Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Academies Enterprise Trust National Teaching School Alliance
Executive Summary
The Academies Enterprise Trust National Teaching School Alliance is fully behind the School Direct initiative as part of a school led approach to improvement. There have been teething problems, which will improve with time. Issues with the portal however have not been resolved and will have a detrimental impact of the AETs ability to attract high quality trainees.
1. The Portal
1.1 The Academies Enterprise Trust/Columbus has only one URN number representing 72 academies across England.
1.2 This has resulted in all applicants being led to believe that training only occurs in the Chelmsford area.
1.3 This has significantly reduced the number of trainees applying to our academies across England.
1.4 Despite a meeting in January to try and resolve this issue with the Teaching Agency, we have yet to receive any guidance as to how the complexities of this year can be avoided for the next round of School Direct.
1.5 Changes to the portal are very slow.
2. Providers
2.1 The best ITT providers set up a central VLE which hosts application forms, return forms, costings, partnership agreements etc with a personal log in which ensures applications can be processed quickly. Eg Institute of Education.
2.2 The best ITT providers encourage academies to contribute to training programmes but this is not consistent.
2.3 Not all providers are willing to work with “require improvement” schools, which will ultimately affect recruitment in the very academies that need high quality staff.
3. Teaching Agency
3.1 Whilst some staff are very helpful on the telephone, others do not answer either phone calls or e-mails.
4. Funding
4.1 Primary academies cannot afford to meet the costs of a salaried position hence very good candidates have been lost.
4.2 Business and D&T candidates are often mature applicants who are currently in jobs. With no funding available, academies are not in a position to offer salaried places. Again experienced candidates are lost.
4.3 Academies are put off salaried places due to costs to schools. Many presumed funding would be similar to the GTP model and cannot cover the additional costs now required.
4.4 The Provisional funding documentation does not break down payments to individuals therefore contributing to additional administrative work where one provider is working with more than one academy.
4.5 Most academies will opt for mainly School Direct (training) places in the future.
5. Administration
5.1 For a large national chain of academies, the administration was initially overwhelming, although we how have systems in place to cope with the demands.
5.2 Administration/telephone calls/e-mails would be reduced if the portal issues were addressed. Too much time is spent explaining to candidates why the place they see on the portal is not in the area that they searched for.
July 2013