Tag: Department for Education

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 25 March 2011.

Following the first ever Church School Awards, held in London on 24 March 2011, Schools Minister Lord Hill said:

I am delighted to congratulate the regional and national winners of the first ever Church School Awards on their superb work. These schools have demonstrated their commitment to respecting and supporting other young people around the world as well as in their own local community.

Church schools make an important contribution to education in this country – not only in achieving good exam results, but also in nurturing young people to become real ambassadors for the ethos of their schools. It is wonderful to be able to celebrate this and see the links they have established in volunteering in local communities, fundraising for countries hit by disaster and building relationships with pupils around the world.

The Church School Awards website contains more details about the awards, including how to enter for next year.

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 23 March 2011.

The Department for Education has welcomed Chancellor George Osborne’s commitment in the Budget for an additional 12 new Technical Academies such as University Technical Colleges (UTCs).

These Academies will offer high quality vocational and technical education to give secondary pupils the skills they need and employers want.

The new money will mean at least 24 new Technical Academies will be set up across England by 2014.

These Academies will be sponsored by local businesses and local further or higher education institutions which would help set the ethos and curriculum of each Academy and provide support and work experience for students. They will have the freedom to employ lecturers and instructors working in relevant industries. Pupils will continue to study core academic subjects but will spend additional time on specialist vocational and technical training in areas such as engineering or construction. They can extend the working day for students and teachers and organise work experience with local firms.

Michael Gove MP said:

Professor Alison Wolf showed in her independent report on vocational education that thousands have been let down. There is an urgent need for more specialist Academies giving high quality technical and vocational education. The announcement today will mean many more children will have this opportunity.

Lord Kenneth Baker, co-founder of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust (BDET), said:

We are delighted that we have the backing of the Government on what we see as one of the most radical changes in education for a generation.

Mike Wright, Executive Director of Jaguar Land Rover, said:

Jaguar Land Rover welcomes the announcement by the Chancellor regarding the expansion of University Technical Colleges. It is essential for economic growth that we increase the number of young people prepared to work in engineering and manufacturing.

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 21 March 2011.

The School Teachers’ Review Body’s (STRB) recommendations on pay for those unqualified teachers who earn a full-time equivalent salary of £21,000 or less are being published today. The recommendations cover the first of two matters which were referred to the STRB in October 2010. I am grateful for the careful consideration which the STRB has given to this matter.

Copies of the STRB’s analysis and recommendations are available in the Vote Office, the Printed Paper Office and the Libraries of the House and from the Office of Manpower Economics.

The STRB has recommended that a non-consolidated payment of £250 should be made to those unqualified teachers who earn £21,000 or less; that the £250 is pro-rated for part-time unqualified teachers; and that consultation should seek to identify a simple and cost-effective method of payment.

I am grateful to the STRB for these recommendations which will apply to those unqualified teachers on scale points 1 to 3 and subject to consultees’ views, I intend to accept these recommendations.

My detailed response contains further information on these issues.

Annex to Written Ministerial Statement of 21 March 2011:

School Teachers’ Review Body’s (STRB’s) recommendations on pay for those unqualified teachers who earn a full-time equivalent salary of £21,000 or less and response from the Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove).

The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove): The STRB’s analysis and recommendations on pay for those unqualified teachers who earn a full-time equivalent salary of £21,000 or less are being published today. The recommendations cover the first matter which was referred to the STRB in October 2010. Copies of the analysis and recommendations are available in the Vote Office, the Printed Paper Office and the Libraries of the House and from the Office of Manpower Economics.

In making its recommendations, the STRB was required to have regard to items a-e set out in the remit letter of 27 October 2010. The recommendations apply to those unqualified teachers earning £21,000 or less in the context of the two-year public sector pay freeze that will affect teachers from September 2011; and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s instruction that there should be a minimum award of £250 in each of these two years. I am grateful for the careful attention the STRB has given to this matter.

The STRB is due to submit its 20th Report, which will include the recommendations set out below as well as recommendations on whether there should be a limit on the value of discretions that can be applied to head teachers’ pay, by 30 March. I propose, therefore, that the statutory consultation on the STRB’s recommendations (below) should wait until the 20th Report and my response to that report are published in due course. I will, however, accept comments in the meantime on the pay recommendations for unqualified teachers earning £21,000 or less.

