Teaching and leadership Teacher Training and Recruitment

1. Teaching and leadership • Teacher Training and Recruitment • Ceasing funding for initial teacher training for those graduates who do not have at least a 2:2 degree; • Expanding Teach First; • Financial incentives to attract more of the very best graduates in shortage subjects; • Enable more talented career changers to become teachers; • Increased classroom time for trainees; • Develop a national network of Teaching Schools; • Former servicemen to be  encouraged to become teachers, by developing a ‘Troops to Teachers’ programme; • Enhanced role for National College including training of chairs of Governors. • Reduce bureaucratic burdens on schools (SEF and FMSiS) • Schools are responsible for physical health and well being. • remove the duty on schools and colleges to cooperate with Children’s Trusts and abolish the requirement for local authorities to produce a Children and Young People’s Plan. • Locally, schools will be relied on to work together with voluntary, business and statutory agencies

2. Impact/Influence analysis High Impact Low Low High Influence

3. Impact • At least 1 Teaching school needed in all 8 ASHE areas. What is Primary/Special schools’ capacity. • Teaching schools become the hub of all Initial teacher training, staff development/ leadership development • Centres for Excellent teachers, Advanced skills teachers and Specialist Teachers. LLE work with training schools to provide support. • National (NLE)and Local Leaders of Education (LLE)– expansion of scheme.? NLE – LA for intervention, LLE -coordinated and deployed by teaching schools. • Need to coordinate across Essex Teaching schools, Funding and QA • Relationship to existing teacher training providers. • Removal of duty to cooperate with children’s trusts. LDGs future? Influence – • Essex Learning Partnership – already working with National College to develop models for teaching schools. • Role of school facilitators who liaises with schools and other agencies

4. Behaviour • The greatest concern voiced by new teachers and a very common reason experienced teachers cite for leaving the profession is poor pupil behaviour. The government will: • Increase the authority of teachers to discipline pupils by strengthening their powers to search pupils, issue same day detentions and use reasonable force where necessary. • Strengthen headteachers’ authority to maintain discipline beyond the school gates, improve exclusion processes and empower headteachers to take a strong stand against bullying, especially racist, homophobic and other prejudice-based bullying. • Change the current system of independent appeals panels for exclusions, so that they take less time and headteachers no longer have to worry that a pupil will be reinstated when the young person concerned has committed a serious offence. • Trial a new approach to exclusions where schools have new responsibilities for the ongoing education and care of excluded children. • Improve the quality of alternative provision, encouraging new providers to set up alternative provision as free schools. • Protect teachers from malicious allegations – speeding up investigations and legislating to grant teachers anonymity when accused by pupils. • Focus Ofsted inspection more strongly on behaviour and safety, including bullying, as one of four key areas. Inspection will consider whether pupils are and feel safe in school.

5. Impact • Exclusions and how will vulnerable students will be treated and by whom? Free Market provision? • Need new systems for alternative education and Children’s Support Services CSS • Cost of alternative provision moves to schools. • Locality provision? • NB - These are usually our most vulnerable pupils. Influence – • Behaviour and Attendance Partnerships if they still exist and work after this year? • Schools’ forum and LA • Heads associations/LA

6. Curriculum, assessment and qualifications • Review the National Curriculum, Expectations related to core subjects at every key stage; • Support for teaching of systematic synthetic phonics, as the best method for teaching reading; • Introduction of the English Baccalaureateto encourage schools to offer a broad set of academic subjects to age 16, whether or not students then go down an academic or vocational route; • Respond to Professor Alison Wolf’s review of vocational qualification with reforms to supportprogression to further and higher education and employment; • Raise to 17 by 2013 and then 18 by 2015 the age to which all young people will be expected to participate in education or training. • Introduce a simple test at age 6 of the ability to decode words; • Further assessment at age 11, as pupils complete primary education and age 16 as pupils complete compulsory schooling.

