Efforts to improve teaching quality are being “crushed” by rising levels of child poverty, and mental health and SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) referrals, according to a former special adviser to the Department for Education (DfE).
Speaking at the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) Conference in Birmingham today, Sam Freedman, now a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, said he was “really worried” by the huge increase in pastoral-related issues seen by schools since the pandemic.
“Every metric that we have, whether it’s attendance, whether it’s mental health, whether it’s various SEND conditions, everything is getting a lot worse very, very quickly,” he said.
What’s more, he said increases in poverty in society are having a major impact on schools.
“Poverty has got a lot worse, and a lot of the services that used to support schools with those aspects of supporting a child’s life have lost funding, disappeared or are overwhelmed in the case of Camhs (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services).”
“And, of course, it hits schools in the poorest parts of the country the hardest, and so all the problems they face are made worse by poverty.”
As a result, Mr Freedman said, efforts to improve teaching quality, such as with National Professional Qualifications and the Early Career Framework, are being undermined.
“Any academic improvement or gain in teaching quality is being crushed because people don’t get to focus on the curriculum. They’re too busy focusing on those wider social issues,” he said.
Whoever is the next prime minister should create a cross-department approach to tackling these problems rather than expecting schools or the DfE alone to fix it, he said.
“My biggest hope for the next government is you have a prime minister who says, ‘This is a key issue for me and I’m going to get my head of DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], my head of the health service and my head of education to work together and come up with a strategy that takes into account every part of a child’s life rather than just schools’.”
Freedman also said whoever won the next election - which he thought was likely to be Labour - would face several “burning platforms” to tackle from day one, with teacher recruitment perhaps the biggest issue.
“We have a massive teacher recruitment crisis. We’re on track this year to recruit half of the secondary teachers of the target the DfE set. That is by far and away the worst ever teacher recruitment number - and there is not much time [for it] to be better next year.”
Freedman’s wider comments echo those of CST chief executive Leora Cruddas, who said during her keynote speech to the event that schools face a “rising tide of mistrust” among parents, but are key to the “social recovery” required post-pandemic.
Meanwhile Baroness Barran told Tes earlier this week at the Conservative party conference that schools should conduct deep dives on attendance issues to help get to the root causes of the attendance crisis that has hit schools since the pandemic.
