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SCHOOLS NorthEast review of the Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy

The Department for Education has released “A Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy”, an independent review led by Sir Nick Weller, CEO and Executive Principal of Dixons Academies in Bradford.

 

The report outlines a series of proposals to “tackle educational underperformance in the North of England” in the following five areas:

  • Building teaching and leadership capacity
  • School improvement capacity
  • Raising standards by closing the disadvantaged gap
  • Curriculum
  • System conditions

 

SCHOOLS NorthEast welcomes that there is a strategy in place and some funding available to improve school performance in the North, but has reservations about some of the recommendations contained within.

 

Funding – Sir Nick is right to note that “schools in the North typically receive less funding per pupil than those in London, despite having lower attainment and serving communities with greater disadvantage”.

The over-reliance on London as the benchmark for schools in the North ignores the huge resources injected into the London Schools Challenge. It also doesn’t articulate the scale of disparity – the fact that if North East schools were funded on a par with London schools this would inject £360m into the education system here.

Money doesn’t automatically make for good teaching, but an additional £360m/year would significantly enhance leaders’ ability to properly resource their schools and widen access to proven interventions.

The strategy could also have done more to make recommendations to reform current plans for a National Funding Formula which will further entrench the funding disadvantage in the North.

This inclusion of an area cost adjustment multiplier will disproportionately favour more affluent areas where educational attainment is higher – an issue that SCHOOLS NorthEast has urged the Government to reconsider.

We would echo Sir Nick’s call for the DfE to better fund special education provision in the North. Demand outstrips supply and planned changes in funding will only exacerbate this situation.

 

Leadership & teaching – We echo Sir Nick’s focus on building teaching and leadership capacity and fully agree with him that “teacher effectiveness is the most important determinant of pupil outcomes”. We are also in full agreement that the DfE “should improve its teacher supply model to take better account of local need”.

Given the agreed importance of teaching and leadership, we were disappointed by the strategy’s focus on structure and its recommendations regarding MATs. Whilst we agree that MATs in our region should be supported to be as strong and effective as possible, this emphasis on structure distracts us once again from what really matters; great teaching and great leadership.

We do not consider leadership investment to be a solely academies based requirement and believe the focus on leadership should extend to all schools and at all levels.

Sir Nick is right to note that the DfE should enhance existing and new leadership initiatives and programmes in the North, but the report fails to recognise existing financial and geographical barriers to participation.

We need more strong leaders in our region, but many of the existing programmes are too costly and – from a North East perspective – very inaccessible. A centre, dedicated to leadership, should be located in the region and/or virtually, that is not-for-profit and ensures that programmes are both accessible and provided at reasonable cost to participants.

 

Recruitment – The need for marketing initiatives to attract teachers to live and work in the North is one that SCHOOLS NorthEast has already identified and is actively working to address. This is a key part of our strategy in launching our regional jobs portal, Jobs in Schools | North East. Ours is a regional approach, and we believe that this is preferable to the city-based approach the strategy suggests, which runs the risk of leaving behind non-urban parts of our region. It is also schools-led.

We also have reservations about the suggested ‘Teach North’ scheme “to attract and retain talented newly-qualified teachers in disadvantaged schools in the North”. Teach First is already operating in the region and it is not clear what additional benefit another scheme would have. Rather, we believe that the DfE should concentrate on building on the successes of Teach First in the North and  working through the issues that the scheme has in the region. Replicating structures unnecessarily without increasing the size of the talent pool seems unproductive.

 

Curriculum – On Sir Nick’s recommendations regarding curriculum, we believe that education must support children into the world of work but are concerned that the current direction of policy does not align with regional skills needs. Ofsted noted today that “the nation’s prosperity is at risk because the majority of England’s schools fail to prioritise enterprise education and work-related learning”. We agree that more can be done to align curricula to the world of work.

 

Evidence-led practice – SCHOOLS NorthEast welcomes Sir Nick’s recommendations that EEF work in our region should be scaled up. This is a key strand of the three-year-long strategy ‘Shaping our Future’ launched by SCHOOLS NorthEast at this year’s annual Summit.

We are working with schools to support the North East to become an area of evidence-based excellence and it is essential that work is done to develop that culture – both at leadership level and to promote the grassroots professional drive that is developing strongly in other regions of the country.

As a priority, the North East needs to establish a Research School to help facilitate this culture shift.

 

Admissions – the report seeks to shake up the admissions policy to encourage a more diverse mix of students whilst at the same time recognising there are some schools – it cites the Academy at Shotton Hall as an example – that deliver high attainment despite large numbers of disadvantaged pupils.

We would echo the call to better understand why these schools achieve better results in comparison to others.

What is confusing then is that the strategy also proposes mixing up school populations to balance the number of disadvantaged pupils in each school.

 

SCHOOLS NorthEast is supportive of a strategy for northern education, but we believe it needs refinement. With only £70 million to spend over a period of three and a half years, the Government will have to choose wisely when prioritising the areas that will benefit most.

 

“A Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy” – an independent review by Sir Nick Weller (November 2016) can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/571641/Northern-powerhouse-strategy.pdf

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