16
Examination of witnesses
Siobhan Jones and Caroline Pusey.
Q8 The Chair: Good afternoon and a great welcome to Siobhan Jones, director of local government and communities and the department for all those things—levelling up, housing and communities; we cannot keep up with the changes. We are very pleased to welcome you, Siobhan, and Caroline Pusey, who is director for the teaching workforce at the DfE. I am sorry that our first panel was all men and our second panel all women, but these things are not all in our control. Again, most of the members of the committee are here in person because we are voting. That might mean that there is a vote in the middle of all this, so I will suspend the committee for a few minutes while we vote so that we are not all deafened by the bells, too.
When you are answering your first question, we would be grateful if you would just say a few words about who you are. None of us can see your labels from this far away, so it would be useful to be sure that we know who is who. If you do want to say anything, that will be fine.
Q9 Lord Porter of Spalding: Just for the record, I declared my interest earlier, but specifically I am a non-director of—in your words—the department for all those things.
Mine is a relatively tame question. I do not know why I have been singled out for the nice, easy stuff but here it goes: how does improving the skills of the public service workforce contribute to the levelling-up agenda, given that that is the big banner for the Government?
Siobhan Jones: I am director of the department, which I will attempt to say is part of levelling up housing and communities. That is my first test to see if I can get that right. As the Chair said, I am the director for local government. I want to apologise to the committee that we sent over our evidence just yesterday, which is less time than I would have liked to give you ahead of the session, so apologies for that.
As Lord Porter will know very well, the department is in a slightly different position than that of some of the other witnesses, in the sense that we have a slightly different world in the local government workforce because of democratic accountability. No doubt that will come out in the session, but if anything comes out of today that you would like us to reflect in our evidence, no doubt we can issue a supplementary point, so I hope that is helpful.
On Lord Porter’s question, as you say, levelling up is such a core mission for the department. Speaking particularly from the local government perspective, local government has a critical role to play and can play a role in several ways. More generally, the public sector is a huge part of our workforce in this country and, as you will know, one of the key ambitions in the levelling-up White Paper was improving skills. That will benefit our public sector workforce in the work that is happening on skills.
The reciprocal part to that is that improving the skills of our local government workforce will help to improve levelling up. Local government is critical to delivering many of the missions in the White Paper. They are in a central position to lead for their place. They really understand their local residents and what their local residents need, so they are ideally placed to pull together an awful lot of the effort on levelling up for their community. That can be quite specific elements, such as participating in things like the local skills partnerships that have been announced and which are under way in various areas.
They can also be a convenor. Just to take a couple of examples of the missions in the levelling-up White Paper, local government plays a critical role in delivering pride in place by understanding the needs of the communities—investing in high streets, for example; the department is providing quite direct support to local authorities on the regeneration of high streets. Education was mentioned. They might not be a local government lead in education, but they are a key player in that. Investing in the local government workforce, improving their skills and helping them to work across organisations across the public sector at a local level and with businesses is critical to delivering levelling up. I am happy to elaborate on any of that.
Caroline Pusey: I am director for the teaching workforce in the DfE, so I am responsible for everything to do with the teaching workforce, primarily teachers and leaders, but also teaching assistants, right across the lifecycle of that workforce.
I should also apologise that my colleague, Suzanne Lunn, could not join us today. She was due to be here but unfortunately is sick. She is my counterpart on social care. I just want to say up front that I will not be talking about the social care work, so please do not see that as a sign that we are not interested. Obviously we are. She will submit evidence and we can follow up on anything that you particularly want to ask about that.
On the teaching workforce and levelling up, our key priority is getting the brightest and best teachers into our classrooms, so that every child has access to an excellent education, with a particular focus on ensuring that children in the most disadvantaged areas have access to the best teachers. That is of paramount importance, because teacher quality is the most important factor in improving pupil outcomes, and there is evidence to suggest that it is even more powerful for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
There are three key ways in which we are focusing on doing that. The first is specific teacher training routes that place high-performing graduates in the most challenging schools. The second is what we call tilting, focusing our national policies and programmes to ensure that they have the greatest impact in the areas of most need, and I can give a couple of examples of those. The third is through education investment areas, which we have established across education and into which we are directing a number of interventions; from a workforce perspective, we are providing additional funding through what we are calling levelling-up premiums.
