rural schools

This will bite hard in rural communities….

The number of secondary school teachers has been falling rapidly since 2010, it has been revealed.

A report by the public accounts committee has shown that since 2012 more teachers have been leaving the profession for reasons other than retirement.

Although the overall number of teachers has risen, the number of secondary school teachers fell by 4.9% between 2010 and 2016.

Many teachers have said that their heavy workload is the reason for exiting the profession.

This, combined with rising pupil numbers and pressures for schools to make significant savings has led to a “growing sense of crisis” for schools in England as they struggle to retain and develop their teachers.

The report claims that the Department for Education has given “insufficient priority” to teacher retention, arguing that the current situation could have been predicted and that action should have been taken to address it.

Spending on training new teachers has been 15 times greater than spending on supporting the existing workforce, and the report argues that the department’s “disparate collection of small-scale interventions” are “inadequate to address the underlying issues.”

The report also criticises the department’s lack of understanding of the various challenges faced by schools in different regions.

Chair of the public accounts committee, Meg Hillier, said that a “crisis is brewing,” and called government action: “sluggish and incoherent.”

Sounds to me like the issues at the heart of the furore are pretty similar to those assailing many other areas of public spending. This article tells us…

School funding cuts are threatening to undermine the quality of education in England’s classrooms, putting children’s academic progress at risk as head teachers struggle to find savings, finds a highly critical report.

MPs on the Commons public accounts committee (PAC) say schools in England are facing the most significant financial pressure since the mid-1990s, with school leaders having to find £3bn in savings by 2020.

Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the PAC, accused the government of collective delusion about the scope for further efficiency savings and warned: “Pupils’ futures are at risk if the DfE fails to act on the warnings in our report.”

The scathing report accuses the Department for Education of failing to understand the plight of England’s schools, which have already had to cut staff, maintenance costs, IT investment and pastoral services to meet rising costs.

The report casts doubt on claims saying schools can save £1.3bn by better procurement and £1.7bn by using staff more efficiently, and urges officials to go out and talk to school leaders rather than rely on desk-based statistical analysis of school spending.

The government has been under sustained pressure over school finances as concern has grown among parents as well as head teachers. Funding per pupil is projected to fall by 8% in real terms by 2020 as schools face increased employer costs, cuts to the education services grant, plus the introduction of the apprenticeship levy from next month.

Every now and again I find an article which completely hits the spot making a powerful point about rural service issues without the need for interpretation. This is one such story based on the views of Hugo Swire MP for East Devon. He tells us:

I’m not a rebel at heart but unless proposals to the new funding formula for schools are not improved on, I will not hesitate to vote against them, if and when they come to a vote.

Ever since I was elected to represent the constituency of East Devon in 2001 I have campaigned for fairer funding in light of the fact that we are one of the lowest-funded education authorities in the country.

Currently, we rank below the national average by some £290 per pupil, which is the equivalent of £25.5 million. In East Devon we were looking forward to the new funding formula redressing that imbalance, however if these proposals go ahead the situation would be made even worse: under the proposals, we would see 15 schools gaining but 20 losing out, including all five of our secondary schools. This would be fundamentally unfair.

The National Funding Formula for schools is designed to level a desperately uneven funding map for schools and it is commendable that this Government is at last attempting to do this.

The idea behind it was to address wage differentials to take account of living costs, as well as support special requirements, such as the need to teach pupils English in mainly urban local authorities with high immigrant populations. Thus the school funding per pupil in parts of London is £8,500 compared with £4,346 in Devon.

The new formula was supposed to bring greater transparency to a muddled system and to make it fairer. It is anything but.

The root of the problem is that rural areas always seem to play second fiddle to urban ones. It started during the 13 years Labour were in power, probably because that was where their heartlands were, but the trend continued during the previous Coalition Government, in which I was a Minister. In fairness, some rebalancing in the funding of rural schools did take place.

Now, from the backbenches, I have become part of an increasingly vocal group of MPs that are saying enough is enough.

All of us who represent rural areas are determined to stand up for our constituencies, which have been left behind in favour of cities.

Oops has something gone awry here- this seems in part to involve a positive redistribution to rural areas. I am sure the picture is less than straightforward but the article tells us:

Thousands of cash-strapped schools are set to lose further money from their budgets as a result of the government’s new funding formula unveiled by the education secretary, Justine Greening.

Under the proposals announced on Wednesday, more than 9,000 schools in England will lose funding, with money moving from London and other urban centres that have been well funded in the past to schools in areas that receive less money.

Almost 11,000 schools will gain from the redrafted formula, of which 3,400 will see increases of 5% to their funding. However, unions warned that even the so-called winners in the funding shakeup were likely to see their gains outweighed by real-terms cuts to their funding over the next three years.

The long-awaited new funding formula was announced on the same day that Whitehall’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, warned that schools in England were facing an 8% real-terms cut in funding per pupil by 2019-20 as a result of £3bn worth of cuts. The changes outlined in the new funding formula will mean further cuts on top of this for some schools.

Full details of which areas will win and lose were revealed in the Department for Education’s second consultation on its national funding formula, which aims to address historic gaps in funding between different areas that can amount to thousands of pounds per pupil.

More than 100 local authorities will see gains under the new formula – with the 10 lowest-funded local authorities gaining on average 3.6% – while almost 50 will see cuts to their funding. In 2018-19, the first year of the revised funding, Derby, York and Plymouth are among the winners, while the top five losers are London boroughs.

