Date: 07/04/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

One of the key parts of our Trust Development Plan is the pledge that we will fulfil our vision and values by “working with hope and aspiration”. A key part of the Easter message is a reminder that hope should not be lost. I think that this is probably the point in my lifetime where perhaps hope seems very far away for many people.

After two years of the impacts of Covid-19, which hasn’t gone away, the terrible war in Ukraine and its innocent victims, price rises virtually every week and new taxes to pay, it feels like it is a huge challenge to stay hopeful about our future.

Yet amongst all of this, we can see the great impact of those who work with hope. We can see this in the incredible bravery of the Ukrainian people, in their belief that they can defeat an invading army many times the size of its own. We can see it through the magnificent work of our NHS and our scientists in coping with the overwhelming challenge of Covid, caring for those who have suffered most from it and developing vaccines and anti-viral medicines. We can see it in all of those who work so hard to support those who need help to cope with the continuing impact of austerity and rising prices, from the Wansbeck and Alnwick food banks to charities such as Children North East.

Most importantly for our parents and carers, we see the hope in the children in our schools. Our children aren’t immune from the problems I’ve described or from more individual ones either. However, our children come to school hopeful; about their learning, about extra-curricular activities and about being with their friends after so much disruption. Our pupils who have external exams next term are working incredibly hard so that they can do their best and all year groups are working hard to make up for lost time when their education was disrupted. They’ve also shown great hope with the efforts with fundraising this term, from the amazing collections for Ukraine to the other well established events such as Red Nose Day.

I hope that all of our community across our Trust schools, our pupils, staff, parents, carers, governors and trustees have a happy and hopeful Easter.

‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ [Romans 15:13]

Date: 31/03/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT

This week the Government published its long awaited Education White Paper. White papers are policy documents produced by the Government setting out their plans for new laws and Acts of Parliament. However, in the case of education, many proposals in White Papers don’t need to become laws to make changes. For example, the Department for Education can publish an ‘aspiration’ for schools and ask OFSTED to report on it, or make changes to qualifications and ask OFQUAL to implement them. Often this is a much easier route than taking a Bill to parliament where MPs and the House of Lords can discuss the proposed changes, debate them and modify or eliminate them through voting.

Let’s take the proposal in the White Paper that all schools should open for 32.5 hours each week. It seems on the face of it to be a really appealing idea – children spend more time at school, so learn more and get better outcomes. Who could argue against this?

Unfortunately it turns out that this proposal is not quite what it seems. Firstly there is no additional funding to accompany the proposal. This means that the additional staff required to make this happen have to come from existing school staff and budgets. As in almost all schools, staff are already working to their maximum contracted hours, and delivering a lot of extra things on a voluntary basis, more staff will need to be employed with no extra cash for schools to do this.

Secondly, there is nothing in the guidance around the 32.5 hours per week to say that this means extra learning time for children. Many schools, including ours, are currently under the 32.5 hours per week or 6.5 hours per day. The main reason for this is that over time, lunch breaks have been reduced.

When I started teaching many years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for schools to have up to one hour fifteen minutes for a lunch break. In secondary schools, most of the pupils went home, or at least off site, so schools were often very quiet. As things have changed since then, such as safeguarding restrictions on pupils leaving school sites, lunchtimes got much busier and many pupils got bored easily. As it is the time when schools have fewest staff available as other than senior leaders, teachers can’t be directed to work during their lunch break and can only volunteer to help. The pressure on a small number of staff to supervise a school’s worth of pupils led to most schools cutting the lunchbreak right down. There are some schools, not NCEAT ones, who have only 20 minutes for a lunch break.

To accommodate this, most schools started to take the half hour or so they reduced the lunch by off the end of the school day, so that schools finish earlier than they did in the past. Pupils still spend the same amount of time in lessons that they always have, which is around five hours, plus time for tutor groups, assemblies etc.

So let’s be clear, the proposal for a longer school day or week isn’t about giving the pupils more educational opportunities as this won’t be achievable without a significant increase in funding. So what is the reason for this change?

