Education Journal No. 239

EDUCATION

JOURNAL No. 239

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ISSN: 1364-4505

Monday 6 July, 2015

New safeguarding advice for schools and childcare providers

he Education Secretary has announced new advice and social media guidance for schools and childcare providers to help them keep children safe from the risk of radicalisation and extremism. Nicky Morgan said that schools could build the resilience of young people and promote fundamental British values by providing safe places in which children could discuss controversial issues and be given the knowledge and confidence to challenge extremist beliefs and ideologies.

The advice has been published to coincide with the new prevent duty, introduced as part of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which legally requires a range of organisations including schools, local authorities, prisons, police and health bodies to take steps to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. The new advice published complements the statutory guidance and intends to help schools and childcare providers by: • Clarifying what the prevent duty means for schools and childcare providers.

• Outlining what they can do to help protect children from the risk of

radicalisation.

• Making clear what schools and childcare providers should do to

demonstrate compliance with the duty.

• Informing them about other sources of information, advice and support.

The Government has also published advice for schools on how social media is being used by extremist groups to encourage young people to travel to Syria and Iraq. It warns every teacher to be aware of the risks posed by the online activity of extremist and terrorist groups and look out for the signs of radicalisation.

The Government is considering what more can be done to support schools and childcare providers in carrying out their safeguarding work, including delivering training and ensuring schools have access to quality-assured classroom resources.

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In this issue Coasting schools and the Education Bill Pages 4, 16, 26 and 27

The pupil premium Page 15

U3A Pages 18 and 19

NUT report on exam factories Pages 7 and 24

OECD report: children of immigrants Page 22

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Comment Coasting schools, coasting legislation There is remarkably little evidence behind the Government’s legislative plans for coasting schools.

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Have schools become exam factories?

The NUT has just published research it commissioned on the impact of accountability measures on children and young people.

News New safeguarding advice for schools The Education Secretary has announced new advice and social media guidance for schools to help them keep children safe from the risk of radicalisation and extremism.

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Ofsted’s new Online Safety survey Ofsted has revealed data from a survey of online safety practice across all HMI-led inspections during March 2015. The survey referenced a discussion on online safety issues with senior leaders, staff, governors and staff across 39 primary schools and 45 Secondary schools’ inspections.

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Pupil premium funding unclaimed £50 million of Pupil Premium funding from the DfE is lying unclaimed by London schools, according to Brian Durrant, CEO of not-for-profit education trust The London Grid for London.

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Rise of machines causes skills shortage The advance of robotics and 3D printing is boosting the demand for highly-skilled, IT literate workers in the UK’s advanced manufacturing sector, according to a new study by the Government’s skills experts the UK Commission for Employment and Skills.

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Business-university research collaboration BIS has published the Dowling Review of BusinessUniversity Research Collaborations, which shows that strategic business-university research collaborations provide a myriad of benefits to their participants.

Language skills gap at age 5 revealed Research from Read On. Get On, a coalition of charities, teachers and businesses, has found that up to a third of disadvantaged children start school without the language skills they need to learn to read.

Confiscating unhealthy foods The Education Minister, Lord Nash, has told the House of Lords that teachers can lawfully “confiscate, keep or destroy” unhealthy snacks in children’s school lunchboxes. But he added that the child and a second member of staff should be present during the search and parents must be warned that searches could take place.

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Design and Technology GCSE content The Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, has publishing design and technology GCSE content that aims to assess both breadth and depth of knowledge, without limiting students on the materials they can work with.

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School standards, not structures According to the LGA, councils are calling for high performing maintained schools to be able to sponsor struggling schools without having to go through academy status first.

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Ofqual Director for General Qualifications Dr Ian Stockford has been appointed as Ofqual’s new Executive Director for General Qualifications.

Two more free schools rated inadequate Two new free schools have been rated as inadequate

by Ofsted.

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Are schools ready for the budget squeeze?

The National School Procurement Survey aims to provide a national picture of how schools are preparing for a predicted budget squeeze between now and 2020 due to a combination of increases in national insurance and pension contributions, rising pupil numbers and an anticipated government freeze on real terms funding increases.

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People Margaret Clark wins national award Professor Margaret Clark has won the Academic Book Award presented by the UK Literacy Association.

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Research Baseline assessment NFER Reception Baseline Assessment is a face-to-face resource-based assessment with a mixture of tasks and observational checklists for Early Years practitioners.

No link between academy status and performance NFER has just published research evidence that shows that there is no significant difference in overall school performance between academies and similar maintained schools in 2014. This is the conclusion from the Analysis of Academy School Performance in GCSEs 2014 report, commissioned by the Local Government Association.

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Social class more than ethnicity a barrier to friendship New research, Children’s and Adults’ Friendships across Social Class and Ethnic Difference by the UCL Institute of Education and the University of Surrey, has revealed that primary schools generate friendships and supportive social relationships for both children and their parents or carers. The study found that children commonly made friendships with others from different ethnic groups, but that social class was more of a barrier.

Evidence of benefits of school music tuition inconclusive A study by NatCen Social Research examining the impact on attainment of providing musical instrument tuition in school, as compared with drama and singing classes, has found inconclusive results. The study, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, highlights the challenges of providing music tuition as a major barrier to any effect on attainment.

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Features How effective is the pupil premium?

Tracy Coryton reports on the National Audit Office report, Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils, which has warned that it will take time for the full impact of the Pupil Premium to become clear. While the early signs are that the Department for Education’s funding for disadvantaged pupils has the potential to bring about a significant improvement in outcomes, the Department and schools will need to do more to realise it.

Coasting schools The Government reveals what it thinks a coasting school is.

New technology revolution brings ‘learning windfall’ to 500,000 third-agers Ian Nash reports on how the University of the Third Age is to give almost 500,000 adults greater access to online education in their homes and community-based groups throughout the United Kingdom.

Conferences Tackling degree inflation The new Universities Minister, Jo Johnson, addresses the Universities UK conference.

Mental health a ‘top priority’ At the Royal College of Psychiatrists International Congress in Birmingham, the Minister of State for Community and Social Care, Alistair Burt, announced his priorities for children’s mental health.

Support for part-time students The Vice-Chancellor of The Open University has warned that policy and funding changes in England over the last five years have had a major impact on the number of people studying part-time.

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International Discrimination and poor job prospects hit children of immigrants The children of immigrants continue to face major difficulties integrating in OECD countries, especially in the European Union, where their poor educational outcomes leave many struggling to find work, according to a new OECD/EU report. Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2015: Settling In found that young people with immigrant parents experienced nearly 50 per cent more unemployment in the European Union than those with native-born parents.

HIV risk reduced by longer schooling Researcher believe that secondary school education can alter the risk of HIV infection. A new study indicates that an extra year of secondary schooling could substantially reduce the risk of HIV contraction.

Reference Document review The NUT report Exam Factories is reviewed.

Consultations Consultations published last week.

Parliament – Committees The Education and Adoption Bill The first meeting of the Public Bill Committee taking the Education and Adoption Bill took evidence from expert witnesses.

Parliament – Debates BIS oral questions Education and training oral questions to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

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Post-study visas for overseas students Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con, Life) asked the Government whether it would consider reintroducing a post-study visa for international students studying at bona fide higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

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Sustainable development goals The co-chairman of the all-party group on global education for all, Mark Williams (LDP, Ceredigion) introduced a debate on education and the sustainable development goals and financing global education.

Parliament – Questions

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Parliament – Questions Written questions to the DfE Languages – GCE A-level. Sixth form colleges and VAT. Written questions to BIS The finance of further education.

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Coasting Schools

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ast week the Government revealed what it meant by coasting schools, in draft regulations issued at 10.00 pm on Monday night. The following morning the House of Commons Public Bill Committee dealing with the Education and Adoption Bill held its first meeting. Labour’s Shadow Schools Minister, Kevin Brennan, complained that the Bill had been rushed and the draft regulations were also rushed and not thought through. He had a point, although also a large dose of amnesia as he appeared to have forgotten that the last Labour government was far worse. There was a time when it rammed two education or children’s Bills a year onto the statute book, with clauses in one Bill amending another which had become law only a few weeks earlier.

The Public Bill Committee spent its first day taking evidence from a large number of expert witnesses. Mr Brennan is not alone in thinking that there is a certain lack of clarity, to put it politely, about the Government’s plans. The Conservatives have a fair point in wanting to tackle coasting schools. As the NAHT general secretary, Russell Hobby, pointed out in his evidence to the committee, whether this is the way to do it is another matter.

While the Bill does not mean automatic academisation for coasting schools, it is the Government’s preferred solution and the Bill will allow regional schools commissioners to go down that road pretty rapidly if they wish. Yet it is far from clear that this will address the problem. Doing some fast number crunching, the Local Schools Network has calculated that 814 secondary schools would be defined as coasting under the Government’s regulations, and 342 of them are already academies. A high proportion of these are converter academies.

Malcolm Trobe of ASCL was surely right when he said that there was not a difference between coasting maintained schools and academies and that all schools should be judged on the same range of indicators. Yet the Bill applies the definition of coasting only to maintained schools. The Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, quickly announced that the Government would apply the same definition to academies, yet there is nothing in the Bill to indicate how the Government will tackle coasting academies.