I should also say, since the question was about skills, that if a high-quality teacher has the biggest impact on educational outcomes, obviously improving the quality of teaching is a fundamental factor in levelling up. I will say a bit more about each of those issues. Our High Potential ITT—Initial Teacher Training—programme is a route designed to attract high performing graduates and career changes into teaching, who might otherwise not have joined the profession. They are then placed solely in challenging schools serving low-income communities with high numbers of disadvantaged or low attaining pupils. The programme is delivered by Teach First. Often it is known by that name rather than High Potential ITT and it is a high prestige graduate programme. It was ranked eighth in the Times Top 100 graduate employers in 2020 and it has been in the top 10 for a number of years.
On the second way, tilting, I was going to talk about two particular programmes that are specifically relevant because they are also our key programmes in place to improve the quality of teaching, to upskill teaching—in other words, teachers and leaders. The first is the Early Career Framework. It is a catchy title, but this sits at the heart of our strategy to reform teacher recruitment, retention and quality. It is the biggest reform of teacher training in a generation. It is a government-funded entitlement for all early career teachers to access high-quality professional development at the start of their career. That means that new teachers now receive development and support and training for two years instead of the one year they received previously, to ensure the solid foundations of a really successful career.
We took a phased approach to the introduction of the Early Career Framework.[1] We started with an early rollout in the autumn of 2020 in selected areas of the north-east—Greater Manchester, Bradford and Doncaster. These represent some of our areas of greatest need but also represent a diverse range of schools in varying circumstances. It was to help us to understand how to support schools in implementing the programme and how to develop the approach to the Early Career Framework.
Another part of our key teacher training reforms is the introduction of a new suite of what we call National Professional Qualifications. These are for experienced teachers and leaders rather than the early career teachers who the ECF focuses on. They cover the knowledge and skills that those experienced teachers and school leaders need for the future. They include three leadership qualifications, in headship, senior leadership and executive headship, as well as three new specialist qualifications for experienced teachers. They are about leading teacher development (helping to develop less experienced teachers); leading teaching (this is for your expert teachers who want to bring on other teachers in teaching); and leading behaviour and culture. These qualifications will support class teachers and leaders to improve pupil outcomes, particularly in disadvantaged areas where teacher quality can have the greatest impact.
As for where we currently stand on eligibility, these are fully funded, so we will fund anyone in state schools who wants to take one of these. That is the case following the injection of an additional £184 million as part of the education recovery package. In previous incarnations of our national professional qualification scheme the scholarships were tilted to areas of most need. In the situation we are now, with universal funding, we are continuing to put particular effort into encouraging teachers and leaders in disadvantaged schools to take up a national professional qualification and to target our communications to those areas so that we ensure that take-up.
Finally, the education investment areas will cover a third of local authorities in England where education attainment is at its weakest, plus any local authorities that contain an existing opportunity area or have been identified as having the highest potential for rapid improvement. As I said, our workforce contribution to these is the levelling-up premiums. These were announced by the Prime Minister at the autumn conference, and they will support the recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in the subjects and areas of most need—physics, chemistry, maths and computing. They are worth up to £3,000 tax free annually for teachers in those subjects in years one to five of their careers. We have not yet confirmed full eligibility for those, but we will do so in due course.
Lord Porter of Spalding: From the two of you who are giving evidence now and the three previously, it seems quite clear that the teaching profession probably has its career progression better covered than in any of the other departments. I do not know if there is a way of mapping what is available by department for the staff they will be responsible for back on the ground. That expression of what we are doing for teachers in order to get the right teachers in the right place with the right skills, and ongoing, continually making sure that those skills are up to where they need to be, seems to be a much more comprehensive offer than we had from the first witnesses. I do not want to press the department on all those things, because I will probably step beyond where I should be, when I could have those conversations through a different route anyway.
Q10 Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: I was thinking about Teach First, which you referred to. Could I ask you more generally about retention issues among young teachers, Caroline? I do not have the figures with me, but I think there is quite a dropout rate. Could you comment on that and what you are doing to tackle that? Is it people leaving who in the end have found out that they do not really like teaching and do not want to do it, or are we losing some good people who we should be worrying about?
