Steve Besley's Education Eye: week ending 27 October 2023

What's happened this week?

Important stories across the board:

AI has been a big talking point this week. 

Everyone seems to have pitched in, from prime ministers past and present, to well, everyone else with strong views. Views range from the hesitant, to the excited, to the downright worried, although the PM did his best to put things in perspective in a keynote speech this week.

It all comes as the government prepares to host its big AI safety summit next week. 

It’s a big moment for the government. As the PM explained in his speech: “AI can help us solve some of the greatest social challenges of our time”, but a lot depends on how it’s developed and managed. The implications for education are expected to be one of the talking points. Summary details below.

Elsewhere and on more routine matters this week, the education secretary kept up the momentum with another half-term missive following last week’s call for minimum service standards. This one was on sex education, calling on schools to make any curriculum materials available for parents to observe if required. “Parents must be empowered to ask and schools should have the confidence to share”,,,, she argued.

Also in Westminster this week, the Education Committee continued to take evidence on Ofsted’s work with schools and in a ‘hang on a minute’ moment, called on the Chancellor to look into business rates and VAT costs for childcare providers following a rather dismissive response to its report on the matter last week.

This week also saw education questions of ministers. 

Prime topics included school funding, with ministers claiming in response that “next year schools will be funded at their highest level in history, at £59.6 billion”. Also pupil absences, ‘still too high and my number one priority according to the secretary of state. On school buildings, “we will do whatever it takes to keep children and staff safe”, and on student cost-of-living, “we are doing everything we can to help”. Other topics covered ranged from SEND, to apprenticeships, to recognising the impact of the conflict in the Middle East on education in the UK. 

In other general news this week, the ONS published new ‘experimental’ data on the labour market showing slight increases over the last quarter in both the unemployment rate and the economic inactivity rate. 

And the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a disturbing report on destitution in the UK. To take just one statistic: 'The number of children experiencing destitution since 2017 has almost tripled with an increase of 186%'. The report calls for wider social security reforms.

For schools this week, where things have been a bit quieter with many on half-term, pupil absences and the cost-of-living have remained priority topics. Increasingly, these are being seen as linked issues as a briefing from Action for Children highlighted this week. 

In FE this week, the Association of Colleges (AoC) highlighted the pressures caused by GCSE resits. More staff, more rooms, more resources, more support – all needed. ‘It’s becoming like a military operation’, according to one college. 

Also for FE this week, the Nuffield-funded Economy 2030 Inquiry called for the famed (Lord) Robbins demand-led principle for HE to be adopted for FE. It would mean anyone eligible for training, such as for an apprenticeship, would gain a place. 'Demand-led funding would inject real dynamism into vocational and technical education, just as it has dynamised the universities', the report argues. 

In HE this week, early data from UCAS on undergraduate applications for 2024 showed a 2% fall overall compared to the same point last year, although still up on the last pre-pandemic year. The figures cover Oxbridge and medical courses at this stage, and as HE data expert Mark Corver suggested, "Weakening demand for medicine courses’ seemed to be behind the cause for the drop". 

And while getting a place is one thing, affording a room is another, according to the latest report on student accommodation out this week from the student housing body Unipol and HEPI. With rent rises now swallowing up most of a maintenance loan, ‘university students in England have 50p a week to live on after rent’, as one headline put it. The report calls for a ’rebasing’ of the maintenance loan system. HEPI’s Nick Hillman has a great 10-point summary of it all here.

Finally, do you still do the ‘Zoom wave’ – that little hand wave at the end of a remote meeting? Behaviourists have been analysing it since it first emerged during lockdown and reckon it’s now become an important social ritual. According to an article in Bloomberg, it’s still a thing, but mainly because of the cultural cost of being seen as impolite if you don’t do it.  

Links to most of these stories below, but first some detail behind the big story of the week.  

• AI 

AI has been a big talking point this week. 

The Prime Minister and Secretary of State both made major speeches on it; Bloomberg UK hosted a summit on it; the think tank IPPR released a report on it; the Tony Blair Institute published an update and a roadmap on it; Westminster’s House magazine published a series of articles on it; and The Guardian asked ‘How scared should we be of it?’.

