Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 2

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

Starting a second thread as the first one is still very busy, albeit it's veered off in a few directions...

Original article

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e6465c9e-d462-48cb-a73e-74480059a1f3?shareToken=05bf599cd4a2376fe3ce83cdce607100

That’s very useful, thanks.

Reduced competition for places in 26/27 could be handy… . It got a bit mad a few years ago and looking at the 11+ threads still is!

Never seen a government with so much desire to level everyone down to the ground.

Education is the backbone to every civilised society. What are we doing to ourselves? What is this self harm business that we are doing?

The UK has one of the best reputable sought after schools across the world. Well not anymore….
They are-
Destroying a successful sector because of envy and because they can’t seem to get their act together to get their own state system fit for propose thus letting all the children down.

Where the heck is 6500 teachers that they promised to train? Reminds me of Boris’s empty promise about building. a silly amount of hospitals … that never happened.

Why aren’t EHCP applications being approved? And why are they taking so long to approve?
why are SEND children being neglected?
why haven’t we got TAs in classes anymore?!
why have we got the biggest numbers of children in any one class in Europe?
why have still got untrained teachers in British classrooms?!!
why are teachers’ workloads ridiculously high and schools have unrealistic expectations of the teachers?
why isnt the gov working on fixing social services to help support families who need it and not leave these issues for schools to pick the pieces?
where is the mental health support nhs teams that are supposed to help support children that need it so that the school doesn’t end picking the pieces?
I could go on forever..,

If the Gov is serious about improving state schools , then they would tax the multimillion pound oil companies who are actually wrecking our children’s future and contribute nothing for our young ones not independent schools who contribute so much for our society.

Where the heck is 6500 teachers that they promised to train? Reminds me of Boris’s empty promise about building. a silly amount of hospitals … that never happened.

you do realise Labour took power 6 months ago don’t you? With all the will in the world you can’t train teachers in 6 months. Maybe you need some education!

Why aren’t EHCP applications being approved? And why are they taking so long to approve?

14 years of Tories

why haven’t we got TAs in classes anymore?!
14 years of Tories

Why have we got the biggest classes in Europe?

14 years of Tories
**
why have still got untrained teachers in British classrooms?!!

14 years of Tories and private schools where teachers don’t need a qualification.

why are teachers’ workloads ridiculously high and schools have unrealistic expectations of the teachers?

14 years of Tories

where is the mental health support nhs teams that are supposed to help support children that need it so that the school doesn’t end picking the pieces?

14 years of Tories

I could go on forever..,

14 years of Tories.

Labour have been in power 6 months

14 years of Tories mean Labour has had 14 years to come up with viable costed policies and plans for all this - yet 6 months in and they’re yet to share ANYTHING which will meaningfully improve education.

Wonder why that might be….? 🧐

Bookmarking @Jaimenotjamie’s posts because the “14 years of Tories!!!” line is starting to wear thin, and both Labour and their supporters are going to need to come up with something a bit better, pretty sharpish.

Still, free cornflakes for rich kids, that’s something I suppose 👏 👏 👏

“14 years of Tories” has given the UK far improved rankings for Maths and Reading compared to the previous government.
Improving education is one of the few things (only?) they may have got right.
Time will tell where we are in another 5 years!

Thanks this is helpful. Is there any way to find out more local trends in demand for school places? Obviously other factors will influence need for school places, as well as birth rate such as family moves and new home building and so on

HMRC has already taken the 20 VAT from private schools yet they have gone quiet on training new teachers. Empty promises like all the previous gov.

No sign of recruiting more TAs, working on reducing teacher workload to help with teacher retention and mental health. Our state school children are suffering yet Bridget is obsessed with something else.

Empty promises. Easy to blame someone else when you’re incompetent.

Levelling down Britain.

I vote Labour (and always have) because I feel they’re the only hope for public services. Especially at the last election due to 14 years of Tory neglect of education budgets and the unfunded needs of schools.

