SEND reforms, breakfast clubs and making the school workforce more inclusive were all on the agenda as the Labour conference kicked into gear today.
Below is your handy round-up of the key schools news talking points of day two on the conference, in Liverpool.
Freddie Whittaker and Sam Booth report …
1. Breakfast clubs trial to launch April
First, we’ve had an actual schools announcement!
During her speech, chancellor Rachel Reeves outlined plans to launch an “early adopter scheme” for 750 primary schools to run free breakfast clubs.
It will act as a “test and learn” of which approach works best ahead of a national rollout of the government’s £315 million manifesto commitment to fund free breakfast clubs in every primary school in England. The pilot will cost £7 million.
Reeves said it was an “investment in our young people, an investment in reducing child poverty, an investment in our economy”.
Full story here.
2. Wider SEND reform on the agenda?
During a fringe event hosted by the education unions, education secretary Bridget Phillipson had some interesting comments on the broken system for pupils with special educational needs.
She said “the conversation, I think, we need to have as a country is: ‘is the system that we have right now working?’
“Is this the system that we would start from, the system that we would design if we wanted to make sure that we had early identification of need, and the right level of support put in place as quickly as possible that I think we have to take our time to get right?
“I appreciate the really difficult situation facing so many children and families at the moment, not least the adversarial system that so many encounter.
“But I think we need to have a conversation about how we look to reform the system overall.”
The government has told Schools Week it is “carefully considering its entire approach to SEND” and alternative provision and will “set out next steps in due course”.
Full story here.
3. Time to making teaching more inclusive, too
Meanwhile, schools minister Catherine McKinnell, said she is also looking at the inclusivity of the education workforce.
Speaking at an Education Policy Institute event, she said: “We’re very focused on creating an inclusive education system that ensures every child thrives… we need to ensure that our workforce is the same”.
It is something she’s “looking at. I’m very keen that we do everything we can to break down barriers to teaching, as much as break down the barriers to opportunity for every young person.
“Being able to be part of a vibrant, valued, professionalized teaching workforce has to be a key part of that as well.”
4. More clarity on the 6.5k more teachers
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said the government’s flagship teacher recruitment pledge will plug the current vacancies and posts filled by temporary teachers.
Philipson was taken to task over Labour’s manifesto pledge to recruit an additional 6,500 new “expert” teachers into shortage subjects during a broadcast interview with GB News on Sunday.
Phillipson said: “What this will do is make sure that we fill the gaps that we have at the moment around specialist teachers, where we’ve got huge shortages, particularly in some subjects like maths and science, and we are determined to ensure that all of our children have got a brilliant teacher at the front of the classroom, a specialist in their field.”
Pushed on whether it amounts to just three teachers per every school, Phillipson said she would instead categorise it as “filling the gaps that we have in terms of posts that are vacant or where they’re temporarily filled by someone who isn’t a specialist in their field because we don’t, for example a PE teacher stepping into cover the role of a maths teacher,” she said.
The latest school workforce census, for the 2023-2024 academic year, says there were 2,800 teacher vacancies and 3,400 temporarily filled classroom teacher posts in November 2023.
That adds up to 6,200, just 300 shy of Labour’s target number.
That does seem handy. When the pledge was first made, in 2021, vacancies were at just over 3,000.
Meanwhile, National Foundation of Educational Research figures for the last recruitment phase for the 2024-2025 cohort show government is likely to miss its secondary target by 40 per cent.
Twelve of 17 secondary subjects are due to underrecruit.
“As the new government took office so late in the recruitment cycle it is unsurprising that this picture is unchanged since the July election, but the government will need to bring forward measures for improving recruitment and retention this autumn,” NFER’s Jack Worth said.
Labour has yet to decide on its delivery plan for the 6,500 new teachers pledge. Schools Week revealed last month that options on the table included delivering them over years and also watering down the pledge to include retention.
5. Phillipson dragged into donations storm
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has also appeared on national media, but most of the questions have been about the ongoing donations furore.
Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has been criticised for accepting more than £100,00 of gifts since 2019, including clothes bought for him by Labour peer Lord Alli.
Phillipson received a donation of £14,000 Alli too. It funded two events: a bash with journalists, trade unionists and education sector people ahead of her 40th birthday, and a reception for sector people and lobby journalists.
She said both were in work contexts and properly declared.
It has also emerged Phillipson accepted free Taylor Swift tickets worth £552 from the Football Association.
She told ITV the tickets were “a hard one to turn down” as “one of my children was keen to go along. It’s hard to say no if you’re offered tickets in those circumstances. It was declared, I’ve been clear about that, but I do recognise that I’m in a fortunate position to be able to receive them.”
