Sunday thoughts: What can we expect in education in 2023?

2023. New Year, new you. Though for the education sector, a little of the same old you might be preferable following the events of the previous 12 months. But what will we see in education in 2023? Here’s 10 predictions for the forthcoming year (with the 11th being, is this column just going to be listicles now? Maybe, maybe….)

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Teachers will strike, but heads won’t; this will have relatively limited impact on the public and the government won’t substantively concede. NEU, NASUWT and NAHT are almost at the end of their formal strike ballot period and ASCL have just completed the consultative ballot. The thresholds for achieving industrial action are both complex and high — unions need to demonstrate a 50% turnout among members on a ballot, and the majority of those who vote, to do so in favour, AND (a third threshold for education and a handful of other critical areas), a total of 40% of ALL members must vote in favour of action. Looking at the results of the consultative ballot, I think the NEU will pass strike action — they achieved 62% turnout and 86% in favour of a strike and met all three thresholds. NASUWT didn’t do a consultative ballot, but I’d expect the numbers to be similar, i.e. for action to pass. However, the NAHT consultative ballot favoured “action short of a strike” (64% response, 84% in favour) and ASCLs consultative ballot, closed yesterday, failed to hit all three thresholds for strike action (54% turnout, 69% in favour of a strike — meaning only 37% of total members in favour of strike action). I’d expect the heads unions to end up in a position of action short of a strike. Although the NEU is briefing days of school closures if they strike, I think this is unlikely if heads don’t go out — we may see one or two days but not sustained closures. In such a scenario, I’d expect the government to hold a firm line: you can see the outlines of a strategy emerging from No10 in which they hug the NHS close, and leave most other sectors out to dry, especially railway workers. Teaching would fit somewhere in the middle, and it’s a lot for easier for the government to demonise the much more militant NEU than it is if heads go out. Gillian Keegan is also on a personal level vociferously opposed to union action, given her history in industry on Merseyside. So it will be ugly, and will inconvenience parents, but I don’t think government will substantively move.

Gillian Keegan will remain all year as Education Secretary; as will Bridget Phillipson as her Shadow. I’d expect Labour to do a reshuffle this Spring, and the Tories to perhaps do a limited one in May after the local elections (especially if results are terrible and there’s a Cabinet resignation or two, or a firing) and a fuller one in the Autumn to be the final team in the run up to the election. But following last year’s musical chairs, I think both education portfolios will remain consistent. Keegan is pretty much what the Tories want education to be focussing on, which is skills and childcare, they don’t have many senior female Cabinet Members, and if she handles the strike media well then they’ll want her to stay in post. For Labour, Phillipson is emerging as something of a star in the Shadow Cabinet, boosted by her profile over private school taxes, and I don’t expect for a second that Starmer et al will want to move her or Streeting away from the two key public service briefs for Labour.

Teacher shortages won’t get any better in England; but a little noticed change to international recruitment will start to fill the gap. Last year’s figures for ITT, should anyone need reminding, were dreadful. Very early figures for this Autumn’s ITT, courtesy of Jack Worth at NfER, show a small increase at secondary (mostly in the subjects where government has increased bursaries — who knew, teachers do respond to economic incentives) and a small decline at primary. Vacancy levels in posts for serving teachers are also very high — 25% up on 2021. Depending on what the graduate labour market looks like this summer (which I’d expect to be fairly resilient despite wider economic wobbles), we may see a late surge, but the shortfalls won’t be substantively addressed. What I think will have an impact is what sounds like two small and incredibly technical sounding announcements, but aren’t, which is the introduction of international Qualified Teacher Status (iQTS) in October last year, and a widening of eligibility for countries whose teachers can be retrospectively be granted QTS in December. The former allows for UK universities to deliver teacher training directly abroad to local trainee teachers, who will then be recognised as automatically gaining QTS and be able to work in the UK (subject to visa requirements). 6 universities have just started delivering this and the DfE is planning to expand it further. The latter has granted the ability for teachers in nine new countries (Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, Ukraine, Zimbabwe) who hold a local teaching qualification, for that to be recognised as equivalent to QTS and for those people to come and work in England without retraining — and with a commitment to expand this to every country in the world by the end of 2023. Put together, you can suddenly see how the pool of both prospective teachers, and serving teachers, grows massively — and how, for the latter in particular, salaries for even junior teachers of £30,000+ are hugely appealing compared to, say $1,500 in Ghana. iQTS trainees in the first scheme won’t graduate until summer 2023, and the recognition of QTS status for the nine countries doesn’t fully kick in until February (and the country list doesn’t widen until December), so it may take a while for numbers to grow, but I’d expect to see some indications in either teachers starting in Autumn 2023, or recruitment rounds that start at the tail end of 2023 for 2024, that these routes will become a visible source of staff.

