South West Surrey Compass

January 2017 Update

Education Research and Action Group Policy Statement on Education

Education is a right, not a privilege. We believe in the principal of high quality free education as an entitlement for all children and young people from nursery age to adulthood.

Local authorities like Surrey County Council have responsibility for education in their area, but they have had many of their powers taken away from them by central government and their budget reduced. One example of the difficult position that they find themselves in is that local authorities are responsible for providing school places to meet local needs, but are prohibited from opening new schools.

As a result of central government policy, local authorities struggle to overcome the constraints placed upon them.

Nonetheless, locally, we believe that to maintain the principle outlined above, in the first paragraph, we should support the following:

• free early years education for all children from the age of 3 with extended day facilities for all primary age children (from 3 to 11) to support working parents at minimal cost
• no explicit or hidden charges for children and young people attending maintained schools
• investment in education, even at a cost of higher council tax charges, protecting school budgets and taking every opportunity to expand the facilities for learning, including adult learning, within the locality
• universal and inclusive comprehensive education for all and resistance to all attempts to re-introduce selection at 11 in areas like Surrey that abolished it many years ago
• an end to the creeping privatisation of education and opposition to any further academisation, whilst using all means possible to ensure that existing academies and free schools are held accountable to their local community
• using existing maintained schools to absorb any increased demand for school places in a locality rather than creating new Free Schools (the government’s preferred option)
• enabling local schools facilities to be opened up for use by their local communities outside school hours as far as possible
• support for students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to go into further higher education (prior to the election of a government committed to the reintroduction of Education Maintenance Grants (EMAs) for 16-19 year olds, the abolition of student fees and the gradual replacement of student loans by student grants)
• positive support for adults to "return to learn".

JUNE 2016 GROUP UPDATE

Group member Matt Bennett presented his research into academies at the June 2016 South West Surrey Compass Meeting.

Download Matt's discussion paper  'Academies Everywhere: The Growing 'Democratic Deficit' in the English Education System'.

Academisation Resources

Keep up to date with the latest news stories about the academisation of primary and secondary education by following these teaching union websites:-

National Union of Teachers (NUT) - https://www.teachers.org.uk/ 
NASUWT: The Teachers Union - http://www.nasuwt.org.uk/ 
ATL: The Education Union - https://www.atl.org.uk/
NAHT: The Union for School Leaders - http://www.naht.org.uk/
ASCL: Association of School & College Leaders - http://www.ascl.org.uk/

Articles:

Joint union statement on Government plans for all schools to become academies- 
https://www.teachers.org.uk/news-events/press-releases-england/joint-statement-plans-all-schools-academies 

NASUWT Academies news: http://www.nasuwt.org.uk/InformationandAdvice/NASUWTPolicyStatements/PolicyStatement1/index.htm 

ATL Response to the Education White Paper: https://www.atl.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/campaigns/white-paper.asp 

NAHT Forced Academies Campaign - http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/news-and-media/campaigns/academies-campaign/

ASCL 'Government right to drop compulsory academisation' - http://www.ascl.org.uk/news-and-views/news_news-detail.government-right-to-drop-compulsory-academisation.html

MARCH 2016 GROUP UPDATE:

National Thinking

Compass has been working on an Education Inquiry: Big Education - Learning for the 21st Century.

To download your copy of the report please visit http://www.compassonline.org.uk/education-inquiry/the-final-report/

Did You Know? - Discussion Paper

The Education Action Group has compiled some of the latest news - have you seen these issues impacting in Surrey?
Let us know...

Schools 

• Public spending has been cut successively year-on-year from 2010, and on current plans, this will continue to 2020. On current forecasts government spending will fall from 21% of GDP in 2009-10 to 12.6% of GDP in 2019-20. This represents a 39% cut. A systematic dismantling of the public sector? A shift from public sector provision to private sector provision? [HM Treasury, Autumn Statement 2015]
• Although the government has talked of protecting the schools budget, education spending as a share of GDP has fallen from 3.3% of GDP to 2.8% of GDP between 2009-10 and 2015-16. [HM Treasury, Autumn Statement 2015] As a share of GDP, this represents a 15% cut.
• In Surrey gross spending on schools has not risen, which essentially means that schools budgets have not been protected because of schools having to pay for more out of their own budgets and as a result of the pressure of an increasing school population. From 2015/16 to 2019/20 schools spending will fall only slightly from £469m to £468m [Surrey’s Medium Term Financial Plan]
• There are  188,012 pupils in Surrey schools (2.2% of the total for England as a whole). Of these 38,879 are in independent schools. This means that in Surrey 20.6% of the population is educated in the independent sector (compared with 6.9% in England as a whole). [DfE Statitstical First Release Jan 2015]
• Surrey’s school population is 188,012. It is forecast that this will rise by 11,000 over the next five years. This means that Surrey’s school population will rise by 5.85% over the next five years with no commensurate increase in funding.
  
  

Further Education

• “Competition and Chaos” could be used to describe the current landscape in Further Education in the light of recent government policies. The impact of unfettered choice and the opening of free schools and academies with new sixth forms has been “destabilising” to the successful existing colleges serving Surrey’s post-16 learners.
• The funding landscape is worrying:  Post-16 educationfunding has been reduced year on year since 2011, with three separate funding reduction policies particularly impacting upon Sixth Form and FE Colleges. There has been a real-terms cut of 30% funding to Further Education since the Tory-led coalition government came into office in 2010.   In 2011 'Entitlement Funding' was cut from 114 to 30 hours with severe impact on student tutorials, enrichment activities and additional courses.  
• These changes have often hit Sixth Form Colleges the hardest because they cannot cross-subsidise from other key stages or their adult learning/employer-focussed budgets like many schools and colleges are able to. They are also unable to recover VAT on purchases (unlike schools).
• The government’s curriculum reform, by focusing heavily on so-called ‘facilitating subjects’, is undervaluing subjects such as music, art, drama and dance.  Facilitating subjects are defined as English, mathematics, history or geography, the sciences and a language.
• By moving towards A levels based on terminal examinations rather than modular courses, and moving back to students typically taking three rather than four subjects, the government was “turning the clock back”.

Higher Education

• The Autumn Statement & Spending Review 2015 states “Grants for health students will be replaced by loans, and the cap on the number of nurses and midwives that can go into training each year will be removed, providing up to 10,000 more nurses and other healthcare professionals for the NHS”. 
• Existing bursaries are being converted into loans, increasing the burden of debt on students.   There have been marches and petitions amongst students and the Unions representing them:- http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/09/student-nurses-midwives-march-london-nhs-bursary 
• The government is cutting £30m in Disabled Students Allowance which pays for non-medical support staff. Universities have been given one year to plan how they will support students from their own resources, discrete funding having been withdrawn.  This has been described as “pushing the problem down to the institutional level and claiming they’re given enough money to solve it”.  These cuts are expected to affect 70,000 students.  See http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/dec/02/government-to-cut-funding-disabled-university-students-jo-johnson
• Abolition of Maintenance Grants – Full-time students starting their studies in September 2016 will be eligible for means tested maintenance loans of up to £8,200, paid back in the same way as a tuition fee loans, after graduation and once earning over £21,000 a year. Previously, this loan would have taken the form of a non-repayable grant.  This change means that compared to their more affluent peers, the poorest students will graduate with an extra layer of debt on top of the average £40,500 tuition fee debt they will already accrue at University.  The cut has been described as a direct attack on students from low-income families and an affront to social mobility.  The change is expected to affect 500,000 of England’s poorest students.
• http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7258