Evolve

Education Issues

During the last ten years the public education sector has been under the spotlight as never before. It has been a period of continuous and major change presenting enormous challenges for education authorities and schools alike.

Central government has been increasingly ambitious in the goals it has attached to each new piece of legislation in order to achieve step changes in standards of teaching and learning rather than incremental improvements. Two major current initiatives epitomise the scale of this ambition: the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda and Building Schools for the Future.

Every Child Matters requires every Local Authority to adopt a new and more widely based approach to meeting the needs of young people. The ‘Five Outcomes’ at the heart of the initiative are driving big changes in the way that services are organised at Local Authority level. The creation of Children’s Services Departments to bring together all the services that have been provided separately by Education, Social Services and the Health Services is at the heart of these changes. The process of combining previously separate services and groups of personnel while continuing to deliver those services effectively requires a great deal of skill and investment in both people and processes.

The roll out of Building Schools for the Future is proceeding in parallel with this major piece of work. Capital spending on school buildings has increased nearly ten fold since 1997 and investment in new and refurbished accommodation is taking place at unprecedented levels.

The aim of BSF is to achieve a transformation in standards of secondary education through a programme that will see every secondary school in the country rebuilt or refurbished over a fifteen year period. Major spending on ICT is a key element in this programme, once again at unprecedented levels.

Alongside these two major initiatives there is a raft of other programmes introduced both by central government and local authorities.

There are significant challenges to LAs and individual schools as they try to deal with many different workstreams, each with its own objectives, criteria, targets and timescales alongside major capital investment and increasing revenue funding for schools all present.

These challenges arise at several levels:

• Strategic level – coordinating policies, resources and activities within and across councils and between councils and other agencies and providers;
• Project management – there is shortage of skilled and experienced project managers to run the complex procurements and projects that are taking place;
• Change management and process reengineering – schools and LAs will not get the maximum value from either capital or revenue investment in school buildings and ICT unless it is supported by well developed change management and CPD programmes;
• Operational – linking separate programmes together to get the maximum overall benefit for staff, students and the wider community requires a skill set that is not always available at school or LA level.

To give some more specific examples of major pieces of work that are taking place alongside the Every Child Matters and BSF initiatives:

Workforce re-modelling. Schools should now have undertaken this re-structuring of their staff, aimed at reducing the administrative burden on teachers so they can concentrate on teaching and learning. Some schools have gone for some quite radical new structures, with administrative managers taking on more responsibilities from senior teaching staff who may take on responsibilities such as timetabling or data tracking. This could have a significant impact on new school buildings, for example around ICT systems. However, some schools are still finding it difficult to implement and take full advantage of opportunities offered.

ICT is a current preoccupation with the government, who regard it as key for improving standards. ICT can also improve home-school communications and the quality of pupil tracking systems, both of which are seen as crucial for raising standards. In some schools, the ICT network is a single, integrated system which provides for state of the art teaching resources as well as information about pupil achievement levels, absence (staff and pupils), even whether pupils had chips or a healthy lunch! If ICT is to work to best effect, discussion about how it is integrated into any new building work is hugely beneficial for its overall effectiveness in the finished school and careful attention to procurement is very important.

Extended schools are intended to provide a range of services and activities to meet the needs of pupils, families and the community such as sports provision, adult education classes for local residents and child care, the latter underpinning a great deal of government policy. It is envisaged that, in extended schools, the school will be open well beyond the normal school day, giving wide access for a range of facilities for more of the local community. Many schools require external help to develop their extended schools activities for the benefit of their wider community.

The school improvement agenda underpins all education policy and everyone working in the education arena is affected by it. The latest development is the introduction of School Improvement Partners, typically a head teacher who is recruited to work with a school in order to improve school leadership, identify priorities for improvement and plan effective change.

Educational provision for 14-19 year olds was the subject of a major government review. It is intended to tackle the lack of progression in secondary schools and improve staying-on rates after 16. Key themes include the provision of better vocational options to create a more highly skilled and better off workforce. This ties in with the government’s desire to move towards a ‘knowledge economy’: one based on high skill, higher value work leading to economic regeneration and less deprivation through low wages.

Future changes – the Education White Paper

The new education white paper has been widely reported on and discussed. Despite the suggested ‘watering down’ of some of its more radical proposals, especially around admissions, it is set to continue the move towards even more locally managed schools. The tension between what individual schools (teachers, parents and governors as well as the local community stakeholders) want and need, what local authorities would prefer and what central government demands will carry on and has the potential for some interesting scenarios for new school procurement. The context is political as well and educational and economic, and is likely to be played out in different ways depending on the prevailing local dynamics.

Our Consultant  

Our consultant has worked in the state education sector for 25 years as a teacher, an LEA officer and, currently, as a consultant. He has very significant experience of school building procurement using both the traditional and PFI routes, including five and a half years as a PFI Project Manager. He is currently working both for public and private sector organisations on a wide variety of projects but with a particular emphasis on Building Schools for the Future.

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