Back in November 2021, Schools North East wrote to Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, highlighting the pressure schools had been under during the pandemic and suggesting that the Department for Education implemented 5 key policies that would have an immediate positive impact on schools and their staff.
We called attention to the incredible job schools in the North East had done during numerous lockdowns and that while members of staff should be praised for going above and beyond for the young people in their care, we expressed deep concern over the negative impact this was having on staff mental health and wellbeing.
Schools North East asked Mr Zahawi to tackle the excessive bureaucratic workload of school staff in order to alleviate the stresses and pressures they were under. As well as temporarily suspending routine Ofsted inspections in the immediate post-pandemic period, Schools North East asked the Secretary of State to remove obstacles to delivery of support, especially in regard to automatic FSM registration, and to suspend school performance league tables. We finally asked Mr Zahawi to ensure a period of stability for schools and to allow them to focus solely on recovering from the effects of a pandemic that was far from ‘over’.
You can read the full letter we sent to Nadhim Zahawi here
Nadhim Zahawi’s response
Mr Zahawi has this week responded to our letter, stating that £1.8 billion has been allocated to support young people to catch up on missed learning, taking the total to £5 billion all together. That is not to mention the further £4.7 billion that will be provided to early years, schools and college funding by 2024-25.
In response to our call to suspend Ofsted inspections, the Education Secretary stated that ‘There are no plans to suspend routine inspections’, before continuing to say that ‘as the conduct and reporting of inspections is a matter for Ofsted, I have passed your letter and this response to the office of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, and asked that she responds to you directly on the matters you raise.’ We await this response with baited breath.
This is very disappointing as many school leaders feel that, by removing the pressure of impending inspections, the Department and, indeed, Ofsted, will be relieving a large part of the strain schools are currently feeling and allow their staff to more effectively move forward from the pandemic.
Zahawi then went on to thank Schools North East for raising the point regarding obstacles to providing support to students. Focusing predominantly on Free School Meals, Zahawi stated that ‘we want to make sure as many eligible pupils as possible are claiming their FSM, and to make it as simple as possible for schools and local authorities to determine eligibility’. The way in which this occurs, however – via the Eligibility Checking System (ECS), as well as a potentially embarrassing process of encouraging schools to then encourage parents to sign up for Free School Meals through a model registration form developed by the government – does not really address the obstacles we originally pointed out.
As is stated in our letter, we believe that the Government should use the data it already has to automatically register eligible children for FSMs, taking the onus away from schools and LAs, and ensure students can access the support that they are entitled to.
Focusing on our request to suspend school league tables, Mr Zahawi confirmed that no school performance data will be published and that ‘qualifications achieved in 2020 and 2021 will not count towards performance measures in future years.’ However, he then went on to say that ‘in 2021-22, we will publish, as far as possible, our usual performance tables for KS4 and 16-18’, which may very well lead to some confusion.
The concern raised by Schools North East was that, due to the higher rates of disruption experienced by the region throughout the pandemic, school performance league tables would merely reflect a map of Covid’s impact, rather than school performance. Rather than actually suspending league tables, the Department appears to be continuing to publish them and will ask schools, parents, local authorities and the media to consider the impact of Covid by ensuring ‘clear messages are placed on the performance tables to advise caution when drawing conclusions from the 2021-22 data’.
When addressing our request for schools to be given a period of stability, in order for them to recover properly from the ongoing impact of the pandemic, Zahawi pointed out that children no longer need to be kept in bubbles and that schools do not need to identify close contacts, instead this will be completed by NHS Test and Trace. He then went on to say that, with regards to structural changes and reforms, the Department for Education ‘continues to assess the impact of our policies on teachers, leaders, and schools. We have developed a more rigorous approach to assessing burdens on schools throughout the lifetime of a policy and we do not want to burden schools with extra workload.’
