The BBC has reported that 95% of all local council-funded outdoor education centres have had their entire funding cut. A third of all the council-funded out door centres now feel their future is uncertain. 12 outdoor education centres are set to shut, in addition to all those that have already closed over the years.
I can not think of another national, educational service that has suffered a 95% cut in the latest rounds of budgets and been expected to survive.
The Liberal Democrats should be championing outdoor education.
Affordable high quality outdoor education which is available …
Yesterday Michael Gove, finally, announced the government’s proposals for replacing the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) scheme. As previously trailed, Liberal Democrat pressure has secured more than £100m extra for the plans.
The £180m being spent on the new scheme compares to the £560m cost of the EMA. At first glance, that is a large cut. But if you view the key objective for the funds to be helping more people to take part in post-16 education, then the picture looks very different. That’s because several different studies of EMA concludes that the vast majority of its funds went to people …
As we approach the end of the first year of coalition government it is worth assessing the balance sheet in respect of education. Can we as Liberal Democrats be pleased or dismayed at what has happened in education?
The two obvious big events provide contrasting pictures. On the one hand there has been the tuition fees debacle, and on the other, the Pupil Premium success. But, there has been much more to consider; new forms of academies; additional schools; changes to the ways schools are funded; abolition of EMAs; and of Quangos such as the GTCE and TDA; provision for deprived …
Education has always been particularly important to Liberals. Wales has always prioritised education but this great tradition has been left to slide.
Alarm bells rang when last summer, our GCSE and A level results fell behind England for the first time.
Now, two recent reports have exposed just how badly Labour and Plaid Cymru have mismanaged the Welsh education system.
Firstly, an international assessment of performance (PISA, run by the OECD) has shown that Wales is the lowest achieving nation of the UK and falling behind many European countries. Welsh students have fallen behind in reading, mathematics and science. …
As a former constituent and activist in Bermondsey and Old Southwark I greatly enjoyed campaigning on behalf of Simon Hughes and have a lot of respect for his approach to policy and the hard work he puts in, especially meeting face to face with local voters and community groups. I was shocked, however, to read quotes from Simon on the front page of Saturday’s Guardian calling on universities to ‘cut intake’ from independent schools in order to match nationally ‘representative’ proportions: 7.2% was his quoted figure for the proportion of students we ought to aim at coming from an …
The value added by schools is in many ways more important that the actual raw results achieved – is a school good because its students have got the results commensurate with their potential when they entered the school, or because …
By Alex Feakes
| Thu 30th December 2010 - 12:05 pm
In my earlier article, I looked at the new proposals for dealing with school exclusions set out in The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper, published by the government last month. Two other areas of concern in Paper, which otherwise contains some good ideas, relates to the curriculum changes and the measurement of schools’ performance.
Curriculum – the broad academic core
The White Paper gives some welcome attention to the breadth of the curriculum students study. Although the freedoms proposed for schools elsewhere in the paper allow them to adopt their own route, it is proposed to encourage the …
At the start of this week details of the Pupil Premium to help the education of the most disadvantaged children were published. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has now run its eye over those details and come up with its verdict:
Pupil premium: simple and transparent financial incentive
The Government’s chosen pupil premium is simple, amounting to £430 per pupil eligible for free school meals no matter which local authority children live in. The Government originally proposed a pupil premium that would have varied in generosity across local authorities, been relatively complex to understand, and gone against the Government’s stated
How does a poor school system become good or a good school system become excellent? Those are the questions asked in a recently published McKinsey review of twenty school systems around the world, including both developed and developing countries.
In school systems where there have been significant improvements in performance, McKinsey found that these were often achieved in six years or less from the start of the changes. In other words it is possible for a government to bring about improvements in time for the public to see the benefits before the next election. However, continuity amongst key educational officials (including politicians) is frequently beneficial, with improving systems usually having their educational leaders in place for long periods of time.
Many of those improvements were, according to the McKinsey analysis, brought about without significant changes in the structure of education systems or in the resources put in.
I’m sure many of you, like myself, watched Vince Cable’s interview on the Politics Show last week where he denied breaking any promises to oppose a rise in tuition fees, with a certain feeling of discomfort. But now I think the time has come to discuss a change in narrative.
Lib Dem MPs and Ministers (including up until now Vince Cable,) have a reputation for giving straight-forward honest answers to journalists questions without coming across as evasive or revisionist. However, with the tuition fee pledge to deny a promise was ever made and as such never broken is not a …
After a year’s work in the run up to the General Election co-writing the Liberal Democrats’ Equity and Excellence education policy paper with other members of the 5-19 Education Policy Working Group, I opened the Coalition Government’s first education White Paper with understandable trepidation.
