Government behaviour adviser’s company recruited fewer than one seventh of predicted recruits to �1 million training programme

A company run by one of the best-known figures in education recruited fewer than a seventh of the number of participants to teacher training sessions, compared to the total it had stated it hoped to recruit within a near-�1 million contract with the government.

Tom Bennett Training, at the time wholly owned by the Department for Education behaviour adviser of the same name, indicated in a contract document viewable via the government’s “Contracts Finder” website that it was “envisaged” that it would recruit up to 5,400 participants for government-funded courses in behaviour management.

The company secured a contract worth up to £952,430 under the government’s Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund (TLIF), and was eventually paid £922,753 for its work. However, only 756 teachers were recruited, or just 14 per cent of the 5,400 figure, with only 647 completing the training. The cost to the taxpayer was £1,221 per participant recruited.

Tom Bennett Training (TBT) ran courses for the TLIF programme which, according to a report commissioned by the DfE, were generally well-received by its participants: the scheme was one of five funded by TLIF which were said in the official evaluation to have achieved “high levels of participant satisfaction".  

Also, TBT’s courses were subject to an official recruitment target by the DfE which was much lower than 5,400, at only 720, which it achieved.

It may also be that the company has been unlucky to have seen sections of its contract document with predicted or hoped-for numbers left unredacted and viewable to the public, when for other TLIF-funded projects this was not the case.

However, this website’s investigations into TLIF, a programme designed to improve teacher professional development and social mobility in disadvantaged schools which ran from 2017 to 2020, raise questions about value for money, and specifically why it was not investigated more probingly.

The TBT revelation is part of a series of reports published today by Education Uncovered on information contained within TLIF contract documents, spending data and the official evaluation of the project. These also disclose:

-Individual TLIF-funded projects cost up to £11,000 per participant, though this was not disclosed in the official evaluation.

-The official evaluation did not consider whether individual TLIF projects, or the policy as a whole, provided value for money for the taxpayer, the lead evaluators stating this was because ministers had cut back funding for its work.

-The evaluation also did not consider whether TLIF would achieve what was one of its key aims: boosting social mobility.

-researchED, the conference organisation of which Mr Bennett has been the public face, was in its first four years a “trading name” for his privately-owned company, Anvil Education.

-Contract documents also saw Mr Bennett setting out how his career had developed across social and conventional media, researchED and his work for the government.

The detail

Tom Bennett Training, which is a trading name of Anvil Education, was one of 10 TLIF-funded projects which were subject to an evaluation published by the Department for Education last September. Evaluation reports were published on the TLIF project as a whole – embracing eight of the 10 schemes* – and, separately, on each of these eight projects individually.

These evaluation reports, carried out by researchers at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and Sheffield Hallam University, included data on how many participants had been recruited for training for each of the funded projects, and how many schools they came from.

Education Uncovered has then been able to cross-reference this against data obtained separately on the cost to the taxpayer of each project – this was not disclosed in the NFER/Sheffield Hallam report – and what individual contracts, as published by the government, were saying at the time the work was commissioned.

On Tom Bennett Training (TBT), which would provide courses and online support in behaviour management for school leaders and teachers, the NFER/Sheffield Hallam report stated that it had recruited 756 participants from 75 schools.

This compared to an official recruitment target, given by the government to TBT, of only 720 participants. So the company, at the time under Mr Bennett’s sole ownership but which now appears to be jointly owned with an Anna Bennett, exceeded that recruitment target by five per cent, according to the evaluation report.

However, detailed contract documents remain available on all of the TLIF projects via the Government’s “Contracts Finder” service. The one for Anvil Education includes the following passage, seemingly describing what was intended to be provided under the TLIF scheme.

Under “Schedule 5: Implementation Plan,” the contract document states:   

“This training program [sic] will run twelve timetabled leadership training cohorts in the first year, and twelve timetabled classroom teacher training cohorts. These will be supported by a team of six tutors who will participate on a rotational basis. Each training course will be delivered by a team of three trainers over two days. Each leadership cohort will consist of up to 50 school leaders, and classroom teaching programs [sic] up to 100. Therefore it is envisaged that in the first year the program will reach up to 600 school leaders and 1200 classroom teachers. Assuming this is repeated throughout the bid term, this would lead to 1800 school leaders and 3600 classroom practitioners.

“Subsequent booster training days will be delivered by three trainers.

“As the program progresses, the model assumes that schools will additionally book the course as an in-school training offer for their whole staff cohort, which will extend both the reach and the affordability of the program.

“When early indications forecast demand will outstrip supply, more tutors will be recruited to the program to meet projected need…Materials have already been planned, and in the event of a successful bid, will be written and produced within a three week time scale.”

