Iain Mansfield is Director of Research and Head of Education at Policy Exchange.
Every parent knows the importance of a good school.
Fortunately, as demonstrated by last week’s stunning results, where England was ranked fourth in the world in reading by the international PIRLS study, we are already getting a lot of things right. The schools revolution unleashed by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb in 2010, built upon phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, school autonomy and robust accountability, has paid dividends in increasing the performance of our state schools. While Policy Exchange has written about what more should be done, including Completing the Revolution (on the knowledge-rich curriculum) and It Just Grinds you Down (on behaviour), we are undoubtedly in a strong place.
These reforms were not inevitable. The US commentator, Matthew Yglesias, is currently writing a series of articles titled The Strange Death of Education Reform, lamenting the fact that, across the Pond, both Republicans and Democrats seem to have lost interest in how to make schools better. Fortunately, in the UK, this agenda is alive and well, with many on both left and right showing a lively interest in what works best to improve the education of children.
So what makes a good school? If you were to listen to the National Education Union or the Institute of Fiscal Studies, you might be led to believe it’s all about money. But the evidence suggests that’s not actually the case.
Take this analysis by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which shows that although funding matters up to a certain point, beyond that point – and the UK is well beyond it – funding per pupil makes little difference. Beyond the average spending of Latvia, Slovakia or Poland, there is essentially no correlation between spending per pupil and learning outcomes.
As the report says, ‘Whatever the reason for a lack of relationship between spending per student and learning outcomes, at least in the countries and economies with larger education budgets, excellence in education requires more than just money.’ Or let’s consider the evidence from the United States, where analysis by the CATO Institute showed the inflation-adjusted cost of a K-through-12 public education almost tripling over a 40 year period, with no change to the outcome in reading, maths or science scores.
Here in the UK, real terms funding per pupil in England increased by around 60 per cent during the New Labour years, but based on any verifiable measure – performance on international tests; readiness for university; basic skills assessments; employers’ reports of workplace readiness – there was no evidence of any significant improvement.
Indeed, our performance on international PISA tests, taken at 15, actually showed a significant drop in performance between 2000 and 2006, the period of greatest funding increase. Similarly, recent research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that Scotland has been spending increasingly more per pupil than the rest of the UK. This consistently higher spend is not delivering better results – with the damage done by Scotland’s ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ far outweighing any marginal gains from increased spending.
Why do schools feel squeezed?
But if funding in real terms per pupil has been largely flat since 2010 – a period which followed a 60 per cent real terms per pupil increase – why do schools feel squeezed? It is unarguable that they do – indeed, in 2017, a grass-roots campaign by head teachers played an important part in the unexpectedly poor performance of the Conservatives in the general election.
One reason is that we are asking schools to do too much, with schools and teachers increasingly expected to pick up the pieces from family break-down, poverty or diminished social cohesion. But an equally big reason is that much of the current funding is being badly spent.
The most comprehensive study on school spending was carried out by the Education Policy Institute, looking at the years between 2003 – 2017. During this period, real terms expenditure on educational consultancy increased by 196 per cent, on catering by 184 per cent, on education support staff by 138 per cent, and on back-office functions by 102 per cent. Meanwhile, expenditure on teaching staff increased by only 17% – much less than the overall growth in spending (42 per cent).
As we argued in our paper, Balancing the Books, the most alarming component of this is the growth of spending in teaching support staff, which grew eight times faster than the growth in spending in teachers, and which in 2018 accounted for 15p in every pound spend in schools. The number of teaching assistants employed by state-funded schools in England has more than trebled since the turn of the century. Restoring the number of teaching support staff to year 2000 levels would deliver savings of approximately £5bn annually.
The Special Educational Needs system is also out of control, driven by a system that combines the worst aspects of a post-code lottery, inconsistent diagnoses – and a golden ticket for those children who obtain the holy grail of an Education, Health and Care Plan. The number of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in England has increased for a third consecutive year to 1.37 million. Meanwhile, the number of pupils with an EHC plan has increased by nine per cent between 2021 and 2022, and by a total of 50 per cent since 2016. Situations which were once meant to be for a small proportion of pupils, such as additional time in exams, are now being used by more than one in four students.
To pay for this, the High Needs Block of school funding, used for the support of pupils with Special Educational Needs, has increased by 28 per cent since 2019-20, having received cash-terms increases of c. 10 per cent year on year, and now stands at just below £10 billion, money which is then top-sliced from the overall school budget.
It is increasingly common for some children to be receiving full time 1:1 support in schools, or to be sent – at the taxpayers’ expense – to private schools costing £50,000 a year or more. Of course, all children deserve support, but is it really fair for some children to be receiving ten times the resources than others? As always, it is bright children from poorer backgrounds – who aren’t lucky enough to get the ‘right’ diagnosis – who lose out most from this diversion of funds from core teaching.
It should be emphasised that none of this spending constitutes ‘waste’ in the sense of a failed procurement contract, or money being blown on obviously pointless things. It all feels useful – we can all tell stories of a teaching assistant who seemed invaluable. But the evidence is clear that these activities do not significantly improve attainment – indeed, the Education Endowment Foundation has said that, “in many schools in England, teaching assistants are not being used in ways that improve pupil outcomes.”