Last week also saw NFER publish research, also reported in this issue, that there is no significant difference in overall school performance between academies and similar maintained schools. The report, Analysis of Academy School Performance in GCSEs 2014, explores the association between academy status for secondary schools and the attainment of pupils in 2014 GCSE exams, by comparing sponsored and converter academies that have been open for between two and four years and a group of maintained schools that had similar characteristics at the time the schools became academies. While there were no short-term benefits in improved school performance that could be associated with the converter academy status, it is early days yet as almost all converter academies have been open for three years or less.

What became clear from the evidence session of the Public Bill Committee is just how little hard evidence lies behind the proposed legislation. For example, Emma Knights of the National Governors’ Association: “We actually have very little evidence about which different types of formal intervention work best and that is a bit of a worry for me. This whole Bill has come into place when actually we are guessing.”

Dr Lee Elliott Major of the Sutton Trust on ignoring parents in a forced academisation: “I always come back to the evidence on that, and we have very little evidence. We know that parents have a huge impact on children’s outcomes, but we have little evidence of what interaction is supportive and what works and what does not work. It is not a fudge, but there is no evidence to know which way it would go.” Russell Hobby of NAHT: “The evidence that the structural change to academy status will stop a school from coasting is not as strong as the Government might wish. Other interventions might be more appropriate.”

The previous Coalition Government paid lip service to evidence based policy making. Perhaps this Bill would be a good place for the new government to demonstrate its commitment to the same principle.

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Language skills gap at age five revealed

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esearch from Read On. Get On, a coalition of charities, teachers and businesses, has found that up to a third of disadvantaged children start school without the language skills they need to learn to read. The Ready to Read report shows that disadvantaged children are 15 months behind their more advantaged peers by the age of five. The report highlights the crucial role of local services, including children’s centres and libraries, in helping to support parents in developing their children’s early language.

It showcases the success of the three National Literacy Trust Hubs, which are partnerships with councils and a wide range of local organisations in Middlesbrough, Bradford and Peterborough, to embed literacy services in the local community. In the Bradford Hub, the Early Words Together programme is being delivered in children’s centres to empower parents to support their child’s early language development, along with a targeted project to engage fathers in their child’s school readiness.

Ready to Read also recognises the need for integration between literacy and health, and highlights how this is a key focus the Middlesbrough Hub. The partnership with South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Middlesbrough Council involved 3,000 free reading packs being given out to new mothers and children at a local hospital. Volunteers handing out the packs had been trained to talk to parents about the importance of reading to their children from an early age.

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Pupils to have unhealthy food confiscated

he Education Minister, Lord Nash, has told the House of Lords that teachers can lawfully “confiscate, keep or destroy” unhealthy snacks in children’s school lunchboxes. But he added that the child and a second member of staff should be present during the search and parents must be warned that searches could take place.

During questions in the Lords about powers that teachers had to inspect lunchboxes and confiscate unsuitable items. Lord Nash said it was up to school governors to decide whether to ban certain products to promote healthy eating. But the independent Labour Peer, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, strongly criticised the Government for allowing teachers to undermine parents over the contents of their children’s lunchboxes.

He argued that the decision was the nanny state writ large and he insisted that it was incomprehensible that a Conservative Government had given powers to teachers that totally undermined the authority of parents.

Lord Stoddart said he would like to know what qualifications teachers had to determine what was healthy for pupils to eat and what was not. He added that teachers did not even seem to be under an obligation to inform parents that items had been confiscated. Lord Stoddart said that in view of some of the heavily sugared and unhealthy dishes served in some schools, the move struck him as the height of hypocrisy. He concluded that the dramatic expansion of the powers of teachers had not been properly thought through and it smacked of the dead hand of political correctness.

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Design and technology GCSE

he Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, has publishing design and technology GCSE content that aims to assess both breadth and depth of knowledge, without limiting students on the materials they can work with. Current design and technology GCSEs have a wide range of titles each of which is focused on separate material areas (such as resistant materials, textiles or graphics).

The new content will support a single qualification title, a change which subject experts believe is critical to the development of a qualification that requires students to have a broad knowledge of the design processes, materials, techniques and equipment that are core to the subject. The content emphasises iterative processes of designing which all students should understand and be able to demonstrate.

Subject experts have advised that such processes are at the core of contemporary practice. By teaching students this approach, the new qualification will prepare them for further study and careers in design, engineering, manufacturing and related areas. The content also sets out the mathematical and scientific content that students must know and use that relate closely to design and technology.

School standards, not structures

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ccording to the LGA, councils are calling for high performing maintained schools to be able to sponsor struggling schools without having to go through academy status first. With more than 80 per cent of council maintained schools currently rated as “good” or “outstanding”

by Ofsted, local government leaders are calling for central government to remove the bureaucratic barriers currently stopping councils from intervening in underperforming schools and allow high performing maintained schools to play a direct part in raising education standards and improve life chances, including taking on the running of failing academies.

The Local Government Association argued that councils have a good track record of raising education standards. It cited a new research report by the NFER which revealed that, on average, pupils attending maintained schools achieved the same high standard of GCSE results in 2014 as those attending academies. With the Department for Education already halting the expansion of some of the largest academy chains in response to over-rapid growth, the LGA is concerned that there is a lack of potential academy sponsors to take on large numbers of additional schools.

Councils are already reporting that a lack of sponsors is hampering their ability to open new schools as academies, as required by law. Cllr David Simmonds CBE, Chairman of the LGA’s Children and Young People Board, said that councils were education improvement partners and they were not a barrier to change. He argued that the Education and Adoption Bill provided the ideal opportunity to right the wrong and allow councils and the best maintained schools to share expertise and provide support to school leadership teams to ensure standards rapidly improved.

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Two more free schools rated inadequate Two new free schools have been classed as inadequate by Ofsted inspectors who highlighted flaws in the quality of teaching and learning as well as failings in the schools’ leadership and pupil behaviour.

The Ofsted reports for Robert Owen Academy, a secondary school in Hereford, and St Anthony’s primary school in Gloucestershire, mean that Ofsted has rated a quarter of the 93 mainstream free schools inspected so far as inadequate or requiring improvement.

Inspectors were particularly critical of discipline and pupil safety at Robert Owen Academy, which opened in September 2013 and has 49 pupils.

Oftsed inspectors were also critical of St Anthony’s in Cinderford which they placed into special measures and recommended that it should be barred from appointing newly qualified teachers.

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Survey asks schools if they are ready for budget squeeze

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chool business managers, headteachers, bursars and governors in schools across England are being urged to take part in the third annual National School Procurement Survey. The survey, which is run by the national register of education suppliers Incensu.co.uk, aims to provide a national picture of how schools are preparing for a predicted budget squeeze between now and 2020 due to a combination of increases in national insurance and pension contributions, rising pupil numbers and an anticipated government freeze on real terms funding increases.

NSPS15, which runs until the end of July, is being backed by Incensu partners the National Association of School Business Management, school support and resource service TheSchoolBus and Minerva Procurement Consulting. The National Association of Headteachers is also supporting the survey.

The results of NSPS15 which will be completely anonymous will be shared with schools, professional associations, education policy makers, unions and education suppliers in the autumn.

Have schools become exam factories?

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he NUT has published independent research it commissioned on the impact of accountability measures on children and young people. Exam Factories? The Impact of Accountability Measures on Children and Young People by Professor Merryn Hutchins and Dr Naveed Kazmi of London Metropolitan University is a wide ranging research project incorporating a survey of almost 8,000 teachers, an extensive literature review and quantitative research utilising case studies of both heads and teachers (not all of whom were NUT members) and children.

The research demonstrates the negative impact on children and young people in England of the current range of accountability measures in schools. Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that the report was “essential reading for Government and policy makers of all political hues. It demonstrates in vivid terms that the accountability agenda of Government and Ofsted is having deep-rooted and negative effects on both primary and secondary pupils. It is also clear that this will worsen on the new Government’s watch and spread to both teachers and children in Early Years settings.”

Mr Courtney felt that schools felt enormous pressure to “placate the whims of Government and Ofsted. Teachers at the sharp end are saying this loud and clear: ‘If it isn’t relevant to a test then it is not seen as a priority.’ The whole culture of a school has become geared towards meeting Government targets and Ofsted expectations. As this report shows, schools are on the verge of becoming ‘exam factories’.”

Lucie Russell, Director of Campaigns at Young Minds, said: “The findings of this research are very concerning as they demonstrate that both pupils and teachers are under a lot of pressure to achieve results in a pressure cooker, exam factory environment … Young people are growing up in a really pressurized, fast paced world and they need to learn the skills to navigate this new world successfully – character education, resilience building and life skills are all just as important as exam results. A young person can have the best grades possible but if they can’t cope or deal with the harsh realities of modern life then our education system is failing them.”

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The report is reviewed in the Document Review section of this issue.

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Ofsted’s new Online Safety in Schools survey

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fsted has revealed data from a survey of online safety practice across all HMI-led inspections during March 2015. The survey referenced a discussion on online safety issues with senior leaders, staff, governors and staff across 39 primary schools and 45 Secondary schools’ inspections.

The main findings were: • 25 per cent of secondary students can not recall if they have been taught about online safety over

the last 12 months.

• 5 per cent of schools do not have an Online Safety policy in place.

