Tag: 2013

The statement made by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, on 1 March 2013.

Today I am announcing details of the capital funding of around £4billion that will be made available to create new school places and to carry out maintenance and repair work to existing school buildings.

The number of pupils in England is rising and is set to continue to rise well into the next parliament. Ensuring that every child is able to attend a good or outstanding school in their local area is at the heart of the Government’s comprehensive programme of reform of the school system. We have previously made available core annual allocations of £800million to help local authorities meet the demand for additional school places together with a further £500 million in 2011-12 and £600 million in 2012-13. Today we are allocating capital funding for basic need of £1.6 billion covering the two years 2013-14 and 2014-15.

It is vital that this money is targeted where it is needed and so we have worked with local authorities to improve the way that funding for new school places is distributed across the country.

Until now, we have not had detailed information about the specific areas within local authorities where the demand for school places is expected to increase. This meant that we could not target funding in the most effective way possible to meet pockets of demand within local authorities.

Over the past 12 months, we have worked with local authorities to ensure that funding is distributed more fairly across the country. Local authorities told us that funding should be allocated based solely on projected shortfalls between the places available and the places required within the smaller planning areas that they use when assessing the need for new school places. They also said that funding should be confirmed for at least two years in order to aid better planning.

We redesigned the annual school capacity survey, which local authorities submit to the Department each year, to ensure that, for the first time, we have detailed information about the pressure points within individual authority areas.

As a result of these changes, the distribution of funding to local authorities for additional school places should be fairer, more accurate and better value for money. Some local authorities will see their funding go up, while others will see funding levels go down. This reflects changes in the number of new school places required in different areas of the country as well as the use of more detailed data and it is right that money is allocated where it is needed.

These changes in allocation will get the best value from our core funding for new places. But, in view of the urgent need for more school places following the steep rise in birth rates in many parts of the country, this extra investment needs further enhancement. That is why, in his Autumn Statement on 5 December, the Chancellor announced that the Government will provide additional investment of £982 million for schools in England over the remainder of this parliament.

With this additional money, we are now launching the Targeted Basic Need Programme to fund the provision of new, high quality school places in the areas that need it most. The programme will offer additional support to those local authorities experiencing the greatest pressure on places and will help them to prepare for further rises in pupil numbers. The programme will deliver new Academies and Free Schools, as well as enabling investment to expand existing good and outstanding schools.

Local authorities will be able to bid for funding to increase the number of high quality school places available in areas with the most acute levels of need. All new schools will open as Academies or Free Schools and successful local authorities will be required to run a competitive process in order to select the best provider. This will enable greater parental choice where it is most needed, thereby driving up standards across the local area.

This, together with the additional local authority allocations we made in 2011-12 and 2012-13 will bring the total amount of funding allocated to local authorities for new school places over the current spending review period to over £5 billion. This is more than double the £1.9 billion spent by the previous government over an equivalent period. We are also setting out our expectation today of greater transparency so that local authorities’ decisions about where to add places are more transparent and accessible to the public. Local authorities will be required to make available details of how they have used their basic need allocations to create additional places and in which schools.

In addition, we must also ensure that existing school buildings are kept in good condition. In 2013-14, as in the previous two years, an additional £1.2 billion will be made available to local authorities and Academies to maintain and improve the condition of existing school buildings across the country.

The previous government did not collect comprehensive and consistent data about the schools most in need of repair and investment. That is why we are in the process of gathering extensive information about the condition of the school estate through the Property Data Survey. In the meantime, funding for condition and maintenance will be allocated on a simple and transparent per-pupil basis. In addition to this £1.2bn in 2013-14, a further £200 million of devolved formula capital funding will be given directly to maintained schools and Academies in 2013-14 to maintain the condition of their buildings.

Today’s announcement also includes capital funding for 16-19 provision. £80 million will be made available for 2013-14 and 2014-15 to maintained schools, Academies, sixth form colleges and independent specialist providers to fund additional places needed as a result of demographic changes. This funding will also support the provision of new places for students with learning difficulties and disabilities.

£61 million of capital maintenance funding will be allocated to sixth form colleges in 2013-14. Alongside this, £15 million of capital maintenance funding will be allocated to independent specialist providers for 2013-14 and 2014-15.

Capital allocations for 2013-14 and 2014-15 have been published on the Department for Education’s website and I will also place a copy of this and accompanying documents in the House Libraries.