A 20 per cent pay rise for teachers
So what does matter – beyond the knowledge-rich curriculum and other reforms already discussed? Well, here the evidence is clear: teachers. Repeated studies have found that, “teachers are the most influential within-school factor in determining children and young people’s academic attainment”, a point also made by Policy Exchange in The Importance of Teachers.
And, unfortunately, here we have a problem. In 2021, schools reported the highest number of vacancies in over a decade. The Government has missed its recruitment targets for year after year – with latest figures showing only 59 per cent of the recruitment target for trainee secondary teachers was met in 2022-23.
In some subjects the situation is even more acute: for physics, only 17 per cent of the target was achieved. A third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have quit the profession, with good progress on reducing teacher workload largely undone by the pandemic.
As Policy Exchange’s work in It Just Grinds You Down found, behaviour continues to have an impact on teacher retention, though Government should be commended for its efforts to improve this, including through Behaviour Hubs and – as we recommended – including a more thorough grounding in behaviour management techniques in Initial Teacher Training.
It is clear though, that – as in any job – a major driver of recruitment and retention is pay. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the pay of senior or experienced teachers has fallen by 13 per cent in real terms since 2010 – and with a buoyant job market and high inflation, the challenge of retaining good teachers becomes ever harder. This is particularly so in subjects such as STEM, where graduates can command significantly higher salaries.
A 20 prt cent pay rise for teachers would be a game-changer. It would cost £3.5 billion annually which, as we have shown, is eminently affordable within the existing school budget.
It is well-known that most people under-value the pension contributions made by their employer. Switching 10 per cent of remuneration from pension contributions to core salary would fund half the increase – and, at over 13 per cent, the remaining employer contribution would still be approximately triple the average private-sector contribution.
The remaining 10 per cent would be funded by school efficiencies – particularly through a reduction in teaching support staff. The Department for Education would issue guidance as to where savings might be made, with the details left up to each school. Schools that made greater savings would be permitted, if desired, to recycle all or part of this into an even larger uplift, up to a maximum of 30 per cent. The resulting salaries would not only help to retain the existing workforce, but would attract the best and the brightest back into the profession.
A smaller, better paid, more capable workforce – with a focus on attracting, rewarding and retaining outstanding teachers, rather than support staff – would allow our school system to perform at its peak. That would do more to deliver the outcomes we need than today’s ever-burgeoning budgets.
Iain Mansfield is Director of Research and Head of Education at Policy Exchange.
Every parent knows the importance of a good school.
Fortunately, as demonstrated by last week’s stunning results, where England was ranked fourth in the world in reading by the international PIRLS study, we are already getting a lot of things right. The schools revolution unleashed by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb in 2010, built upon phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, school autonomy and robust accountability, has paid dividends in increasing the performance of our state schools. While Policy Exchange has written about what more should be done, including Completing the Revolution (on the knowledge-rich curriculum) and It Just Grinds you Down (on behaviour), we are undoubtedly in a strong place.
These reforms were not inevitable. The US commentator, Matthew Yglesias, is currently writing a series of articles titled The Strange Death of Education Reform, lamenting the fact that, across the Pond, both Republicans and Democrats seem to have lost interest in how to make schools better. Fortunately, in the UK, this agenda is alive and well, with many on both left and right showing a lively interest in what works best to improve the education of children.
So what makes a good school? If you were to listen to the National Education Union or the Institute of Fiscal Studies, you might be led to believe it’s all about money. But the evidence suggests that’s not actually the case.
Take this analysis by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which shows that although funding matters up to a certain point, beyond that point – and the UK is well beyond it – funding per pupil makes little difference. Beyond the average spending of Latvia, Slovakia or Poland, there is essentially no correlation between spending per pupil and learning outcomes.
As the report says, ‘Whatever the reason for a lack of relationship between spending per student and learning outcomes, at least in the countries and economies with larger education budgets, excellence in education requires more than just money.’ Or let’s consider the evidence from the United States, where analysis by the CATO Institute showed the inflation-adjusted cost of a K-through-12 public education almost tripling over a 40 year period, with no change to the outcome in reading, maths or science scores.
Here in the UK, real terms funding per pupil in England increased by around 60 per cent during the New Labour years, but based on any verifiable measure – performance on international tests; readiness for university; basic skills assessments; employers’ reports of workplace readiness – there was no evidence of any significant improvement.
Indeed, our performance on international PISA tests, taken at 15, actually showed a significant drop in performance between 2000 and 2006, the period of greatest funding increase. Similarly, recent research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that Scotland has been spending increasingly more per pupil than the rest of the UK. This consistently higher spend is not delivering better results – with the damage done by Scotland’s ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ far outweighing any marginal gains from increased spending.
Why do schools feel squeezed?
But if funding in real terms per pupil has been largely flat since 2010 – a period which followed a 60 per cent real terms per pupil increase – why do schools feel squeezed? It is unarguable that they do – indeed, in 2017, a grass-roots campaign by head teachers played an important part in the unexpectedly poor performance of the Conservatives in the general election.
