Why I changed my mind on for-profit schools

Back before the last election I wrote several reports arguing in favour of profit-making schools.

In 2009 I wrote:

 

"The question of profit is one the most emotive aspects of [school reform] and has been the focus of discontent on the left of American and Swedish politics. There seems to be little basis for this, or for the queasiness over potential profit-making schools in the UK, beyond an intuitive dislike of the idea that money could be made from educating children."

 

I never thought it was key to reform

 

"We do not believe that the inclusion of for profit firms in any reform is essential to making

making reform work – and reformers may consider the additional opposition it creates not worth the trouble."

 

But I did think that it would create extra incentives for people to develop federations of schools (which I've always thought is key to the success of any school reform movement):

 

"However, for-profit groups are much more likely to have the scale and ambition necessary to create multi-school federations. Larger charities with a national or regional focus, such as Harris and ARK in the UK or KIPP and the other CMOs in the US, are also able to do this, but such groups are relatively few and far between, especially during an economic downturn."

So why have I changed my mind?

Well I haven't had a Damascene conversion to Marxism. I still think that the intuitive horror many on the left have to the use of for-profit companies to provide public services is irrational. There are plenty of existing examples where for-profit companies fulfil a need at least as well as alternatives. It perhaps works best where services are simple and easy to measure (rubbish collection; maintenance etc...) but the NHS uses for-profit companies to buy-in treatments; many parents spend their nursery entitlement in for-profit nurseries. And so on. In parts of the developing world for-profit schools are the only chance many children get to have a decent education.

The question for me isn't "are for-profit schools inherently good or bad" it's "would for-profit schools improve the education system as it currently is". And there my answer is no - for three connected reasons.

One: the incentives that I thought allowing profit would create exist anyway

I failed to predict, back in 2009, how many natural entrepreneurs existed in the education system who would take advantage of the Academies Act to quickly develop chains and federations. When I left the DfE back in February there were around 150 schools that had not only converted to academy status but started up their own federation. I expect that number is now closer to 200. Some chains have grown very fast (some have grown too fast).

In some cases I guess this surge of entrepreneurship is linked to desire for personal gain or status (you don't have to run a for-profit company to make a lot of money yourself). But I think in most cases it has been motivated by moral purpose - successful school leaders wanting to reach more children than they could do by running a single school.


Two: allowing for-profit wouldn't in any case create much extra incentive because it's not a profitable industry

As many a CEO has found to their cost in America and Sweden it's very hard to make any money out of running schools. 80% of a school's costs are staff; without good staff you can't have a good school so offering lower salaries isn't really an option. There are only two ways you can make any money. First employ fewer teachers by using blended learning approaches. To put in kindly there's not a huge amount of evidence for these approaches (the for-profit "virtual" charter school sector in the US is an absolute scandal). Secondly, run so many schools that you make your money by cutting back-office costs. But the number of schools you'd need to make much profit make this pretty undesirable too. Most of the reputable firms that have run the numbers on schools have backed off pretty quickly.

You might be thinking (though you probably aren't) that it's worth a try anyway. You might get some really innovative companies that come up with a way of running great schools and making some money at the same time. But...


Three: allowing for-profit would require a complete overhaul of current processes

 

One of the big misconceptions about the Government's reform programme is that it "paves the way" for profit-making schools. In fact the system only works because all academies and free schools are not-for-profit. Back under the last Government anti-academy campaigners judicially reviewed the decision to allow UCL to sponsor an academy in Camden. They argued that it broke EU law because there wasn't a public procurement process where anyone could bid for the "contract". The judge ruled for the Government but only on the grounds that academies were all sponsored by not-for-profits. Had the Government handed that academy to SERCO they would have lost the review.

That means if the current Government wanted to allow for-profits they'd have to run a full procurement exercise for every sponsored academy and free school. The Swedes get around this by giving licenses to run free schools to any provider who meets a certain threshold. But that means losing any real control over who can set up a school. And as it precludes handing out capital (because you don't know how many will be over the threshold) it also pushes not-for-profits out of the market. There are no big not-for-profit chains like ARK or KIPP in Sweden. In any case that model wouldn't work for sponsored academies.


So that's why I changed my mind. We don't need them and the cost of overhauling the system is completely disproportionate to any potential benefit they could bring. For these reasons I can't see any Government going down this route for the foreseeable future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ResearchED 2013

About six months ago Ben Goldacre and I were having a twitter conversation about how one might mobilise the burgeoning collective interest in research amongst teachers. We'd agreed that a grassroots conference would be a great thing...but that sounded like a lot of work. Who would be crazy enough to take on that kind of a challenge in their spare time? I half-jokingly asked Tom Bennett on the grounds that he was a) a teacher b) had written a lot about research c) is well liked across the political/policy spectrum and d) is just about crazy enough to take on a project like that...