The article written by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, for the Independent on 28 February 2013 and republished by the Government.

The most important man in English education doesn’t teach a single English child, wasn’t elected by a single English voter and won’t spend more than a single week in England this year. But Andreas Schleicher deserves the thanks of everyone in England who wants to see our children fulfil the limit of their potential.

A German mathematician with the sort of job title that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy – Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division (Directorate for Education) at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – Andreas Schleicher might seem like the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. But in truth he’s the father of more revolutions than any German since Karl Marx.

Because Andreas is responsible for collating the data that shows which nations have the best-performing education systems, analysing that data to determine what makes those systems so successful and then publishing the findings in a way which anyone can absorb. And many have.

Since Andreas and the OECD established the Pisa league tables of international educational achievement as benchmarks of excellence in schooling, certain common features have been consistently identified among the top-performing nations. And, increasingly, those features have been introduced into the education systems of countries with poorer performances. Which, in turn, have seen their own performance improve.

Indeed, many of those nations which are themselves top performers – such as Singapore and Hong Kong – eagerly analyse what their own principal competitors are doing and how they perform in Pisa, with a view to implementing further changes to maintain their competitive edge.

No nation that is serious about ensuring its children enjoy an education that equips them to compete fairly with students from other countries can afford to ignore the insights Andreas’s work generates. Ignoring what Pisa tells us in education would be as foolish as dismissing what control trials tell us in medicine. We would by flying in the face of the best evidence we have of what works.

And just as the evidence Andreas has gathered has influenced education reformers in Asia, in Scandinavia and in North America, so it is influencing the Government here. Not least because the evidence Andreas has gathered shows that we are falling further and further behind other nations. In the last 10 years we have plummeted in the world rankings from 4th to 16th for science, 7th to 25th for literacy and 8th to 28th for maths. While our new young teachers are better than ever and our children are working harder than ever, the rate at which other countries are improving their education systems leaves us straggling behind.

Its the melancholy nature of our decline, and the energy with which other countries are implementing the lessons of the most successful education nations, that is behind the coalition government’s drive to modernise our own schools system. Every child in England risks being left behind unless we catch up with the world’s top performers. Our schools white paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ was deliberately designed to bring together policies that have worked in other, high-performing nations. It was accompanied by a detailed evidence paper, ‘The Case for Change’, and drew on insights generated by successive Pisa results tables. The white paper’s policies are our priorities for 2011.

We know that the most successful education nations recruit the best possible people into teaching and provide them with high-quality training and professional development. Which is why we are expanding the principal elite route into teaching, Teach First, raising the bar on entry into the profession, providing support for top graduates in maths and science to enter teaching, establishing a new generation of teaching schools on the model of teaching hospitals, to spread best practice, and investing in more national and local leaders of education – superb heads who lend their skills to raise standards in weaker schools.

The principle of collaboration between stronger and weaker schools, with those in a position to help given the freedom to make a difference, lies at the heart of our academy programme. And 2011 will see a change in the programme, with more than 400 academies now open as of this week. These schools exemplify many of the virtues which are enjoyed by schools in the best-performing education systems. The greater the amount of autonomy at school level, with principals free to vary curricula, staffing and internal organisation, the greater the potential for all-round improvement and the greater the opportunity for the system to move from good to great.

But while greater autonomy can drive innovation and spark improvement all round, Pisa tells us that the greatest benefits for pupils are secured in a system which also has robust accountability and marked examinations at crucial stages, that allow fair comparisons to be made. It’s because it is so important that those comparisons are fair that we are reforming performance tables, to place more emphasis on the value schools add as well as the raw results they secure.

When the performance tables are published next week they will help reveal where the real areas of weakness are. And that will present the Government with an unambiguous challenge to tackle under-performance where it is most deeply entrenched. Because the final lesson Pisa tells us is that the best performing education systems all have a much higher level of equity than the UK. In other words, they are more likely to be excellent overall when they work on the assumption that all children are capable of excellence. It is that vision which drives us. We believe that we can educate progressively more of our children to an ever higher standard and thus achieve the levels of fairness and social mobility that have long eluded us. The evidence shows us it can be done. And the challenge in 2011 is to follow the path which the evidence, so patiently acquired by Andreas and his team, tells us can liberate our children.