Of course, talk of AI isn’t new, it’s been on the lips of policy professionals, future thinkers, Davos entrepreneurs, social commentators et al for months, so why the big interest now? 

It’s partly because it has risen up policy agendas. Rishi Sunak, for instance, listed it among net zero, the cost-of-living, and global challenges, in his one-year-on report this week. Partly also because the debate about where AI goes in terms of risks and opportunities has been getting more intense. The last few months for instance have seen everything from Elon Musk calling for an overall halt to AI development, to the EU working through its own AI Act. But partly also because, next week, the government is hosting the first major global summit on AI safety ‘right here in the UK’, as the PM put it. 

The government is keen to be seen as a global leader of AI and of its safe – for which read regulated – use. Regulation matters of course. The Guardian quoted an American professor, who said “There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies”. But what sort of regulation also matters. The House magazine looked into some of the challenges involved acknowledging that 'For politicians and policymakers, the core challenge is that the technology is still evolving at speed'. ‘Kill or Cure?’ it mused. 

The first day of next week’s summit is given over to a series of roundtable discussions with leading players on risks and opportunities. According to a recent YouGov poll quoted in the i newspaper, most people would support controls of some sort. Guardrails, as the government likes to call them.

To help inform debate at the summit, the government this week released a series of discussion papers ‘outlining the capabilities, risks, and cross-cutting challenges presented by the technology, pointing particularly to dangers around misuse, social harms, and loss of control’. The risks range from AI acting in ‘unexpected and possibly dangerous ways’, to its use in scamming, fake news and cyber and terrorist attacks. It’s quite a list and led the PM to confirm in a pre-summit announcement that the government intended to set up ‘the world’s first AI Safety Institute’ in the UK to help manage such dangers.

Yet, as the IPPR paper argued, while regulation is important and should be backed up through 'strong national supervisory institutions with statutory powers', the summit should look more positively at how AI can tackle big societal challenges – from public health to public services. 

The government is keen to come out of the summit with a global strategy on regulating risks, as well as positioning the UK as a global leader in AI developments. As the secretary of state told the Onward conference this week: “I want AI companies to know that the UK is the most up-to-date, agile, and economically rewarding place in the world to build their business in”.

As ever the balance lies between regulating and enabling. 

vestment between HE and FE’ and ‘restore government control over the number of university places funded each year’. Wonkhe described it as ’a Bill to shrink the sector’. 

The top headlines of the week:

• ‘Gillian Keegan tells schools to let parents see sex education materials’ (Monday).
• ‘Labour in ‘punitive’ VAT receipts plan for private schools’ (Tuesday).
• ‘Class sizes grow to keep up with GCSE resits (Wednesday).
• ‘Rationing access to apprenticeships is increasing the UK’s skills deficit’ (Thursday).
• ‘Franchising facing greater scrutiny as OfS lists new priorities’ (Friday).

 General:

• One year on. Rishi Sunak reflected on his first year as PM pointing to his 16+ education reform, expansion of childcare, and ‘historic long-term workforce plan for the NHS’ as examples of domestic achievements and support for Ukraine, the Middle East and international partners as evidence of international achievements.
• The PM on AI. The Prime Minister reported on the recent publication setting out risks and opportunities around AI in a speech to the Royal Society, highlighting the work being done to minimise risks which will form the focal point of the forthcoming summit but also the work being done to optimise potential benefits.
• AI address. Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state for science and technology, outlined the work being done to ensure safety and security around AI while ensuring the UK remained ahead of the game on AI as she made a major speech on the subject to Onward. 
• Risk assessment. The government published a discussion paper setting out the current capabilities of AI along with possible risks and other listed dangers ahead of its global summit on AI safety.
• AI pillars. The IPPR think tank called on the government to set out a positive vision for AI rather than just focusing on potential harms when it hosted the global AI global safety summit next week, suggesting ‘three policy pillars’ to consider including how AI could create public value, enabling value-added innovation, and ensuring an open market. 
• Childcare. The government rolled out the next stage of its childcare plans providing additional funds to help local authorities ‘plug the market’ and providing parents with ‘an eligibility checker’ to see what they’re entitled to by way of support.
• Childcare costs. The Chair of the Education Committee followed up the government’s low-key response to its recent report into childcare costs by calling on the Chancellor to undertake a review of tax-free childcare policy to make it easier to use and to re-consider the charges around provider business rates and VAT.
• Plan for Jobs. The Commons Work and Pensions Committee published the government’s response to its recent report into jobs and employment support, which while acknowledging many of the issues, only fully accepted one of the report’s 30+ recommendations, that of trialling a person-centred Jobs Plus approach to employment support. 
• Labour market. The ONS provided updated, experimental data on the UK labour market for the last quarter, using different figure sets to show slight increases in both the unemployment and economic inactivity rates compared to previous quarters. 
• Workplace equity. The British Chambers of Commerce launched a Call for Evidence around workplace culture and the sorts of positive steps being taken by businesses of all sizes to develop equitable workplaces as part of a year-long inquiry being undertaken by its Workplace Equity Commission. 
• Financial wellbeing in the workplace. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) and Aegon updated their research on financial wellbeing and productivity highlighting the extent to which financial worries were taking their toll on employees and productivity generally 
• Living Wage. The Living Wage Foundation confirmed the increase in the real Living Wage paid by signed-up employers and set to affect nearly half a million workers with an increase of £1.10 an hour to £12 an hour, £13.15 in London.
• Destitution. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported on the extent of destitution in the UK in a new report indicating there had been ‘a shameful increase with some groups particularly exposed’ calling for an Essentials Guarantee among wider reforms to social security.
• Council asks. The Local Government Association (LGA) highlighted the pressures local councils were facing in areas such as children’s services, housing and adult social care as it called on the Chancellor ‘to provide long-term funding for local government’ in his forthcoming Autumn Statement.
• Early childhood. The Royal College of Psychiatrists pointed to concerns about mental health and emotional wellbeing among the under 5s as it published a new report highlighting the importance of children’s early years and calling for early intervention, multi-agency arrangements and a workforce training strategy to help with this stage of development.

FE/Skills:

• Needs driven. The Association of Colleges (AoC) reported survey evidence showing how colleges were putting on extra courses in sectors such as construction, engineering, digital, and health and social care as demand from learners and employers grew in these key areas.
• GCSE resits. The AoC highlighted the costs and impact for both colleges and students of increasing numbers of young people having to resit GCSE maths and English as grading returned to pre-pandemic ‘normal’ and the numbers of young people continued to rise.
• Demand-led apprenticeships. Leading contributors to the Nuffield-funded Economy 2030 Inquiry called for the Robbins ‘demand-led’ principle in HE to be adopted to FE and apprenticeships, meaning that any eligible apprentice candidate who sought a place would get one with two-thirds of the apprenticeship levy funding reserved for young people.
• Apprenticeships. JIsc announced its revamped apprenticeship toolkit intended to help colleges and training providers embed digital technology in each stage of the apprenticeship ‘journey’ through from preparation to delivery and assessment.
• Digital skills. NCFE published the latest in its sector-based reports looking on this occasion at digital skills, offering case study evidence of the skills needed to ensure we have the digitally skilled workforce of the future, recommending among other things more training and integration of digital skills in other subjects. 

HE:

