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| Reading in Nottingham Primary Schools. Image courtesy of Welbeck Primary School. |
I’ve been reading far too many reports recently that seem to signal that there is a crisis coming in education and it will be felt very acutely in Nottingham City.
I love the city’s primary schools and the fantastic teachers who work in them – I was in Brocklewood Primary in Bilborough yesterday and seeing the brilliant things the school is doing really inspires me. They have also seen the value of having a dedicated non-classroom teacher coordinating their non-core curriculum and the increased uptake, especially in sport, is remarkable. Bilborough is not an affluent area but these kids are bright, creative, inventive, active and inquisitive. They need support (like all schools do) and the ability for school to give children positive learning experiences – take them out of the classroom on trips, have arts and music curriculum in school from specialist teachers, have excellent sports equipment and compete in the School Games, go on overnight residential – like Brocklewood’s year 2s last night at Wollaton Park! All of this costs money.
School budgets are shrinking – my local primary school (Djanogly Northgate Academy) receiving a 25% budget cut and Brocklewood who I mentioned earlier a 12% cut. At Brocklewood this equates to the equivalent of 8 teachers lost by 2021. Chris, the excellent coordinator I mentioned, would be an easy cut for the school, as is their excellent sports programme, or swimming lessons, or school trips, or subsidising the residentials for children (this is a huge issue in a city with low household incomes).
We’re also not getting new teachers. Teachers again are having their pay capped at a 1% rise for another year, and for 7 years in a row (a real terms cut with inflation at 2.9% back in May), and almost a quarter of teachers, who qualified since 2011, have left profession. Who’d be a teacher now? With many young bright graduates considering leaving the UK, including myself, due to Brexit, is a chronically under-valued profession something people want to work in? Every teacher I know tells people not to be one – and the extra year’s training to do your post-graduate training to be a teacher will cost you £9,250. Nah, I think you’re alright, ta.
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| Display at Brocklewood Primary. My image. |
Good teachers and high-quality additional activity (sports, arts & culture, outdoor learning, residential, PSHE and learning outside the classroom in a fresh, different or unusual way in subjects around literacy or STEM) provides both value for money and value for learning for schools and for pupils. That said, you can’t put a monetary value on helping a child become who they want to be. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, in their 2014 report Cracking the Code: how schools can improve social mobility, stated "we need to prepare students for all aspects of life and not just exams… supporting children’s social and emotional development and the character skills like 'grit' that underpin learning". It also observed "marked social differences, not just in grades that disadvantaged children get relative to better-off children, but in terms of non-cognitive skills and 'performance virtues' like resilience to educational knock-backs, persistence and optimism… [and] in access to work experience and advice and extra-curricular activities that build these broader skills and help convert good exam results into good jobs". Such inequalities matter and are a barrier to both learning and a young person’s life chances.
This all has knock-ons. Nottingham and Nottinghamshire already has issues with low attainment in literacy in Key Stage 2; only 61% of children in the city and 65% in the county achieving expected standards in reading in 2016. This drops further to 58% and 57% for children with English as a second language, to 53% and 48% for children identified as disadvantaged and to 50% and 43% for children eligible for free school meals. The East Midlands is join third-bottom, barely above Yorkshire and Humber and the West Midlands, in regional attainment (all figures from here - source DfE). Nottingham City is the 4th worst education area (when judged by local authority) at GCSE with only just over half (50.4%) of young people getting 5 A*-C grades, the expected minimum national target. Only Knowsley on Merseyside, Blackpool and Sandwell in the West Midlands are doing worse. Nottinghamshire is 111th out of 151 (all figures from here – source DfE). In a report on released few months ago from the National Literacy Trust and Nottingham’s own Experian every single electoral ward and parliamentary constituency in England were given a literacy vulnerability score. Nottingham North came 8th bottom and Nottingham East 14th bottom out of 533 constituencies. Every Nottinghamshire constituency also contains at least one ward with significant literacy need (all figures from here – source NLT).
This won’t change with cuts, demoralised teachers and schools being forced out of offering a diverse and varied curriculum for children. Hopefully I come back from America with some ideas about how we can support anyone’s literacy across Nottinghamshire, because we know Literacy Changes Lives.