7. Impact • Not much about learning more about systems! • changes to national curriculum – staff workload and development of support materials. By whom? • Changes to the testing and assessment systems – evaluating performance. • Downgrading of Vocational education • Arts and creative subjects downgraded • Raising the participation age – to do what courses? Capacity • Influence • Via professional associations and via LAs

8. The new school system • Increase freedom and autonomy for all schools, removing unnecessary duties and burdens, and allowing all schools to choose for themselves how best to develop. • Restore for all academies the freedoms they originally had while continuing to ensure a level playing field on admissions particularly in relation to children with special educational needs. • Ensure that the lowest performing schools are considered for conversion to become academies to effect educational transformation. • Dramatically extend the academies programme. Every school judged by Ofsted to be outstanding or good with outstanding features which converts into an academy to commit to supporting at least one weaker school in return for academy status. In January 2011, special schools will be invited to apply to become academies as well.

9. The new school system 2 • Ensure that there is support for schools increasingly to collaborate through academy chains and multi-school trusts and federations. • Support teachers and parents to set up new free schools to meet parental demand, especially in areas of deprivation. • Give local authorities a strong strategic role as champions for parents, families and vulnerable pupils. They will promote educational excellence by ensuring a good supply of high quality school places, co-ordinating fair admissions and developing their own school improvement strategies to support local schools. All state schools, including academies and free schools, are bound by the Admissions Code and participate in fair access protocols. • Consult on a simplified and less prescriptive Admissions Code early in the new year so that a revised code is in place by July 2011. • As academy status becomes the norm, local authorities will increasingly move to a strategic commissioning and oversight role and will have the freedom to define what role they will play in supporting school improvement for local schools.

10. Impact • Academies – how do they relate to schools around them? • Free schools and University Technical Colleges • Changes in demography are already causing problems in some areas. • New Admissions code – parents choosing between schools and academies who might not have traditional catchments! • LA central funding devolved to academies • LAs role and functions • Influence – • ELP/Governors/Parents/LA.

11. Accountability • Reform performance tables so that they set out our high expectations – every pupil should have a broad education (the English baccalaureate), a firm grip of the basics and be making progress. • Institute a new measure of how well deprived pupils do and introduce a measure of how young people do when they leave school. • Reform Ofsted inspection, so that inspectors spend more time in the classroom and focus on key issues of educational effectiveness, rather than the long list of issues they are currently required to consider. • Establish a new ‘floor standard’ for primary and secondary schools • Make it easier for schools to adopt models of governance which work for them – including smaller, more focused governing bodies

12. Impact • New performance tables introduces new winners and losers • English Bac will create more failure in deprived areas. • Changes in floor standards – more schools deemed failing. • Change in Ofsted focus • Changes in the ways we monitor progress across areas. • Smaller governing bodies – more professional ? How is that done? • Influence – • VIA professional associations and ELP

13. School improvement • Make clear that schools – governors, headteachers and teachers – have responsibility for improvement. We will end the requirement for every school to have a local authority school improvement partner (SIP) and end the current centralised target-setting process. • Instead, increase the number of National and Local Leaders of Education – headteachers of excellent schools committed to supporting other schools • Develop teaching schools to make sure that every school has access to highly effective professional development support. • Make it easier for schools to learn from one another, through publishing ‘families of schools’ data from next year for every part of the country, setting out in detail how similar schools in a region perform, so that schools can identify from whom it is possible to learn.

14. School improvement • Make sure that schools have access to evidence of best practice, high-quality materials and improvement services, which they can choose to use. • Free local authorities to provide whatever forms of improvement support they choose. • Ensure that schools below the floor standard receive support, and ensure that those which are seriously failing, or unable to improve their results, are transformed through conversion to academy status. • Encourage local authorities and schools to bring forward applications to the new Education Endowment Fund for funding for innovative projects to raise the attainment of deprived children in underperforming schools. • Establish a new collaboration incentive, worth £35 million each year, which financially rewards schools which effectively support weaker schools and demonstrably improve their performance. • As the National Strategies and other field forces come to an end, support a new market of school improvement services with a much wider range of providers and services available for schools to choose from.