I am disgusted that the lack of a Labour plan for education while pursuing private school children so punitively. It’s such a let down.
I’m mot excusing the Tories at all- child poverty, lack of household funds for food or heating is at record levels under them. Cost of living crisis, environmental crisis, failed Brexit at massive public cost with no public benefit, corrupt contracts, awful contemptuous treatment of the public over COVID partying etc. That is all at the door of the Tories .. It’s shameful.

However, we now have a Labour government and once upon a time their mantra was ‘education, education, education’. I feel really quite stupid that I didn’t see how much Labour have changed away from that.

Our Local Authority website has a “school planning” page which includes “forecast” spreadsheets for primary and secondary school places. I assume other LAs offer the same.

That’s interesting @IVTT. Of course, you only have to look at the disaster that Labour has made of education in Wales to know that things don’t bode well for anyone now.

And what are we to do as voters? Badenoch is vacuous, solely focused on trying to drag the Tories ever further right to try to recapture votes from Farage- Boris Johnson having kicked all the Tory moderates out for being anti Brexit. So we don’t have an effective main opposition party to look to for education policies. Self servingly, the Tories have turned completely inwards to lick their party wounds after losing power.

The Lib Dems could be making great strides on VAT issues by taking a centrist position because they already do oppose VAT on education. So this could be a gift for them with the constant updates of more schools unprecedentedly closing at the same time, not enough state school places in some areas, and the VAT policy patently costing far more money than it will make. But yet I don’t see them releasing comments on this. I feel they’re can’t bring themselves to stick their necks out for private school parents either. What campaigning are they doing on this?

The only hope is that they come to realise that closer alignment with the EU is the only way forward. And that will mean alignment of taxation laws around education as well. So let them get themselves in the economic hole they find themselves in already and the biggest growth boost will be new trade deals with the EU. The EU zone needs it too. The US turning inwards, China & Russia on the other hand etc - Europe needs to regroup. It is about values as much as economics.

You are deluded if you think that Labour are going to improve the ECHP process. Their answer is to prevent many SEN children from being able to get an ECHP in the first place. The current education secretary is too hell bent on stirring up class warfare with her ridiculous Facebook posts to care about the ones that actually matter in this (i.e. the children).

Its also clear that the government is going to make it more difficult for children with more severe SEND to attend specialist schools (state as well as private). Much cheaper to pretend/lie that their needs can be met in mainstream schools, most of which are already on their knees trying to cope with the SEND kids they already have.

As more lockdown-affected children make their way from primary the secondary schools are facing a tidal wave of additional needs with no proper funding or plans for support, so restricting places in specialist schools is clearly a great idea! 🙄

I am far more concerned by the Labour government’s plans to undo the Gove-instigated reforms that actually raised standards, as per the charts posted above. The focus on the basics, including phonics and times tables checks, made a real difference despite howls of outrage from some sectors of the teaching profession.

The education policy of mainstreaming anyone with Sen they can is so short sighted - they're banking on being out of power by the time they have to face a new mysterious bulge in young adults not in work or education.

I'll be amazed if the Ed stats don't fall - this is a direct cut and paste from SNP policies and look at the Ed stats in Scotland...

But not to worry the tories will be back in and it'll be back to 'autism is just laziness and special pleading' etc etc.

@shockeditellyou i agree - labour aren't listening even to longterm term MPs in their own party that feel standards have gone up when schools have had more control over curriculum and other matters.

Cheap headlines to muck about with policy...

Why aren’t EHCP applications being approved?
Don't be ridiculous, there has been a massive increase in echp applications, a 20 percent increase from 2022 to 2023, for example. 84,400 new plans were made in 2023.