Caroline Pusey: I have the figures. Twenty per cent of qualified teachers left the profession within the first two years of teaching and 31% left within the first five years. Therefore, yes, it is a problem, which we acknowledge.
Are we losing people we want to keep? I think the answer is yes. It will almost certainly be some people for whom the profession was not suitable, but some are definitely teachers we want to keep. The evidence we found was that one of the key factors was what we call the cliff edge: teachers completing their ITT—initial teacher training—year and then being thrown into the classroom in a sink or swim way. It was that evidence that led us to the intervention I have just talked about, the Early Career Framework, which addresses two things. First, it ensures that we are investing in CPD, which we know improves retention, and, secondly, it gives the support and development that teachers need, not just in that first year in teaching but into the second year. As I say, that is our key intervention.
We have a number of other things that we are doing to support retention more broadly in early career and beyond, which I can talk about, but, yes, it is key to address early career retention as well as to improve quality of teaching at that stage.
Q11 The Chair: Can I follow up on some of that? It is partly because I come from a family of teachers. At the moment, talking to people in the education service, it seems that if there is a job at a senior level in a difficult secondary school, it is virtually impossible to fill it. I will not go into all the stuff about bureaucracy and the amount of form filling they have to do. Every profession complains about that and every department is trying to do something about that, but for teachers now there are so many other pressures that it is very difficult to get support on.
That comes round to what I was talking about in the previous session. Are you thinking about other professional activity, other sorts of work, and very early on, that classroom assistants used to do? Yes, there is the mental health issue, which is another big issue that we had a look at earlier with regard to vulnerable children, but there is a whole raft of other issues, whether it is the child’s behaviour because they are being groomed or are subject to county lines, all these things, and teachers really feel that they are on their own. Are you looking at that?
Caroline Pusey: Yes. I will talk about a couple of things. This does not directly address that specific point, but the main reason we know why teachers leave the profession—they tell us they leave the profession—is what they call excessive workload. There are a number of drivers of that, including what you have just talked about, which I will come to in a minute. We have evidence that it is not workload; it is time spent on non-value- added tasks—time spent not teaching children, in essence.
We have a fairly comprehensive programme of work that we have collaborated and worked really closely with the profession on to seek to reduce workload. That is focused primarily on a workload reduction toolkit that, as I say, we have developed alongside teachers, and it is a resource that head teachers can use in their own context to seek to reduce workload.
We have very good evidence and statistics from the number of schools and teachers who talk about the use of that toolkit having reduced workload, particularly on those non-value-added tasks. Over the period before Brexit, the average teacher week reduced by about five hours; I think it went from 54 down to about 50, or something like that. Do not quote me; we can come back with the specifics. But it was by a substantial amount, particularly in the areas that we focused on. That is a more general answer to your question.
On the specific things that teachers are getting pulled into where they feel unsupported, maybe they do not feel that those areas are areas that they should be brought into. You talked about behaviour and you mentioned mental health, which I can say something about. We absolutely know that dealing with negative behaviour affects the well-being of teachers and is one reason why teachers leave the profession.
We are currently consulting on the behaviour in schools guidance and the suspension and permanent exclusion guidance. These will equip head teachers to create calm, orderly, safe and supportive school environments where pupils and staff can thrive. We have invested £10 million in behaviour hubs, where schools with really positive behaviour can help to support others that are perhaps struggling a bit more. Last April, we launched the national behaviour survey to understand parents’, children’s, teachers’ and leaders’ perception of behaviour in schools.
I was going to talk about mental health in response to another question that is coming up.
The Chair: You do not need to go into that. It is certainly coming up. I am keen that you think about whether there are other roles that education establishments need to be thinking about and which the Government need to be thinking about. That might be something that you can write to us about later. I am thinking of how you employ more local people, people who are not getting into the sorts of jobs that stimulate them and so on, because that is part of levelling up too.