Recommendations on pay for unqualified teachers earning £21,000 or less

The STRB has recommended that:

• A non-consolidated payment of £250 be made in both years to all full-time teachers on spine points 1-3 of the Unqualified Teachers’ scale;
• The £250 payment be pro-rated according to their working hours for part-time teachers on points 1-3 of the Unqualified Teachers’ scale;
• The Department consult, with a view to identifying a simple and cost-effective method of payment, and issue guidance as appropriate.

I am grateful to the STRB for its consideration of this issue and, subject to consultees’ views, I intend to implement the payment from September 2011. I also intend, subject to consultees’ views, for the school’s relevant body to decide how the £250 payment should be implemented.

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 17 March 2011.

More than 79,000 children have missed out on a place at their first-choice secondary school for this September, official statistics figures reveal today.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said too many pupils – nearly one in six – would be going to a secondary school that was not their top choice.

The statistics break down the secondary school offers made to more than 512,000 children by 151 local authorities in England on 1 March.

They show that nationally:

• 84.6% of children received an offer at their first-choice school. This is up 1.4 percentage points on last year.
• 95.6% were offered a place at one of their top three preferred schools. This is a 0.7 percentage point increase on 2010.

This year there were far fewer children applying for a similar number of secondary school places. The number of children decreased by 17,500 on 2010 while there were 1,200 fewer places available.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said:

More than 79,000 children missed out on their first choice of secondary school, nearly one in six of the entire year group, and more than 22,000 do not even get into any of their top three schools.

These figures expose the fact that there simply aren’t enough good schools.

Too many parents are forced to choose between schools which don’t deliver the academic standards and good behaviour they demand.

Yesterday’s OECD report underlined the serious problems in our school system and showed how far we have fallen behind other leading countries over the past decade. That is why we are restoring the integrity of the curriculum and exams, and giving more powers to teachers.

Our reforms to education, with a focus on raising standards of behaviour, trusting teachers and encouraging new schools to be established, are designed to deliver higher standards and genuine choice for parents.

Only when every school is regarded by parents as a good school will we be able to remove the anxiety parents suffer when choosing a school for their children.

Regional headlines

• The North East had the highest percentage of first preference offers at 94.3%
• Greater London had the lowest percentage at 66.2%.

Specific local authorities

• the Isle of Wight had the highest percentage of first preference offers, at 100%, followed by Cornwall and North East Lincolnshire with 99% and Central Bedfordshire with 98.6%
• apart from City of London (where there are no secondary schools), Slough had the lowest percentage of first preference offers at 46.2%, followed by Southwark (52.5%) and Wandsworth (55.5%)
• the biggest increase in first-choice preferences being met was in Trafford (11.5 percentage points), then North East Lincolnshire (11.4 percentage points)
• the biggest decrease in a first-choices preferences being met was Westminster (down 7.7 percentage points), followed by Kensington and Chelsea (6.6 per cent) and Camden (6.5 percentage points).

London headlines

Bexley had the highest percentage of first preference offers at 81.1%, followed by Newham at 79.9%. Apart from City of London (where there are no secondary schools), Southwark had the lowest percentage at 52.5%, followed by Wandsworth (55.5%).

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 15 March 2011.

Kingsford was one of the first schools in the country to introduce the study of Chinese into their curriculum and it now has one of the largest and most successful Chinese departments in the state sector. It was one of the first 5 Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) Confucius Classrooms in England. There are now 34.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said:

“Getting more young people to study a foreign language is vital to the social and economic future of our country. The introduction of the English Baccalaureate will encourage more pupils to take GCSEs in a broad range of academic subjects, including a language.

Schools like Kingsford are leading the way in language teaching. China is at the centre of the global economy, which is why it is important that our young people understand its culture and language.”

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 14 March 2011.

In response to the letter in the Guardian on Saturday 12 March 2011 about the SEN Green Paper:

Dear Sir

I was very disappointed to read the misrepresentation of the government’s green paper on special educational needs and disabilities (letters p.41 Saturday 12 March 2011).