Sadly, I think that it is about political point scoring and trying to please some of the core voters by saying ‘look we’ve extended the school day so children will learn more and catch up’. Unfortunately that’s not how it works if you don’t fund it to make that happen. Learning is about the quality of the experience much more than the quantity. If they funded schools so that we can run compulsory clubs, activities, tutoring, etc to lengthen the school day then I would be entirely in favour of it. My worry is that without the funding, then it will just mean more unstructured time, bored pupils and even more stretched staff.

Our challenge for our schools in NCEAT is to find a way of adding more productive time to the school day which will enhance our pupils’ experiences and make it more enjoyable, without having the additional funding to do so. We won’t back away from the challenge, but it is a huge ask for schools to meet it.

Date: 17/03/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

On this day in 1973, a very famous photograph was taken by the photographer, Sal Veder, at an airforce base in California. The image shows a US Airforce Colonel being reunited with his family after spending more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The photograph was given the title ‘Burst of Joy’ and was awarded the famous Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

There are a number of reasons why I thought about this photograph. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that every newspaper this morning has on its front page a photo of Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, who was basically held hostage by the Iranian government for six years and has finally been released. No doubt tomorrow’s editions will have a photo of Nazanin reunited with her husband and their daughter, who she hasn’t seen since she was baby.

Both photographs can give us joy and hope, two things which have been in very short supply recently. They also remind us that war and conflicts will eventually end and there will be a better future. The photo of the Colonel reminds me too that when powerful countries start wars which can’t be justified then they will eventually lose. This is particularly true when they invade a country where people are as brave as the Ukrainians.

The other event which offered hope this week was the bravery of Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian journalist who interrupted a live Russian TV news broadcast to protest against the invasion of Ukraine. She held up a poster which was half in Russian and half in English to tell the Russian people what is really happening in Ukraine, but also to show people outside of Russia that many ordinary Russians are against the war. Her actions have led to a number of other Russian journalists and presenters to resign as they are not prepared to follow President Putin’s propaganda and lie to Russian people about the invasion of Ukraine.

When people act like Marina, and we see the incredible bravery of ordinary Ukrainians to defend their country from invasion then it keeps hope alive. Let us pray for peace so then we can experience the joy at the end of a needless war as families are reunited.

Date: 10/03/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

Watching the news at the moment is very difficult. The content is all tremendously bad news and some of it is very frightening. It is natural for us to feel very pessimistic about events in Ukraine and also about the pressures that we face at home with huge price rises for electricity, gas and fuel, rising prices in shops and the tax increases in April.

In spite of that, this week has reminded me of the power of good over evil. The response from our school communities to support humanitarian aid to Ukraine has been nothing short of magnificent and we have been overwhelmed by the generosity of the donations received. In fact we are so overwhelmed, as are many of the aid agencies, that we are now pausing the collection of donated items and focusing on getting them transported to the people who really need them.

Your generosity is even more amazing because the price increases I mentioned earlier mean that everyone has less to spend, so it is a huge ask to request donations at this time.

While there have been no shortage of wars and conflicts since the end of World War 2, the invasion of Ukraine seems to have captured attention to a much greater extent than any other recent conflict. I think that this is partly because armed conflict in Europe has not been seen on this scale since 1945, but it also because technology such as social media gives us access to so much more information on what is really happening. I think that many people are also shocked by Putin’s aggression with the type of invasion not seen since World War 2, solely about gaining territory and power at the expense of innocent victims.

When faced with the evils of this war on a daily basis, it is easy to be very pessimistic about the future. However, the response of our communities to the crisis has been stunning and reminded me that there is far more good in the world than evil. This is also reinforced by the way that ordinary people in the neighbouring countries, particularly Poland but not least Moldova which is probably Europe’s poorest country, have welcomed Ukrainian refugees with open arms.

Since the invasion, I’ve seen how much our children care about people they’ve never met and how much they want to do what they can to help. When we see this generosity of spirit and the support of our communities for the appeal, it acts as a reminder that hope will prevail and good will always overcome evil in the end.