Nothing can be more important than giving every child a fair start in life, but the education system inherited from Labour offered some young people pretty much the best education system anywhere in the world, while leaving others ill-equipped, under-funded, and lacking the skills needed to get on in life.
The White Paper launched by the government today, called The Importance of Teaching takes as its starting point the unflattering international comparisons of the performance and skills of our pupils. Its critique of where and why the school system is underperforming is one that will be very familiar to most Liberal Democrats. It is a vision for a system based on excellence, underpinned by freedom and fairness: an education system which challenges low aspiration and achievement and where school-level innovation and diversity are seen as strengths to be welcomed.
I commented yesterday on the good deal Chris Huhne has got for environmental spending (due to go up by a fifth in cash terms over the spending review period). The best settlement for any ministerial area however looks to have been secured for Sarah Teather’s early years education brief – assisted by Nick Clegg’s own repeated insistence on prioritising the area.
Here’s what Sarah Teather wrote yesterday to fellow MPs about the education settlement:
Today’s Comprehensive Spending Review involved some very difficult decisions that we had to take to deal with the black hole in public finances left to us by
Over at the Financial Times today, former Lib Dem cabinet minister David Laws and CentreForum’s director Julian Astle write about the potential of the ‘pupil premium’ to transform the life chances of pupils from the most disadvantaged backgrounds — but argue that schools must be held accountable for using the money directly for this purpose. Here’s an excerpt:
The pupil premium, which for the first time will see a universal service underpinned by an explicitly pro-poor funding system, sits front-and-centre in this agenda.
At present there is additional school funding for young people from deprived backgrounds, but it is allocated in
By Stephen Tall
| Sun 10th October 2010 - 11:35 am
Ah, the Daily Mail and its stable-mate the Mail on Sunday: bastions of enlightened reason and liberal decency. Or something. Today, the paper takes it upon itself to scream ‘Hypocrisy’ at Nick Clegg.
Not on grounds of policy, but because of the options Miriam and he are considering for their eldest child’s school, including a voluntary-aided Catholic school in London, the Oratory: as the Mail so subtly fulminates, ‘Nick Clegg is an atheist whose party doesn’t believe in school selection. So where does he want to send his sons… the same exclusive Catholic school as the Blairs’.
You can gauge the extent of the Mail’s self-righteous fury from the comparison of Nick Clegg to Tony Blair. The only thing missing from the usual Mail checklist-of-outrage is the accusation that Nick Clegg causes cancer. Next week, perhaps.
What do the Mail’s online readers make of the paper’s tirade? Here are the top three ‘best rated’ comments so far submitted:
Why is atheist Nick Clegg considering sending his son to an exclusive Catholic school?
erm – his wife is Catholic.
– Paul, Richmond, 9/10/2010 23:39
Lib Dem MPs need to take a vital role restraining the exuberance of the Coalition’s secretary of state for education. His enthusiastic promotion of academy status for top ranking schools (as opposed to the previous government giving this to struggling schools) and his determination to get parents and others to set up state-funded free schools answerable only to himself, is in danger of creating a two-tier system of state education.
These innovations are driven by political ideology rather than by educational evidence and professional advice. They will undermine the erstwhile democratic attempts by local authorities, once supported by …
By Ed Fordham
| Thu 16th September 2010 - 10:30 am
With the Conference season now upon us and with Labour preparing to crown their new Leader it seems appropriate that we lay to rest the myth that BSF (Building Schools for the Future) was some great effective scheme. In fact it was a bureaucratic joke with too few beneficiaries and huge expensive processes. The Liberal Democrat Conference is a good chance to cheer and toast the end of BSF and focus on education and pupils and real improvements.
It was 2005 and the local elections in London were scheduled for 2006. It was clear, we were clear, parents were clear, that there was a need for additional secondary school places in north west London in the Borough of Camden. The case for more places in the south of the Borough was also compelling – the campaign for a school ‘south of the Euston Road’ was pretty noisy and indeed compelling. And yet Camden Council had got itself to a place whereby it looked inactive, unable to articulate a more pro-active vision and lacking the political leadership to secure a new school.
I remember very clearly the conversation in Cllr Keith Moffitt’s front room in West Hampstead about the need for a new school.
The news that a motion criticising free schools was to be debated at the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference caused a rush of excitement among journalists looking for their next “coalition splits” angle. This lazy interpretation ignores the strong tradition within the Liberal Democrats of having open debate and grassroots influence on policy. Although I disagree with the motion, I welcome the chance for our party to debate the pros and cons of free schools.