To be honest I didn't actually think he'd do it.

Anyway fast forward six months to yesterday and I found myself watching Tom presenting Ben to an audience of 500 expectant educationalists - most of them - uniquely in my experience of attending research conferences - classroom teachers. Taking that germ of an idea to reality in such a short space of time has been a heroic effort by Tom and his small team of volunteers; especially Helene Galdin O'Shea. They deserve all the praise they're getting.

The event itself was the best I've attended on the topic. Partly because of the speakers but also because of the shared sense that this was a real tipping point for the profession. There are now enough teachers engaged in research to make a conference on a Saturday at the beginning of term viable (with another 400 on the waiting list). This movement is only going to get stronger....

As for the speakers Ben Goldacre summarised his DfE report with great humour. I particularly enjoyed his caricatures of the sort of people who will try to put teachers off research (especially the smug git who once read about a methodological problem with RCTs and now thinks it's smart to dismiss them completely...)

I stayed in the main hall to watch Amanda Spielman talk about the ways in which ARK schools use research for school improvement. As usual when listening to Amanda speak I found myself wondering why more schools aren't just copying ARK given the strength of their systems and the robustness of the results to date.

After that I rushed over to another building to listen to Joe Kirby and Becky Allen talk about Teach First. Joe's excellent presentation is here and I've already blogged about Becky's research here. I did think Becky's presentation was masterful in its careful use of caveats and refusal to make overblown assertions about the findings. There were lots of questions at the end but no time left to answer them. I did, though, see Becky furiously scribbling them down so I'm hoping for some more analysis in the future.

Then it was on to my favourite presentation of the day from Laura McInerney. She challenged us to think up 7 "touchpaper" problems for education that were focused on cognitive development, would of direct relevance to classroom teachers and would have a clear end point. She had a couple of interesting ones herself including (I'm paraphrasing) "if you wanted a class to learn 20 chunks of knowledge between two lessons what's the most effective homework you could set"? She's promised me she has thought up seven and will be blogging on it shortly. I think it's an idea that the DfE or a education foundation should pick up and run with.

I missed the next set of sessions to compose myself before my own talk on evidence-based policy-making. I had a decent crowd who seemed receptive to my musings. It was filmed so I'll post a link when I have one.

I then really wanted to see Katie Ashford talk about her views on teacher training based on her own experiences and subsequent research. Unfortunately the door was physically blocked because there were so many people in the room. I'm told it was fascinating.

After the event finished a large group of us went off to the pub. I met many tweeters I'd only known virtually before and had some fairly spirited debates...

I got back home at 11:00 after a great day wondering what I should ask Tom to do next...

Anyway my proposed slogan for ResearchED 2014:

"The geeks shall inherit the earth"

Teach First boosts GCSE grades

Today sees the publication of the most comprehensive quantitative analysis of Teach First's impact to date.

The paper - by Dr Becky Allen and Jay Allnut - uses several different methodologies to see whether schools and departments with Teach First teachers achieve better GCSE grades than similar ones that don't. Their two key findings are:

1)    That schools using Teach First see an improvement of around one GCSE grade per pupil across their "best eight" GCSEs. If this doesn't sound like much bear in mind that most secondary schools involved with the programme have only a couple of teachers from Teach First out of a staff of 80-100. Furthermore the researchers only looked at Teach Firsters in their first three years of teaching.

2)    That subject departments containing at least one Teach First teacher see an improvement of about 5% of a grade in that subject when compared to other departments in the same schools. As the authors note given that only 1 in 6 of a department's teachers (on average) will be Teach Firsters this means that if all of that 5% is being generated in their classrooms they will be improving their pupil's results by 30%. Which is a very significant increase. As the authors put it:

"Our estimate of impact of the order of at least 5% of a subject grade could be as high as 30% of a grade if we assume no spillovers of participation to other teachers in the same department. This implies that Teach First participants are highly effective, on average, compared to those they have displaced."

These are really encouraging results but like all good research the paper raises some interesting questions for further study - many of which are noted by the authors in the text. For instance:

1) How much of the impact found is due to Teach First's highly selective recruitment model? The authors think most of it but the effects of recruitment can't easily be separated from the different training model and the sense of mission inculcated during this training. If these things are partly responsible for the impact what could other teacher training programme learn?

2) How much of the departmental impact is down to the Teach Firster's own teaching and how much is it do with the knock-on effects of them joining on the rest of the department? The authors think knock-on effects (or spillover effects as they call them) are important. If this is right then it raises some interesting questions about the validity of value-added models for individual teachers.