Date: 27/01/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

We are a few weeks into the New Year and I wonder how many of you heard or maybe even sang “Auld Lang Syne” as 2022 began? If you’ve heard the song, I wonder how many of you know that it was written by Robert Burns, the Scottish poet. Tuesday, 25th January, was Burns’ Night in Scotland (and beyond), when people have ‘Burns Suppers’ where haggis is always on the menu and people celebrate his poems and songs.

I was always very aware of the work of Robert Burns. I was born in Ayr, the same town as him, and lived where there are a lot of places connected to Burns’ which attract many tourists from all over the world. At school we were taught some of his most famous poems and learned to recite them off by heart. Even in the O level English exam (old version of GCSE), we had a whole section on Burns’ poems.

I never thought about it at the time, but now I wonder why the work of Robert Burns is still celebrated as being important and relevant 263 years after he was born? After all, he came from a very humble background, both he and his father were tenant farmers, where they rented small farms from rich landowners and struggled to make a living. Burns didn’t make any real money from his poems became much more famous after he died, at the age of just 37, than when alive.

I think that his fame is because he wrote about things that mattered to ordinary people in their everyday lives, but also he wasn’t afraid to challenge what he saw as injustice, speaking up for people who were poor and had nothing. Although we might find his work very challenging to read now because of the language it was written in, to the ordinary working people of the time he was speaking their language and standing up for them.

More than that, the fact that someone from a poor, working class background could succeed and produce some amazing work can be seen as an inspiration for us. Think of him as somewhere between Sam Fender and Stormzy for a modern comparison!

One his most famous lines is “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” This is best translated as no matter how much you plan or prepare in life, things can still go wrong, which I think is sound advice for all of us! This is from Burns’ famous “To a Mouse” poem and also inspired the title of John Steinbeck’s famous book “Of Mice and Men”.

Maybe we should think about the role model, despite his many personal flaws, that Burns provides. He was certainly honest enough to recognise his own failings: “God knows, I’m not the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be”. Perhaps this time of year is a good time for us to be inspired by Burns and consider what we each need to do to make ourselves the person we should be.

Date: 13/01/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

At last there is some hope from scientists that we can see some better days ahead, but the next few weeks will see continued challenges for our schools. The impact of absence is felt across all schools, but the issues are more severe in some than others. I’m very proud of how hard our staff have worked to keep all of our schools open so far but we are at the edge of our capacity in some schools where there are 25% of staff absent, overwhelmingly linked to Covid-19.

While I hope that we can continue to keep all schools fully open, we have very coherent contingency plans if we have to partially close. In context, recent rates of Covid-19 in Northumberland have reached over 2200 per 100,000. By comparison, the national figure at the start of the last lockdown in January 2021 was around 400 cases per 100,000. As a result, during the last 3 months we have experienced more Covid-19 staff absence than at any point in the pandemic, probably more than the previous 18 months combined.

You may have read about the difficulties in getting supply staff to cover staff absences. This a national problem and Northumberland is in the same position as the rest of the country, with high demand and limited supply. The Government’s call for retired teachers to return to the profession has had a minimal impact so far. As is often the case, those in government failed to appreciate the practical difficulties in making an idea reality, not least the long delays in obtaining Disclosure and Barring Service clearance for staff to be able to return to the classroom. Ironically this is another government department that is slowing down the Department for Education’s scheme.

Today’s announcement that from Monday, Covid-19 self-isolation will be cut to five days with two negative lateral flow tests should help reduce the impact of staff absence. However even under this week’s change to seven days with two negative tests, we have staff who are still testing positive on day 10 who then can’t cut their isolation period.

Thankfully pupil attendance hasn’t been significantly impacted so far, which is really important as the last thing pupils need is to miss more time in school. This isn’t just to catch up academically but also for the impact it has on their wellbeing.

I began by talking about better days ahead and I believe that although we seem to be at the peak of the wave of the Omicron variant, there is genuine hope that it may mean that we move from Covid-19 as a pandemic to where it becomes endemic. In simple terms, this means that it will become more like flu; it will still pose a significant health problem periodically but we will learn to live with, probably through annual vaccinations as with flu.