The suggestion that government is trying to make children with complex needs ‘earn’ a place in a mainstream school is both offensive and inaccurate. At the heart of the green paper is the importance of parental choice. Parents know what type of education they want for their child and they should be allowed to decide if that is a mainstream or special school, academy or free school.

At no point do we suggest that one form of schooling is better or preferable for children with additional or complex needs – this is about parental choice, not the ideologically driven idea that the state knows best.

Sarah Teather MP, Children’s Minister

Department for Education

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 13 March 2011.

In response to the publication of Ofsted’s report entitled ‘History for All’, Schools Minister Nick Gibb said:

“It is worrying that Ofsted finds that many pupils lack a chronological understanding of history and are unable to make links between events. It is also a concern that secondary schools are squeezing history out of the curriculum or into general humanities courses. The facts, dates and narrative of history cannot be learnt in disparate chunks – without them we cannot compare, interpret or evaluate the past or draw lessons from them.

We are carrying out a root and branch reform of the national curriculum to set out the essential knowledge that children need, while leaving schools free to decide how to teach it. We are toughening up recruitment and training, attracting the brightest graduates, increasing the number of specialists, building a network of top class training schools, and transforming professional development throughout teachers’ careers. We have also introduced the English Baccalaureate so more pupils study the core academic GCSEs which we expect will lead to an increase in uptake of subjects like history.”

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 11 March 2011.

An independent review of the key skills that teachers need to improve students’ performance has been launched today.

Every new teacher must meet a series of standards to stay in the classroom – but the current standards aren’t rigorous, clear or effective enough.

In a recent survey, more than a third of teachers did not feel the current standards provided a good definition of teacher competence and 41 per cent believed that professional standards did not make any difference to the way they taught.

Instead of focussing on the essential skills of great teaching, the current standards are a vague list of woolly aspirations. For example, an experienced teacher must “contribute significantly, where appropriate, to implementing workplace policies and practice and to promoting collective responsibility for their implementation”.

The new approach will set out rigorous standards teachers should meet in order to:

• provide excellent teaching
• crackdown on bad behaviour
• improve pupils’ skills in the basics of English and maths
• provide better support to those pupils falling behind.

New standards will help raise the bar for performance and help identify those who need more support to improve. Under the current approach, teachers and headteachers say:

• it is hard to measure a teacher’s progress
• there is a lack of clarity about when a teacher is meeting the standards
• the standards do not fit easily with the procedures for tackling underperforming teachers.

The review will be led by Sally Coates, the outstanding Principal at Burlington Danes Academy in London. Other excellent headteachers, teachers and education experts will sit on the review.

They will recommend to Government a simple and clear set of key skills that teachers must meet. They will also review the GTCE Code of Conduct and consider how the standards fit with the new Ofsted inspection criteria.

The current bureaucratic standards are expected to be replaced from September 2012.

The current standards include:

• 33 standards a trainee teacher must meet in order to qualify for Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). Three are focused on how to “communicate effectively” and “have a commitment to collaboration and co-operative working”. Only two standards are explicitly about skills on how to teach effectively
• 120 pages of guidance to go with the QTS standards that trainee teachers are expected to follow
• a total of 102 standards teachers must meet across all levels. There are four core standards on ‘health and wellbeing’. Just two are on making sure they have a good ‘subject and curriculum knowledge’.

Education Secretary of State Michael Gove said:

We already have the best generation of teachers we’ve ever had working in our schools. But the progress being made by other nations to improve their education systems means that we need to redouble our efforts to transform our schools.

We are already expanding Teach First and focussing our reforms on attracting the best graduates into our schools. But we need to make sure that those already in the classroom are continuously improving.

Headteachers and teachers have told me in no uncertain terms that the current teachers’ standards are ineffective, meaningless and muddy, fluffy concepts. There is also no clear evidence that they help to improve standards.

That’s why we need clear standards that teachers can use to guide their development. I am delighted that one of the best headteachers in the country, Sally Coates, who has made it her mission to transform schools, has agreed to lead the Review.