…and I bet a fair chunk of the schools featured here are rural! This story tells us:

Schools are spending thousands of pounds on recruitment agencies because of an ongoing “recruitment crisis”, with schools even paying agencies more than £10,000 to hire teachers, a new survey shows.

Figures by the NAHT union also showed that six per cent of schools paid more than £7,000 including two schools that paid more than £10,000.

This comes amid concerns that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hire teachers because a growing economy means recent graduates have more career options and concerns that growing workload is putting people off teaching.

However, the Department for Education (DfE) said the number and quality of teachers in UK classrooms was at “an all-time high”.

The new survey showed almost four in five UK schools find it difficult to fill positions is proof of an ongoing “recruitment crisis”.

According to the annual recruitment survey, 79 per cent of school leaders who advertised vacancies had a problem recruiting. Over 2,100 leaders took part.

The main reason – cited in just over half the cases – was an overall shortage of applicants. The findings will be presented to the Education Select Committee’s session on the supply of teachers today.

NAHT general secretary Russell Hobby said: “The Education Committee today asks whether there is a crisis in the recruitment of teachers and school leaders; our evidence clearly shows that there is.”

Nonsensical this may seem but at least the story shows in Wales they take the importance of rural schools seriously. This story tells us:

Like all schools, it has a head teacher, governors, and a caretaker.

But unlike any other school, Llanfynydd Primary has not a single pupil.

The “phantom” village school near Carmarthen in South Wales remains open despite this, and will remain so for another seven months.

Red tape means it cannot be closed for lessons even though all 11 pupils have left for other school.

No children have been taught there since last July, when it cost taxpayers £50,000 to run.

But the “statutory process” by the Labour-led Welsh government dictates that it cannot officially close until a consultation has been carried and a formal decision is made.

The consultation on the closure of the school began in 2012 after it was hit by falling pupil numbers in a village with a population of 580.

At the beginning of the spring term last year, there were 16 pupils being taught at the school, but that fell to 11 by the beginning of the autumn term.

The remaining children were then removed by their parents and sent to other schools rather than waiting for Llanfynydd to close.

It is understood the head teacher and staff have been deployed to other duties.

This article demonstrates how the very varied pattern of education is conditioned by amongst other things, critical mass and geography – very often to the detriment of smaller rural schools. I am not sure this increase in numbers will do very much, without careful thinking and engagement to improve the local options available and a proper realisation from people like the lGA spokesman quoted below that this challenges also exists in rural places!! It tells us:

But the latest figures show that the “demographic bulge” will hit lead to the first recent increase in the secondary-age population by 2016. Over the next decade, the rise in the secondary school population – 17 per cent – will be more than double that seen in state primaries.

It suggests that some of the problems seen in primary schools could be replicated in secondary education.

The disclosure comes just weeks after figures showed 4,000 infants had been left without the offer of any primary for September because of the pressure on places.

Today, the DfE insisted it was spending £5bn over the course of this parliament on new school places, with more than 260,000 being created in the last few years alone.

But the Local Government Association said there was “huge local pressure in some areas”.

David Simmonds, chairman of the children and young people board, said: “The reality is that parents in many cities are not able to exercise choice over the school they send their children because of the pressure on places. That’s true in parts of London and we’re also starting to see it in other cities such as Bradford and Bristol.”

He added: “There was always more spare capacity in secondary schools than primaries, which is why the huge capacity-building programmes have been aimed at primary level.

I care less about old and slightly run down schools than the availability of  education in small rural communities. I am not a personal fan of investing in bricks and mortar at the cost of pushing everyone into big and expensive urban cited buildings. Wonder why RIBA might be in favour of more capital expenditure on schools………..? This article tells us:

The UK’s school building programme is progressing at an “alarmingly slow pace”, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has warned today.

In a report that sets out a number of recommendations for the next government, the institution says that “urgent action” is needed to prevent “old, crumbling schools from falling into further disrepair” and to relieve those that are overcrowded.

Of the 29,000 schools in the country, 80 per cent are operating beyond their “shelf life”, according to the report, while more than 75 per cent reportedly contain asbestos. This, it is estimated, amounts to an £8.5 billion backlog of repairs.

The report states that while Labour’s £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative – scrapped by the coalition Government – was based on a “sound premise of initiating a step-change in children’s education” the scale of the project was “underestimated”.

This, the report highlights, led to 231 schools “under or nearly in construction” and a further 1,000 “in the pipeline” when the scheme was ended six years into its 15 year intended time span.

We have known about the challenges facing rural and coastal schools – seems like Ofsted has clocked onto the issue as this article reports:

Sir Michael Wilshaw will also spell out a tougher approach from Ofsted to schools that are believed to be failing poor children. Schools previously judged outstanding but which are not doing well by their poorest children will be reinspected by the inspectorate.

The head of Ofsted argues that a cadre of “national service teachers” should be created, employed directly by central government rather than by local authorities or individual schools. They would be sent to teach in parts of the country that struggle to attract accomplished teachers, into schools that are said to be failing their most disadvantaged pupils.

Wilshaw believes that schools in large cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham have been successfully turned around since Ofsted first raised the issue 20 years ago, and that the children now most at risk of missing out on the benefits of education are “hidden” in otherwise well-off areas, including Kettering, Wokingham, Norwich and Newbury.

“Today, many of the disadvantaged children performing least well in school can be found in leafy suburbs, market towns or seaside resorts. Often they are spread thinly, as an ‘invisible minority’ across areas that are relatively affluent,” Wilshaw will say.