It has been easy, this week, to get suckered into a pre-occupation with Westminster’s collapse and forget that many don’t have the time, inclination or reason to watch every turn and stall.
A good example: on Tuesday, as the first resignations hit and the education secretary departed, most teachers were too busy plugging the holes in a broken system to ruminate upon Nadhim Zahawi’s “real” reasons for ditching the Department for Education (DfE) in favour of the Treasury. They were doing the same when Michelle Donelan resigned from the post after just 35 hours in the job and James Cleverly then became the third education secretary in a week. .
Of course, any event that leads to a DfE empty of ministers (barring Baroness Barran) is a disgrace. And, yes, I could spend this leader writing about that. But to do so would be of no real help to those who work in schools. As a trade publication, sometimes our role is to work within the political arena to force transparency and push for change. But right now, our role must be to highlight the desperate situation schools are in and shout about it repeatedly until people listen.
Politics so often side-steps, drowns out and dilutes these issues. Right now, we have to tell it like it is, in all its raw brutality, so they cannot be ignored. So if parts of this leader feel repetitive, I make no apology for it.
Covid and education
Let’s start with Covid. It ravaged education - through staff and pupil absence, through the collapse of support services, through long-term illness, and through a complete change in not just the way teaching had to happen but the willingness of some to be taught. The government simply hasn’t got to grips with the scale of the problem and the damage done, nor the ongoing disruption.
And that’s not because school leaders haven’t told them. Our recent Education Insights Expert Panel webinar - with a multi-academy trust leader, a headteacher and a special school principal - lays out clearly what many have been saying for some time. Wider society needs to recognise that schools are in desperate need of help. The only reason things are not worse (as our reporter Matilda Martin pointed out in her Twitter thread on the absolute shambles of the SATs process this year) is because school staff are going above and beyond.
Then there is the funding. Schools simply don’t have enough money. Even those not in the red predict that energy price rises, non-educational spend on filling social or health service gaps, building costs, extra intervention spend owing to Covid impacts and supply costs resulting from open vacancies will send them into financial trouble.
Quite simply, calling it a “school” budget is inaccurate: that money is now meeting health, social, community, wellbeing and outreach needs. It simply can’t go on.
Teacher recruitment
Recruitment and retention is a mess. There are not enough people who want to be teachers and there are not enough teachers currently doing the job who want to carry on. The early career framework and establishment of the Institute of Teaching are not likely to make enough difference to change this situation. The handling of the re-accreditation of initial teacher training providers will likely make it worse. Come September, some parents will find that their children don’t have permanent teachers. The workforce experts will tell you that, in 2023, there will likely be even more parents in that situation.
And the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system? It has been abysmal for years and the SEND Review - which shows so much promise in fixing some of its worst problems - is likely now dead in the water. Children with additional needs will continue to suffer throughout school and their life chances post-school will continue to be poor, despite the best efforts of their teachers.
Each of these things alone should be a national scandal. But enough smoke has been poured out in the form of swerves and meaningless statements and distractions, that your average member of the public has no idea that things are this bad. Worse, they think it’s being overplayed.
The real danger now is that - with new faces and new teams coming into the DfE - once again, nothing will be done. It will take months for the complexities to be understood, months for ideas to form, months for proper consultation and, at the end of it, so many of the problems cited here will be left on the “too complicated”, “too expensive”, or “I don’t believe it’s that bad” piles. And then the faces will change once more and it will all start again.
Of course politics is important. Of course it is at the root of the change needed to solve these problems. But sometimes the politics gets in the way. Sometimes we need to ignore the political distractions and keep saying the same thing, without wavering, until someone listens.
