The Week in Public Services: 26th February 2021

This week: education, education, education (and some other stuff)

General

On Monday the prime minister set out his ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown. The ‘data not dates’ approach is a good one, even if all the next day’s headlines were about the provisional dates. The government’s four tests could be much clearer, at the very least. I found Tom’s thread and Cath’s blog helpful commentary. You can check out whether the roadmap met the tests we set at Institute for Government here.

And it feels like the next big row will probably be about on vaccine passports (or vaccine certificates)…so you should get up to speed by reading the Ada Lovelace Institute’s report on exactly that here.

Health and Social Care

In health and social care news, the Department of Health and Social Care will use an algorithm to prioritise people for vaccines…whether it will be proved to be a good or bad use of data remains to be seen. It is based on analysis by the University of Oxford’s QCovid risk prediction model.

Talking of algorithms, another 1.7m people were added to the ‘shielding list’ in England (people advised to stay at home because they are at greater risk of dying if they catch the virus), after the Department updated the list using a predictive model which took into account existing health conditions and other factors that have been identified as contributing to patients’ risk levels, such as ethnicity and location deprivation data to expand the list. This could be positive insofar as many more vulnerable people are told to shield but also risks telling many people to shield inappropriately.

In (even more) contentious news, a legal ruling found that the Department acted unlawfully by not publishing contracts within 30 days. Matt Hancock defended the decision not to publish as the “right thing to do” due to the time constraints.

In (perhaps) better news, the NHS is setting up mental health hubs for staff which will allow staff to “ring one of the 40 new hubs in England, receive advice and be referred for support from psychologists, mental health nurses, therapists and recovery workers.” This comes following a research study which found large numbers of ICU staff had reported symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In vaccine news, the government has announced new vaccine targets that all adults will be offered first dose by the end of July, and nine priority groups by April 15th. The Nuffield Trust have also found that vaccinating unpaid carers has been difficult. In their words: “rightly, unpaid carers have been included in the Covid-19 vaccination programme priority groups list, but until now there has been no clear plan for identifying carers, with wide variation in how this is happening in different places.”

In the research world:

• A new IFS report analysed living costs and the impact of change in living costs on nursing labour outcomes in NHS acute Trusts. They found that increases in living costs lead to more nurses leaving the NHS, or switching between Trusts. Retention and churn are higher in high-cost areas… the implication being that the currently fairly static NHS pay policy should vary more by region.
• Audit Scotland published a report entitled ‘The NHS in Scotland 2020’, which contained similar findings to reports in England. It found that “progress in addressing recommendations from pandemic preparedness exercises has been slow” and “those from the most deprived areas are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than those in the least deprived areas”
• The King’s Fund published a brilliant report about what drove GPs to make increased use of remote technology, and found that “practices themselves were supported to be the key drivers of change […] able to react much more rapidly than national NHS bodies and clinical commissioning groups […] this was particularly helped by several companies initially offering software solutions free of charge and without needing complex installation” (summary blog from Becky here)
• Reform published a new paper on NHS resilience, looking in particular at waiting lists. They recommend that “NHS England and Improvement should mandate the publication of waitlist recovery plans by integrated care systems and trusts”
• A big analysis of obesity policy in England (no pun intended) “identified and analyzed 14 government strategies published from 1992 to 2020 containing 689 wide‐ranging policies. Policies were largely proposed in a way that would be unlikely to lead to implementation; the majority were not interventionist and made high demands on individual agency, meaning that they relied on individuals to make behavior changes rather than shaping external influences, and are thus less likely to be effective or to reduce health inequalities.” Turns out it’s really hard to rely on people to change their own behaviour without thinking about the environments they live in…

Beyond big reports, there’s also been a lot of quick turnaround work:

