Delivery depends on detail for new ministers

I've posted at the Sutton Trust on the reshuffle.

Reshuffles can be a brutal business. This week’s surprise move of Michael Gove, and his replacement by Nicky Morgan as education secretary, seemed particularly so. But no less surprising to those in education was the departure of David Willetts as universities minister to make way for Greg Clark.

Both had been highly able ministers, as well combative advocates in defence of their policies. And both leave significant legacies. For Gove, the media has focused on the growth of academies and free schools and the changes to the curriculum. With Willetts, raising tuition fees without any medium-term impact on the numbers of young people going to university was a clear political success. 

Yet, their legacies in tackling disadvantage and improving access may lie elsewhere, and it is important that their successors recognise these achievements as much as those with a higher profile.

It is true that there are now 4000 academies, scores of free schools and that the curriculum is being made more knowledge-focused, with exams toughened to match. The direction of travel towards greater school independence has been accelerated, but whether it leads also to rapid improvement will owe as much to other less celebrated changes. The best academies and free schools clearly make a difference, but there have also been significant failures.

As significantly, Gove – and his Liberal Democrat deputy David Laws – have championed the use of evidence to improve teaching, gradually increasing expectations that their pupil premium is used on what works, and this week’s Ofsted report suggests that is having some impact. The funding of the Education Endowment Foundation, our sister charity, was an important part of that process, and it is one that not only enjoys cross-party support but growing buy-in from school leaders and teachers.

Equally important in my view has been the continued use of floor targets to raise the minimum acceptable standard for schools – though the impact of planned changes to the core league table measure may not have been fully considered – and the development of Teaching School Alliances to support school-to-school improvement, a key feature of the London Challenge.

Although his critics presented his policies as intensifying competition, the reality of the growth of academies has been an explosion in multi-academy trusts and similar co-operative arrangements at a local level, of which the Teaching Schools are an important aspect.

For Nicky Morgan, the challenge will be to build on these aspects of the Gove legacy and to foster greater collaboration between schools, particularly isolated primaries and schools in regions as yet largely untouched by the reform bug in ways that may support the growth of academies, but also enable all schools to provide the academic curriculum now expected of them.

If there was one significant weakness in the Gove – and to an extent, the Laws – approach, it was in their willingness to use levers sufficiently. The pupil premium is being used more effectively, but why not do more to reward schools that make a real difference to their disadvantaged pupils, and cut the premium from those that persistently fail to do so? Why not expect more collaboration from converter academies, which gained financially from their conversion, so they are required in their funding agreements to play a part in wider school improvement, as the best converters already do?

Greg Clark faces challenges in higher education too. Although student numbers have held up, and the proportion of students from poorer backgrounds has continued to grow, there are significant concerns about the impact of student debt in the future. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others suggesting that the current likely repayments will barely cover the increased fees suggest that the overall funding model needs review; equally, while it may seem attractive to load repayments onto people’s salaries in their 40s rather than their 20s, the social implications of this extra burden may not have been thought through. The new minister will need to take another look at the arithmetic.

It will also be important to monitor the impact of the raising of the student numbers cap on recruitment to elite universities. While this may increase student places overall, some Russell Group vice-chancellors fear that it will make it harder to improve access, as A*AA or higher may become the norm in popular courses, with less room for contextual offers.

For both ministers – and the same is true for Nick Boles, who replaces Matthew Hancock as skills minister in improving apprenticeships – it is to be hoped that tackling social mobility and the impact of disadvantage should be as much a priority as it was for Gove and Willetts. Doing so means getting the detail right, as much as it does sketching the big picture

The Trouble with Boys

My latest Sutton Trust blog post looks at research on white working class boys.

Universities minister David Willetts was quick off the blocks for 2013 with his ideas on how to encourage white working class boys to go to university.

Young women are now a third more likely than young men to go to university, and there is a three-fold gap in applications between the poorest and richest neighbourhoods. In an article and interview for The Independent, Mr Willetts said that the education system “seems to make it harder for boys and men to face down the obstacles in the way of learning.

He told the paper that the Office for Fair Access “look at a range of disadvantaged groups – social class and ethnicity, for instance – when it comes to access agreements, so I don’t see why they couldn’t look at white, working-class boys.”

The Minister has a point. Growing research in recent years suggests that white working class boys perform less well than many minority ethnic communities in their test and exam results.

Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally, in a 2006 LSE study, identified a stronger gender gap in secondary than primary schools. They argued that “the importance of coursework in the GCSE examination is likely to be a key explanation for the emergence of the gender gap at age 16.” They also identified differences in teaching and learning styles, and modes of assessment.