Labour will formally announce a review of undergraduate tuition fees. They’ve been dancing around this for ages, but as we get closer to an election, it becomes increasingly ridiculous for Labour to dodge questions on what they’ll do on fees. Their formal, Corbyn era, position is to abolish them. Starmer’s latest statement is that they’re bad, mmmkay? I suspect it’s not a coincidence that former Labour Secretary of State and now Vice Chancellor of UAL James Purnell commissioned some really detailed work from London Economics on what alternatives to the current system could look like, at the tail end of last year. It would be uncharacteristically bold (and cause an unnecessary fight) for Labour to land on a formal alternative model before the election, but they’ll need to say something, and the obvious thing to do is announce the Purnell review (or similar), reporting in say 2025, with a remit to look again at a graduate tax (sigh), changes to a fee and loan system, or full abolition.

Widening Participation numbers, and UK undergraduate numbers, will go into reverse at a few high profile and selective universities, for reasons not entirely within their control, but they will be blamed for this. Between 2017 and 2021, the proportion of UK home undergraduates from state schools at Oxford rose from 58.2% to 68.2%; the proportion from socio-economically disadvantaged areas rose from 10.6% to 17.3%; and the proportion from areas of low progression to higher education rose from 12.9% to 17.0%. This is a strong success story. But at least some of Oxford’s widening participation success in the last two years is in part — through no fault of its own — a result of the grade inflation caused by the cancellation of A-Level examinations in 2020 and 2021. This led to an increase in the number of students who received top grades, with 44.3% of A-Level results being A or above in 2021 compared to 25.2% in 2019. The same will likely be true at Cambridge, and other highly selective and high tariff universities. Although this was not something which the universities could have significantly controlled for, the logical conclusion is that the future trajectory for widening participation statistics will therefore most likely — and quite possibly in this summer’s exam series and Autumn 2023 entry — trend downwards rather than upwards as exams continue on their glide path down, and the universities will likely take at least some of the (unfair) blame for this. Similarly, one of the issues that has the potential to cause an explosion this summer is the perceived closing off of places at high tariff institutions for UK students, in favour of international students because they pay more. Again, although the picture is far more nuanced in truth, growing numbers of 18 year olds and pretty fixed numbers of university places means that it is very possible that fewer UK students will get places and growing numbers will be “denied a place”; headlines from summer 2022 such as “one fifth of Russell Group places awarded to overseas pupils”, will be repeated at greater scale; and universities will fall right into the firing line on this in summer 2023.

The new Chat GPT will become a significant challenge for coursework and non-examined assessment at both school and university level. Chat GPT caused a huge fuss when it came out last year, both positive and negative. Its human-like model of interaction is actually the ground breaking innovation, in my view, rather than the calculations itself — and a lot of its outputs do read like human drafted essays and reports. Cue a lot of agonising about whether this will lead to mass cheating by students, and the end of any essay or coursework or other non examined model of assessment. I actually don’t think the current model meets the standard anywhere near the level for widespread substitution of real life work — the outputs are polished but highly generic, and the AI has been found to just confidently lie when providing citations for work when it doesn’t know the answer (it’s clearly a male AI). However, the rumours are that the next generation output, GPT4, is issuing later in 2023, which will be 100 times bigger (in terms of the parameters it has to work from). Early chatter, admittedly from people prone to hype in this area, is very excitable. If a model emerges that can draft essays and other forms of writing that sound not only realistic, but specific, then it could potentially lead to quite significant impacts on forms of assessment at school and university level (and ironically, technology could re-emphasise the importance of paper and pen based real time examinations). Like all paradigm shifting technology, I am confident it will end up as a net benefit, but the transition period could be very messy for the next few years while education institutions struggle to catch up. On the other hand, it could put the essay mills — I’m sorry, I mean the companies that offer to help students with asynchronous means of catching up and support for their studies — out of business.

Government will continue to mutter about international students, but trade deals will mean numbers don’t substantively change, though the composition will. I wrote at the tail end of last year about the hokey-cokey that is the UKs approach to international students, and I don’t think that will change this year. There will continue to be noises made about crackdowns, especially on dependents and low quality courses, at a minimum every quarter when the new immigration figures drop from ONS. But I would predict no substantive change to visa arrangements. This is because the Home Secretary is weaker than previously in Cabinet, and HMT and No10 remain cautious about things which may cause further economic harm, and DfE and DIT will remain opposed to big changes. And while backbench opinion in the Conservative party is violently opposed to current immigration levels, there will remain a caucus sceptical about addressing this via curbing student numbers. Perhaps most importantly, the UK is keen to sign a trade deal with India in 2023, the No1 source of international students, and with whom the PM obviously has a personal interest in getting something over the line. I would, however, expect the composition of students to shift. We’ve probably hit ‘peak China’ and as noted above, India has now become the No1 destination. Growth is now coming from other parts of South and South East Asia (Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan), and from Nigeria. This has all manner of implications for universities: although fee income will be (broadly) the same, average spend by Chinese students in-country is much higher than for other international students, so there may be a slight negative economic impact. Different groups of foreign students, at postgraduate level, also have different expectations as to what ‘good’ looks like, as the recent Advance HE work shows. And, although this is a difficult subject to discuss, the British public has a list of immigration that is more or less acceptable to them, where ‘skilled immigration’ (you’d imagine like graduates) is more popular, but immigrants from certain countries, including Pakistan and Nigeria, are less popular.