It may be that this information was included in the published contract – ie left un-redacted – in error, since the contracts of other organisations which won TLIF funding all have blank pages where the fully readable “Implementation Plan” is in TBT’s document. Also, other documents published on “Contracts Finder" in relation to the Anvil Education contract redact out predicted participation numbers.

So it may be that these details were made public on this government website by mistake.

But the disparity between these numbers and the target and subsequent recruitment to TBT’s courses makes for an interesting comparison.

The contract implementation plan’s “envisaged” figure of 1,800 school leaders and 3,600 classroom practitioners of course equates to 5,400 participants in total.

Yet the figure of 756 actual participants is only 14 per cent of that, or fewer than one in seven. The 720 target statistic is only 13 per cent of the figure of 5,400.

I have asked the Department for Education why the target figure was so much lower than that quoted in Schedule 5 of the contract. But its response (see below) failed to answer the question.

Funding data

It has long been possible to get details on what the expected payments for the TLIF contracts were, with this detail available even in advance of them concluding. But I was keen to track how much each had actually received in the end.

So I sent a freedom of information request to the DfE and received information on funding paid to each project, for each year.

Anvil/Tom Bennett Training received a total of £922,752.65 for the TLIF project from the DfE. This amounted to 97 per cent of what was stated on the “Contracts Finder” website to be the contract’s maximum total value.

The actual funding provided equates to £1,200.57 for each participant on the programme, given the fact that 756 people were stated in the NFER/Sheffield Hallam report to have taken part.

That seemed quite a high figure to me, although it ranked only mid-way (fifth) among the 10 TLIF projects in terms of cost-per-participant (see separate story on that here).

To put it in context, if that figure of 5,400 participants as stated in the contract document had materialised, it would clearly have worked out at a much lower cost to the taxpayer per participant, at only £171.

I asked the DfE why there had been this disparity between the figure of 5,400 participants and what actually happened, as well as what seemed quite high per-participant figures for other providers.

There were no answers or specifics in its response. The DfE said: “The intention of the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund was to design and test a range of different and innovative professional development programmes and deliver them to schools in challenging areas. The programmes were all different, involving a range of different activities and they varied in terms of intensity and length.

“The evidence from the evaluation about the delivery and impact of the different programmes has been valuable in learning lessons for the delivery of other DfE-funded programmes.”

I also sent a lengthy request for comment to Tom Bennett himself. But he did not respond.

Further analysis: what does the training usually cost?

I was also curious to see how the actual cost per participant might compare with Tom Bennett Training’s usual charges to schools, ie without the direct DfE funding.

This was hard to pin down, as few costs seem available on TBT’s website. However, I did come across a set of TBT courses for which costs were available, albeit via another website. Courses running this month (online only) and March and April (in person) quoted the price of £350 per school to access four sessions. For this price schools could send up to six people for the online sessions, and two for the in-person ones.

Clearly, this is not the same as the TLIF courses, which featured an initial two-day training session, two booster sessions and access to an online platform. But a figure of £350 per school compares to that one of more than £1,000 per participant, in terms of cost to the taxpayer, via TLIF. So it seems worthy of scrutiny.

On TBT’s own website, upcoming webinars with Mr Bennett, one on “Running the Room: Better behaviour for school teachers” and the other on “Running the Room: a leader’s guide to behaviour management” are advertised for this month. When I accessed the website before Christmas, costs were billed at from £51.71 for the former and from £64.49 for the latter.

My request for comment to Mr Bennett included asking how costs for the TLIF-funded scheme compared with those usually charged by his firm.

It is possible to wonder about the impact of what seem like ambitious numbers for projected recruitment- Anvil Education is a small business with only two employees, recent annual accounts filed at Companies House disclose - on an organisation’s ability to secure the contract in the first place.

Could such numbers have played a part in persuading the government to grant the funding, only then for a target to be set much lower, but with most of the maximum stated funding being paid out in any case? Did other TLIF organisations have similar gaps between predictions/aspirations and reality?

These seem reasonable questions.

As reported in a paper I co-authored back in 2020, a total of 15 universities and two local authorities had also bid for TLIF funding, but without success. Again, it seems reasonable to ask if they might be feeling extra aggrieved on reading how this turned out.

It may be that TBT has been unlucky that, as described above, information is available in relation to its contract that has been redacted for the other projects, as other detailed information on target and expected recruitment numbers has been blanked out in other contract documents for both itself and the other TLIF schemes.

However, this would also seem to raise the question as to whether it was in the public interest for any such redactions to have happened, since it would seem a way for the public to hold to account the government, and perhaps individual projects, on whether recruitment actually matched expectations.

*Two of the 10 funded projects were not evaluated, as the report said that the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) was publishing separate analyses on them. However, as Education Uncovered reported, in fact one of them, a Ruth Miskin Training phonics scheme, has gone without evaluation by the EEF as well, as its trial had to be abandoned earlier this year.