Sally Coates, Chair of the Teachers’ Standards Review and Principal at Burlington Danes Academy in London, said:

Clear and focussed Teachers’ Standards that are relevant to classroom practice are key. They need to reflect the craft of teaching and be meaningful to teachers so that they can teach and develop to the best of their ability.

With more than a hundred different standards on top of the GTCE’s Code of Conduct, it has become bureaucratic and confusing for headteachers and teachers alike. That is why I welcome the opportunity to lead the review into Teachers’ Standards.

Ava Sturridge-Packer CBE, headteacher at St Mary’s Church of England Primary School in Birmingham, said:

As the educational landscape continues to change, it is timely for a review of the skills, dispositions and evaluations in teaching. They impact on the climate of teaching and learning in schools today.

Greg Wallace, Executive Principal of the London Fields and Woodberry Down Federation in Hackney, said:

The move towards defining clearer professional standards for teachers has been positive in many ways. Now is the time to go further, to seek to define unequivocally clear standards that ensure the best classroom practice becomes the norm.

There will always be huge scope for some exceptional teachers to develop new ideas. However, I think the new standards should give due weight to the importance of understanding how to teach reading, writing and maths. They should define a precise core of skills and knowledge to enable the best possible start for every child.

Patricia Sowter, Principal at Cuckoo Hall Academy in London, said:

I welcome a review of professional standards for teachers to achieve improved clarity, with a strong emphasis on excellent teaching and outcomes for children. Behaviour and conduct of teachers can be made explicit within the standards therefore eliminating the need for a separate GTCE code. I look forward to a review of the current Ofsted framework to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for schools.

Dr Dan Moynihan, Chief Executive of Harris Academies, said:

As things stand the existing Teachers Standards are poorly used. They are complicated and over burdensome and as a result too many schools make little reference to them beyond the 12 month induction period for new teachers. This is a lost opportunity.

We now have a chance to produce a more slimmed down, coherent and user friendly set of standards with recommendations on how these can be incorporated into the life of a school in a meaningful and practical way. It will help transform the quality of teaching and the lives of young people. It is long overdue.

Brian Lightman, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said:

The production of one explicit and concise set of professional standards for the whole teaching profession has the potential to greatly assist school leaders to maintain a consistently high standard of teaching throughout the service.

There are currently too many sets of standards relating to the teaching profession. This proliferation makes the standards very bureaucratic and difficult to use. This review is therefore to be welcomed if it leads to the production of one set of standards which can be applied to the whole profession.

This review comes as part of the Coalition Government’s plans to raise the status of the teaching profession and improve standards in schools.

The White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, says that raising the quality of teachers is the most vital reform if the education system in England is to become truly world-class.

The Teachers’ Standards Review will submit an interim report to the Secretary of State in July 2011, setting out the recommendations for the standards required of teachers to acquire QTS and to pass induction (Core).

A final report is expected during the autumn term making recommendations for the entire suite of teachers’ standards, with the new revised standards planned to come into effect from September 2012.

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 10 March 2011.

The Secretary of State today announced that he will launch an open competition to appoint a new chief schools adjudicator to replace Dr Ian Craig.

Dr Craig’s contract is due to expire in April 2012 and he and the Secretary of State have agreed it makes sense for his successor to take over in October this year to give them time to get up to speed ahead of the new admissions process.

As a result Dr Craig’s contract will end this autumn and the process will begin to find his successor.

Dr Ian Craig said:

“I would like to place on record my thanks to the Secretary of State and his Ministerial team who have shown me considerable support since they took office.

I would also like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to my team of fellow adjudicators and the officials in the Office of Schools Adjudicator, who have worked so hard and so professionally to ensure that the admissions system is as fair as we can possible make it.

With a new admissions process coming into force in 2012, I feel the time is right for a new chief adjudicator to take on the role. It has been my privilege to have held this post and I look forward to a smooth transition to my successor.”

Education Secretary Michael Gove said:

“I would like to place on record my deep appreciation for the rigour and hard work, as well as the professionalism and diligence that Dr Craig has brought to this post. With the implementation of a new slimmer Code and Admissions Framework, subject to the passage of the Education Bill, we both agree the time is right to appoint a new adjudicator.