3) Are there knock-on effects between departments? So - for instance - does an improvement in the English department also help the Maths department? If it does then the methodology will have underestimated the impact of Teach First teachers (as it compares improvements in departments with Teach Firsters with those without them in the same school).

4) What are the long-term impacts on schools who stay with the programme over many years? Do Teach Firsters who stay in teaching continue to have a strong impact? Do they make particularly effective leaders?

5) What impact will the expansion of Teach First have? This research covers a period when we were recruiting between 200-500 teachers a year. Will be able to maintain that impact when recruiting 2000 - as we plan to do in two years' time? We certainly hope so - and have no intention of consciously dropping the quality bar.




 

On Memory

Probably the most enjoyable book I read over the summer was "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer. In it he describes his journey from covering the US memory championships in 2005 as a science journalist to winning it the following year; with the help of various gurus including UK memory grand master Ed Cooke. Along the way he offers multiple digressions on the history and science of memory.

Foer wins the Championships by learning a series of well established memory techniques like the Method of loci, or Memory Palace. This technique, also popularised by illusionist Derren Brown, enables the user to memorise long lists of items or numbers by coming up with a striking visual representations and then placing them on a route around a well-known location. It is effective because it taps into our much more powerful visual and special memory rather than relying on standard rote learning.

Foer also picks up some more advanced tricks such as the PAO system for remembering six digit numbers. This works by assigning an arbitrary Person, Action and Object to every two digit number; so 38 could be David Cameron eating a kebab; 47 might be Ed Miliband bouncing on a space hopper and 98 Nick Clegg talking to a toddler. After encoding all two digit numbers any six digit number can be remembered by combining the person from the first number; the action from the second and the object from the third. So 384798 is Cameron bouncing on a toddler.

While PAO and some of the other more complex systems are unnecessary unless you want to baffle your friends or win memory championships, the basic techniques actually have quite a lot of utility for people who do need to remember a lot of information such as schoolchildren preparing for an exam. Dan Willingham includes a list of such mnemonic techniques on p.59 of "Why Don't Students Like School?"* And nearly all of us will remember at least one or two mnemonics passed on during childhood (for some reason I always remember how to spell "necessary" by thinking "never-eat-cake-eat-smoked-salmon-and-remain-young").

Foer includes a fairly cursory discussion of the potential education benefits of more systematic mnemonics citing Bronx schoolteacher Raemon Matthews who became nationally known for his startling success with students using memory techniques and won several teacher of the year awards (before being stuck off - after the book's publication - for sexual misconduct).

This isn't much to go on but I did find myself wondering whether many teachers in the UK systematically teach their pupils how to remember more easily (as opposed to using the occasional mnemonic). It's not something I've seen widely discussed despite the seemingly endless debates on the value of memorised facts over generic skills. It would certainly be fascinating to run an RCT to investigate the value of memory techniques. The potential irony is that learning a set of skills might enable children to remember a lot more facts.

There is a deeper question, of course, as to whether the sort of memorising still required for exams is actually useful at all. Foer acknowledges that, of course, memorising masses of information does not make a person intelligent - indeed many of the memory champions that turn up in his book are almost comically unsuccessful in any of their real-life endeavours. And he includes a poignant meeting with the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for Rain Man, who remembered the complete content of over 9,000 books yet could do absolutely nothing with the information but party tricks.

Despite this Foer ends up taking the E.D. Hirsch line that memory is essential in providing the conceptual framework for the further development of ideas. As he puts it:

"It goes without saying that intelligence is much, much more than mere memory...but memory and intelligence to seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition. There's a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded in the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world."

And not only is memory a facet of intelligence it is also vital to our shared sense of humanity:

"How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humour in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character."


* Willingham says he's not a fan of method of loci because they are "hard to use for different sets of material" - e.g. if he uses a walk around his house to memorise the periodic table can he use the same walk for French verbs? Foer makes it pretty clear in his book that you can't use the same route for two different sets of information so have to have multiple routes available to you (your house; your parents house; work; the park etc...).

Why are young people today so sensible?

Earlier today the Home Office released some eye-catching stats on drug use. Since 1998 the number of 16-24yr olds self-reporting drug use has halved.

 

 

Interestingly all the articles I've seen on these stats have chosen to focus on the numbers using Nitrous Oxide - reported for the first time this year - with the overall fall in drug use buried down the story. This is not an accident. All newspapers (and even the BBC) systematically under report good news and will nearly always look for a negative angles.