In 2007, Joseph Rowntree Foundation research, conducted by Robert Cassen and Geeta Kingdon, with some Sutton Trust input, found that nearly half of all students defined as low achievers were White British males. White British students on average – boys and girls – were more likely than other ethnic groups to persist in low achievement.

National College research by Denis Mongon and Christopher Chapman from Manchester University with the National Union of Teachers in 2008 suggested that some school leaders were better than others at narrowing this gap. They suggested a focus on clear strategies including relentless application of the highest standards in teaching and attention to data detail were key where the gap was lower.

They rightly pointed out that the social class gap is much wider than any gender gap, yet the data suggest that white working class boys are at an even greater disadvantage than white working class girls. This lower attainment can translate into lower ambitions, as reflected in applications to Sutton Trust summer schools – an important route for many low and middle income young people into leading universities.

Sutton Trust summer schools target the first child in families who might go to university. In 2012, there were 5,295 applicants from girls and 2,712 from boys, a ratio of 2:1. Even with a slightly higher acceptance rate among boys than girls, 62% of attendees were girls and just 38% boys.

Recent exam data bears out both the gender and socio-economic gaps. The 2012 Key Stage Test data suggests that 60% of White British boys eligible for free school meals reach level 2 in English and Maths, compared with 67% of White British FSM girls. This is larger than the three point gender gap among all other pupils. However, there is a six-point gender gap across all FSM pupils. The big difference is in English, where the gender gap among FSM pupils is 12 points.

On the main 5 GCSE indicator (including English and Maths), 2011 data (2012 data is due later this month). shows that 26% of White British FSM boys reached this standard compared with 32% of girls, a slightly smaller gender gap than exists for all other pupils, but one consistent with the gap at age eleven. On overall performance, only traveller boys perform worse now at GCSE. 33% of Black Caribbean boys, for example, now reach the 5 GCSE standard (though overall White British students perform ten points better than Black Caribbean students).

So what can we do? David Willetts is surely right to want universities to provide concerted help through summer schools over several years to lift aspirations. The Trust is planning to use this approach through programmes with Kent academies and working with University College London to support highly able pupils from Year 8 onwards over five years.

Of course, Michael Gove’s changes to the exam system and curriculum – more facts, more end-of-course testing – may reduce the overall gender gap, as girls are believed to perform better in coursework.

But, in addition to OFFA looking more closely at the data, a more concerted focus on white working class boys could also be productive. When the Labour government targeted Afro-Caribbean achievement in the late 1990s, after the Stephen Lawrence murder, it set clear goals and a strong focus that has particularly benefited FSM pupils. The London Challenge will have been of particular benefit, with its strong focus on leadership, teaching and data.

Today, our sister charity, the Education Endowment Foundation is testing the most effective ways to lifting achievement for pupils in receipt of free school meals, and has the potential to make a real difference in narrowing attainment gaps. 70% of its target group is White British.

The experience of minority ethnic communities suggests cultural change is also important. Bangladeshi students used to perform relatively poorly in schools. Now they out-perform White British students overall, and 56% of Bangladeshi students eligible for free school meals – including 53% of FSM boys – reach the five GCSE benchmark. That change owes a lot to a community’s desire to learn, backed by parents and teachers working to meet that desire.

Harnessing a similar will to learn in white working class communities must be a part of the solution to the low attainment of too many of their boys – and girls.

Vince Cable's department gets its university sums wrong again

There is but one conclusion to draw from today's rather belated HEFCE grant letter (these things are usually issued before Christmas) - that BIS, Vince Cable's business and skills department, has got its sums even more badly wrong than we realised over its student support package. There was a good reason why Labour had a lower starting threshold for student loans than the £21,000 adopted by the coalition in a hopeless bid to rescue Nick Clegg from ignominy for his broken promise: it was based on how quickly people could pay back when they were in work. There is a big difference between starting at £15,000 and at £21,000 in the speed of repayments.

