcomes of late coinciding with the COVID epidemic. I do not understand the third bullet point, which seems to start from the premise that overall levels of achievement have declined since 2014/15. This is at odd with the other bullet points on this page and my understanding, but I may be missing a nuance of the authors' reasoning.
To my mind, we should be concerned about the outcome for children, not the maintenance of discredited governmental bodies.
Yes, I am similarly sceptical of the source - given their agenda is to roll back the SEN tribunal system holding them to account, and that in many cases the failure to improve is down to LA failures to implement the 2014 reforms.
(Our LA being found to have significant failings in 2017, and to have been continually found against by SEND tribunal and Local Government Ombudsman)
I would not object to the whole thing being taken out of their hands. It’s also clear from looking at the academic outcomes in the specialist schools, that a far tougher line needs to be taken.
If a mainstream school was taking in children with age-expected attainment at Y6, but only achieving Entry Level qualifications at 16, serious questions would be asked, yet this low level of ambition is considered normal, acceptable and impossible to challenge in the SEN sector.
My point about Academies relates to the statistics around Academies tending to have fewer SEN or EHCP pupils (objective data)
https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/identifying-send/
There are also a number of papers linked here which require journal access
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2019.00003/full
Academies also have higher exclusion rates, and Ofsted have been looking into offrolling (I can’t say if this is or is not higher in academies, as Ofsted admit it is quite difficult to establish where offrolling has occurred, as it is typically masked as a managed move or elective home education).
I don’t see evidence that academisation in the current form has improved SEND outcomes, although that could be down to way the legislation still leaves the LA still responsible for provision.
It was clear to me as a GLC candidate in 1977 that parents who were usually first generation immigrants were determined that their children did their homework and supported teachers who had problems with disciplining a child. Happily this attitude seems to have survived and must be a big contribution to integration over time.
On inner London, where the improvements have indeed been massive, there has been a shift in population - with far more middle class parents and of course a number of second generation immigrants. While I know as a former chair of governors how hard teachers and teaching assistants have worked this must be a factor. It gives rise to a question over what is happening in the inner cities in the rest of the country.
I have a slightly different view.
After retiring from Finance, I took a PGCE in Maths, and taught voluntarily in a State School at Camden. Apart from absenteeism -, the behaviour problem was hard for a new teacher. I spent evenings calling parents at home, about absent children and home-work never attempted. The parents, often a divorced low-income mother, living off benefits, was uninterested.
My strong belief is that education is a partnership between the teacher and the parents, between the school and home. Simply pouring in money into the education system will not help, if the encouragement is missing at home.
Culturally, we know of "tiger moms" in Asia, even poor families, who have driven their children's education. We must wake up to understand that in a global sense the British children are competing in a open world against the Chinese student who is working with a kerosene lamp in his small village home -- driven with the desire to learn and progress.
This motivation must be kindled in the youngsters. If (as my experience was) the state school becomes a place to drop-off centre for children during the daytime hours by many parents, the lack of enthusiasm for learning will feed itself in the results. A motivating teacher, important though it is, will not be enough -- nor more and more social spending.
With respect, I think you could do with a bit more empathy for the single parent mother!
Sorry to have upset you. I was limiting myself to the education impact of our society.
China’s 2018 ranking in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap report has fallen 26 places since 2006, placing it at 78th out of 149 countries.
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-gender-inequality/
Ranking of the gap between men and women of other countries:
UK: 15th
Canada: 16th
US: 51st
Perhaps, but you mentioned China. Did you know that women in China are denied all maternity benefits available to married women if they have a child while unmarried? Moreover, unmarried women who have been employed before they had a child, once they are mothers, are usually legally let go from their jobs. No doubt, this suppresses the number of children born to single parent mothers, but it is hardly a model that can be followed in the UK.
As an American/Canadian engineer, I am oh so tired of the stereotypes around the education system in China. British and American educated STEM professionals are as good as those that come from China. There is no shortage of well educated competent STEM professionals. Arguably, there may be a shortage of STEM professionals that are willing to work 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, as is expected at companies like Nvidia, and at Foxconn, the maker of the iPhone, but that is another matter.