This tendency means that the extraordinarily positive trends in social policy data are largely hidden from the public. Did you know, for instance, that:

Teenage pregnancies are at their lowest level since records began in 1969. (Look at how that stat is buried beneath a supposedly negative story).

The number of 11-15 year olds who drank alcohol in the previous week has more than halved from 26% to 12% since 2001.

The number of 15 year olds smoking regularly has almost halved from 20% to 11% since 2002.

That the number of crimes reported in the Crime Survey have halved since 1995.

And it's not just the media's fault. These trends don't really fit with narratives of either the political right ("broken society") or the left ("austerity Britain") so they don't get talked about. It's also not particularly in the interests of groups that campaign on these issues to play-up the positive trends. It's much easier to raise money for drug prevention schemes if people don't think the problem is diminishing.

It seems to me that understanding why this is happening is pretty important. For a start it does seem to be generational. The drug stats, for instance, show use amongst 25-39 year olds rising. It's also unlikely to do with any UK specific issues or policies as these trends are manifesting across the developed world.

One journalist who has tried to focus attention on this phenomena is The Economist's Daniel Knowles. In an article last year he suggested a number of causes:

"Whatever has happened to carefree youth? Public-health campaigns, better education and more hands-on parenting have no doubt had some effect. Some young people are probably staying inside watching television and playing video games instead of smoking behind the bike sheds. And Britain’s population is changing. The proportion of 15- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as “white British” has fallen slightly in the past decade, to about 80%. Among the groups filling the gap are British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, who are less likely to drink or take drugs than their white peers."

I'd add a couple more suggestions to the list including the increasingly negative portrayals of drug, cigarette and alcohol use in TV and films. Another suggestion that arose in twitter discussion today is that these are the children of a generation that were the highest users of dangerous substances; and there's nothing less cool than being like your parents...

Of these the change in social behaviours seems particularly important to me. Young people are just spending much less time in the physical world and much more time in the virtual. Even since 2007 there's been, according to Ofcom, a 25% increase in the average amount of time 12-15 year olds are spending online (to 17 hours a week). And girls in that age category send a frankly mind-boggling 221 texts a week on average.

Whatever the reasons the trend poses some interesting questions about how these shifts might affect the next generation of children. We know that young people whose parents are teen Mums, drug or alcohol addicts or in are in prison are much less likely to do well in school. If there are fewer such parents in the future it should have a significant knock on impact on education (as well as other public services like health and prisons).

It also means that jeremiads about "young people today" can be safely ignored. A narrative of decline around young people has been commonplace throughout history (though that famous Plato quote about children disrespecting their elders is sadly not genuine). But now more than ever we can safely say that young people are much more sensible than their elders were at their age.

Why structures and standards are inextricable

Earlier this week I was on a conference panel. The question was "Do academies improve teaching and learning?" It wasn't a great discussion - there were too many panellists and not enough time - but speakers from both the panel and the floor kept coming back to "standards not structures".

This must be one of the most commonly espoused views in education at the moment and usually goes along the following lines:

"What matters is great teachers and leaders, with moral purpose, who are committed to improving the life chances of young people. Governments always fiddle around with structures because they can but it never makes more than a marginal difference. The quality of teaching and leading is key."

For me this is the equivalent of saying:

"What makes a good cricket team is excellent players and a great captain all of whom are committed to the team's cause. The only thing that matters is how good the players are and how well they're trained."

On one level this is obviously true. Banally so. But it's also incomplete. Do teams of great cricketers just emerge by chance or are there different ways of structuring a country's youth teams and domestic leagues that give a greater chance of having a good team? It seems obvious that the latter is true. Indeed one reason for the renaissance in English cricket over the past ten years was the introduction of central contracts for players in 2002. Prior to that the English Cricket Board had to negotiate with county sides to give their players time with the national side, not only for playing, but also training and analysis. A structural change led, over time, to a better side.

The same is true in any sector. Would you ever find a businessman arguing that the structure of their organisation had no impact on its performance?

And it's no different in education. Obviously the immediate driver of a school's performance will be the quality and motivation of staff (and, relatedly, the young people in it). But the idea that the wider structural system in which these staff work is irrelevant seems myopic to say the least.

My answer to the conference question was that academies can lead to improved teaching and learning because they offer scale. There are many excellent schools in England - some academy, some maintained, some foundation, faith or grammar. What the academy model has driven is much faster formal federation between some of these excellent schools and other less successful schools.

Outstanding schools that convert to academy status are strongly encouraged to bring other schools into their chain. Around 150 have now done so. Most of the so-called "forced" academies are now being partnered with local outstanding schools. The academies policy isn't the only way this could have been achieved but it is the easiest legal mechanism in place at the moment. As a result of these structural changes many schools are coming into the orbit of sustained excellent practise for the first time. (Of course there have always been less formal collaborations between schools but they have usually relied on personal relationships rather than governance and accountability).