• Only 74 per cent of students were aware that they had an online safety policy.

• A significant majority of schools still do not allow the use of personal devices.

Other findings include: • In terms of students influencing online safety policy, a significant majority of schools do not involve student contribution. In 2010, Ofsted concluded that the contribution of children was a characteristic in schools with outstanding online safety practice and recommended had this as a priority.

• Assemblies and computing/ICT lessons are the main focus for online safety teaching for many schools, although PSHE lessons play a significant role in the delivery of online safety in some schools.

• In 2010, the Safe Use of New Technologies report had recommended that more focus would be required on developing a curriculum for e-safety which built on what pupils had learnt before and which reflected their age and stage of development. Whilst there was evidence that some schools had embedded this across the wider curriculum, there was inconsistency in the provision of an online safety curriculum with scope and sequence.

• Just over a quarter of secondary students lacked confidence in their teacher’s knowledge of online safety issues.

• Staff training was inconsistent, and what senior leaders might see as training was not reflected by staff. Anecdotal feedback suggested that staff development in online safety was often reactive as emergency training was delivered if there had been an incident.

• While staff have confidence in recognising, responding to and resolving online safety issues, it is slightly stronger in secondary schools than in primary schools.

• From the data presented reporting is the weakest area of school practice it terms of online safety.

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Pupil Premium funding unclaimed by London schools

50 million of Pupil Premium funding from the DfE is lying unclaimed by London schools, according to Brian Durrant, CEO of not-for-profit education trust The London Grid for London. Mr Durrant is urging London parents to visit the Trust’s Free School Meal Eligibility Checker www.fsm.lgfl.net to ensure that their child receives a nourishing lunch time meal and their school receives the funding to provide the extra support they require.

As an incentive to parents LGfL, which bulk buys Internet connectivity, associated services and engaging digital curriculum content for their 2,500-strong community of schools, is offering those that register free Sophos AntiVirus software for the PCs and laptops used by their children at home. Nationally, it is estimated £350 million of the £2.5 billion funding remains unclaimed by 200,000 parents and schools.

Rise of the machines causing skills shortages

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he advance of robotics and 3D printing is boosting the demand for highly-skilled, IT literate workers in the UK’s advanced manufacturing sector, according to a new study by the Government’s skills experts the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. The global advanced manufacturing market is predicted to double in size to £750 billion by 2020, largely driven by developments in new technologies.

But the UKCES report, Skills and Performance Challenges in the Advanced Manufacturing Sector, warns that the advances achieved through automation are at risk if the right people with the right skills are not available to support them. The sector is already experiencing difficulties in recruiting the right people as employers are nearly twice as likely to report a hard to fill vacancy than in the economy as a whole. IT skills, understanding of complex materials and the ability to translate digital design into real-world production are set to be some of the most important skills for those working in advanced manufacturing sectors, from assembly workers to production engineers.

In particular, quality assurance is becoming a key skill, and one that is holding back advances in the sector. The report points out that the number of high-skilled jobs in the sector is projected to increase, as the importance of R&D raises demand for workers with higher degrees and specialisms. While the search for high-performing staff will also make the UK workforce more international in nature, the growing automation of production processes will lead to a reduction in low skill and machine operative roles.

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Keeping business-university research collaborations simple

he Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published the Dowling Review of BusinessUniversity Research Collaborations, which shows that strategic business-university research collaborations provide a myriad of benefits to their participants. For academics, these benefits can include the opportunity to address challenging research questions with real-world applications, see their research have tangible impacts and gain access to new skills, data or equipment.

Companies can improve business performance through developing new techniques or technologies, de-risk investment in ‘The report research, and extend the capabilities and expertise available to the firm. Investment in collaborative R&D also delivers benefits to the suggests that because UK, driving growth and productivity improvements for firms and high innovation is a quality research outputs. The review points out that while the UK has complex, non-linear played host to many successful business-university collaborations, it is not reaping the full potential provided by the opportunity to connect process, the innovative businesses from the UK and overseas with the excellence complexity of in the UK’s academic research base. the UK’s innovation

The report stresses that government has a crucial role in fostering the conditions under which such collaborations can happen ecosystem is not at scale and deliver enduring impacts for all parties involved. The key surprising and messages from the review are that public support for the innovation may be to a system is too complex and business-university collaboration is an important component of the innovation ecosystem. The report degree inevitable.’ suggests that because innovation is a complex, non-linear process, the complexity of the UK’s innovation ecosystem is not surprising and may be to a degree inevitable.

However, the complexity of the policy support mechanisms for research and innovation poses a barrier to business engagement in collaborative activities, especially for small businesses. It also makes it difficult for government to take a systems view of its support mechanisms for research and innovation. The over-arching recommendation of the review is therefore that government should seek to reduce complexity wherever possible and, where simplification is not possible, every effort should be made to ensure that the interface to businesses and academics seeking support for collaborative R&D is as simple as possible, even if internally the system of schemes is complex.

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Margaret M Clark OBE wins national award

rofessor Margaret M Clark OBE, Visiting Professor at Newman University and Emeritus Professor, The University of Birmingham, has been chosen as the winner of the Academic Book Award in the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s annual awards 2015, for her book, Learning to be Literate: Insights from research for policy and practice. She will receive the award at the UKLA’s 51st International Conference in Nottingham.

Professor Clark said that children’s literacy levels had a significant bearing on their life chances and it was crucial that educators - parents, teachers, advisers and not least policy makers, learned from research and understood how Margaret Clark literacy was developed effectively. The book charts over 50 years of research into the subject, and puts to bed some myths about childhood literacy where they fly in the face of research evidence. The awards were judged by a panel of teachers, head teachers, consultants and Higher Education lecturers, which was tasked with identifying a book that would make a lasting, significant contribution to the teaching of English.

They described Professor Clark’s book as “a moving record, of vital importance to classroom teachers.” Professor Peter Lutzeier, Vice Chancellor at Newman University, said he was delighted for Margaret that her work had been publicly acknowledged with the award. He added that her work as a primary school teacher, clinical psychologist and lecturer had given her a unique overview of the subject and he believed that her book would become a mainstay for early childhood educators. The book is distributed by Witley Press and is available from Amazon at £16.50.

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Ofqual

r Ian Stockford has been appointed as Ofqual’s new Executive Director for General Qualifications.

The role oversees Ofqual’s general qualifications directorate, which has responsibility for qualification accreditation, standards and awarding. Dr Stockford will report directly to Chief Regulator, Glenys Stacey. Dr Stockford joined Ofqual in 2014 as Deputy Director of Research and Analysis.

His previous roles include Head of Research at AQA and as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham.

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Baseline assessment

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he Department for Education has confirmed the National Foundation for Educational Research as one of three approved suppliers of the new reception baseline assessment for use by schools in September 2015. NFER Reception Baseline Assessment is a face-to-face resource-based assessment with a mixture of tasks and observational checklists. Everything needed to conduct the assessment is included in the NFER Reception Baseline Assessment pack and no additional training is required for Early Years practitioners to administer the assessment.

The assessment uses resources that children would typically find in an Early Years Foundation Stage classroom, such as counting bears, plastic shapes, number cards and picture cards. It is easy to administer and is designed to be carried out by any Early Years practitioner, with no additional training needed.

Children work through the activities, taking around 30 minutes in total, while the practitioner records the child’s progress either on a laptop or tablet or in the individual paper pupil booklets.

Responding to the Government’s announcement that they are to introduce reception baseline assessment, Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said they were deeply concerned about the introduction in September of the baseline assessment of four- and five-year-old children in reception classes.

They said that while it was essential for teachers to assess children as they started school to plan learning that would support and challenge each individual, the national baseline system had been designed to provide numerical scores rather than useful information for teaching. The union leaders said they were unconvinced by the Government’s claim that giving children a baseline score was essential to their successful progress through primary education. They were concerned that baseline was a measure which would further contribute to the narrowing of the primary curriculum and to its dominance by a culture of testing.

Dr Bousted and Ms Blower were also concerned about the impact on teachers of such late changes.

They added that those schools which had chosen a scheme which had not made the cut would have to decide whether to choose a new scheme, familiarise themselves with the materials and carry out training in the remaining few weeks of term to make the best use of the assessments in September. The union leaders said that where their members were involved in baseline assessment in the autumn, they should evaluate it carefully, and measure it against their knowledge of what good early years’ assessment and a rich and fulfilling early years curriculum looked like.

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No link between academy status and improved pupil progress

FER research evidence shows that there is no significant difference in overall school performance between academies and similar maintained schools in 2014. This is the conclusion from the Analysis of Academy School Performance in GCSEs 2014 report, commissioned by the Local Government Association.

The report explores the association between academy status for secondary schools and the attainment of pupils in 2014 GCSE exams, by comparing sponsored and converter academies that have been open for between two and four years and a group of maintained schools that had similar characteristics at the time the schools became academies. Due to inherent differences between them, sponsored and converter academies have been analysed and compared separately.

The key findings of the report are: • Attainment progress made by pupils in sponsored and converter academies is not greater than in

similar maintained schools. The only statistically significant difference in favour of sponsored

academies was found in the percentage of pupils who achieved 5 or more A* to C grades.