And why are they taking so long to approve?
Because the services are totally overwhelmed by the volume increase in applications at a time when funding for LAs is so tight that they can't increase their teams to match the level of need (Tory policy).

why are SEND children being neglected?
The Tories made the curriculum exponentially harder just as COVID came along and disrupted everyone's education. They didn't properly adjust the curriculum afterwards, or understand the soft skills underpinning curricular success such as attention, listening, negotiation, sharing, play. They offered a short period of academic catch up but did nothing to support this side of things. As a result lots of children are struggling. Ofsted inspections were standards and attendance focused and there was no incentive on schools to be inclusive, plus the Tories decided to allow academy trusts to set behaviour rules that are pernicious to neurodivergent children.

why haven’t we got TAs in classes anymore?!
There are TAs in classes. However post COVID recruitment has been harder as TAs discovered they could do easier roles working from home that paid better.

why have we got the biggest numbers of children in any one class in Europe?
Education policy.

why have still got untrained teachers in British classrooms?!!
Independent schools have never had to have trained teachers, unlike state schools.

why are teachers’ workloads ridiculously high and schools have unrealistic expectations of the teachers?
It was ever thus.

why isnt the gov working on fixing social services to help support families who need it and not leave these issues for schools to pick the pieces?
Why indeed.

where is the mental health support nhs teams that are supposed to help support children that need it so that the school doesn’t end picking the pieces?
Like Thrive in Education? Very much in evidence. Camhs like all other services has had an enormous wave of referrals post COVID. In my area the autism pathway referrals quadrupled and have never reduced since COVID.

Since part of what is making these kids so stressed is education policy, particularly the ridiculously hard Gove curriculum, it seems unfair to frame it as "school picking up the pieces". Actually CAMHs is picking up the pieces of children destroyed by our education system.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14n6U8PgDA/?mibextid=wwXIfr

@GoldVermillion - so you're saying that the curriculum changes which have resulted in the UK climbing the international educational PISA rankings, as shown by @IVTT yesterday at 23:49 don't suit all students?

OK, well in an internationally competitive world we do need to educate those who can access the curriculum, if we want any kind of a standard of living in the UK.

So maybe expanding selective education - and having different education options - is the way forward after all?

Well having read the most recent parliamentary subcommittee report on SEND I don't see where that information is coming from. Couldn't be scaremongering, I suppose?

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/46238/documents/231788/default/

Absolutely. A range of qualifications at the end of secondary so that every child can achieve and leave school with appropriate qualifications. Rather than a system that is skewed so high that 40 percent of kids are automatic "failures" and even able kids develop mental health issues. For example, to attain AQA biology grade 9 in 2023 was something like 65 Percent. What's the possible justification for setting exam papers so hard that even the most able few percent can only access 2/3 of it? What does that do to children in terms of how competent they feel psychologically? Maths GCSE "pass" rate for the higher paper has been around 26 percent. Why is it not set at around 50 percent? So children don't have to sit exam after exam that, despite being at a reasonable standard of functioning, they cannot answer 2/3 to 3/4 of the paper. Why is so much of the paper concerned with separating out grade 8 and 9? It's psychologically a very damaging thing to do to children in terms of their sense of academic competence and if themselves as learners, and I am sure that this, coupled with COVID fallout and the social media age, is behind the mental health crisis we face in our youth.

What in that report makes you feel like Labour have this in hand? Most of their action items are either ‘study the situation’ or ‘come up with a plan at a later date’. The language also suggests a focus more on cutting costs than meeting children’s needs. They have been very public about intentions of placing more of the burden for send education onto mainstream schools, which are already not coping. At the same time they are actively legislating to limit access to private education and homeschooling, which often serve as escape routes for those failed by the system.

You have hit the nail on the head; I don't think Labour has a firm plan of any sort yet. I don't think there is evidence yet of the specific allegations made in the shared Michael Charles Facebook post. Seems to me like they (the government) are recognising a problem but nowhere near yet identifying a plan let alone being decided on things like not allowing appeals. There have been at least 3 calls out to the sector for evidence around education, SEND and curriculum since November, the latest of which the deadline has not yet passed for.