This offers the hope that we will have a return to a ‘normal’ education provision by the summer term, which would be of massive benefit to our pupils. I put normal in inverted commas as there is no doubt that some of the changes we’ve made to deal with Covid-19 have changed the way we will work in the long term and hopefully have improved our provision for the better, such as the increase in capacity to use laptops to support learning.

Let’s hope that the scientists are correct and we are about to finally turn a corner, as that really would make 2022 a much better year than the previous two.

Date: 06/01/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

I always feel like January is the longest month of the year. The days are still very short and it’s generally colder than December. After celebrating Christmas and New Year, it’s easy to feel a bit deflated. This is especially true when the cold and dark is combined with a resolution to give up something we enjoy but we know isn’t the most healthy option (like chocolate!) or we are tired from increasing the amount of exercise we are doing! The first week in January is therefore often described as one of the most depressing weeks of the year. Taking down the decorations before the Twelfth Night (5th January in England) also signals that celebrations are over for another year.

However, in many countries, Spain for example, January 6th (El Dia de los Reyes) is a day of huge celebration, just as important as Christmas Day. As you will see in Sally’s column, it celebrates Epiphany and the visit of the three Wise Men or Kings to see Jesus and present him with gifts. The idea of Wise Men and the concept of wisdom may seem a little old fashioned and the word wisdom is not as widely used today as it was in the past. Given the challenges over the past couple of years, maybe we should be looking at wisdom as one of the key qualities we demand from our leaders.

In our school Trust, as with other Church of England Schools, wisdom is a very highly regarded quality and one which we try to develop in our pupils. Educating for wisdom is a key part of how we fulfil our Trust vision. For us this means not just learning the knowledge in the content of the curriculum, but also about encouraging children to be curious, ask thoughtful questions about what they are learning and to transfer something learned in one lesson and apply it in another. It’s also about developing reasoning, understanding ethics and being able to see things from the perspectives of others. It’s about learning to make wise decisions.

Traditionally wisdom was seen as something that develops with age and experience, and to some extent this is true. However it is also something all of us can develop through our resilience, determination, empathy for others and in our personal skills. Again, as a Trust we are committed to giving our pupils chances to experience a range of opportunities that they may not otherwise be able to enjoy, from forest and beach schools, to learning a musical instrument, to Mandarin and Chinese culture lessons. Much of this learning won’t be recognised in exam grades but it does give pupils the chance to develop wisdom through a variety of experiences.

One of the struggles for all countries in dealing with the pandemic has been, at times, a lack of wisdom in how to cope with this type of challenge. Experience of this type of rapid spread of infection around the globe is very limited and much of the planning was based on a flu pandemic, which is different in nature to coronavirus. When dealing with a huge amount of data and a variety of views and advice from scientists, the wisdom to interpret information and make the right decisions is a rare and very valuable attribute for a world leader.

Maybe next time we hear the story of the three Wise Men we need to remind ourselves of the importance of wisdom in all that we do and put wisdom near the top of our list of qualities we require of our leaders.

Date: 09/12/21
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

This week marked the first anniversary of the roll out of Covid-19 vaccinations. It was a sign of hope for 2021 after a very dark and grim 2020. Sadly although there have been a few glimmers, 2021 hasn’t quite lived up to the hopes that many of us had for the year. We are certainly not out of the pandemic yet and there have been other dark times during the past 12 months. Last week, Storm Arwen literally brought darkness (and the bitter cold) to many people in the North East.

I’m a big fan of Christmas lights. I find the progressive shortening of days from September to December hard to bear and having bright lights in and on our homes and buildings somehow seems to make the darkness a bit more bearable, as the light decreases it.

Looking back twelve months, I also wrote about lights shining through the darkness and our hopes for better times ahead. While 2021 hasn’t brought as much hope as we wished for, there have been some shining ‘lights’ which have brightened up our year. For many people that may have been the lifting of lockdown restrictions and seeing friends and family again. For others it may have been England’s run to get to the final of the Euros, or the departure of Mike Ashley from Newcastle United!

For me though, one of the brightest lights has been the hope and determination I have seen in our pupils and staff.