• There were no short-term benefits in improved school performance that could be associated

with the converter academy status. However, it is still too early to judge the full impact of the

converter academy status on school performance, because almost all converter academies have

been open for three years or less.

• Compared with 2013 school performance data, changes in the way school league tables were

calculated in 2014 have differentially affected the GCSE results of sponsored academies, because

of the differential use of equivalent qualifications in sponsored academies compared to similar

maintained schools.

• There is tentative evidence of an upward trend in the performance of sponsored academies

compared to similar maintained schools the longer they are open.

• There was very little evidence of pupils of different types, such as pupils eligible for free school

meals, or pupils with high or low prior ability, making relatively more progress in academy schools

compared to similar maintained schools. There was evidence that the attainment gap between

pupils eligible for free school meals and those that are not is slightly narrower in converter

academies than in similar maintained schools, which might show an increased focus on

disadvantaged pupils being taken by converter academies.

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Social class, more than ethnicity, remains a barrier to friendship

ew research, Children’s and Adults’ Friendships across Social Class and Ethnic Difference by the UCL Institute of Education and the University of Surrey, has revealed that primary schools generate friendships and supportive social relationships for both children and their parents or carers. The study found that children commonly made friendships with others from different ethnic groups.

But social class appeared to act as a more divisive factor than ethnicity for children and adults.

The study had set out to examine whether living in diverse areas meant that local populations had diverse friendship groups. The research team studied three London primary schools to provide evidence of how

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children and their parents managed and navigated their friendships and relationships across social class and ethnic difference.

Using in-depth interviews with parents, teachers, and eight and nine year old children, children’s drawings, and observations of classroom, playground and school events the study found that the cultural and social mix of both the local areas and the schools were valued by the vast majority of participants.

However, despite valuing living in diverse neighbourhoods, parents had a tendency to gravitate towards “people like us”, and the sense of “likeness” was often defined in terms of social class and culture.

Nearly all the children surveyed had made friendships across different ethnic groups and almost three quarters had friends from different class backgrounds. When asked specifically about their closest friends, children’s responses still showed a significant number of friendships across ethnic groups (nearly three quarters) but there were fewer “best friend” friendships across different social classes (just over a quarter). Social and cultural differences were recognised by the children as a positive everyday feature of their lives.

For children, “difference” was also seen in terms of hobbies, games and likes and dislikes, as well as in ethnic and social terms. But the extent to which children mixed inside the classroom was not always replicated in the outside world. Parental management of children’s friendships outside school, including whether their children went to other families’ houses and vice versa, could reinforce cultural and particularly social difference, and children tended to spend time after school with those who were similar to them.

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Evidence of benefits of school music tuition inconclusive

study by NatCen Social Research examining the impact on attainment of providing musical instrument tuition in school, as compared with drama and singing classes, has found inconclusive results. The study, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, highlights the challenges of providing music tuition as a major barrier to any effect on attainment.

In seeking to test previous research that had linked music tuition to improved attainment by examining it in a school setting, the study randomly allocated 900 pupils at 19 primary schools in England into a stringed instrument singing or drama workshop of 10 students. Each pupil received tuition once a week over a 32 week period and was tested to see if their maths skills and literacy had improved.

Researchers did not find any evidence to suggest that music tuition had more of an impact on maths or literacy than drama when comparing all children in the study and children who received free school meals. But the research suggested that the challenge of providing music tuition in schools was likely to be a key reason that no impact on attainment was found. Some of the music tutors struggled to keep students focussed on learning music and others, especially those not used to teaching primary age children, needed extra guidance in running lessons.

However teachers did identify some benefits of the classes and they reported that confidence and social skills had improved for some pupils, although it had not been measured as part of the trial. Emily Tanner, Head of Children, Families and Work at NatCen Social Research said that the practical difficulties schools faced in the trial suggested that successfully delivering music tuition to large numbers of children would take longer for schools to set-up and the potential benefits may take a number of years to be realised.

She added that keeping primary age children engaged in learning a stringed instrument in school had proved to be particularly difficult and it was likely that smaller group sizes and more support for the tutors would have helped.

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How effective is the pupil premium?

By Tracy Coryton

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he National Audit Office has warned that it will take time for the full impact of the Pupil Premium to become clear. While the early signs are that the Department for Education’s funding for disadvantaged pupils has the potential to bring about a significant improvement in outcomes, the Department and schools will need to do more to realise it.

The NAO’s report, Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils, found that introducing the Pupil Premium had increased school leaders’ focus on improving outcomes for disadvantaged children, as 94 per cent of school leaders that the NAO had surveyed said that they targeted support at disadvantaged pupils, compared with 57 per cent before the creation of the Pupil Premium. The attainment gap between disadvantaged and other pupils had narrowed by 4.7 percentage points in primary schools and 1.6 percentage points in secondary schools between 2011 and 2014. However, no definite trend had been established and the gap remained wide.

The Department said that it did not expect the full impact of funding to be felt until 2023. The NAO said that although the Department used a formula to distribute the Pupil Premium, not all disadvantaged pupils were being identified. The NAO’s survey found that 75 per cent of school leaders had reported that some pupils with parents in low-income employment were ineligible for funding. The report added that the introduction of Universal Infant Free School Meals and Universal Credit may also make it difficult to identify disadvantaged pupils consistently.

Other real-terms reductions in school funding mean that the Pupil Premium had not always increased school budgets. The NAO estimates that per-pupil funding in 16 per cent of the most disadvantaged secondary schools had fallen by over 5 per cent in real terms between 2010-11 and 201415. The funding’s impact was also reduced by the fact some schools were not spending the Pupil Premium effectively. Ofsted had expressed concern about provision for disadvantaged pupils in 8 per cent of primary schools and 21 per cent of secondary schools it had inspected between September and December 2014.

The NAO estimated that schools had spent an extra £430 million on teaching assistants since the introduction of the Pupil Premium; a high-cost approach which, research indicated, would only improve results if schools learned to deploy the staff more effectively. Other low-cost interventions were being used too infrequently and only 25 per cent used peer-to-peer learning. The report warned that the current accountability and intervention mechanisms, which worked in some cases, could allow schools to waste money on ineffective activities for many years without being challenged.

The Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation have called on the Government to automatically reward schools that successfully and consistently improve results for their disadvantaged pupils. Their report, Pupil Premium: Next Steps, argued that the rewards recommendation would build on the Government’s Pupil Premium Awards scheme, which rewarded 660 schools this year for their success with the pupil premium, with prizes for the most successful schools worth £250,000. When it comes to spending priorities for the pupil premium, a clear favourite continues to be early intervention schemes and one-to-one tuition was chosen by one in six schools.

In his foreword to the report, Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust and of the Education Endowment Foundation, said that there was no doubt that the Pupil Premium had enabled schools to do more to improve the results of their less advantaged pupils. But He added that equally, the data suggested that there was still a long way to go.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said that while the concept of the pupil premium was a good one, when it had first been introduced the NASUWT had predicted that given the cuts to school

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budgets the funding would inevitably end up being absorbed into the general school budget, which would minimise its impact.

She argued that to make progress in closing the achievement gap for the most disadvantaged pupils, those who were actually teaching the pupils needed to be consulted on the use of the pupil premium.

Ms Keates added that there certainly needed to be a system of monitoring its use and, above all, schools needed to be funded appropriately to ensure the pupil premium was truly additional funding.

Coasting schools

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t ten O’Clock on Monday evening, a few hours before the Public Bill Committee on the Education and Adoption Bill met for the first time, the Government published its proposals of what it meant to be a coasting school. The Government’s accountability system already defines a floor standard, the standard below which they consider it is unacceptable for any school to fall even in one year and where immediate scrutiny and/or intervention may be needed. The new coasting levels are proposed to be set at a higher level on the same measure as the floor standards in any given year.

A school will be defined as coasting only where it has been below this level for three years. A secondary school is below the floor in 2014 and 2015 where fewer than 40 per cent of a school’s pupils achieve 5 A*- C grades including English and maths and the school has a below median score for the percentage of pupils making expected progress. The Government has already announced that the absolute floor standard for 2016 will be -0.5 (where, on average, pupils in a school achieve half a grade less than those with similar starting points nationally).

For 2014 and 2015 the draft regulations propose that a school will fall within the coasting criteria if fewer than 60 per cent of a school’s pupils achieve 5 A*- C grades including English and maths and the school has a below median score for the percentage of pupils making expected progress. Once 2016 results are available, the Government intends to announce the level above the floor standard which will be the coasting level in that year. A school will be defined as coasting, and become eligible for intervention, if it falls below the standard in 2016, and has already failed to meet the coasting standards specified above in 2014 and 2015.

To be deemed coasting, a primary school must fall below the coasting level for all three of the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. A primary school is below the floor standard in 2014 and 2015 if fewer than 65 per cent of pupils achieve Level 4 or above in reading, writing and mathematics and below the median percentage of pupils make expected progress in reading, writing and maths. A school will fall below the floor standard in 2016 where fewer than 65 per cent of pupils achieve the expected standard and pupils do not make sufficient progress.

