The gossip: week of April 23rd

“The gossip” is a new reporting strand on Education Uncovered, and at the moment a bit of an experiment. I am getting so many interesting tip-offs, I need a format for processing and reporting on them which is perhaps less detailed/multi-sourced than you might find in a conventional news story on the site, or even in our diary column.

Instead, here you will find snippets of information, sometimes with the institution concerned anonymised to reflect the slightly more provisional nature of the story. But I suspect readers are going to find it interesting, so let’s get going with it….

Thursday, April 26^th

Schools have been inundating the Department for Education will applications to take on teaching school status, with an opportunity to boost their budgets in the face of the funding crisis an important factor in this demand, Education Uncovered has been told.

The numbers taking part in the latest round of the scheme has then, in turn, provoked a knock-on effect, with the DfE repeatedly putting back the announcement on which bids have been successful, with this not expected, now, until mid-June.

These are the thoughts of a well-placed source. They said: “I have been told that the National College for Teaching and Leadership* has been absolutely swamped with applications for teacher school status.

“People are trying to grab a pot of extra money wherever they can.”

The DfE’s teaching schools webpage states that schools receive a total of £150,000 in “core funding” for taking on the status, over a three-year period.

The webpage states: “Funding is paid to newly designated teaching school alliances on receipt of singed grant funding terms and conditions.

“Payment in subsequent years is made on an annual basis following the completion of an evaluation in the summer term and the return of signed terms and conditions relating to the current financial year.”

However, our source questioned whether cash earmarked for the scheme was always being spent on teaching school activity, rather than subsumed for spending in schools’ overall budgets. The source said it was “understandable, though not right” if schools were viewing the policy as a way of cushioning their institutions against cost pressures.

The DfE’s website said that applications for the latest round of teacher schools opened in November last year closed in December. Our source said an announcement on the successful bidders had been expected in mid-February, then at the end of the April, then mid-May and was now planned for mid-June.