• Natasha Curry has looked at care homes for the Nuffield Trust and concludes that “although we haven’t yet seen the predicted widespread closure of providers, there is a risk that some care organisations are only just managing with the increased temporary pandemic support from the government. Much of this support is set to end on 31 March and it is crucial that the care sector isn’t faced with a cliff-edge.” Care providers will have a keen eye on the budget, that’s for sure…
• Sarah Scobie’s explainer on care homes is well worth reading too — there have been fewer deaths this spring than during the first wave, but we still know near-nothing about those receiving care in their own homes
• A Health Foundation blog analysed what having a disability and/or an underlying health condition meant for people during the pandemic. They conclude that “future analysis and debate on the impacts of Covid-19 need to accord weight to inequalities faced by disabled people alongside inequalities based on ethnicity, poverty and other vital factors; as well as an appreciation of compounding experiences”
• A similarly interesting King’s Fund blog looked at the health of people from ethnic minority groups in England and found that “ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by socio-economic deprivation, a key determinant of health status”
• At the King’s Fund, Sally Warren has set out their stall for the budget next week, arguing that this budget will be more consequential for the wider determinants of health (people’s living situations including housing, poverty, and employment) than for health and social care spend itself.
• It would be nice, of course, if local government got more than two weeks’ notice of next year’s public health grant, though.

The NHS reform debate continues to wander on, with Richard Murray, Nigel Edwards and Chris Ham contributing to the debate here, here, and here. A more detailed King’s Fund report analysed how much progress that the London Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) (which would be put on a legal footing by the government’s NHS reforms) had made prior to the pandemic, arguing that “workforce constraints remain the biggest risk for health and care in London” and that ICSs need bold and co-ordinated action to ensure that their separate initiatives do not undermine each other’s.

Children and Young People

I seriously regret not publishing this on Tuesday: it has been an extraordinarily busy week since then. Life lesson: procrastination doesn’t pay, readers. The biggest stories are the government’s new extra cash for school catch-up, and its decision to plump for teacher-awarded grades for pupils sitting exams in England this year. But before we get into those, a reminder of a few other things that are happening:

• In Scotland, the youngest pupils in P1 to P3 (ages 4–7) returned to school on 22nd February, as did the youngest pupil in Wales
• In England, the Department for Education has now delivered a million laptops to vulnerable children — but there are still 250k to go. A reminder: schools were first closed on 20th March 2020
• There are worries that some schools may not admit all students back on March 8th because of the logistical difficulties of testing all students twice a week (Tom Chivers’ article about lateral flow tests remains the best overview of how and where these tests are useful)

In terms of the bigger stories, let’s start with catch-up funding. On Wednesday 24th February, the government announced an additional £700m to expand small-group tutoring, help disadvantaged students in early years settings, and increase summer education provision, which is being nicknamed the ‘recovery premium’. This builds on the existing catch-up funds and National Tutoring programme. Most of the new money (£500m) is being allocated to schools, with the expectation that they use the cash to increase summer provision or put extra help in place for the most disadvantaged pupils come September. The press release doesn’t say what this extra cash would be for but I’m sure the Education Endowment Foundation has advice on the most effective interventions.

The reaction from education wonks has been…muted. The Education Policy Institute reckons the cash is “much too modest to make a serious difference”, says Natalie Perera. Luke Sibieta also thinks it’s not enough. The government’s education recovery commissioner, Kevan Collins, says this is “just the beginning”, however.

A few wonky questions that the Education select committee should be questioning the DfE about for this announcement:

• What, if any, real-world resource constraints (e.g amount of teacher and tutor time) are there in spending the money?
• Would there be any adverse consequences to catch-up schemes? (Some academics worry that extending the school day would boost quantity of learning time at the expense of quality, might harm pupils’ wellbeing, and might increase teacher burnout, for example)
• In short — what is the government’s view on constraints and effects, and what is the case for holding back spending?
• What do we know about how time-dependent catch-up interventions are? Do children need to learn within a certain time, or can tutoring continue to ameliorate learning loss for quite a long time after missing school?
• Is catch-up more effective if it happens within a certain time period?
• In short — what does the evidence suggest about how to design the timing of the funding?

In terms of how England’s recovery package compares with Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the Education, England is…middling. It plans to spend more per pupil than Wales and Northern Ireland but less than Scotland. Wales and Northern Ireland’s plans are focussed more specifically on disadvantaged pupils (note: this was published before the England announcements yesterday). Luke wrote a useful summary thread of the four nation’s policies on early years, support for children with special needs and disabilities, support for children eligible for free school meals, and catch-up funds.

Another problem is that, in a vintage government press release way, the exact allocation of money is quite confusing. Fortunately, SchoolsWeek listened in to the education select committee yesterday and summarised what they heard. In an interesting tidbit, we found out that “so far, around 125,000 pupils have signed up for tutoring, and […] the DfE was still aiming to reach its target of 250,000 pupils this academic year.” The DfE think the number will increase rapidly when English schools go back in March, and teachers can identify which pupils would most benefit from tutoring.