Q12 Lord Bichard: Everyone talks about more integrated working now, and sometimes perhaps we do not think carefully enough about the skills that public service staff need to work in a more integrated way. It is a question particularly directed at you, Siobhan. What skills do you think we should be developing? Secondly, you fund some pretty important development programmes. One of them is a graduate development programme. I know you will tell me that they are delivered by the LGA, but, knowing how determined you will be to get good value, you will know what is in the programme. In the graduate development programme and the programme for chief executives and directors, do you think we are focusing enough on developing the skills that we need for more integrated working? As I say, I think this is really for you, Siobhan.
Siobhan Jones: Yes, I am very happy to come in on that. It is a very important point about the skills side. As you will know, integration is about the culture of the organisation, the mindsets and some of the knowledge as much as the skills, but the culture is driven by the leadership, and you have already touched on some of the leadership programme. The leadership side of this is very important.
The skill that I would pull out in particular is leadership, because culture is a strong element. There are some quite practical skills around sharing knowledge, sharing information, sharing some of the basics, and that is partly about skills and partly about structures. But it is also about getting the structures right and understanding the need to get the basics right and to reduce some of the barriers. There is a skills element to that, so if I may, I will just touch on some of those.
On leadership, there has been a real step change, which Covid has partly driven, in the level of integrated working at a local level. I am always struck when I talk to local authority chief execs by how much they are talking to their partners, particularly in health but also in businesses, in the police and in local services, and DWP is often quite an important element of that. The people I have talked to say that sharing some of those leadership skills is important. You have touched on a couple of programmes that we fund through the LGA—IGNITE and the Total Leadership programme—which are very much focused at chief execs or people hitting those chief execs.
There is also the National Leadership Centre, which you will be familiar with, which allows the cross-public sector element of this. That is another important element in that knowledge exchange. It is a particular avenue. Colleagues from health may have mentioned the particular focus on leadership in the health and social care area, with the health and social care integration White Paper talking about individuals with responsibility and the leadership review they have initiated that will cover local authorities as well. So there is a variety of leadership programmes. We also sponsor the LGA to do the corporate peer reviews, which many of you will be familiar with. That also provides that learning.
I have talked a bit about different leadership programmes there. It is important that we keep ensuring that a strong element of that is the building of relationships and building the understanding between the different organisations to keep doing that. I am sure there is more we can do there, and that is coming up in conversations that I have with the sector about where we might want to work together on that.
Lord Bichard: I was really trying to get down to some of the nitty-gritty skills. I have seen leaders at work who make it pretty impossible for their staff to work across any boundary. They are still leaders, but they are not actually doing the sort of thing that we are trying to talk about. If you want to do that, you have to get leaders who understand how you build and sustain trust. You have to get leaders who understand how to focus activity on the client and how to ensure that you get feedback from clients, all the nitty-gritty things that really matter. I suppose I am just looking for some reassurance that, if I were to go on a chief executive/leadership course now, those are the things that I would be helped to develop rather than just how I control the budget, which is what happened in my day. I know that was a long time ago.
Siobhan Jones: There will still be the budget element but, yes, I think there will be, and it is the conversation I am having with the LGA to make sure that we regularly review the programme. It has more of a focus on that, but there is probably more that we could do, if I am honest. I am happy to get more detail on what the courses cover, but I am assured, from my conversation with the LGA, that it is a much stronger feature of that partnership working and that building trust.
Lord Bichard: Would that mean that we would now see clients on, say, a chief executive or a director course? Would they be exposed to real people who may have concerns about the way we deliver services to them?
Siobhan Jones: I cannot talk about those specific courses, but I know that is increasingly a feature of the training that is happening in organisations. Earlier, one of the other witnesses talked about immersive training. I was speaking to colleagues in Manchester who run an immersive experience, and that is very much about people working in services but also people using services so that there is a much stronger connection there. Another example is that we sponsor the Supporting Families programme, which you will have heard a lot about in your previous inquiry.
A key element of that is training people up in a very different way. There are two elements to that. There is basic knowledge sharing, because there is still quite an awful lot of disconnect between people understanding how you work if you are a policeman and going out and visiting some of these families. How do you work if you are a social worker? How do you work with very different mindsets? There is some very basic stuff that will help to chip away at that, so it is about knowledge as well as skills.
On the Supporting Families programme, Durham has introduced a scheme that trains everybody and shares information about the specific services that they will be working with and about how they work, the skills they use and what they can bring to that, but there is also the important element of actually hearing from the people they are working with. People who have been through the system can explain how it affected them and what was good, what worked and what did not work.