Both the Conservatives and Labour will make a substantive move on childcare. Labour have been briefing theirs for months, and were all set to announce it at last year’s conference until something happened to make them pull it, leading to a slightly underwhelming breakfast club announcement. It seems likely that a full package that they will announce this year includes more hours on a universal basis including for younger children, and an expansion of something that looks like extended schools. Although Liz Truss was due to make a big move on childcare on the Tory side, the Sunak government have just formally announced that the ‘big bang’ changes won’t go forward (which focussed on a deregulatory agenda to cut costs, including through loosening ratios of staff to children in formal settings). However, what they abandoned was the Truss plan, rather than the principle of doing something altogether, and my guess is that they’ll bring out their own plan at some point this year. This will be relatively small, and lead to some criticism, but it will be combined with a promise of more significant change if they are in government after the next election (probably around some form of deregulation for smaller and independent childminders, plus greater flexibility in how parents can use their subsidies such as tax free childcare allowances, including in more informal care settings). If I had to guess, I’d say they may commit this year and repeat in the manifesto something around a medium term ambition for a single childcare account, which parents can use like a personal budget (with a mixture of state funding and incentives to save prvately) to access the care they want.

The OfS will show its teeth on low quality and call out at least one provider and series of courses, in a high profile way to drive wider change. In March last year the Secretary of State wrote to the OfS with some guidance as to how the regular should look at quality of courses. This said, among other things, that “…it is our clear and firm expectation that the OfS will use the new outcome thresholds to identify providers with unacceptable levels of performance and challenge them. In the event that they cannot convincingly explain and justify their student outcomes data, then this should provide the basis for generating robust regulatory investigation and action. In cases where low and unacceptable quality is confirmed, action should include, where appropriate, financial penalties and ultimately the suspension or removal of the provider from the register (and with it, access to student finance)”. This is a pretty explicit steer. In case that didn’t give enough of a hint, the SoS went on: “…given the number of providers currently with performance below the proposed numerical thresholds that the OfS is consulting on, we would expect a significant number of investigations to be initiated as a result of the B3 condition in due course…our priorities for investigation are: a) larger providers with university title which are below proposed numerical thresholds either for the whole provider, or multiple subject areas; and b) a set of investigations focused on a major subject grouping with large numbers of students and high variation in outcomes, such as Computer Science or Law, with the intention to drive up the quality of those courses across the sector as a whole”. And who knew — in May, the OfS decided to launch some investigations, into business and management courses at 8 providers! The providers are (rightly) anonymous at this stage because no failure has been proven, and investigations only started in the Autumn last year, but whether through this or through other instances, I’d expect there to be at least one provider, and / or at least one large course, that is properly called out on low quality and sanctioned in a severe way this year, pour encourager les autres.

More LAs and MATs will start to consult on closing and merging primary schools; this will be very controversial, especially among MATs. Lambeth Council has just announced a programme of consultation on merging 16 of its primary schools due to falling numbers. Primary numbers are due to drop by 16% in the next decade, and London is likely to be particularly affected due to housing costs, people moving out because of Covid, and declines in immigration. Camden, for example, is in similar situation of shrinking primary rolls. While in previous times, LAs might have tried to keep small and uneconomic primary schools open through soft loans, and use of the lump sum in the funding formula to maintain a skeleton provision, this is harder to due in tighter overall financial circumstances, so I’d expect to see similar models of consultation happening in LAs outside of London, and also with MATs. Both of these will cause significant local (and in some instances national) political unrest. In particular, MAT closures / mergers will move right into the spotlight. It will be described as further privatisation and profiteering, as faceless entities close down much loved local institutions in order to pay giant salaries to central staff. More truthfully, it will be a test case for the democratic element of MAT governance. Technically, the guidance on “making significant changes to an open Academy” only requires the MAT to submit a full business case to the DfE, via the Regional Director, for approval. The Department has a “strong expectation that academy trusts will support LAs to meet the Sufficiency Duty by providing additional places where they are needed and reducing the number of places offered where they are surplus to requirements” — but this is (purposefully?) vague. In other words, MATs can do an “amalgamation” (ugh, what a word) with no formal discussions with local stakeholders. This strikes me as implausible, and indeed, I’d fully expect MATs in this situation to be consulting widely — but I’d predict that there will be an instance next year where a large MAT does want to do an amalgamation, consults, has pushback from the LA and local stakeholders, but does it anyway. Maybe that will be the right decision, educationally and financially. But it will cause tensions.

Happy New Year, everyone!