For 2014 and 2015, a school will fall below the coasting level if fewer than 85 per cent of its pupils achieve Level 4 or above in reading, writing and mathematics and below the median percentage of pupils making expected progress. The government is proposing a school will fall below the coasting standard in 2016 where fewer than 85 per cent of pupils achieve the expected standard across reading, writing and mathematics and pupils do not make sufficient progress. The same progress measure will be used in both the floor and the coasting criteria, but a higher progress bar will be set for the coasting criteria.

The Government will announce the exact levels of progress for both the floor and the coasting criteria once tests have been taken in 2016. Schools will be notified that they fall within the definition.

Regional Schools Commissioners will look in more detail at the circumstances of any coasting school and any coasting school will be given the opportunity to demonstrate that they have the capacity to make sufficient improvement. The Government plan is not automatically to seek academy solutions for all schools that fall within the definition of coasting. It has indicated that it wants to challenge and support the schools to improve sufficiently and it will only be where the capacity or plan for sufficient improvement is not evident that intervention will follow.

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ASCL General Secretary, Brian Lightman, said he was disappointed that the announcement had come without a formal consultation, and that the criteria it set out for what constituted a coasting school would initially be on an attainment rather than a progress measure. He insisted that academisation was not a magic wand and schools in challenging circumstances required individual support which would take account of their specific situation.

Nansi Ellis, assistant general secretary at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that the Government’s definition of coasting schools was further evidence that it cared more about ideology than children’s education. She questioned how putting schools through huge turmoil by forcing them to become academies would improve education when even the Department for Education’s figures showed that only three of the 20 largest academy chains performed above the national average.

Ms Ellis argued that Nicky Morgan’s definition of a “coasting school” would only focus attention on schools that did not reach her new targets for primary and secondary schools, but schools which reach the new targets yet failed to achieve the expected levels of progress for their students would not face any scrutiny. She insisted that introducing a retrospective target for the 2014 GCSE and SAT results meant that the Government had broken its promise to give sufficient notice to schools, teachers and parents of any changes to accountability measures.

Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that although it had taken the Education Secretary 45 days to arrive at a definition of “coasting”, it revealed the incoherence in Government policy, especially in primary schools. He pointed out that many good secondary and primary schools, as defined by Ofsted and parents, would now be classified as coasting.

Mr Courtney said that while Mrs Morgan had said that coasting schools would ultimately be transformed into academies, by her own definition many academy schools would also be coasting. He warned that the Government’s arbitrary target would only serve to sharpen teaching to the test and a concentration on borderline students which already resulted in a narrowed curriculum and, for many pupils, disengagement. Mr Courtney stressed that the NUT had consistently argued that it was the job of local authorities to assist schools, but the London Challenge had unwisely been scrapped by the Coalition Government even though it had been a proven success.

He urged the Education Secretary to follow its example, instead of turning to Regional School Commissioners. Mr Courtney added that Mrs Morgan continued to leave unaddressed the central questions facing education: the growing shortage of teachers and head teachers, the crisis in the supply of school places and the developing school funding problems.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Secretary of State was selecting criteria to define coasting schools to maximise the opportunity for extending academisation.

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New technology revolution brings ‘learning windfall’ to 500,000 third-agers

By Ian Nash

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national learning technology revolution is underway to give almost 500,000 adults greater access to online education in their homes and community-based groups throughout the United Kingdom. Reforms being shaped by the University of the Third Age and overarching Third Age Trust draw on the evidence from pilot work with a small group of U3As, which is now extended to around 100. In part it is a “catching-up” exercise since organisations for informal adult learning are seen as being slower than further education colleges to develop such opportunities.

The U3A reforms go much further, however, creating a national network for all 950 member University of the Third Age associations to promote more adult learning opportunities, share the best ideas Ian Nash and resources more widely and manage issues such as membership bureaucracy and expansion of a national resource library more effectively.

But there is an even more crucial imperative, says Anthony Hughes, an architect of the reforms and U3A Trustee. He is concerned, first, that an increasingly aging population will create greater isolation and loneliness; second, younger people entering the third age with technology skills will expect U3As to be up-to-date if they are to join. “They do not want formal learning that leads to exams and they want to have far greater control over what they learn,” he says. New technology learning tools fit the U3A ethos – the learner is also the teacher and the members of each independent U3A decide what learning groups to create “from macramé and bridge to mediaeval history and nuclear physics”.

Far from being behind the times, says Hughes, U3As were often ahead of the game when it came to the use of developments such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), but ideas were not as widely shared as they could be. Also, the fear that such provision, targeted at the personal computer user, would encourage greater isolation in the home was unfounded. “We find people who use technology are more likely to get out and actively seek face-to-face study groups; learning is a force for socialisation not isolation.”

The power of new technology to give people control over what they learn and how they learn it is a strong factor. Too many teachers think you must learn “formally” how to use technology before applying it to informal learning, he says. Hughes’ approach is to tap into a desire to learn, picking up IT skills in the process. For example, he is convenor of a group at Swansea U3A that used iPads for detailed research into Oystermouth castle and created YouTube films of the castle’s history, the life of Dylan Thomas and archive film history of the Mumbles Train. “I contend that we have been teaching skills of technology for learning the wrong way. The right way is what I call Windfall Learning. Like so much that is too formally taught, a defined syllabus can put you off.”

Where initially many members start by admitting they have a fear of technology, all the Swansea group ended up with a range of skills – handling sophisticated systems including the internet, digital picture cropping, PowerPoint, cloud computing, sharing eBook design, handling timeline software and managing online genealogy research methods. “The whole point of this is that we didn’t set out to learn technology although we knew that we would be using it throughout - it was a ‘Digital Media for Fun’ class after all.”

The ubiquity of the Internet and digital technology is such that, in formal education, it has official status as a ‘skill for life’ alongside literacy, language and numeracy. FE colleges have invested huge sums of money in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) or depositories for learning materials developed by

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the teachers. While such developments steal headlines in the educational media, little is said about developments in the informal learning sector.

Some U3A developments are linked to local schools and colleges and many U3As team up with them to create tutor groups which impart computer and information technology skills. However, the U3As have a pedigree when it comes to technology for learning, says Len Street, former national chairman of the Third Age Trust, who set up the U3A’s Standing Committee on Education in 1996. “Members have been delivering online courses written by third agers for third agers since the late 1990s on art, creative writing, garden design, and much more,” he says. There has been the “Computer Awareness Roadshow” visiting U3As to demonstrate practical uses of a computer, such as word processing, information search, emails and spread sheets. More recently, in-depth studies being developed include “Mathematics ‘Real or virtual, – making use of the virtual classroom” and a course in “Early however, it signals Christianity”, he said. a major advance in

Hughes has further ambitions for the U3As. “I want to come up with a virtual TV channel equivalent of YouTube focused on national learning. Call it a ‘virtual TV channel’, or people will think it is a real communications and channel,” he says. Real or virtual, however, it signals a major advance sharing for the U3As.’ in national communications and sharing for the U3As.

The potential for U3As to both reach out to isolated adults and go far beyond to reach new audiences is epitomised by the work of Malcolm McIvor (Grange & District U3A), who, for family reasons, depended for a time on distance learning. “My wife and I spent half of each year with our family in Canada and couldn’t usefully take part in [U3A local section science group] activities; so I took up U3A online courses of one sort or another and eventually ended up leading the ‘Design in Your Life’ course for 8 years. The course I led was written by a member of Reading U3A but operated out of the Griffith University arrangement with U3A Australia,” he says.

“This worked really well and meant that participants could come from all over the world.” However, he adds, with such growth comes the need for good management, constant vigilance and updating if globally-available courses are to retain local value. This is true even in the “sciences” which many would see as the most objective of studies. “There are three science courses on offer currently: one on Climate Change and two relating to Astronomy. An online science course...that more reflects the variety that is experienced in the local section science groups would be more popular because it would be much more variable and encourage greater participation.”

For Hughes, the need to encourage greater participation is what the technology is all about. At the extremes, giving physical access to the most immobile and infirm will continue to pose problems, “but they are problems about which technology can help”, he insists. “We have to use Skype and other devices more imaginatively to combat isolation. Whatever challenges U3As face, technology is there to help.”

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Teaching Excellence Framework will tackle degree inflation

uring his speech to Universities UK, the Universities Minster, Jo Johnson, said that in the coming months, his focus would be on implementing three key manifesto pledges. The first was lifting the cap on student numbers and widening participation to remove barriers to ambition and meet the Prime Minister’s commitment to double the proportion of disadvantaged young people entering higher education by 2020 from 2009 levels.

The second was delivering a teaching excellence framework that to create incentives for universities to devote as much attention to the quality of teaching as fee-paying students and prospective employers had a right to expect. The third was driving value for money both for students investing in their education, and taxpayers underwriting the system, to ensure the continuing success and stability of the reforms.

The minister expressed concern that recent surveys such as the HEPI-HEA Student Academic Experience Survey and a BBC/ComRes poll, had showed that only half of students believed their course had provided good value for money. He explained that thanks to the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act which had been passed in March, it was possible to assess the employment and earnings returns to education by matching Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Education data with HMRC employment and income data and Department for Work and Pensions benefits data. Mr Johnson stressed that such information would be very useful for young people in choosing courses or jobs that were most suitable for them. He added that it would also enable education providers to assess their effectiveness in delivering positive labour market outcomes for their students. The minister said that while independent learning was vital, universities needed to get used to providing clearer information about how many hours students would spend in lectures, seminars and tutorials, and who would deliver the teaching.