Lord Bichard: It would be interesting if you could give us a bit of detail on that. I am probably saving Baroness Pitkeathley from asking a question, but it seems to me pretty important now that leaders in local authorities and other services, which we have been talking about, understand how important the voluntary sector is and how important it has become, particularly during the pandemic, and therefore know how to work with it and develop partnerships with it. Are we giving that enough attention, because some people still feel—I am probably one of them—that the voluntary sector is not seen as a real partner but merely as a convenient way of delivering some of the things that we cannot deliver.
Siobhan Jones: The honest answer is that it will vary quite a lot. Some of the chief execs I have spoken to absolutely see the voluntary sector as a key partner, and in some of the initiatives that are being developed in particular local areas they are doing work on its levelling-up plan or ethics. They are bringing in the voluntary sector and seeing them as a key partner. I probably would not claim that that is universal.
Lord Bichard: I was asking whether you are featuring that issue in your chief executive and leadership programme, whether you are actually developing chief executives who look differently on the voluntary sector.
Siobhan Jones: I would have to check if that is part of the existing programme, but the leadership programme was one of the areas we are planning to review in partnership with the LGA and talking to SOLACE about it as well. I cannot answer that specific about the leadership programme but I am very happy to take that away and I will come back on that specific and feed it into the next review.
Q13 Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth: Welcome to the two members of the panel from remote workstation to remote workstation. That provides a useful segue, because my question is about digital transformation, which is clearly key to the provision of so many services going into the future but is not without challenges to users, clients and employees. Specifically, I get the sense that we need to up the impetus from some of what is happening. I would like to know what is happening from the two different departments on the digital transformation, with some specific examples of what you are doing, if possible.
Caroline Pusey: As part of our sustainable digital strategy for education, we are working to make sure that teachers and children can make the best use of technology for in-school learning, and we have done a number of things. We have invested up to £30 million on our Connect the Classroom pilot programme and in providing internal wi-fi networking to 1,000 schools. We are working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to accelerate the full-fibre internet connectivity rolled out to all schools.
We have rolled out our EdTech Demonstrator programme, which has helped around 18,000 schools, colleges and trusts to improve their capability in planning for using technology, and we are developing standards to assist all schools and colleges in England to reach a good minimum standard of digital data and technology. In the short term, we are publishing a core set of minimum digital, data and technology standards, and in the longer term we will support all schools and colleges to meet those. We have provided a rollout of a further 500,000 devices to support disadvantaged students, and we have provided online platforms to schools to help with curriculum delivery as part of the Get Help with Technology programme.
As part of our Covid response, the Oak National Academy was created as a rapid response to the pandemic, funded by government, with teachers and colleagues from leading educational organisations coming together to support schools’ efforts to keep children learning through the provision of remote education.
In terms of training our workforce in this area, our approach is that technology in schools is a tool for teachers to deliver evidence-based teaching more effectively, so the leading providers who are delivering the key phases of our training—initial teacher training, the early career framework and the national professional qualifications that I talked about—can give examples of these technologies as part of their training to participants. The frameworks that we have developed do not teach teachers about digital technologies, not least because it moves so fast and, although we review the frameworks, we do not want something to be out of date almost as soon as it is written.
I did not talk earlier about something called the Institute of Teaching, which is part of our reform of the teacher development landscape, the delivery landscape, which we are establishing as a centre of expertise on teacher development. That will be trialling cutting edge practices in teacher development in a number of areas, building an evidence base for what works and seeking to share that evidence base. One area that it may well look at is the use of technologies so that it can share findings and evidence on what works best here. That is another reason why we have not enshrined anything in those frameworks: because they are very much evidence led. We have only included things in them where we have evidence that that is the best way to teach, and we do not yet have that strength of evidence on digital data and technology.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth: Have you noticed any resistance from kids, from teachers, from parents to the switch to digital and, if so, how are you addressing that?