It is very easy for us to feel overwhelmed at times by the huge impact that Covid-19 has had on all of our lives. This impact has been greater in communities that were already struggling economically and where disadvantage creates the greatest challenges for education. However, what I’ve seen across our Trust schools this term has given me greater optimism for the future. I’ve witnessed staff who are incredibly committed to their roles and are working tirelessly to support our children. I’ve spoken to parents who want their children to have the best possible education and are supporting our schools to do this. Above all else, I’ve seen the children in our schools working with determination to make up for lost time and who are trying their hardest to succeed.

When we speak of light in our Trust schools, we use this as a metaphor to describe the inner light that all of us have. While this might not be able to put out the actual darkness at this time of year, it makes a massive difference to all our lives when people choose to let their ‘lights’ shine through their determination, hope and kindness towards others. This is something we see in our schools each day and this ‘light’ gives us hope that our children will overcome the darkness created by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” – Albus Dumbledore. (from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling)

Date: 18/11/21
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

Social media can be an amazing thing. It helps us to keep in touch with friends and family when we aren’t close by. It can support the running of clubs through sharing of information on key events. It allows us to communicate with people with similar interests. In many aspects of life, such as in education, it allows the sharing of ideas and resources to improve what we do.

However, social media also has a dark side. It can be used to spread hate as well as good. It can be used to attack or troll people, often without justification just because someone holds a different opinion. It has even been used to arrange acts of violence and terrorism.

On balance, I believe that social media probably tips the scales more on the side of good than bad. Its use is part of everyday life for most of us and the challenge is to ensure that we use it appropriately and responsibly. If we can do this, then we can role model this to our children and teach them to use it positively.

During the last week, there has been a lot of national media coverage on some of the abuse directed at secondary school staff on TikTok. This is something that sadly a large number of schools across the country have experienced and had to deal with. Like many such trends, it will disappear over time, particularly as both TikTok and the police have taken steps to remove these accounts and deal with the culprits.

However, this particular problem poses a wider question: do we really know what our children are accessing and posting online? Besides the current trend on TikTok, sadly the worst abuse of social media by pupils tends to be its use to bully other pupils.

I believe that the work we do in our schools on anti-bullying and e-safety means that our children are well aware of the rules and boundaries, such as many social media sites having a minimum age of 13 to use them. However, many children do have access to unsupervised use of mobile phones, etc. for a significant period of time each week.

The onus is for us as parents and carers to make sure that we ask questions and check their use of social media. Many of us, and I include myself here as a parent, need to do more to ensure that we keep our children safe from the possibility of harm from the misuse of social media. This can be very challenging but it is about us protecting our children.

For your child’s use of social media, the NSPCC has some really good support for parents and carers https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/ and the staff in all of our schools can also support you if you have a particular concern about your child.

By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT

This week we’ve had the pleasure of hosting the BBC’s education editor, Branwen Jeffreys, to interview pupils, staff and parents/carers at Bishop’s and Duke’s Schools. The purpose of this was to get a view on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on schools ahead of the conclusion of the Government’s Spending Review next week. The Spending Review will set out what the Government priorities for spending will be over the next few years and how this will affect funding for education, health, etc.

There are some huge decisions here and these are complicated by the need to pay for the extra spending to deal with the pandemic and also the cost of moving to being carbon neutral by 2050. There is no doubt that the additional funding we’ve received so far for things such as catch-up tuition, laptops, summer school programmes and academic tutors has made a positive impact on our pupils, however what is also very clear is that the process of all pupils ‘catching up” is a long term one, which will require additional funding for a number of years.

When politicians make big decisions, the language around the decision and the justification for making that decision can be really important. For that reason, I think that we should stop talking about education spending and use the word “investment” instead. When governments make decisions when resources are limited, talk about reducing “spending” sounds attractive and easy to justify, but talk about cutting “investment” is much harder to justify, as clearly a lack of investment will create problems in the future.

There are few more important investments any nation can make than in its future through ensuring that its young people have the best possible education. The better educated a nation’s population is, the stronger the economy will be in years to come. Covid-19 has magnified long term problems linked to disadvantage and if we don’t invest in our education system, these problems will get worse rather than better. The problems are also unevenly spread over the country and there is a desperate need for extra investment to support the hard work that many schools in areas like the North East are putting into giving their pupils the best possible start in life.