He added that the Competition and Markets Authority had advised higher education providers that information should be available to prospective students to meet the requirements of consumer law. Mr Johnson pointed out that a Higher Education Policy Institute survey had suggested that three-quarters of undergraduates wanted more information about where their fees went. He said that because the graduate earnings premium was an important measure of the value universities add and of the greater productivity of those with skills acquired in higher education, evidence of a decline in the graduate earnings premium was a concern. The minister pointed out that between 2006 and 2015, the graduate earnings premium had decreased from around 55 per cent higher to around 45 per cent higher than the earnings of nongraduates and graduates were currently earning on average £31k and non-graduates £22,000. He said that the country was not yet rising to the challenge of ensuring that enough young people were choosing courses where there were skills shortages and strong employer demand, notably in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Mr Johnson said that the UK’s standard model of classes of honours was on its own no longer capable of providing the recognition hardworking students deserved and the information employers required. He pointed out that there had been a significant increase in the proportion of people receiving firsts and 2:1 degrees. He said that while the expansion in the number of firsts and 2:1s was to do with rising levels of attainment and hard work, he was concerned that less benign forces were at work with the potential to damage the UK higher education brand.

The minister pointed out that the Teaching Excellence Framework would include incentives for the sector to tackle degree inflation and ensure that hard-won qualifications would hold their value. He said that the green paper would examine the role that external examiners played in underpinning standards and ensuring that the grading system provided a clearer, more comparable picture of student attainment.

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Mr Johnson added that he also wanted to make sure that the Teaching Excellence Framework encouraged universities to adopt a grading system that would do more to motivate and engage students throughout their course.

He said that while the familiar pattern of a First, 2:1 and 2:2, Third was widely recognised, providing extra granularity through a grade point average, a 13 point scale developed by the sector, would encourage consistent effort, make it less easy to coast within the 2:1 band and give employers more information about candidates within that classification. Commenting on the minister’s speech, Martin Doel, Chief Executive of the Association of Colleges said that because higher education was a big part of what colleges offered, they would have an important stake in the plans of the Higher Education Minister, Jo Johnson and the Higher Education Funding Council for England in assessing the quality of the level of education.

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Children’s mental health is minister’s “top priority”

t the Royal College of Psychiatrists International Congress in Birmingham, the Minister of State for Community and Social Care, Alistair Burt, announced his priorities for children’s mental health.

He pointed out that through NHS England, the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme would be expanded to cover the whole country by 2018.

He pointed out that in implementing the Government’s report of the Children’s and Young People Mental Health Taskforce, Future in Mind, the Department for Education would pilot single point of contacts on mental health in schools to give young people access to seamless and integrated mental health advice. The minister said that because children’s mental health was his top priority, £1.25 billion would be allocated for improving children and young people’s mental health over the lifetime of the parliament.

He added that he strongly supported collaborative working between psychiatrist, schools, charities and communities to create a safety net for children.

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OU Vice-Chancellor urges support for part-time students

he Vice-Chancellor of The Open University has warned that policy and funding changes in England over the last five years have had a major impact on the number of people studying part-time. Peter Horrocks told delegates at unionlearn’s annual conference that the number of people studying part-time in England had dropped by 41 per cent over the last five years and there were currently 200,000 fewer part-time students than in 2009/10. He added that the decline in part-time students in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland was a fraction of that in England.

Mr Horrocks said that part-time study was about offering a chance to students who had just as much drive and desire to learn, but for whom full-time study was not possible for a whole range of reasons.

He pointed out that at the Open University, around 20,000 of its students had declared a disability, which was more disabled students than many universities had on their whole campus.

He highlighted the Equivalent or Lower Qualification rule, which meant that students were not eligible for a loan if they already held a qualification of the same level to the one they were studying. Mr Horrocks said that while many of those wishing to study part-time were already in work and wanted to retrain or up-skill, if they already had a degree, quite possibly following a decision they had taken when they were 18, they were unable to access the same financial support as other students.

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Discrimination and poor job prospects hit children of immigrants

he children of immigrants continue to face major difficulties integrating in OECD countries, especially in the European Union, where their poor educational outcomes leave many struggling to find work, according to a new OECD/EU report. Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2015: Settling In found that young people with immigrant parents experienced nearly 50 per cent more unemployment in the European Union than those with native-born parents.

Even if their labour market outcomes are generally better than those of their foreign-born parents, discrimination is felt more keenly among native-born children of immigrants than among people who have themselves immigrated. In EU countries one in five feels discriminated against, something that is not observed in non-European OECD countries. Although overall educational outcomes are improving for many immigrant children and for those with immigrant parents, major gaps remain, notably for children with loweducated parents.

In the European Union, the share of immigrant students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds who performed at the highest levels in the OECD’s PISA literacy tests, was only half that of native-born students. The OECD Secretary-General, Angel Gurría said that countries were not making enough progress in helping immigrants and their children integrate. The OECD/EU report contains the first detailed international comparison of the outcomes of immigrants and their children in all European Union and OECD countries.

In both the EU and the OECD, the immigrant population has grown by more than 30 per cent since 2000. One in ten people living in the EU and OECD areas in 2012 was born abroad and one in four young people (15-34) is either foreign-born or the child of an immigrant. While more and more immigrants are high skilled and one in three immigrants of working age in the OECD and one in four in the EU now holds a tertiary education degree. Most had obtained their highest degree abroad. In contrast to the low educated, tertiary-educated immigrants have lower employment rates than their native-born peers in virtually all countries.

When employed, they are overqualified more often than their native peers. This holds especially for those with foreign qualifications, who account for the majority of highly-educated immigrants. Across the EU, 42 per cent of highly-educated employed immigrants with foreign degrees have jobs that would require lower levels of education, twice the number of those who hold a qualification from the host country.

Despite this, highly-educated immigrants still perform better in the labour market than low-educated immigrants.

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HIV risk reduced by longer secondary schooling

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esearchers believe that secondary school education can alter the risk of HIV infection. A new study indicates that an extra year of secondary schooling could substantially reduce the risk of HIV contraction. The study, published in The Lancet Global Health, suggests that expanding secondary schooling could be a cost-effective strategy for preventing HIV infection.

Senior author Prof Jacob Bor of Boston University School of Public Health, said that the study suggested that schooling should be considered alongside other proven interventions as part of a multipronged combination HIV prevention strategy. Because it was difficult to isolate the effect of education on the risk of HIV infection from the complex web of associated factors such as family background, socioeconomic status and psychological traits, the use of “natural experiments� would be needed to provide evidence to guide healthcare policies.

In the absence of large-scale trial data, the researchers used a recent school policy reform in Botswana as the basis for their study to assess what role an increase in the number of years spent in secondary school played in the risk of HIV infection. From the data, the researchers estimated that those who had received an extra year of secondary schooling were 8 percentage points less likely to test positive for HIV infection a decade later. Around 17 per cent of the cohort was infected compared with 25 per cent of those who did not receive an extra year.

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Study questions whether schools have become exam factories

xam Factories, published by the National Union of Teachers, examines the impact of accountability measures on children and young people. The study, which was commissioned by the NUT, was conducted independently by Emeritus Professor Merryn Hutchings of London Metropolitan University. The wide ranging research project incorporates a survey of almost 8,000 teachers, an extensive literature review and quantitative research utilising case studies of both heads and teachers (not all of whom were NUT members) and children.

The research demonstrates the negative impact on children and young people in England of the current range of accountability measures in schools. These include Ofsted inspections, floor standards and the whole range of measures published in the school performance tables including attainment, pupil progress and attainment gaps between groups of pupils. Professor Hutchings found that: • The Government’s aims of bringing about an increased focus on English/literacy and maths/ numeracy and (in secondary schools) academic subjects, had been achieved at the cost of narrowing the curriculum that young people receive.

• Recent accountability changes mean that in some cases secondary schools were entering pupils for academic examinations regardless of aptitudes or interests, which is contributing to disaffection and poor behaviour among some pupils.

• The amount of time spent on creative teaching, investigation, play, practical work and reading had reduced considerably and there was a tendency towards standardised lesson formats. But pupils questioned for the study said that they learned better when lessons were memorable.

• Teachers witnessed unprecedented levels of school-related anxiety, stress and mental health problems amongst pupils, particularly at exam time. That was prevalent in secondary schools, but it was also present in primaries.

• Pupils of every age were under pressure to learn things for which they were not ready, which had led to shallow learning for the test and children developing a sense of “failure” at a younger and younger age.

• Pupils’ increased attainment scores in tests were not necessarily reflected in an improvement in learning across the piece as teaching could be very narrowly focused on the test.

• The Government and Ofsted’s requirement that schools should target pupils on Free School Meals with Pupil Premium money was prompting some schools to take the focus away from special educational needs children. Accountability was discouraging schools from including SEN children in activities targeted at Free School Meals children even when children with SEN needed the support more.

• Accountability measures disproportionately affected disadvantaged pupils and those with SEN or disabilities. Teachers reported that the children were more likely to be withdrawn from lessons to be coached in maths and English at the expense of a broad curriculum. Some schools were reluctant to take on pupils in the categories as they could lower the school’s attainment figures. Ofsted grades were strongly related to the proportion of disadvantaged pupils in a school.