By lifting the starting threshold so much, even with added interest repayments, the coalition has made it impossible to grow student numbers significantly. At the same time, the continued linking of loans to fees, rather than maintenance, with no effective agreements with other EU countries over collecting unpaid loans, has left another black hole in future BIS finances. No wonder they have announced an effective cutback of 15,000 places in today's remit letter to Hefce, the funding council. Or, rather, they haven't. This is what the letter which is signed by Vince Cable and David Willetts actually says:

In this context we want to work with the Council as follows. First, we need the Council to bring its sector-wide entrant controls into closer alignment with the Government's financial planning. HEFCE has historically set student number control limits across the sector slightly above the recruitment level assumed in the Government's expenditure plans. This recognises that the control is a maximum and some level of under recruitment, at the sector level, was to be expected. The aim of over allocating in this way was to achieve the Government's planned student numbers. The recent trend for strong recruitment across the sector now makes this approach unnecessary. Furthermore, it exposes Government to higher than budgeted costs which cannot be absorbed at a time of financial constraint. As a result, we are now asking the Council to reduce its entrant control maximum by 5,000 places in 2012/13. This brings it in line with our original spending plans and reduces the risk of over recruitment. It does not represent a reduction in the total number of students the Government expects to fund.

I've read a lot of officialese in my time, but this one takes the biscuit. As the National Union of Students notes in its response, the cuts come "from not repeating a planned stimulus of 10,000 places designed to combat the effects of recession, and also a change to controls on universities that over-recruit which will see 5,000 less places available."

At the same time, universities face bigger fines for over-recruitment than before, and there is no news yet on whether competition will be extended both at the upper level, by moving from free recruitment of those with AAB in their A-levels to ABB, and at the lower priced end, by extending the number of low cost places that can be bid for (or even lifting a cap for qualified students paying less than £6000 a year).

The Government was right to grasp the nettle of tuition fees, but it was wrong not to do its sums over its repayment terms for graduates. With a planned higher education white paper already ditched in the confusion, the coalition's higher education policy has lost its way.

Back to the university drawing board

I know the Government is getting desperately confused in its higher education policy, but the answer is not to introduce a two-tier fees system for home students. Instead, the Government needs to examine the problems it has created for itself in its higher education policy. The most important mistake was in getting the pricing wrong, assuming that universities would not charge £9000 while it was cutting their teaching budgets. This was a false economy, as the Government has to pick up the tab for the extra loans, which although attracting some interest are now only repayable when earners exceed £21k in income. It looks like there was no proper modelling done which included the likely impact of abolishing all state funding.

Perhaps now is the time to look again at the inter-relationship between several aspects of the new system: the size of the maximum fee and the availability of loans, the loan repayment terms, the extent to which government and universities underwrite those loans and the level of HEFCE grant for non-science subjects. A better balance could certainly be more manageable - and fairer- than allowing rich kids to indulge in a spot of arbitrary queue jumping. Vince Cable - if he can refocus on his department for a moment - and David Willetts need to go back to the drawing board.

Gradually moving away from a graduate tax

David Willetts, the universities minister, gave a characteristically thoughtful tour d'horizon of the challenges facing higher education, when he addressed the Universities UK conference yesterday. But important though a reshaping of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act will be to many colleges and universities, it was his further refinement of the coalition's ludicrous contortions on the repayment of fees that has inevitably attracted the media's attention.

Willetts clearly thinks his boss Vince Cable was mad to start floating the idea of a graduate tax; since then, he has loyally been trying to find ways to shift the position back towards the graduate contribution that David Blunkett introduced alongside fees in 1998 and which was refined with the 2005 changes to fees. Yesterday was his latest attempt. He told journalists at the UUK conference that he ruled out a full-blown graduate tax but was looking at making the current system more progressive.

What he and his boss signally fail to do is to explain the basic fairness of the current system, particularly compared to other countries. Students not only get their fees paid while at university, but - unlike many other countries - they get a generous loan (with a grant for some) to cover living costs while they enjoy a rite of passage experience subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of 23p in the £. (In many other countries, most students go to their home universities.) Once they have started to earn at least £15,000 a year, English graduates are asked to pay back their loan at a rate of 9% on all income over the threshold. Those who earn more pay the loan back more quickly, though some high earning professions also involve longer studies and larger debts. The interest charged on the loan is rather less than that on most commercial loans, and certainly a lot less than is charged by banks for overdrafts or credit card companies. It would be ridiculous for the government to move radically away from this repayment system.

However, if the loan system is to keep pace with any rise in tuition fees, it will cost significantly more to the Exchequer initially, unless costs are cut in other ways. One would be to increase the rate of interest charged on the loan, but this would actually see lower earning graduates repaying more, since higher earners would pay the loan back more quickly, though it might also discourage those better off students who take out loans just because they are there. Another option, apparently being considered by Willetts and expounded by Neil O'Brien of Policy Exchange in today's Telegraph would see graduates who earn more paying back a higher proportion of their extra earnings by continuing 'repayments' until after the loan was paid off. If such a progressive contribution is to be introduced, this seems a perfectly sensible way to do it. But it should be combined with a greater encouragement for students to go to home universities or colleges where the course they want is available there - the British taxpayer-subsidised rite of passage is not a universal experience - while universities should do much more to link undergraduates to paid and useful work experience both during term and in the holidays.