One reason is that we are asking schools to do too much, with schools and teachers increasingly expected to pick up the pieces from family break-down, poverty or diminished social cohesion. But an equally big reason is that much of the current funding is being badly spent.
The most comprehensive study on school spending was carried out by the Education Policy Institute, looking at the years between 2003 – 2017. During this period, real terms expenditure on educational consultancy increased by 196 per cent, on catering by 184 per cent, on education support staff by 138 per cent, and on back-office functions by 102 per cent. Meanwhile, expenditure on teaching staff increased by only 17% – much less than the overall growth in spending (42 per cent).
As we argued in our paper, Balancing the Books, the most alarming component of this is the growth of spending in teaching support staff, which grew eight times faster than the growth in spending in teachers, and which in 2018 accounted for 15p in every pound spend in schools. The number of teaching assistants employed by state-funded schools in England has more than trebled since the turn of the century. Restoring the number of teaching support staff to year 2000 levels would deliver savings of approximately £5bn annually.
The Special Educational Needs system is also out of control, driven by a system that combines the worst aspects of a post-code lottery, inconsistent diagnoses – and a golden ticket for those children who obtain the holy grail of an Education, Health and Care Plan. The number of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in England has increased for a third consecutive year to 1.37 million. Meanwhile, the number of pupils with an EHC plan has increased by nine per cent between 2021 and 2022, and by a total of 50 per cent since 2016. Situations which were once meant to be for a small proportion of pupils, such as additional time in exams, are now being used by more than one in four students.
To pay for this, the High Needs Block of school funding, used for the support of pupils with Special Educational Needs, has increased by 28 per cent since 2019-20, having received cash-terms increases of c. 10 per cent year on year, and now stands at just below £10 billion, money which is then top-sliced from the overall school budget.
It is increasingly common for some children to be receiving full time 1:1 support in schools, or to be sent – at the taxpayers’ expense – to private schools costing £50,000 a year or more. Of course, all children deserve support, but is it really fair for some children to be receiving ten times the resources than others? As always, it is bright children from poorer backgrounds – who aren’t lucky enough to get the ‘right’ diagnosis – who lose out most from this diversion of funds from core teaching.
It should be emphasised that none of this spending constitutes ‘waste’ in the sense of a failed procurement contract, or money being blown on obviously pointless things. It all feels useful – we can all tell stories of a teaching assistant who seemed invaluable. But the evidence is clear that these activities do not significantly improve attainment – indeed, the Education Endowment Foundation has said that, “in many schools in England, teaching assistants are not being used in ways that improve pupil outcomes.”
A 20 per cent pay rise for teachers
So what does matter – beyond the knowledge-rich curriculum and other reforms already discussed? Well, here the evidence is clear: teachers. Repeated studies have found that, “teachers are the most influential within-school factor in determining children and young people’s academic attainment”, a point also made by Policy Exchange in The Importance of Teachers.
And, unfortunately, here we have a problem. In 2021, schools reported the highest number of vacancies in over a decade. The Government has missed its recruitment targets for year after year – with latest figures showing only 59 per cent of the recruitment target for trainee secondary teachers was met in 2022-23.
In some subjects the situation is even more acute: for physics, only 17 per cent of the target was achieved. A third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have quit the profession, with good progress on reducing teacher workload largely undone by the pandemic.
As Policy Exchange’s work in It Just Grinds You Down found, behaviour continues to have an impact on teacher retention, though Government should be commended for its efforts to improve this, including through Behaviour Hubs and – as we recommended – including a more thorough grounding in behaviour management techniques in Initial Teacher Training.
It is clear though, that – as in any job – a major driver of recruitment and retention is pay. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the pay of senior or experienced teachers has fallen by 13 per cent in real terms since 2010 – and with a buoyant job market and high inflation, the challenge of retaining good teachers becomes ever harder. This is particularly so in subjects such as STEM, where graduates can command significantly higher salaries.
A 20 prt cent pay rise for teachers would be a game-changer. It would cost £3.5 billion annually which, as we have shown, is eminently affordable within the existing school budget.
It is well-known that most people under-value the pension contributions made by their employer. Switching 10 per cent of remuneration from pension contributions to core salary would fund half the increase – and, at over 13 per cent, the remaining employer contribution would still be approximately triple the average private-sector contribution.
The remaining 10 per cent would be funded by school efficiencies – particularly through a reduction in teaching support staff. The Department for Education would issue guidance as to where savings might be made, with the details left up to each school. Schools that made greater savings would be permitted, if desired, to recycle all or part of this into an even larger uplift, up to a maximum of 30 per cent. The resulting salaries would not only help to retain the existing workforce, but would attract the best and the brightest back into the profession.
A smaller, better paid, more capable workforce – with a focus on attracting, rewarding and retaining outstanding teachers, rather than support staff – would allow our school system to perform at its peak. That would do more to deliver the outcomes we need than today’s ever-burgeoning budgets.