Following discussions with Dr Craig, I am today announcing that we will shortly launch an open competition to appoint a new Chief Adjudicator. Dr Craig’s current contract was due to end in March 2012, but we have mutually agreed that it will be more appropriate for his contract to finish, with effect from 1 November 2011, following the delivery of his annual report.”

The press release issued by the Department for Education on 8 March 2011.

Alison Wolf is professor of public sector management at King’s College London. She completed a review of vocational education for the Department for Education in March 2011.

She wrote the following article for ‘The Times’ on 8 March 2011.

Should we care how two-thirds of English young people are educated? It sounds like a stupid question. But look at what we offer teenage students, and it seems obvious that, in fact, our elite hasn’t been bothered.

In England, as in every other developed country in the world, ‘staying on’ at school is now so normal that it hardly counts as a decision. Well over 90% of 16-year-olds continue education or formal training after their GCSEs, well in advance of it being made compulsory a few years from now.

Of these, only the minority are doing pure A levels, the route taken by pretty well every journalist, politician or senior civil servant. The large majority are not.

I have just completed a review, for government, of our majority – more commonly known as ‘vocational’ – education. I have recommended major changes because we are wasting billions of pounds a year educating young people for unemployment not employment. This is economically demented, and also flies in the face of English citizens’, and taxpayers’, legitimate aspirations and desires.

Vocational education courses are, of course, highly varied. They include Rolls-Royce or Airbus apprenticeships, where competition for a place is fiercer than for Oxbridge. BTEC National Diplomas lead to university for growing numbers of 18-year-olds; long-established craft qualifications feed into good careers.

But many vocational qualifications have no obvious market value at all. We have known this for years, from repeated high-quality research studies. They lead nowhere, other than to more, equally pointless qualifications. Schools and colleges are been rewarded for ‘making the numbers’; paid when people pass and penalised if they do not. So they have had a strong incentive to enter students for qualifications because they are easy, rather than because they are good for students. Many have duly done so.

However, ‘payment by results’ is only part of the problem. Vocational education has been distorted by a particularly strange case of English exceptionalism, which has put us completely at odds with the rest of the developed world.

Does this matter? Yes. As we have just discovered again, economies are not stable and predictable. Changing one’s occupation is the rule, not the exception, and the labour market rewards general skills. Everywhere else, specialisation has been duly postponed and a general core education is taken by all students until around 16. When vocational specialisation does begin, other countries combine it with a lot of general education as well.

And then there’s England. Here, vocational qualifications for young people have been developed, by government, in the most narrow of ways, based on the very specific skills of today’s economy. The theory is that this gives ‘business’ what it wants.

Yet it is not what employers want at all. These new government-sponsored qualifications are the ones which, time and time again, show zero or negative returns in the labour market. In other words, in practice, employers treat them as worthless.

More and more English 14- and 15-year-olds are now taking large numbers of vocational options. But no pupil that age, in the modern world, should be on a narrow track. That doesn’t mean giving up practical and vocational subjects altogether; one can easily deliver broad clusters of academic subjects, such as the coalition government’s new English Bacc, in 70% or 80% of the week. But early specialisation is economically stupid as well as deeply unfair to those involved.

Our current system is one of which we should be ashamed. Take maths and English, the most fundamental skills of all: the entrance tickets to A levels, top apprenticeships, university, the labour market. They are important because they matter in pretty well everything and are rewarded right through life.

In England, over half our 16-year-olds still fail to get good English and maths GCSEs. What I hadn’t realised until I carried out this review is that, 2 years later, over half still don’t have them; and that our education system has been placing huge barriers in their way. If you are paid by results – as sixth-forms have been – and steered by governments towards easy literacy and numeracy tests – as sixth-forms have been – GCSEs do not look very attractive. And so they have duly disappeared from the sixth-form curriculum.

It is simply not true that we are a nation with low aspirations. The mothers of 97% of new-borns, from all social classes, hope their children will go to university one day; parents of every social class are desperate to find good schools for their children. Our major parties are all, quite rightly, signed up to opportunity for all. But English government has been delivering education which systematically denies opportunities to huge numbers of young citizens. This is dreadful for them. It is bad and shameful for us all.