The model of education in China is not needed, or wanted, in a liberal, democratic society such as that in the UK, Canada and the US.
You are very lucky that you've experienced significant succes in raising standards over the last 30 years and, as such, are to be envied. France has the same problems in the state education system and more. We are still favouring "home-working" for public servants and the bourgeoisie, putting screens into the home and schools encouraing short attention span and concentration difficulties. We are, given behavioural problems in the class, the lowest pay in Western Europe and the "progressive" dominance of the national curriculum, having great difficulty in attracting and retaining teachers.
On top of the growing difficulties in controlling classroom and schoolyard behaviour (ie decapitating, strangling, slapping, insulting and knifing teachers, absenteeism, islamic ideological interference, harassement driving bullied pupils to suicide) in many communities, we have a vacillating government playing the 3 wise monkey's in most areas concerning security, health, justice and education. The "monkey in the woodpile" is the massive increase in first and second-generation legal and illegal immigrants (echos of UK in early 70s leading to the "Blood in the streets speech) and radical left wing parties pandering to radical islam which they see as a replacement audience for the working people who now vote elsewhere. The leverage creating this chaos in schools, on the street and in Parliament turns around the fear of being called "racist" or "islamophobic" by those looking to destroy France and its culture.
Newly built schools in "difficult" areas, and there are many, tend to get burned down every time there is a gang riot after the police nab a local drug dealer of scooter thief.
The result is a steadily increasing flow of pupils to private schools and universities when the parents can pay and where the academic results most often put the state system to shame.
I rarely see good reports of OFSTED in the press, or indeed positive views about the metrics against which schools are measured. In a recent article, the suggestion that NHS Trusts should be assessed similarly to schools was dismissed precisely because 'everyone sees the failure in education'. So it is interesting to hear that English school standards have increased significantly and that the monitoring systems in place may be partly responsible. As a parent, certainly I read the OFSTED reports and checked their grades. It influenced where we chose to live and to send our daughters to school. I would probably be interested in knowing the relative outcomes of surgeries etc. but maybe it would be harder to 'choose' a hospital for procedures.
If the issue is the impact of the covid lockdown, does that mean that we'll see a wave of problems chasing the generation most impacted followed by a return to 'normal' or has there been a step-change in the relationship between parent and teacher that cannot be pulled back? How much of this could be mitigated by SureStart programmes and similar, the re-introduction of funding for social and sports clubs for pre-teens and young teens? If the 'problems' are spread across multiple central government, would it be further weight towards decentralising education and moving responsibility back towards local government?
I do wonder how much certain trends in how some Primary Schools treat SATs (indeed, SATs themselves) have an impact.
Like, it was a contributor to my step-brother's mental health issues (he eventually did get back into school, with good attendance, but it probably cost him at least a few grades at GCSE), and I know teachers at Secondary who have noticed a real 'neediness' in Year 7 now.
Plus, that controversy over the Reading SATs last year, where if children were _that_ upset, you wonder whether the importance of SATs _for them, personally_ has been exaggerated by their primary schools. Certainly, parental quotes also give that impression, too. (and teachers being shocked and appalled that students have to show reading comprehension skills in a reading comprehension test isn't a great sign for anything).
If a student's first experience of a 'high-stakes' exam is being traumatised in Year 6, that probably doesn't help when they're looking ahead to GCSEs (which, separately, I think do need a little bit to be taken in January of Year 11, to provide a resilience baseline that is actually workable on an individual level (the current resilience measures aren't quite suitable there) - the bulk being at the end of the qualification is fine, but there does need to be something before for cases of illness).
Anyway, it's tough, because if Primary schools are run by the kinds of people who do that sort of thing, they absolutely need external checks (or, at the very least, removing them now will be disastrous), but there needs to be some sort of move away from something that can be 'gamed' like that.
We have, in the past, had explicit Ministers (and I think Departments?) for Children and Families, rather than only Education or Schools - has this been a helpful lens to consider the interaction of all these things?