Caroline Pusey: I do not think we have. Clearly, an enormous leap forward in change happened in the context of the pandemic, so there was certainly no resistance from parents to that virtual online learning, because it needed to happen. I do not think there was resistance from teachers. I think it was challenging, but I certainly did not hear or understand resistance. As a result of that enormous leap forward in that context, we have seen a recognition of the benefits that can be derived in education from this, a classic example being online virtual parents’ evenings, which are much more convenient for parents and teachers alike.
This is a slight digression, but another key driver of losing people from the provision is the lack of flexible working opportunities in teaching. Things like being able to go home for your parents’ evening make a big difference when we are trying to keep young parents in the profession, so I do not think we have seen resistance.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth: That is very helpful. Thanks. Siobhan, perhaps you are able to tell us what is happening in your department.
Siobhan Jones: Of course, thank you. There are two big programmes that we particularly lead on in this area. There is the cybersecurity element, which I will touch on briefly, but you are probably more interested in the digital fund work that we do. I mention cybersecurity because it is so critical. Digital transformation is important only if it delivers better services for people. People will only engage in that if they can trust that their data is going to get used and you have that resilience behind it.
We have been putting quite a lot of effort into helping councils improve their cybersecurity. We have invested nearly £14 million over the last couple of years and worked with about 120 councils. I can say more about that if the committee is interested. It is quite an important foundation for enabling digital transformation.
We also have a local digital fund, which is very much about supporting the service transformation element of it. Around £11 million has gone to 44 projects spanning 100 councils. It is also trying to incentivise councils to work together, to collaborate, on digital projects so that they are not having to reinvent the wheel and can learn from each other. It is sometimes the very practical things. There is the Drupal project, for example, which is a template website for councils rather than every council having to design its own website. If you are a resident going on to a council website, you are probably looking for the same top five things. With the template, the work is done once and done well, it takes user needs into account and comes from the perspective of the resident. That is then shared across different councils. I think it was Brighton and Hove that initiated that one.
Most people will know that there is an awful lot online about parking or payments. There has also been work to identify where the real stopgaps are and where we can make a better experience for people using services. One in particular is planning. Some 50% of planning applications were rejected because they were perhaps incompletely filled out. There was an exercise to try to find novel ways of doing that, so that you could stop that at an earlier point in the process and short-circuit quite a lengthy period of back and forth just trying to get a form filled out properly. There was a digital project to fund that. There are quite a few other projects which that funds. We also run free training for digital providers.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth: We had something from Caroline about parents’ meetings. Is there progress on council meetings? It might need legislative back-up, the sort of Jackie Weaver dimension. Many of us could see democratic advantages of that.
Siobhan Jones: Yes. You will be aware that there was a call for evidence last year on the ability to hold remote and hybrid meetings. That is being considered. We are trying to follow that up. As you are aware, it requires legislative time, which Ministers are considering alongside other pressures on the legislative programme. We very much heard the messages from the sector, which I know values the flexibility of hybrid meetings. We have also heard from some who want safeguards in place to make sure that they are used appropriately and that you do not get some of the negative behaviours that can be facilitated online, which we saw in some limited examples. I am afraid I cannot give the committee a definite answer on when that might happen, but it is being actively considered by Ministers.
We are also doing some work nationally with the LGA on digital frameworks, toolkits and free training that we offer to try to enhance skills, because we appreciate that digital data technology skills and professionals are a growth area and the sector is keen. I just wanted to pick that out particularly, given the skills focus of this. That is something we are very actively considering. We are also working with local councils on how they make sure that residents can still access services.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth: That is very helpful. Thank you very much.
Q14 Lord Porter of Spalding: I will come back on the two pleasures or vices of remote working. Thankfully, I do not have to look after small children anymore, but my daughter’s parents’ evenings this year were brilliant because they were remote. Teachers had a much easier time with it, parents had a much better time with it, and children had a much better time with it because they did not even get engaged with it; they were off doing Xbox or whatever it is the kids do. In education, making the service work around the user definitely work. It goes back to Michael’s points earlier about where the customer fits into all this.
In local government, my experience is that it is much more awkward because there is a need for the decisions to be made publicly and transparently. Some would argue that a remote meeting is more open and more transparent, in that it is easier for the public to engage with that meeting because they do not have to travel to town or wherever it happens to be. The perverseness of now being back to only having physical decision-making is that everyone is trying to get around the physical decisions being made in a personal way.
