What do we want the new government to do with education?

1. Governments can only do so much at any one time.  Gove did schools but failed to deal with skills and FE.  Filling the skills gap in the British economy should be the number one focus, concentrating on young people aged 16+ eg energy production, infrastructure development, AI and IT, hospital technicians, lab assistants.
2. Review GCSE syllabuses, especially English, remembering that such reviews take at least 5 years to turn into actual revised exams, change adds to teacher workload, and it would be unwise to do more than a few subjects at once.
3. We should never return to modules or teacher-assessed coursework, which were scrapped with the support of most teachers after 2011.
4. We should retain two of the most important reforms of recent years – using phonics for teaching reading, and pushing up the knowledge requirement of GCSEs to match the levels reached in the Far East.
5. Leave A-levels alone…they are not a problem.
6. Leave T-levels alone – they have only just started.
7. Think about introducing an Ofsted scorecard – 4-6 scores replacing one adjective.  But this is not as simple as it may seem. Full inspections do in fact have a scorecard now – four separate scores plus a safeguarding judgment, with an overall effectiveness judgment formed from them.  But DfE has pulled so much money out of school inspections over so many years that Ofsted generally cannot do full inspections. (Money is down 75% in real terms since 2000, down 30% just since 2015 – Ofsted now has about 1/4 of what Estyn or Education Scotland or any European school inspectorate get – the entirety of secondary inspection, including all overheads, now has to be done with the budget of a single secondary school).  Overall effectiveness judgements exist for two reasons: to inform parents and to give government information and legitimacy for regulatory interventions.
8. Remove the requirement for those who have a grade 3 in GCSE maths and English to resit (unless they want to).  It is ridiculous that at present they are forced to study things like algebra and trigonometry and only 15% pass.  Instead, they should take Functional Skills level 2, which should be made easier and generously graded.Those with only grades 1-2 at GCSE need to take Functional Skills level 1…and that should again just cover basic arithmetic.

   Those who studied English and maths from age 5 to 16 and failed need a syllabus based just on those things we want all young people to know.

9. Increasing funding for Early Years should be an important aspiration.
10. Don’t force good local authority schools to become Academies.  They are perfectly OK as they are.
11. Drop the EBacc.  It was a good idea once, but it has run its course.

1. Lift the student loan cap from £9250 to £10,500 so universities can start to afford UG degrees.
2. Fund more UG medicine places. We have a shortage of doctors.
3. Continue to publicise the names of those universities and courses whose students earn less than they would have done if they had not taken those degrees.
4. Stop the OfS interfering so much with universities, which are not supposed to be controlled by the state. Remove the penalties associated with lower degree completion rates which penalise universities taking students from poorer homes.
5. If private universities are going to be controlled by OfS, their students should be able to access the same loans as other universities.
6. We must congratulate universities who, this summer, had closed book exams under invigilated and timed conditions.  University students who performed well under these conditions this year have every reason to worry that other universities permitted open book exams sat at home with over-generous timing.

1. Simplify the rules relating to teacher apprenticeships – several of them are completely unnecessary and are damaging. The PGTA course including end point assessment should be 11 months, September to July.
2. Move to encourage independent schools to be more involved in teacher training for shortage subjects – maths, physics, computing, MFL.
3. Raise the start pay of teachers in shortage subjects in England from £30,000 to £35,000. The teacher shortage is a huge issue.
4. For those who failed GCSE maths or English, Functional Skills level 2 should be an adequate alternative for entry to ITT.

By Professor Barnaby Lenon | Dean, Faculty of Education at The University of Buckingham