So what do schools need from the spending review? Firstly we need certainty over funding. This should mean a return to the previous system of fully funding all future, well-deserved, cost of living pay increases for staff. At the moment we are in the ridiculous position of setting a three year budget in July each year before knowing whether there will be any cost of living pay increases for the autumn, let alone the two years following. This means that if there is a pay increase, we have to find the cost from making further savings from the existing budget. As around three quarters of the costs for schools are for staffing, this is a huge problem. Returning to the long-standing system which was in place under previous governments would help schools plan much more effectively and give certainty over budgeting.

The second wish would be for the additional funding we’ve received for Covid-19 catch-up, tuition, laptops, etc. to be continued for at least the three years covered by the spending review. We are very grateful for the additional money we’ve received so far and it is making a difference, but ‘catch-up’ isn’t going to happen over just one year. Since returning in September, we’ve had a huge amount of further disruption to learning caused by the massive increase in Covid-19 cases amongst pupils and staff, which is likely to continue throughout this school year.

Earlier in the month, I was one of over 100 school leaders to sign a letter from the Confederation of School Trusts calling on the Government to provide additional funding for schools of around £5 billion to help pupils catch up. This is a huge sum, but it is only around one-third of the £15 billion that the Government appointed school catch-up advisor, Sir Kevan Collins, said was needed for England’s school system. I hope for the sake of all of the children in our schools that our Government has the vision and courage to make this level of investment. If they do then I believe that they will get many times the value back from having a generation of young people who will reach their potential and not be held back by the impact of the pandemic increasing existing disadvantage.

Today’s announcement that exam grades will be set mid-way between the 2019 exams and the 2021 teacher assessed grades is a positive one. It gives certainty to pupils taking exams this year, as they have suffered significantly from the ongoing disruption to education caused by Covid-19. It means that the percentage of passes and higher grades will be higher than in 2019, the last year when a ‘normal’ exam series took place. This will be a one year change and exam results for 2023 will return to the previous system of ‘comparable outcomes’, where the percentage of each grade varies very little from year to year.

In some of my previous blogs, I’ve talked about the need to change the way we assess pupils at 16 and 18 and I haven’t changed my opinion that the current system fails many pupils and needs radical change. However, the significant change needed here won’t happen overnight. We need to ensure that the pupils who are taking their exams next summer have the impacts of Covid-19 taken into consideration when their grades are awarded. This is particularly important for the most disadvantaged pupils, as the evidence collected nationally shows that for a number of reasons they have suffered disproportionately from disruption to their education.

It’s also very helpful to know that there is additional support for pupils who have missed big chunks of their education. This will be in the form of advanced notice of topics in some exams, so that revision can focus on topics pupils know they will be examined on. This is really important as it is impossible for pupils to have covered a whole subject syllabus in the same depth as they would have if all learning had taken place in schools as normal. The topics for exams will be published by 7th February 2022.

Pupils will also have more choice in which questions they can choose and will receive formulae sheets in Maths and Science. This poses the question as to why this doesn’t happen every year, as exams in these subjects should be testing the ability to apply concepts and complete calculations rather than remember a whole series of formulae. After all, a book of formulae is no help to someone who hasn’t mastered how to select and apply the correct formula to a question.

Finally, there are also are contingency plans in place for both further disruption where exams could still take place, and for the use of teacher assessed grades in the event of the 2022 exams being cancelled altogether. This is a very welcome change from the previous two years where government ministers insisted that exams would take place come what may and then had to cobble together a plan after cancelling exams without an alternative system of assessment in place.

It is refreshing to feel that lessons have been learned at the Department for Education and that they are again actually listening to those of us working in schools. This certainly wasn’t the case with the previous Secretary of State for Education but is an encouraging start for our new Minister.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think that anyone in a role like mine should publically take a party political view. School leaders have to work with whoever the public elects, both nationally and locally. We need to keep relations positive to avoid creating more barriers which could impact on our ability to provide the education our children deserve.