So far too much of the public debate on free schools has been uninformed by the high-quality evidence that exists on the effects of free schools. In the document at the end of this post I show that the common criticisms of free schools (including those made by the authors of the motion) are not supported by the evidence. Indeed, free schools have benefited pupils overall where they have already been operating and there is no reason to think that England would be different. I hope that as many delegates as possible will read the evidence before the conference debate.
There are many reasons for the Lib Dems to support free schools but I will focus on one particularly good reason here (others can be found in the document below).
The current school system perpetuates inequality. Richer families have a much better chance of getting their children a good education than poorer families. Admissions to most state schools are based on proximity, which results in house price premiums of up to 26 percent. It also means that existing residential segregation is reflected in many state schools.
Free schools are likely to broaden choice for poor families in particular, partly because at least half of the groups interested in setting up free schools want to work with poor children. A lot of the criticism of school choice is based on the fear that poorer families will not be able to navigate the system. But there is no reason that the system has to be as complicated as it currently is in England: ballot-based or first come, first served admissions work very well in the USA and Sweden and are easy to understand. It is already Lib Dem policy to stop schools cherry-picking pupils, and this should apply to free schools too.
The experience of school choice in other countries does not support the idea that poor families can’t take advantage of it. On the contrary, when catchment areas were abolished in New Zealand low-income families were more likely to send their children to a school outside their old catchment area than middle- or high-income families. And in Edmonton, Canada, more than half of pupils go to a school other than their nearest one.
I am drafting an amendment to make the motion in favour of free schools, provided that Local Authorities have strategic oversight of schooling (though no veto on free schools); that free schools cannot cherry-pick pupils; and that the funding system is fair and does not increase the burden on already cash-strapped Local Authorities. I would welcome comments on the draft as well as signatories so that it can be debated at Conference. I can be contacted at n.c.w.smithgmailcom.
Niklas Smith is half-Swedish and has followed the development of free schools with interest. He was Junior Treasurer of Cambridge Student Liberal Democrats 2009-10.
I came into politics to make a difference for the most disadvantaged in our society. It is over three years since I, as Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, championed the Pupil Premium as our flagship education policy and debated it at Conference. I never dared imagine a time when I would be unveiling it as Government policy and then actually implementing it. But this week, the Coalition Government announced that a Pupil Premium, funded from outside the schools budget, will be introduced next September. It will mean that from next year, schools taking disadvantaged children will get the additional money they need to provide them with the extra support they deserve, no matter where they are in the country. This could mean more individual tuition or catch-up classes, but it will be for the school to decide, we won’t be telling headteachers how to spend the money.
This is a real Liberal Democrat achievement. It was the centrepiece of our education policy during the election campaign, and it is now being implemented in Government. While the Conservatives had a similar policy, it was the Liberal Democrats who pushed for it to be funded from outside the schools budget, and for it to feature specifically in the coalition agreement. And it’s no secret that it was one of the sticking points of the negotiations with Labour – they simply refused to agree to it.
MPs have approved legislation which paves the way for a radical overhaul of the school system in England. The Academies Bill, allowing schools to opt out of local council control as early as September, is now due to receive Royal Assent on Tuesday.
However, the Bill sparked a revolt among some Lib Dem MPs, with five defying the whips to back an amendment proposed by Southport MP (and former teacher) John Pugh allowing parents to be balloted if a school governor objected it to becoming an academy.
The five Lib Dems who supported John’s amendment were Annette Brooke …
Today the coalition Government announced that plans for a Pupil Premium will go ahead, targeting funding at schools that take pupils from deprived backgrounds.
The premium, a key part of the Liberal Democrats’ 2010 election manifesto, will provide additional per pupil funding on top of the existing funding provided to schools, and will be spent as individual schools choose.
Co-Chair of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Committee for Education, Dan Rogerson said:
Labour’s unequal education system left too many children falling behind.
The Liberal Democrats made clear during the election campaign that a Pupil Premium targeted at the most disadvantaged pupils was an
The SNP government in Scotland has come under fire – again – for missing its self-imposed target that every child do two hours of formal P.E. a week. Only 35% of primaries and 23% of secondaries have achieved the two hour goal.
But why have the target at all? What’s it actually achieving? Surely it’s sensible to only impose this sort of national target when there’s clear evidence of benefit.
Will two hours of P.E. make our young people more lithe and reduce obesity? Not according to the evidence.