Politically, none of the measures are especially controversial (yet). Labour has only called for more to be spent. It looks like education select committee chair Robert Halfon is reasonably pleased with the announcements, as he argued for more catch-up tutoring and extending school day by including more sports in The Sunday Telegraph last weekend.

The second big story is of course, exams. The essence of Williamson’s announcement yesterday morning boils down to this: pupils will receive teacher-assessed grades, where teachers will draw on “a range of evidence” to assign grades, including “the optional use of questions provided by exam boards”. The press release also promises “detailed guidance” from Ofqual, and two measures to ensure fairness: random sampling of results by Ofqual, and “multiple checks” for consistency of judgement across teachers by schools and colleges (see also Lewis Goodall’s excellent thread).

The government says this is “trusting teachers”. But it is a complicated proposal, and there are a lot of separate points to unpack about it. First off:

Consistency in grade allocation between schools

One big worry is that teachers in different schools will assess pupils more or less harshly, and there is no way of knowing to what extent this will be happening. Sam Freedman nails the problem in a sentence: “the lesson [the government] seem to have taken from last year is that algorithms are bad. But algorithms are just set of rules. So they’ve ended up creating a system without any rules.”

Some inconsistency in grade allocation might be mitigated by school-level consistency checks, but the government hasn’t provided much detail on that yet (and also, it’s pretty much impossible to know how much consistency there is!)

In the absence of teachers’ knowing that grades will be standardised, the likely outcome is that teachers will grade generously in order to avoid harming their pupils’ life chances, as Chris Giles points out — which brings me on to my next point:

Grade inflation

If all teachers face incentives to grade generously (out of a sense that they don’t want to harm their pupils’ life chances, or out of pressure from parents with pupils who need certain grades to go on to the next stage of further or higher education), that’s probably what’s going to happen. Indeed, when the 2020 exam results were allocated by teacher-assessed grades, they ended up being a lot better than the results in the previous year:

I’ve presented the results for Maths here, but the story is much the same in all other subjects. Predictably, a lot of people are quite upset about this because it means that the results for the 2021 cohort will be very good. The 2021 cohort might then be ‘unfairly advantaged’ in the labour market against pupils who sat moderated exams (or, perversely, disadvantaged, as employers might just dismiss the exam results of the 2020 and 2021 pupils ). It also creates a problem for university admissions, as almost all students will meet the offers they’ve been made. It is worth noting, though, as David Kernohan does here, that “teacher assessment, in the form of the grade point average, is as close to an international default as we are going to get” for university admissions. So while it’s weird from an English perspective, relying on teacher assessments for is pretty normal elsewhere.

To give some credit: the government has been clear that this is a trade-off (sort of). Gavin Williamson’s letter of direction to Ofqual explicitly says that: “in this exceptional year, this government’s policy is that Ofqual should give priority to results that credibly reflect teachers’ judgements about their students’ performance, rather than seeking to ensure that the national distribution of grades follows a similar profile to that of previous years.” There is an important accountability point here: the buck stops with Williamson — this is his decision, not Ofqual’s.

The accuracy and fairness of teacher-assessed grades

There is another concern about teacher-assessed grades: are they fair? Both between generations of pupils who sat moderated exams and those that didn’t , and between pupils whose grades are being allocated by their teachers. The first point is easy enough to grasp (see above) and on the second point there’s some research, and the essential points are that:

• Most teacher-predicted grades turn out to be overpredictions
• Lower-achieving students tend to be overpredicted
• High-achieving pupils in state schools are most likely to be underpredicted when looking at data on prior achievement (which teachers will be doing)

TL;DR — it’s really hard to predict pupil grades accurately.

The implications of outsourcing grade allocation to teachers

The knock-on consequences of it being really hard to predict grades is that teachers are going to be under extreme scrutiny from parents and the media come exam time.

Allowing teachers to allocate grades would be a problem at any time, but is a particular problem now because the government also wants teachers to spend the summer helping catch up pupils who have lost learning during the pandemic. It is not a good idea to give them an extra stressful and difficult task right at the point when we want them to be mitigating some of the effects of lost learning!

You could fairly ask: is there anything good about this announcement? And what would you do differently, smartarse?