To take just one example: Sir David Carter was head of John Cabot Academy in Bristol for some time. He and his team made it into a great school. Because of the academy programme Cabot has grown into a chain of eleven academies, with Sir David as executive head, and the other schools have seen significant boosts in performance since joining the network. Those improvements have, of course, been driven by excellent teachers and leaders but they wouldn't have been in a position to do so without the initial structural reform.

Of course there are reasonable questions as to whether the academies policy gets structural reform right. Is the regulation of chains strong enough? Is the complete elimination of the local authority link the right thing to do? Should academies have control over their own admissions policy? But these are all structural questions. Their centrally to the debate only proves the point.

As Tony Blair put it in his memoirs:

"We had come to power in 1997 saying it was 'standards not structures' that mattered. We said this in respect of education, but it applied equally to health and other parts of the system of public services. In other words we were saying: forget about complex, institutional structural reforms; what counts is what works, and by that we meant outputs. This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, as I began to realise when experience started to shape our thinking, it was bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes."

I wonder if "structures not standards" is still a popular piece of rhetoric in the education debate simply because most English schools have so much autonomy - be they academy or maintained - already. It's easy to say structures don't matter if you're broadly happy with their existing configuration. I wonder if my fellow conference attendees would have thought structures didn't matter if their budgets were still controlled by local authorities as they were before 1988? I expect not.

What the spending review means for schools

The 2010 spending review was one of the most gruelling experiences of my career. It's difficult to express to anyone who hasn't been through it how emotional SR negotiations can be. I felt a huge weight of responsibility for squeezing the best possible deal out of the Treasury.

So I have a lot of sympathy for what my old colleagues in the DfE have been going through over the past few months in preparations for today's announcement. Perhaps this makes me prone to being overly sympathetic but I do think they've done a pretty good job.

But what does it mean for schools?

"Protection" for schools

The headline is that the "schools budget has been protected in real terms". What this means in practise is that the revenue budget for pupils aged 5-16 has been held flat taking inflation into account. As there is a rising number of pupils that will mean a (small) per pupil reduction. It doesn't cover the 16-19 budget so school sixth forms aren't included in the protection. There's no news yet on what will happen to this budget.

Now they'll probably be some political debate about whether this picture constitutes genuine "protection" but it doesn't really matter. The reality is schools will feel that budgets are tighter but won't find themselves facing big cuts. They will be in a much better place than other public services (including the NHS as, while, that budget has also been protected costs are rising at much faster rate than in education).


National Funding Formula (NFF)

The Chancellor also announced that a NFF would be introduced. This is a big win for the DfE as it has been in the pipeline since 2010 but neither the PM, DPM or Treasury have previously been prepared to commit given the political risk of big changes to the distribution of school funding. It is badly needed as the current distribution of school funding makes no sense. At the moment LAs simply receive what they got the previous year (per pupil) - and this has happened every year since 2005. There is no account taken of demographic changes since then at all. There are a couple of things to look out for as details start to be unveiled over the coming months:

• What factors are used? The, probably fair, assumption is that a NFF would see inner-city LAs lose out in favour of schools in rural and suburban areas. However, the distribution of funding is entirely dependent on which factors one decides to prioritise. If you up the amount attached to each EAL student, for example, inner cities will do better. If you up the amount for small schools then rural areas will benefit. There's no right answer.
• Will Local Authorities be given any discretion? There are two ways to implement an NFF - give money direct to schools and bypass LAs altogether or publish indicative figures for schools but give LAs some discretion to take local factors into account (e.g. high levels of migration into a particular part of the Authority). Both ways have pluses and minuses.

Update: I understand that the NFF being considered would be at LA level. Authorities would still decide school level budgets but would only be able to use a limited number of factors (as per changes introduced this year).

Education Services Grant (ESG)

The ESG is what academies get in lieu of services they would previously have received from local authorities. Maintained schools get the same amount but their money goes to the LA rather than them directly. This budget - which is around £1bn at the moment - is being cut by £200m. So academies will lose roughly £20-£30 per pupil and LAs will lose the same amount for any maintained schools in the Authority. The DfE press release also says £150m will be saved from efficiencies to the academies process. I assume this will mean reductions to the start-up costs sponsors receive when they take over a new academy.


And that's it really. There's no detail about any of the other big DfE budgets like childcare and teacher training but we can probably assume they will not be protected in real terms given the overall cut to the DfE budget (of around 2%) and the relative protection given to schools.