June’s Trades Council meeting decided that we should write to our three local MPs on Tuesday 20th June to express our support for the “Save Our Schools” Lobby of the House of Commons.
Here is the text of the letter sent:
“We are writing to record our support for the Lobby of Parliament that has been organised for today by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), the National Education Union (NEU), the National Governance Association (NGA) and UNISON.
The Save Our Schools lobby is an attempt to highlight:
The under-funding of education.
Last year the Government spent just 4.2 per cent of GDP on education compared with 5.6 per cent in 2010.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said: “We would still be expecting total school funding per pupil to return to about 2010 levels by 2024. This equates to a 14-year period with no overall real-terms growth in school funding per pupil, a significant squeeze on school resources in historical terms” (Sibieta, L. (2023). How big is the teacher pay offer in England? [Comment] Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-big-teacher-pay-offer-england)
An NAHT survey in November 2022 (“THE CLIFF EDGE: The nation’s underfunded overstretched school budgets”) revealed the detrimental measures school leaders report they have resorted to this year (2022/23) as a result of the current funding pressures:
– Almost four in five (79%) respondents said they will seek to reduce their school’s energy consumption
– Almost two thirds (60%) will reduce investment in essential equipment, including for example IT resources, and half (50%) will reduce investment in staff development and training
– More than half (51%) of senior leaders are taking on additional teaching responsibilities, which will greatly increase workload and further exacerbate the retention crisis
– Almost half (44%) will reduce spending on targeted interventions or pupils requiring additional support, and four in 10 (40%) will reduce non-educational support and services for children
Simon Allford, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, has been reported as saying that the funding for school repair projects announced by the government in May “only represents a small proportion of the amount needed” after several years of funding falling in real terms. A recent House of Commons report found DfE capital spending fell by 50% in real terms between 2009 and 2022.The government’s Building Conditions Survey of schools in England, which ran between 2017 and 2019 and covered more than 22,000 schools, found the total cost to fix capital estate defects would be £11.4bn. (“The Building” website, 23/05/23)
The Government’s failure to recruit enough teachers and retain support staff
According to the “Financial Times” on 13/12/2022, the latest OFSTED annual Report alerted the Government that “workforce and resourcing challenges had forced nurseries to close because they could not retain staff and had led to larger class sizes in schools and colleges, as well as disruption to activities such as drama and sport, mental health interventions and support for special needs children“.
The 5th Annual Report by the National Foundation for Educational Research into the “Teacher Labour Market in England” (published 23/03/23) found that: “The teacher recruitment and retention challenge in England has significantly intensified since the pandemic. Recruitment to initial teacher training (ITT) was considerably below target last year across a range of subjects and as of February 2023, this year’s ITT recruitment is likely to be little better than last year, while teacher vacancies are significantly higher than the year before the pandemic”. “The number of trainees recruited for most secondary subjects in 2022/23 was below their respective targets. Under-recruitment was most substantial in physics, design & technology and computing, which recruited less than a third of their respective targets”. “Last year’s under-recruitment of subject specialists is likely to further contribute to teacher shortages in subjects which schools already find it difficult to recruit for. Recent NFER research has shown that this leads to schools relying on strategies to mitigate against teacher shortages, such as relying more heavily on non-specialist and supply teachers to teach specific subjects, which have the potential to impact the quality of education for pupils (Worth and Faulkner-Ellis, 2022b)”. “Data on teacher vacancies collected by TeachVac, a teacher job board and data scraping service, shows that in the 2021/22 academic year the number of job vacancies for primary and secondary classroom teachers posted by state-sector schools in England was significantly higher than in previous years. By the end of the year, schools had posted a total of 81,468 job vacancies for teachers, which was 59 per cent higher than in 2018/19, the last year before the pandemic. This trend has continued into the 2022/23 academic year. In February 2023, teacher vacancies were 93 per cent higher than at the same point in the year before the pandemic and 37 per cent higher than in 2021/22”.
According to the House of Commons Library Report “Teacher retention and recruitment in England” (08/12/22)
“TALIS” (a five-yearly international, large-scale survey of teachers, school leaders and the learning environment in schools, administered by the OECD) found in 2018, that:
- Full-time lower secondary teachers in England reported working, on average, 49.3 hours a week. This was above the OECD average of 41 hours a week. The equivalent figure in England in TALIS 2013 was 48.2 hours a week.
- Full-time primary teachers in England reported working 52.1 hours a week. This was more than in any other participating country except Japan.
- 53% of primary teachers and 57% of lower-secondary school teachers felt that their workload was unmanageable.
According to “Schools Week” on 13/06/2023: “Pupil numbers have risen 27 per cent faster than teachers since 2017, with 3,600 more teachers needed to keep pace, analysis of official figures shows”. This article also highlights how staff shortages can lead to a negative feedback loop impacting the resource problem identified above: “Schools have sounded the alarm over “unprecedented” supply cover costs draining budgets amid soaring staff illness and widespread teacher shortages, costing the sector hundreds of millions a year”.
The retention crisis in education.
According to the BBC the purchasing power of teachers’ pay has fallen 11% since 2010.
According to “Schools Week” on the 08.06.23: “The rate of teachers leaving the state sector for reasons other than retirement grew to a record high last year, with nearly 40,000 departures. New school workforce data……shows that 39,930 teachers (8.8 per cent of the sector) left state schools in the 2021-22 academic year, up 7,800 on the previous year when 6.9 per cent left. This is the highest since data for the recent records from the 2010-11 census began”.
What is just as worrying is that a high proportion of teachers indicate that they are contemplating leaving the profession. The National Education Union (NEU) published data in April 2022 revealing that 44% of teachers planned to leave the profession by 2027. In a survey of 1,788 teachers, a fifth (22%) said they would leave within two years. Workload was a key motivation for 65% of respondents, while concerns about pay and the level of trust in teachers from the public and government were also significant factors.It seems clear to us that Parliament has a lot to do.
We hope that you will respond positively to the Save Our Schools lobby and resolve to address the issues raised”.