• Ofsted was not viewed as supportive, but as punitive and inconsistent, with the ability to cause a school to “fall apart”. In their analysis of a school, the inspectors also had a tendency not to take on board the way that individual circumstances affected outcomes.

• The legacy effect of past Ofsted requirements meant that the practices were still “drilled in” despite no longer being measured or required, including the focus on marking of pupils’ work in a standardised manner and the monitoring of lesson structure.

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Consultations published last week.

Publication of statistics on maintained schools and academies: inspections and outcomes Ofsted is seeking a wide range of views to ensure that the revised publication format takes into account the needs and circumstances of all those who have an interest or expertise in maintained schools and academies. Ofsted is particularly keen to hear from people who have been directly involved with schools – including children, parents and carers and those who run and commission services.

Department or agency: Ofsted Coverage: England Document type: Consultation paper Published: Wednesday 1 July 2015 Deadline: 29 July 2015 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/publication-of-statistics-on-maintained-schools-andacademies-inspections-and-outcomes Disabled students in higher education: funding proposals BIS wants information and evidence to help it direct funding for disabled students in higher education (HE) more effectively. It wants to balance the support available for all disabled students from HE providers, and that available from Disabled Students’ Allowances (DSAs).

Department or agency: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Coverage: England Document type: Consultation paper Published: Wednesday 1 July 2015 Deadline: 24 September 2015 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/disabled-students-in-higher-education-funding-proposals GCSE reform: regulations for design and technology This consultation is about the rules and guidance Ofqual needs to put in place for new GCSEs in design and technology. These rules will apply to the exam boards that want to offer new design and technology GCSEs from September 2017. This is part of Ofqual’s work supporting the Government’s changes to GCSEs, AS and A-levels.

Department or agency: Ofqual Coverage: England Document type: Consultation paper Published: Wednesday 1 July 2015 Deadline: 26 August 2015 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/gcse-reform-regulations-for-design-and-technology GCSE reform: design and technology We are seeking views on revised subject content for GCSE design and technology for first teaching in 2017.

Department or agency: Ofqual Coverage: England Document type: Consultation paper Published: Wednesday 1 July 2015 Deadline: 26 August 2015 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/gcse-reform-design-and-technology

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The Education and Adoption Bill in Committee

t was not an auspicious start to the Public Bill Committee taking the Education and Adoption Bill through its committee stage last Tuesday. There were not enough chairs for the number of MPs on the committee, and the room they had been allocated had dreadful acoustics. It took half an hour to find the extra chairs before the meeting could start. There was nothing they could do about the acoustics, so witnesses had to be constantly reminded to speak up.

The first three witnesses to appear were Dr Rebecca Allen, director of Education Datalab; Professor Becky Francis of King’s College London; and Robert Hill, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s College London. Labour’s Shadow Schools Minister, Kevin Brennan (Lab, Cardiff West) asked the witnesses to comment on the Government’s draft regulations, which defined a coasting school, which had been published at 10.00 pm the night before. Dr Allen’s concern was that schools in affluent areas would escape a judgement of coasting “using these metrics” while schools in deprived areas “are subject to multiple accountability mechanisms, all of which they have a relatively high chance of falling below”.

Dr Allen thought defining a coasting school was very difficult, especially where schools served deprived communities. “Of course, schools must compensate for any significant social dysfunction in the families of the children who attend. They experience higher teacher turnover. Because they are at significant risk of being deemed inadequate by Ofsted, they find it more difficult to recruit outstanding leaders.”

Robert Hill referred to what Dr Allen had called ‘layers of multi accountability’. “We almost have a teetering accountability system. It is getting heavier and weightier and weightier, layer upon layer. I think it will become increasingly difficult to provide any sort of incentive for people to go into a lead—even good schools—because of the risk of them being done-to and intervened on. We already have problems with recruiting for many positions and the field for candidates is small.”

Academisation The next four witnesses were Malcolm Trobe of ASCL, Sir Daniel Moynihan of the Harris Federation, Emma Knights of the NGA and Richard Watts of the LGA. Kevin Brennan asked them “in dealing with an inadequate school, is academisation the only way to bring about satisfactory improvement?” Three of the four witnesses said it was not. Sir Daniel thought that it was. His reason was that if a school was inadequate the local authority should have known. The local authority should therefore be replaced in its support function. Sir Daniel did not address the problem of failing academies. He did not think that academisation was the only answer with coasting schools.

Peter Kyle (Lab, Hove) asked whether there was a difference with coasting schools between academies and maintained schools. Malcolm Trobe thought that there was not, and that all schools should be judged on the same range of indicators. Mr Kyle thought it “strange” that the Bill applied the term “coasting” only to maintained schools. Schools minister Nick Gibb interjected that the Government would use the same definition when assessing academies. Mr Kyle insisted that the legislation focused only on maintained schools, which he suggested was “odd”. Mr Trobe said “we believe in fairness and equality and, therefore, all schools should be treated the same, whether they be academies or maintained schools”.

Suella Fernandes (Con, Fareham) wondered what programme of improvement measures there should be. Emma Knights of the NGA replied that every school in the country had a school improvement plan. “I would not want the Committee to think that some schools are just bimbling along, not thinking about how they improve teaching and learning and outcomes for children. A huge change has taken place in schools over the last 10 years in terms of schools actually taking responsibility for that.”

There was more than one type of formal intervention yet the Committee had asked only about sponsored academisation. “We actually have very little evidence about which different types of formal 26

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intervention work best and that is a bit of a worry for me. This whole Bill has come into place when actually we are guessing.” She said that the main evidence on this was produced by the National Audit Office last year and it showed that 60% of schools deemed inadequate improved without any sort of formal intervention because they had a school improvement plan. Sponsored academisation worked in 44% of cases and interim executive boards worked in 72% of cases.

Louise Haigh (Lab, Sheffield Heeley) said that the Local Schools Network had calculated that 814 secondary schools would be defined as coasting under the Government’s regulations, and 342 of them were academies. A high proportion of these were converter academies.

ADCS and NAHT After lunch the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Alison O’Sullivan, gave evidence. She was also director of children’s services in Kirklees and had previously been DCS in Bradford.

The Shadow Schools Minister, Kevin Brennan (Lab, Cardiff West) asked Mrs O’Sullivan whether she thought that the regional schools commissioner has the capacity to increase oversight of schools as envisaged in the Bill. Mrs O’Sullivan thought that additional resources would be needed. She said: “It is not for the local authority to determine the support to the academy part of the system. What I would say is that there is an untapped resource of collaboration at a local level. If we look at the shared ambition that we have to drive up standards in all schools in all categories, we should be exploiting the potential to collaborate more closely across the wider system.”

The next witness was Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT. Kevin Brennan asked him what he thought of the Bill and how it could be improved. Mr Hobby replied: “In a spirit of constructive criticism, the first issue is whether the Bill genuinely defines what we would normally regard as coasting schools.”

Mr Hobby estimated that there were about 700 primary schools and perhaps 400 secondary schools that would fall within the definition of coasting. Probably 60% of those have got a good inspection rating. “They will have thought that they had done everything that had been set for them, but now they have a new bar to climb over.”

Mr Brennan then asked whether the issue of coasting schools could be dealt with in the inspection regime. Might there not be confusion about accountability with “two separate regimes running side by side”? Mr Hobby agreed. “There is a risk that schools will feel that they are working towards two distinct and different sets of criteria.”

The Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, asked Mr Hobby if he was happy with the concept of using a progress measure and not just an attainment measure to define a coasting school. Mr Hobby replied: “Yes. It is essential that you use a progress measure.” Mr Hobby added: “I should emphasise that none of us are entirely sure what the progress measures will look like. They have not been used or tested.”

Mr Gibb then asked him whether he thought it was right to address the issue of coasting schools.

Mr Hobby replied: “If we can agree on a fair definition of a coasting school, it is appropriate that every school should stretch itself and all its pupils to the full extent. Challenging coasting schools is the right thing to do. Whether legislation, academy orders and the process of academisation are the right way to provide that challenge is more open to debate.” Mr Hobby also thought that “the evidence that the structural change to academy status will stop a school from coasting is not as strong as the Government might wish.

Other interventions might be more appropriate.”

The final group of people to give evidence were the ministers from the DfE, Nick Gibb, Edward Timpson and Lord Nash. Lord Nash accepted that the regional school commissioners would need further support to carry out their new duties under the Bill. When pressed as to what additional support would look like, Lord Nash replied: “I expect in time we may need more regional schools commissioners—they will certainly need more people. They are heavily supported from the centre—the Department for Education— which runs very tight teams of six, seven or eight people. They will certainly need an increase in capacity.”

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ntoinette Sandbach (Con, Eddisbury) asked the Minister for Universities what plans he had to support the science sector in the next five years. (House of Commons, oral questions to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 30 June 2015.) The Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson (Con, Orpington) said that the Government had reaffirmed its commitment to investing £1.1 billion of science capital, which would rise every year until 2021, including £2.9 billion on grand challenges.

Antoinette Sandbach asked what more could be done to link employers to educational institutions and encourage the uptake of STEM subjects. Jo Johnson said that the country needed more collaboration between universities and business.