From the home education point of view, many of these impacts are still live (mostly especially CAMHS and general social support issues), but all efforts to address them seem to be focused on schools alone. That creates distortions - primarily where being outside of schools is seen as cutting off from support and intervention services (and to some extent that's also true, but that's a policy decision not an inherent truth).
Bridget Phillipson has already moved one junior post from health to education.
It’s clear to me, as someone whose day job is analysing systems, that having CAHMS under NHS trusts under NHS England means there is limited ability to align goals between local NHS and local education.
There is also a clear reluctance to ever say that Home Ed / EOTAS might actually be the best thing for a child, even though it’s clear in many cases that home Ed achieves better outcomes that state SEN settings.
This is obviously because it would open a can of worms around having to pay parents told by the state to become educators, and what that would mean for those electively opting out for other reasons.
As a newly appointed FE College Chair I would be very interested in a similar overview of the position for FE. It’s a new world for me and the salary differentiation with 6th Form is startling to say the least. presumably there is Ofsted analysis of this available?
Sam
You say re missions "changes to Number 10 staff and structures have raised questions as to whether it’s still a model they’re interested in". Can you say a bit more about that?
Thanks
I think there's a danger here that you are conflating measures of improvement with more substantive indicators of improvement. As someone teaching in higher education, what I have seen happen over the last 20 years which I arribute to the effects of Ofsted, is the increasing effects of students being spoon fed in schools so that they rely on being told how to think and what to write. The attendance problems is endemic in universities now and the pandemic certainly accelerated this tendency but I'm not convinced better policy will improve this situation. There are so many complex factors feed into this they can't be captured with a standardized policy response.
Is it possible that the increase in EHCPs is caused by an inadvertent alignment between parents and the school where both see a benefit in claiming the need for a EHCP for a child? The parents get a diagnosis which removes any guilt or blame they may feel while the school can claim additional resources.
Guilt or blame for what, though? I don’t feel guilty for having an autistic child.
Last month I was called in to collect my 12 year old from secondary as they were in a meltdown and had regressed to a non-verbal state - it took 20 minutes of calmly being present and saying nothing to get them back into a calm state.
When they returned to school, the deputy head looked surprised when I said I hadn’t seen anything like that since they were 8.
At this point, it struck me that the school think what they are seeing is their normal behaviour - rather than the reaction of an autistic child in the wrong environment.
In terms of an EHCP - it’s 100% necessary to get anything beyond the most minimal support. Schools are supposed to provide a level of ‘ordinarily available’ support, as is the NHS, but the reality is that schools use the EHCP money for things that should be ‘ordinarily available’ and also for things that should be delivered through CAHMS (ie we are finally getting some anxiety therapy in school, while we have been on CAHMS waiting list since primary).
There is a level of guilt - that we can’t afford the private therapy some parents can, or for one of us to quit work and home educate - watching a friend’s 14 year old home educated autistic child sitting their first GCSEs this summer, while your own is heading towards failure in the mainstream system is certainly guilt inducing.
It’s also frustrating being in a system that is publicly insistent that ‘the child is the centre of every decision’ and ‘ambitious for every child’ when it’s so clearly based around gatekeeping limited resources, and therefore trapped in a loop of late response.
(There are parents further along from us who have only been able to get CAHMS attention when ‘normal’ self harm and suicidal ideation has progressed to actual suicide attempts)
Given that the situation is so complex and no one really knows, surely one answer is to decentralise education so it's not driven by dictat from Whitehall. Allow local regions to try different things and see what works.
If, as Sam says, a number of the possible issues will have to be dealt with by different Whitehall departments and given that Whitehall is so dysfunctional (copyright S. Freedman Failed State) it surely makes sense to devolve the powers and allow experiments. Unlike with Scotland and Wales which have been one party states (although the Welsh reforms were pushed through a Lib Dem minister) you'd get a wide range of different ideas as different parties will be in charge.
Great piece Sam, it's complex. But whatever the direction of the causal relationship on behaviour, it doesn't seem right to say it isn't necessarily about funding by reference to schools have been hammered less than FE ! Costs, in terms of time and resource are being needed in schools that weren't (at these levels) before.
Agreed - and I say that as someone who works in FE policy and envies the funding schools get!