I should declare that I am the leader of a council. For me it is great, because I have a lot more delegated authority to make a decision and we do not have to have a meeting. But the public do not see me making a delegated decision; they just see a piece of paper that comes out of the process when I have done it. There are some tensions there which the society we live in is going to have to engage with, because I do not think it is for us to determine what the right outcome is. I think people should be telling us what they want us to be doing.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Is it a requirement, or should it be a requirement, that every child should have access to the internet and to a smart digital device, and that, for local government, every home should have access to the internet and a smart device in order to receive the services that Lord Porter and others have talked about?
Caroline Pusey: I do not think we have used the word “requirement”, but that is absolutely our aspiration. That is why we invested a significant amount during the pandemic to ensure, to the extent that we could, that every child had a device. We got 1.85 million devices out to children who did not have them, and we funded additional broadband, as I said. Yes to an aspiration, absolutely. Again, I think the investment that we put in at pace during the pandemic moved things a long way forward in that space.
The Chair: Whether that happened depended where you were, I have to say.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Precisely. That is the reason for a requirement.
The Chair: I was not proud of all that. In Durham, in 2001 I think it was, there was a programme for every child to have what we now call an iPad, a computer. That is over 20 years ago. It seems to me that we do not learn and make sure that things we think we have done are embedded.
What we are really concerned about here is how we use technology to improve productivity and to ensure that the workforce in local government and in a school is able to respond to the locality, the place and the issues that are important to those children. One of the problems is that the most difficult areas are precisely the ones where attainment got worse during the pandemic. The gap grew. We have to think about these things in terms of how we shift attainment, involvement and engagement, and we cannot be complacent about that. That is being the preacher here rather than just asking the questions.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Hallelujah.
The Chair: I am very concerned about all of that.
Q15 Lord Davies of Gower: Continuing on the skills issue, my question is about developing skills. How does your department support workforces to develop the skills needed? In particular, how do you involve your people in the design and delivery of the public services that they use?
Siobhan Jones: First, I completely agree that the user—or the client, resident, whatever terminology you use—needs to be involved in designing the services. Again, there are some really good examples of where that happens. One of the benefits of local government is the nature of local government, its role and its democratic accountability. The role of councillors can mean that the council is quite close to what its residents want and need, and what they are expecting from the services. There is very often quite an open dialogue on that. There are some real strengths in the way local government generally operates.
In terms of specifics, at a national level we clearly want to be able to set some expectations and help with some toolkits around that. In the levelling-up White Paper, we committed to some additional work on communities. The communities strategy will include some element of how you ensure that there are real and genuine conversations between local government or other local structures and the residents they are trying to serve. Part of that may well be how you improve some of the skills, because it is a conversation that can be done very badly. One of the elements that we will be talking to people about as part of that communities strategy is what skills the workforce might need in order to have that conversation in a real way, to engage with and reach the people who can sometimes be left out of those types of decisions.
The other element I would pick up is that, where we are running national programmes, we make sure that there is strong user involvement. I have touched on Supporting Families already and I will not dwell on that too much; you will have heard about that previously. Our guidance on that is very clear: that it should have a strong user element to it.
Another programme that we ran was the Community Champions programme on Covid. That was very reciprocal. It iterated over time, learning the lessons from talking to the co-ordinators and the people who were going out there, and it adapted in quite quick time the messages on how the programme was being run. We need to keep pushing on how we make sure that when we are designing things at a national level, we are quite clear that the user voice is a very important part of it. Internally, in the Civil Service, we need to think about our skills. That is a core part of policy professional work. At a local level, we want to keep working with LGA and chief executives to make sure that it is built into the way they plan their local services.
Q16 Lord Davies of Gower: You talked about reaching out. Can you explain what you mean by “reaching out” in this design and delivery?
Siobhan Jones: To local government or within those specific programmes?
Lord Davies of Gower: To local government, as you said.
Siobhan Jones: I have regular conversations. To take the communities strategy as an example, we work very closely with the LGA as a representative organisation, but I will often have discussions with a subset of local chief executives. Our Ministers also talk to their political colleagues. We want them to be very much engaged.