Liam Byrne (Lab, Birmingham, Hodge Hill) said that although universities were critical to the strength of England’s science base, following the tripling of tuition fees in the last Parliament, four out of five students no longer believed that their courses offered value for money. He asked the minister whether tuition fees would go up during the Parliament. Jo Johnson said that although universities and higher education institutions were secure and financially stable, the Government would continue to ensure a fair balance of interests between taxpayers and students.

Topical Questions Chuka Umunna (Lab, Streatham) pointed out that although Britain had the worst productivity in the G7, bar Japan, the Chancellor’s decision to take a further £450 million out of the Department’s budget, could lead to the end of further education. The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade, Sajid Javid (Con, Bromsgrove) argued that one of the most important things for businesses, and for a vibrant economy, was making sure that the Government continued to deal with the record budget deficit it had inherited from the previous Labour Government.

Bob Blackman (Con, Harrow East) said that further education colleges in his constituency were concerned about the decisions being made in-year to reduce funding. He therefore urged that Government to produce a strategy that would enable colleges to have a five-year programme, even if it meant a gradual reduction in funding. The Minister for Skills, Nick Boles (Con, Grantham and Stamford) said he would make sure that the argument for long-term certainty was made.

Wes Streeting (Lab, Ilford North) urged the minister for an assurance that there would be no changes either to tuition fee levels or the terms of repayment on student loans for existing students and graduates. The Minister for Universities and Science, Joseph Johnson (Con, Orpington) said that the Government had every intention of continuing to ensure that the higher education system was funded successfully and sustainably over the years ahead.

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Post-study visas for international students

ord Holmes of Richmond (Con, Life) asked the Government whether it would consider reintroducing a post-study visa for international students studying at bona fide higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. (House of Lords, oral question debate, 1 July 2015.) The Minister of State, Home Office, Lord Bates (Con, Life) said that there was no limit to the number of students who could remain in the UK, if they secured a graduate job. But he added that the Government had no plans to reintroduce 28

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the previous post-study work route, which saw large numbers of fraudulent applications from graduates who remained unemployed or in low-skilled work.

Lord Holmes argued that in addition to attracting the brightest and the best from around the world to come to study in the United Kingdom, they needed to stay and play their part, be economically active and be ambassadors for the UK when they went home.

Baroness Rebuck (Lab, Life) urged the minister to assess the loss of enterprise and competitiveness of ending most tier 1 visas for budding entrepreneurs, and the impact of skill shortages on specialist companies that were reluctant to deal with the increased red tape and hurdles of tier 2 visas. Lord Bates said that a specific tier 1 graduate entrepreneur visa encouraged people to stay, particularly if they were working in the area of technology.

Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB, Life) argued that it was time for the Government to agree that the number of non-EU students who come to the country every year should be taken entirely out of the immigration equation. Lord Bates insisted that the Government was following UN guidelines. He added that while it would be very convenient to lift 140,000 or so out of the statistics, it would do nothing to tackle the problem. The minister stressed that in 2014 135,000 students had arrived in the UK but only 44,000 had left. Baroness Garden of Frognal (LDP, Life) asked the minister what discussions the Government had had with universities to determine what impact the closure of the visa route had had on their intake of nonEuropean overseas students. Lord Bates said that the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Migration had produced a report entitled UK Post Study Work Opportunities for International Students, which had draw on evidence from universities.

Lord Cormack (Con, Life) urged the minister to put in writing for every higher education institution what he had said to the House so that all potential graduates would know what the position would be when they graduated. Lord Bates said he would speak to his ministerial colleague who had responsibility for universities within BIS.

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Sustainable development goals

he co-chairman of the all-party group on global education for all, Mark Williams (LDP, Ceredigion) introduced a debate on education and the sustainable development goals and financing global education. (House of Commons, Westminster Hall debate, 2 July 2015.) The World Vision group had declared that the success of the post-2015 framework that replaced the millennium development goals (MDGs) must be measured by its ability to reach the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children in the hardest places to live.

Mr Williams said that significant progress had been made in improving the state of the world’s education systems, as the number of children out of school had dropped by 48 million since the MDGs had been agreed in 2000.

But he stressed that 58 million children of primary school age still remained out of school; 59 million adolescents were out of secondary school; and, critically, 250 million children were in school but failing to learn the most basic of basics. Mr Williams pointed out that UNESCO has described the situation as a “global learning crisis”. He added that adult literacy levels globally had barely improved and between 2000 and 2011 there had been a decline of just 1 per cent in the number of illiterate adults.

The majority of the world’s out-of-school children were in sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the Department for International Development’s target programmes were located. The Minister of State at DfID, Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest West) stressed that primary education was of key importance in building foundations for development as it was one of the things that delivered huge improvements in delivery of other goals, such as health outcomes and economic development.

He added that an additional year of education could increase a worker’s income by 10 per cent. But Mr Swayne argued that countries were poor because their elites chose to keep their people poor, because it suited them to do so because there would not be an educated, active, civil society that would be able to hold them to account.

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House of Commons The Department for Education Languages: GCE A-level Nic Dakin (Lab, Scunthrope): To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what information her Department holds on plans by awarding organisations to offer A levels in (a) Polish, (b) Gujarati, (c) Panjabi, (d) Bengali, (e) Turkish, (f) Urdu and (g) Modern Hebrew; and whether she plans to consult on the future availability of such qualifications in those subjects.

Nick Gibb (Con, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton): The department is aware of the awarding organisations’ plans to withdraw qualifications in particular languages, and is working with those organisations and Ofqual to consider how best to enable as wide a range of languages as possible to be maintained at GCSE and A level.

The government wants to see all pupils provided with the opportunity to take a core set of academic subjects, including modern foreign languages. The number of pupils entering for a modern language GCSE has increased by 20% since 2010. There are considerable benefits to learning a second language, and the government is keen to see the range of languages at GCSE and A level preserved. To this end, the Secretary of State has written to all the exam boards to express her concern about their decision to stop awarding qualifications in some languages. She has asked the awarding organisations to continue to work with Ofqual and will launch a consultation on how best to secure the future availability of these qualifications.

29 June 2015 Sixth Form Colleges: VAT Fabian Hamilton (Lab, Leeds North East): To ask the Secretary of State for Education, for what reason the Government decided not to provide VAT rebates for sixth form colleges along with VAT rebates for sixth forms in state schools as well as academies and other free school variants.

Sam Gyimah (Con, East Surrey): Sixth form colleges (SFCs) do not qualify for VAT refunds as they are not part of local government, nor are they academies. The VAT treatment of SFCs is determined by their classification, which is designated by the Office for National Statistics. Colleges, including SFCs, have been liable for VAT since they ceased to be part of the local government sector in 1993. In order for SFCs to be classified differently significant changes to their governance, accountability and administration (i.e. in the direction of greater central government control) would be required, which may not be a route that SFCs wish to take. At the end of any such restructuring, the ONS would review how to reclassify the SFC. There is the possibility that, even after such changes, the ONS would not necessarily change their classification to one where it was possible for them to reclaim VAT.

Decisions regarding future 16 to 19 funding will be subject to the outcome of the next spending round where this decision may be revisited.

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Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Further Education: finance David Anderson (Lab, Blaydon): To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what assessment he has made of the relationship between his Department’s funding of further education colleges and how the skills needs of people using those colleges are met; and if he will make a statement.

Nick Boles (Con, Grantham and Stamford): The Department plans to continue to provide funding for further education for adults. Across all our grant, loan and capital support for adult further education, we are making available over £3bn in 2015-16.

For apprenticeships, Government and employers will continue to jointly invest in the training, reflecting the economic benefits that apprenticeships bring. For older learners studying at advanced level (age 24 and upwards studying at level 3) our policy is to provide HE-style loans to fund tuition fees to colleges. We have made £498m of provision available in 2015-16. For adult further education, our policy is to pay grant to providers based on the numbers of learners they teach and characteristics of those learners. There are also specialist funds to support joint projects with employers to grow skills in strategic areas of the economy; to support prisoner education; and for community learning. We also make capital funding available to colleges. In 2015-16 £410m of capital funding is available, of which £330m is distributed according to the requirements of Local Enterprise Partnerships. Finally, our policy is to provide funding to support the learner to access the system and get the most from it.

Apprenticeships are our priority for skills and colleges have been encouraged to expand their apprenticeship offer. As government funding has reduced, colleges have responded well by looking at generating other income streams and creating sustainable business models for the future. This entrepreneurial approach will help ensure sustainable future business models with less reliance on government funding.

The financial health of further education colleges is under constant review by the Skills Funding Agency based on self-assessment information from colleges and the publication of college accounts.

Colleges with inadequate financial health are subject to intervention led by the FE Commissioner.

Our funding mechanism is designed to allow providers the freedoms and flexibilities to decide how best to use their allocation to respond to local learner and employer demand. As autonomous organisations it is up to colleges to manage their own budgets including staffing numbers and what provision to offer.

Colleges are becoming increasingly responsive to employer and learner need and employers are now taking the lead in apprenticeship design so that apprenticeship training, be that in the workplace or at college, equips apprentices with the skills that employers need. We believe that our funding for adult skills through apprenticeship and further education provision can have a positive impact on learners, employers and the UK economy.

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