Good questions. I think there are some positives in this compared to 2020. Bringing results day forward by two weeks to allow for more appeals (and ensuring they are free) is a good, if minor, tweak. But I genuinely cannot believe that this plan is only being announced now — roughly halfway through the school year. The government has had since last summer to plan for 2021 exams, and the fact that this is being announced now suggests there genuinely was no plan B to ‘run exams as normal’ the whole time. Ofqual and the Department for Education only started a consultation on exam replacements on 15th January this year! Given how unpredictable this pandemic has been, it seems absolutely baffling that the government has managed to end up allocating grades in 2021 in almost the exact same way as allocating grades in 2020.

In terms of what the government could have done differently:

• It could have used mini-assessments and coursework to help allocate grades more consistently (thought this would have required more contingency planning last summer)
• It could have run exams with more flexible content (to ensure pupils didn’t have to answer questions on things they hadn’t learned) and to a more flexible timetable (in case of widespread closures)

In any case, making a decision earlier would have been beneficial. Even if they had decided to go for teacher assessed grades earlier, this would have given teachers more time for ongoing assessment.

The most radical option, as Chris Cook has been arguing all along, is just to not have exams in 2021. The teacher assessed grades are still pretending that pupils taking exams in 2021 are in a similar situation to pupils taking exams in 2019 which is…basically mad. His proposal acknowledges that, although the risk is that exam results play a big role in gatekeeping in the workplace as well as colleges and universities, and that pupils leaving school to enter the workplace with a ‘Covid year qualification’ of some kind end up losing out in the labour market.

One final thing to end this analysis: comparing the system announced today to former DfE director Jon Coles’ five tests for a 2021 exam system suggests that it only really meets one — “be generous”. The government’s option might compensate for lost learning (teachers might be more lenient for pupils they know have been out of school a lot). But the government’s option is definitely not consistent, not likely to avoid further grade inflation, and will not protect teachers from criticism of under-grading individual pupils or overall grade inflation. (Jon also did his own comparison here).

Exams and catch-up funding aside…there’s also been some interesting new research:

• FFT Education DataLab have analysed pupil take-up of the EBacc, and found that differences between areas are largely explained by take up of modern foreign languages
• New DfE-commissioned research on the impact of school closures by Renaissance Learning and the Education Policy Institute found that pupils have lost around 2 months in reading, and about 3 months in maths. They also found that “learning losses in schools that have many pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds were around 50% higher than those schools with very few pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds [where disadvantage is measured as the proportion of a school’s pupils eligible for free school meals]”
• An IFS analysis of the consequences of partial school reopening in June and July — the researchers find that partial reopening may have increased inequality, as well as providing some benefits to pupils who attended
• Luke Sibieta also looked at past examples of changes in education following major social disruptions, giving the Butler Education Act of 1944 as a good example. He concludes that “large disruptions to schooling and education during war time have often been followed by large transformations to the education system and extensions to schooling. However, policymakers in the UK have not always been willing to pay for the most transformative ideas”. The Treasury’s influence runs deep indeed…

Of course, not everyone has the time to read the original research, which is why this UCL blog summarising the challenge facing the government as schools go back on 8th March is helpful. As is this Wales Centre for Public Policy briefing on the education response to coronavirus and the implications for schools. Finally, this Tim Harford FT column (£) on school closures recommends tuition (in small groups) to help children catch up, citing much of the same evidence.

In children’s social care, the Association for Directors of Children’s Social Care have published their latest safeguarding research, covering some worrying trends during the pandemic — an essential source of evidence to understand what has been happening.

Law and Order

In criminal justice news, the court case backlog continues to grow. The government has promised more courts to process more cases in response.

Elsewhere, an interesting Probation Inspectorate report looked at how limited the research and evaluation conducted by probation providers was while the (post-2014) Transforming Rehabilitation programme was in place — another legacy of the Grayling probation outsourcing reforms. The report concludes that “within the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, the requirements for providers to engage in evaluation and research were left loosely defined, and it is clear that any focus on research activities has been hindered by resource constraints and the financial difficulties reported by a number of providers”.

Local Government

Jonny Ball argues that local authorities need to be more given more power and resources in any post-crisis settlement, for the New Statesman

And a big new report by New Local explores examples of ‘community power’ in the UK and abroad, and argues that the evidence-base that policymakers demand before devolving power (‘but how do you know it would be better? Where’s your randomised controlled trial?’) is too high a bar for anyone to realistically clear. Thought-provoking.