15. Impact • Academies and academy chains could fragment the Essex school system unless we have an overarching coordinating body to provide and broker school to school support. • ‘Families of Schools’ data produced by whom and accessed by whom. • Schools ‘supported’ to improve – by whom? • Education Endowment Fund for LAs and groups of schools to bid for raising achievement projects • New collaboration incentive for schools supporting others • Influence • LA/Heads Associations/Unions

16. School funding • Target more resources on the most deprived pupils over the next four years, through a new pupil premium. • Consult, in the spring of 2011, on developing and introducing a clear, transparent and fairer national funding formula based on the needs of pupils, to work alongside the pupil premium. • Ensure that considerations of possible reforms to the school funding system take into account the needs of vulnerable pupils, such as those with highly complex special educational needs and those being educated outside mainstream education. • In the meantime, increase the transparency of the current funding system by showing both how much money schools receive and what they spend their funds on. • End the disparity in funding for 16-18 year olds, so that schools and colleges are funded at the same levels as one another. • Take forward the conclusions of the review of capital spending, cutting bureaucracy from the process of allocating capital funding and securing significantly better value for money. Over the next four years there will be a 60 per cent real terms reduction in education capital spending,. • Expect schools to save at least £1 billion on procurement and back office spend by 2014-15.

17. Impact • Schools funding such as extended schools money and other grants amalgamated into the main funding and not ring fenced. Schools able to spend their funds as they see fit. • Grants previously administered by the LA now devolved to schools • Pupil premium to support pupils with Free school meals (deprivation measure) • Special Needs funding to be revised • National Formula funding to be introduced • Changes to the funding of 16-19 – ‘more for less’. Reducing funding of sixth forms in schools. Reducing funding of ‘learner hours’ for all providers • Increase in apprenticeships • 60% reduction in capital spending • Schools expected to save £1b in procurement and ‘back office’ costs by 2014/15 • Influence • Very little – DfE regaining centralist control of funding. Lobbying by all concerned.

18. Spending Review Schools’ budgets static Standards funds amalgamated into main schools’ grant (DSG) Funding this year will be as last plus £430 per pupil on FSM as Pupil Premium. Teachers pay increase from last year not fully funded – 1% increase in costs. Incremental drift – not funded. Increases in NI. Reductions in post sixteen funding. Staff Cost inflation and general pressures of inflation on other services. Impact Reductions in staffing and provision in schools Increase in Pupil teacher ratios and adult to teacher ratios Collaboration funding put under strain. Post sixteen provision put under strain. More limited choice as schools and colleges rationalise provision.

19. Wolf report • The review analyses the youth labour market to demonstrate the massive reductions in youth employment, universal aspirations for higher education and the frequent changes in job, occupation and sector which diminish the value of very specialised vocational qualifications for young people. • The report is highly critical of some vocational qualifications for being obscure, over-specialised and fragmented. It is particularly scathing on some foundation learning opportunities and of courses which don't offer clear routes of progression to employment or higher education. The data suggests that some qualifications actually lower life time earnings. • The offer of some courses is driven by funding requirements rather than the students' best interests. • Meaningful work experience is one of the most important factors in gaining decent employment. Apprenticeships can be very effective. • Given frequent changes in careers and the economy, generalised and academic skills are highly important. We should not be closing down options for younger students.

20. The report recommends an 80% academic curriculum for all children up to 16, with the remaining vocational opportunities available to all, regardless of ability. Different teaching methods rather than subject content are recommended for disaffected or low achieving students. • Students who fail to achieve basic standards for Maths and English should be encouraged to resit them post-16, using alternative structures and content. • Funding should follow the student rather than the qualification. And we should focus on coherent programmes of study rather than qualifications. • Apprenticeships should be better funded, if they are genuinely focused on learning. • Schools should be able to employ FE lecturers (QTLS) and FE Colleges should be able to enroll students from 14 onwards. • We should distinguish clearly between adult and young person vocational training. The same strategies will not be appropriate for each group - e.g. c

21. Green Paper SEN • Replace statements with single-assessment process and a combined education, health and care plan. • Ensure assessment and plans run from birth to 25 years. • Replace school action and school action plus with simpler school based systems • Overhaul teacher training and professional development to better help pupils • Allow greater independence in Local Authority Assessments • Enable outside organisations to bid to run Every Child a Talker , Every Child a Reader and Every Child Counts programme.