Liberal Democrat Children’s Minister Sarah Teather today spoke to Lib Dem Voice about her campaign to put a fair start for children at the heart of the government’s reform agenda. Her first announcement is a review of the Early Years Foundation Stage, which sets out what three and four year olds should do in pre-school and nursery. Sarah said,
“Liberal Democrats have always seen education as the key to social mobility. It isn’t right that differences in social background are evident as early as 22 months and that children from deprived backgrounds are overtaken by lower-achieving children from advantaged backgrounds by …
Back when Cix was the main way of talking to other Lib Dems online, a tradition emerged of posting Lib Dem MPs’ maiden speeches so that people could read them and respond – a tradition LDV would like to continue. Yesterday, we brought you Duncan Hames and Simon Wright.
I praise the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and all those who have made their maiden speeches for their eloquence and endurance. It is customary during a maiden speech to speak in complimentary and glowing terms-indeed, frivolous terms in some cases-about the relevant constituency. However, I hope people …
As the issue of faith schools has often been debated on this site, and it’s been back in the news with the question of sex and relationship education, we’ve asked David Laws to explain the party’s approach to these issues:
The recent Government climbdown over sex and relationship education in state funded faith schools has prompted further debate amongst liberals about what role, if any, faith schools should have in English education.
Some liberals argue that in a free society faith groups should be free to deliver a faith education, and that parents should be free to send their children to such …
Monday’s Today Programme on Radio 4 majored on local government.
It was the usual shambles. We were told that local authorities were expecting to make cuts in services – hardly news. One reporter told us that libraries were not used by many people – in fact had she spent ten minutes on research she would have discovered that libraries are visited by half the adult population each year. This makes libraries far more popular than any if not all of the sporting events on which the BBC lavishes time and our money each year.
Nick Clegg today set out the importance of early years education in tackling inequality in a speech to the Salvation Army. Here’s how Politics.co.uk reports it:
Nick Clegg has placed inequality firmly at the centre of the Liberal Democrat’s education policy and attacked the Tories for not costing their plans for schools. In a keynote speech on education, Mr Clegg said his party’s ‘pupil premium’ policy would see disadvantaged children receive as much funding for education as private school pupil. Headmasters would then be able to spend that money on reducing class sizes.
Nick’s speech has earned the praise of Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers union:
The approach the Liberal Democrats have taken to education reform in a tough financial climate is genuinely refreshing. It would appear that the Liberal Democrats have understood that the last thing you do in times of financial hardship is cut back on the opportunities to boost support for education. Internationally the most far sighted countries are using their education system to prepare for the economic upturn. Nick Clegg appears to have understood this.”
Or there’s the alternative headline the Voice decided not to use: The six Lib Dem MPs who were in favour of devolution before they were aginst it …. The BBC reports:
Liberal Democrats say an “error” led to several of their MPs supporting an attempt to block new powers for the Welsh assembly. Six signed an amendment to a new law that would have stopped the assembly acquiring powers over home education.
The Lib Dems are in favour of more devolution, and their Welsh education spokeswoman Jenny Randerson said her colleagues had signed in error. They will now remove their names
Plenty of media coverage today of Nick Clegg’s announcement that the Lib Dems will pledge to give every child a fair start in life by investing an extra £2.5bn in schools which could be used to cut class sizes, offer one-on-one tuition and provide catch-up classes.
Clegg: ‘Education is everything’ (Radio 4 Today Programme)
Liberal Democrats promise to scrap tax credits for wealthy families (Daily Telegraph)
Once again we see the renewed Lib Dem emphasis on that f-word, Fairness; and in this case, a policy which has long been championed by Nick, the ‘pupil premium’. Here’s Nick describing it in ‘just a minute’ in a BBC interview:
Tristan Ward @ Peter Wrigley
"Somebody has to tell the truth: that we are not over-taxed, and that Inteligently directed taxation will not impede growth."
That is not ...
Peter Wrigley Thank you Sir Vince for a useful survey of the history of "austerity" and the political difficulty of implementing the simple solution to our present social an...
Nonconformistradical "Their overall bills may well be high because electric heating is expensive"
I live in an (almost) all-electric home. I do have a wood burner stove but I've ...
Peter Davies Another group for whom this does not work are those in all-electric homes including many poor tenants in blocks of flats. Their overall bills may well be high b...
Tom Bailey “according to Mark Pack’s website, party membership dropped by a third over the course of the Con – Lib Dem Coalition. “
Did anyone ask those lost memb...
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The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
Tristan Ward 
Peter Wrigley 
Nonconformistradical 
Peter Davies 
Tom Bailey 