I don't imagine any of these deliberations will do much to improve Vince Cable's demeanour. He and his colleagues are already struggling to explain to their student voters in university cities that the Lib Dems sold them a rather scraggy pup.

Will the coalition really adopt a graduate tax?

Today's Times (£) claims that the coalition has now come down in favour of a graduate tax, following David Willetts' interview with James Landale on Marr yesterday. When I saw the Times headline this morning, I assumed I must have seen a different interview. But, no, the Times uses the following quote to justify its position:

“We do have a preference for a way of going forward that involves graduates after they have got into work,” he said. “Graduates on average earn at least £100,000 more during their lives than non-graduates. We think [they] should make a higher contribution to the benefits of the university education they have received.”

I also heard Willetts telling Landale that the Browne review was 'looking at' a graduate tax along with everything else. But Willetts was very careful, whilst soothing his boss Vince Cable's injured ego, to avoid saying anything that could be seen as an endorsement of the graduate tax.

What he was describing in his quote could just as easily mean extending the payments required under the existing system. The difference between doing that and what Cable wants is that the latter would involve graduates paying a fixed proportion of their income for life, while the former could be paid off quickly if one's earnings grew. It may be that David Cameron and George Osborne are committed to raising income tax from all graduates. But I doubt it. Which makes it rather odd to see the Times getting so excitable about some (perhaps too) clever wordplay by David Willetts yesterday.

Who really betrayed universities over funding?

David Willetts, the universities minister, is too clever to believe the partisan tosh that he is mouthing about university funding today. He is right to argue the case for higher tuition fees and new approaches to higher education. But he also knows that Labour - with his support - established an independent review of university funding precisely to address the issues involved. He also knows that the solutions that he is talking about - including a greater focus on teaching quality and on FE college-based higher education were set out with admirable clarity by Lord Mandelson in his higher education strategy paper last year.

If Willetts wants to look for people to blame over higher education funding, he need look no further than his own front bench before he and David Cameron performed their overdue u-turn on tuition fees. (He might have a chat with the Home Secretary, who spoke on education when Labour first introduced fees). And while he's at it, the universities minister might care to educate his coalition colleagues - including his Secretary of State - who cynically misled university students about the potential for scrapping fees.

Such a strategy would be far more credible than attacking Labour ministers who took brave decisions in the face of such political cowardice. After all, he may need Labour support when the time comes to implement his tough decisions.

Universities must give students a better deal if they want higher fees

I have a piece in today's Independent, arguing that if universities want fees to rise to as much as £7,000 a year, they must provide students with a better all-round deal. And this should be an explicit part of the forthcoming fees review. Here's an extract:

In the coming weeks the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, will announce the terms of reference for a review of student fees. The cross-party investigation is likely to recommend an increase in tuition fees from £3,225 to as much as between £5,000 and £7,000 a year, increasing the proportion of courses costs paid back by students after graduation. But if universities want the right to charge higher fees, there is growing political consensus that they must also be prepared to improve greatly the experience they provide for undergraduates.

The Higher Education Policy Institute has shown that the combination of teaching and private study for undergraduates in some humanities and social science courses amounts to just 14 hours a week, though it is much higher in the more demanding universities and the average is 29 hours, including 14.5 hours' contact time. But the higher the fees become, the greater the expectation of students and their parents.

This isn't just a problem with domestic students. Overseas students, who contribute £4bn a year in fees (more than eight per cent of the total income of UK universities) already pay £10,000 to £20,000 a year for most courses. Their numbers have grown over the last decade, but there is greater competition within Europe, Australia and the United States, and Chinese and Indian students increasingly have less expensive options closer to home. Unless they feel they are getting good value for their money, they will go elsewhere.

Some universities are recognising how important it is to provide a good student experience. Lancaster, Manchester and the London School of Economics give students clearer commitments on contact time, class sizes and access to lecturers than many. Others, like Northumbria, provide substantial hands-on facilities and work experience in subjects such as law and health.

But there is still a sense among too many vice-chancellors that they should be allowed to charge higher fees without needing to improve substantially students' overall academic and pastoral experiences. That's why the terms of reference for the new review must explicitly include the issues that Mr Willetts suggested [contact hours, class sizes and employability]. It will be hard enough selling another fees increase to Middle England. Unless their anxieties about what happens at university are addressed, it may prove politically impossible. Vice-chancellors must raise their game if they want the right to raise their fees.