When we are setting up national frameworks, they need to work at a local level. That is largely what I am thinking of. There is no point in us sitting here in central government trying to design something. It is about that process of talking to them and bringing the local expertise of, “Well, that is not going to work for my residents. What is the point?” It is through a variety of mechanisms—some formal engagement through the LGA and some of their associates, such as the District Councils’ Network—and some individual conversations with chief executives and their teams to make sure that what we are designing makes sense on a practical level.
That is also replicated in specific programmes. Again, the Supporting Families programme has quite a strong network of Supporting Families leads across the country to draw that learning into the programme.
Caroline Pusey: I would answer the question on two levels, really. From a departmental, system-level perspective, we work really hard to involve users in the design and evolution of the delivery of our policies and services through a number of mechanisms. We have extensive standing engagement with the sector through a variety of fora and very strong relationships with a diverse range of sector stakeholders.
This was brought to the fore during the development of the teacher recruitment and retention strategy, which I have not had the chance to talk about, back in 2019. That was designed hand in glove with the sector and was received very well by the sector as a result. A key element of that strategy was the CPD reforms that I have already talked about, which were also designed hand in glove with the sector and are very well supported by the sector.
The Early Career Framework in particular, as I said, was introduced fully nationally last September, and we have continued to work closely with the sector to understand how it is working and committing to change and evolve where elements of it are not working exactly as we had intended. We work through our regional delivery organisation to understand the varying needs across different areas of the country to try to ensure that policies can be successfully applied in all contexts. This meant that during the pandemic we were able to facilitate the sharing of national and regional best practice across schools.
Finally, at a national level, we designed our digital services with user need at their heart. Again, a different reform that was part of the recruitment and retention strategy was taking in-house the digital service by which potential teacher trainees apply to do teacher training, which we designed with user need at the heart. That was launched again in September of last year. We have had really positive feedback about that customer experience and we already have evidence of reduced drop-out through that journey as a result. That is at a national level.
The question was also about how we are equipping our workforces to design their services with user needs at their heart, which I found quite hard to conceive of, particularly through the teaching workforce. I guess the services that they are delivering to their pupils and parents are what we are talking about.
We try to give schools and leaders in particular information and services to make the best decisions for their schools, and guidance, support and sharing best practice. That is how we try to achieve it. One example of this is through our schools buying service, which gives leaders information, advice and guidance on areas like catering, cleaning, educational resources and estates management and how they can design those services to best suit their need. I do not know whether that answers the question.
Q17 Lord Davies of Gower: Yes, that is helpful. Turning the clock back slightly to an earlier point that you made, I was quite surprised when you mentioned that 20% of teachers leave in the first two years and just over 30% in the first five years. I find that a staggering figure. Is there something wrong with the selection process?
Caroline Pusey: That was not what our diagnosis suggested. It suggested that it was, as I talked about, the cliff edge. We did a significant amount of work that resulted in the conclusion that the early career framework was the best intervention to support that. I should say that retention has improved. I do not have the breakdown from early career, but, in 2019-20, 7.8% of all teachers left the profession, which was a decrease from 9.4% in 2018-19.
Lord Davies of Gower: And what about 2019-20?
Caroline Pusey: The pandemic might have been a factor, but we had seen an improvement in retention pre-pandemic. I cannot say that the selection process is perfect, but our evidence did not suggest that was the biggest problem.
Now that we run our “apply” service in-house, we can track people through the process, see where people are falling out and then follow up with providers on the why and the how. That will give us a wealth of data and information that will help us to get a bit more at that question, perhaps. Why are people falling out? Are people applying for the wrong things? We will get more insight into that, but that is not what the evidence suggests at the moment.
The Chair: We have run well out of time. There are lots of other things I would love to come back on, but, first, I want to say thank you very much, and, secondly, if there is anything that makes you think, “They did not ask about that”, or, “I’m not sure I said what I would have wanted to say about that”, please let us have some written evidence.
This is a really tricky area, because you cannot just look into the future and think you know exactly what is going to happen. We are asking you to think about what the needs of education and local government will be in the future and how we develop a workforce to fit that. I know we are dealing in really difficult areas, but if you have any ideas that you think we should be considering, please let us know. Thank you very much indeed.