The appointment of Nadhim Zahawi as Secretary of State for Education is, I think, the 16th person in that role since I began my teaching career. I don’t think that anyone would envy the decisions that his predecessor, Gavin Williamson, had to make during the pandemic. However, it was widely felt by those working in schools that often we just weren’t listened to when major decisions were made. There was a huge sense of frustration that many of the mistakes made with educational decisions could have been avoided if the Secretary of State had listened to the voice of the profession. The fiasco over the grade algorithm in 2020 is a good example, as almost all school leaders pointed out how this would lead to unfair results for individual students.

I’ve always regarded the Secretary of State as one of the most crucial roles in Government, after all we are talking about a role where decisions have a critical impact on the future of our children and therefore the future success, happiness and prosperity of our nation. In my opinion it is a role that should always be given to someone with the necessary experience and skills to be successful in the role. Knowledge can always be gained and above all else it should go to someone who cares deeply about children and really wants the role. Consistency and a long term approach would be very welcome but unfortunately many of Mr Zahawi’s predecessors have lasted for only a year. This is in contrast to other nations like Germany, where the equivalent role has had 6 ministers in the same time period that Britain has had 16.

I welcome Mr Zahawi to the role and I wish him every success. He has a long ‘to do list’ passed on to him by Mr Williamson and this contains some huge challenges. The biggest challenge will be securing enough funding to resource schools properly so that they can overcome the impact of the Covd-19 disruption on education and help all of our children reach their potential.

The other huge challenge is to set a clear direction for the education sector and show some decisive leadership. For a number of years, there has been an absence of a strategic view, which has been replaced by short term thinking. Significant decisions often seem to be made only when a crisis point has been reached. A clearer rationale and strategy for education will be welcomed by many. If the Government is really serious about ‘levelling up’ then investment in education, particularly in areas of high deprivation, needs to be a key part of this.

Mr Zahawi has been widely praised for his work in helping roll out the Covid-19 vaccination programme in his previous role as Vaccines Minister. Let’s hope that at the end of his time as Secretary of State for Education that he will be worthy of similar praise for his positive impact on education and improving the life chances of our children.

Date: 16/07/21
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

I wonder how many of us as adults look back nostalgically at summer holidays that seemed to stretch endlessly. My memories are mainly of ‘playing out’ and often being dragged back home to eat dinner. No mobile phones meant we could push the boundaries of staying out until we were ‘hunted down’ by one of our parents.

Summer days for us meant playing football in the park, with games going on for hours with teams constantly changing as friends arrived or were called home. It meant riding on bikes to the beach or inland to climb what we thought were mountains to freewheel down. It meant us all chipping in what cash we had or making some from doing jobs for relatives and neighbours, so that we could share ice cream or chips.

Above all else, it meant spending time with friends, and learning. Not learning in the sense of the school curriculum, although we did learn things like the practical maths required to know how many bags of chips we could afford from our shared cash and how to divide this fairly amongst eight people! What we learned were things like what friendship really was, how to solve arguments amicably and how to grow more independent – doing things without our parents. By spending lots of time outdoors we also learned a lot about nature, even if sometimes this was about which plants to avoid if your football went into the bushes!

For me, those days were long ago and the world is very different now, but I believe that the summer holiday is the time to give our children some of the opportunities that I’ve mentioned above. At the risk of repeating what I’ve said a number of times before, I think that more than ever our children need opportunities to spend time with their friends and families outdoors, playing games, learning about the world in an informal way and reconnecting with nature. The best thing we can do as parents or carers this summer is give our children these opportunities but the challenge, particularly with current circumstances, is do this in the safest possible way.

It’s been another incredibly difficult year but the lights of our communities have shone through in the way that everyone has worked together to support our children. I hope that all our pupils, staff, parents, carers and families have a wonderful summer, where the sun shines and we have the chance to build some happy memories to last a lifetime. I’ll sign off with a final thought in the form of a short poem and I look forward to seeing everyone return safe and well in September.

Summer Holidays by Paul Warren:

The sky goes on forever
In azure blue as I remember
Riding on with a cool breeze
Long hot days doing what you please

White sands that shone
Running free all care gone
Crystal clear sparkling water cooling touch
Summer holidays as I remember much.