Gr8 Progress
The Fairer Schools Index, a new Government white paper on employment, and house prices, all in this week's newsletter
I ran a virtual event back in Covid times where we had a number of people working in cancer research in the region. They spoke about the world-leading stuff that goes on here, and the big challenge they face given the North East comes from a low baseline in health.
Prof Sir John Burn, then chair of Newcastle Hospitals, talked about running an ‘illness service’, not a health service, but said he’d back his trust (and many of the others in the region) in terms of their outcomes and the improvements they could make to people’s lives…even if they often felt like they were firefighting.
The same, it appears, can be said for the region’s schools.
The latest edition of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership’s Fairer Schools Index was out this week, and it found that allowing for the background of pupils saw the performance of schools improve significantly.
The index was developed by the University of Bristol, and they based their analysis on the Progress 8 measure. Progress 8 is essentially ‘value added’, and looks at how a pupil improves across their secondary schooling in comparison to their peers.
The three key findings from the work are, if you adjust for pupil background:
London’s schools see their ratings fall
the North East’s see theirs improve significantly
faith and grammar schools fall back.
As you can see above, a big chunk of the North East and North West’s schools go from being well below or below average up a rating to below average or average.
Looking at Progress 8 as it stands, the North East is given a -0.22 rating, meaning pupils under-perform compared to those at a similar stage at Key Stage 2 across the country.
London, in contrast, gets +0.31 meaning the capital’s pupils over-perform.
(The figure itself comes from a fairly convoluted calculation which weights results - English and Maths super important, sciences, humanities and languages next, other stuff after that) from different subjects and compares them to where the pupil was five years previously. It’s complex, and easier to just look at the indicator.)
Here’s the thing though, adjust for pupil background and the North East goes to +0.01, and London drops back to +0.13.
The reason for that, NPP argue, is that schools in regions like the North East have a higher proportion of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The logic goes that those with a more advantaged background - and all of the things that go with it - accelerate away through their secondary schooling. They start from a strong place, and double down.
When measuring a school’s performance, however, it’s a better idea to account for some of that stuff and see who is achieving positive things and helping elevate pupils, even when dealing with disadvantages.
Henri Murison, NPP’s Chief Exec, explains it as “by failing to account for a number of different variables related to pupils’ backgrounds, the last government labelled many schools in areas like the North East of England as under-performing while failing to account for demographic differences in helping drive higher outcomes in London schools.”
NPP’s index takes more than 200 schools across the North East, North West and Yorks and Humber, and sees them move from lower rankings to be at or above average, so the impact of adjusting the measure is significant.
NPP make three recommendations:
Place less emphasis on Progress 8 when DfE or Ofsted assess a school
Revise the measure, and present an adjusted Progress 8 score alongside the current one
Provide greater insights and context as to why schools achieve the results they do, highlighting the limitations of scores
Get Britain Working - new white paper
The Government has committed to chasing an 80% employment rate in a new white paper from Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall.
They sent Liz to Peterborough to announce it, presumably as some sort of warning to the other Secretaries of State not to be too ambitious.
The paper sets out a different approach to employment support, talking about linking employment with health, as well as skills, and transforming the Jobcentre system into a jobs and careers service.
The Apprenticeship Levy will be reformed and become a Growth and Skills Levy, and there’s talk of ‘empowering’ mayors to connect the dots on various types of support - health, skills, careers, employment - to best fit their local needs.
The North East is one of three areas to receive funding for NHS Accelerators, which are about stopping people falling out of work in the first place due to ill health.
The Tees Valley gets a name check as a youth trailblazer area, meaning some funding to try to prevent young people from dropping out of employment or education by matching them with opportunities.
But the big announcement to my mind is the Youth Guarantee, which promises “every 18-to-21-year old in England will have access to an apprenticeship, quality training and education opportunities or help to find a job.”
That’s quite a commitment, and one that it’s impossible for government to delivery alone.
Apprenticeships need employers to take on those young people, and numbers have been going backwards since the Levy was introduced. T-Level work placements are equally difficult to get businesses to commit to.
The Youth Guarantee obviously aims at continuity after young people leave compulsory education, and making sure those who don’t go to university aren’t just left to their own devices…but I can tell you what I worry will happen.
If there aren’t enough apprenticeship places, and there aren’t enough employers offering jobs, then you are relying on the ‘quality training and education opportunities’ to fill the void.
Now, my definition of quality might be different to yours…and both of ours is probably different to someone on Whitehall’s definition.
Fancy a bunch of digital skills workshops at the local college? Or a ‘work readiness’ boot camp run by a national training provider once a week for six weeks in a hotel conference room? Maybe you need CV writing tips or interview technique lessons as part of an online learning programme?
To make a proper difference, everything has to line up - employment support has to be based on real economic needs, skills programmes have to connect to business requirements, and health interventions have to reach the right people at the right time.
I like that devolution is seen as a vehicle for this to work well, and that there’s a recognition of how it needs to be flexible and tailored to local needs…let’s hope that helps it avoid largely ineffectual busy-work for all involved.
House Prices
The average North East house price is now at £171,000, up from £160k a year ago.
The region remains the cheapest place in the UK to buy a house, but prices have seen significant growth in the last few years.
The latest ONS figures include a sheet indexing price growth against January 2015, which shows North East prices up at 145.7, where 100 is Jan 15.
That lags UK growth a little (that was 153.1), but out-performs London (130.5) where the bubble was largely inflated well before 2015.
To demonstrate that, the data extends backwards to January 2011 - North East prices were at 100 then too, showing a period of stagnation. London was down around 70 at that point, showing the same level of growth in the four years before 2015 as in the nearly ten years since.
Pattern & PLATFORM Christmas Event - 13 Dec
A final Pattern-related event for the year, back at Wizu in Newcastle on the morning of 13th December, in association with Pl_tform.
Full details and registration is here.
Get in touch / working with me
You can reach me on arlen@arlenpettitt.co.uk.
I’m pretty much booked up through until the New Year, with several exciting projects on the go which I’ll look forward to telling you about at some point.
I’ve got a bit of capacity for small scale copywriting or content creation bits, but otherwise, let’s get a coffee in and talk about doing stuff in January onwards.