• University admissions. UCAS published the figures on 2024 undergraduate applications as of the October deadline, showing applications from UK 18-year-olds from disadvantaged areas at a record high but applications overall down at this stage on last year including from international students.
• Student accommodation. HEPI and the student housing company Unipol published their latest report on the student accommodation market pointing to it being in ‘crisis’ with large increases in rents swallowing up virtually all of a maintenance loan and rising development costs hindering new builds. 
• International trust. The QAA published the latest in its series of papers looking into quality in HE in England, examining on this occasion the importance of ‘instilling international trust in English higher education,’ and calling in particular for re-aligning our current quality system with international best practice, honouring the terms of the signed up to Bologna Process and championing our HE sector on the wider stage more generally.
• International strategy. The International HE Commission called for a policy of ‘internationalisation at home’ to be at the heart of a future internal HE strategy as it pointed in a new commissioned report to a decline in international diversity in UKHE triggered by a drop in exchange students, decline in foreign language studies and developmental difficulties around Erasmus and Horizon.
• B3 monitoring. The Office for Students set out the confirmed criteria for use with assessing B3 student outcomes from next year, looking for example at a provider’s underlying performance below a particular numerical threshold.
• Deploying technology. Wonkhe and Kortext reported on the recent survey findings and summary event on the role of technology in HE teaching and learning, highlighting the experiences, challenges and outcomes for staff and students alike and concluding that it largely hinged on its impact on pedagogy.
• Creative majority. The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Creative Diversity published a 2^ndmajor report on access into the creative and cultural sectors focusing on this occasion on post-16 yr olds notably through higher education, calling in a lengthy report for better alignment with the jobs market, strengthened degree apprenticeships and clear guidance and support all round.
• NSS 20024. The Office for Students (OfS) published the timescale and arrangements for the 2024 National Student Survey which will follow the same questionnaire as this year and take place between 11 January and 30 April 2024.

Tweets and posts of note:

• “I know GCSEs on demand would cause all kinds of issues for schools, but.. There's something quite cool about the idea that anyone could do GCSE/A-Level exams, at home, online, with digital proctoring. Think of the lifelong learning opportunities!” | @miss_mcinerney
• “Students set to study AI alongside A levels, says exam board” | @FENews
• “Cost of children crisis: UK parents on coping with half-term on a shoestring | The Guardian” | @FEontap
• “Restaurant divides opinion after charging customers extra if they’re ‘unable to parent’ | @Independent
• “I’m starting my own squashclub - I’ve hired a really small room and I’ve invited far too many people” | @OFalafel
• “My yoga instructor was drunk today. Put me in a very awkward position” | @Dadsaysjokes

Memorable quotes

A selection of quotes that merit attention:

• “This is not a risk that people need to be losing sleep over right now” – the PM seeks to put risks associated with AI in perspective.
• “We will grip the risks so that we can seize the opportunities” – the Technology Secretary gets to grips with AI.
• “We can’t define our way out of this pickle” – the IfS’s Paul Johnson on the high tax/high debt fiscal bind facing this and future governments.
• “Overwhelmingly, the key message is that decisions about the use of technology must be grounded in good pedagogy” - Wonkhe and Kortext report on their research into how HE is deploying technology in teaching and learning.
• “When I was a student—and a bit of a surfer dude—at the University of Southern California, I was struck by the fact that Americans, when they go to university, do not have to make the choice when they are 16 or 17 between arts and sciences.Will the initiative announced by the Secretary of State in Manchester mean that, in future, British students will not have to make that early choice?” – Michael Fabricant MP asks a question in parliament about the government’s post-16 reforms.
• “We currently have a woefully inadequate system of skills training for those who never go to higher education” – the Economy 2030 Inquiry calls for a demand-led system for FE.
• “Not sustainable” – the AoC on the current GCSE resit situation.
• “No ifs, no buts and no more excuses” – the Education Secretary tells schools to give parents the right to see resources used for sex education.
• “It is slightly odd that the Education Secretary has chosen to write to schools at a time when many of them are on half-term breaks” – the ASCL on the education secretary’s tendency to release information during half-term.
• “When I’ve been in to some of these schools and then I’ve seen the [Ofsted] report, I’ve felt like going to Specsavers and getting another pair of glasses because they were not good and it’s giving false comfort to parents” – Sir Michael Wilshaw doesn’t think all schools are as good as Ofsted reports.
• “This is a shocking step backwards in the fight to get severely absent kids back to school” – the Centre for Social Justice responds to last week’s pupil absence figures.

Other stories

• What’s App. Minsiters have grown to be wary of them but online communication services like What’sApp and Snapchat have become increasingly important as a means of communication according to new research from Ofcom. They point to the fact that between 2012 and 2022, the number of text messages fell from 151bn to 36bn while the number of online messages sent in the UK rose from 1bn a year to 1.3trillion. Mobile phone calls are still popular but the benefits of messaging apps such as being free to use and with easy access and a host of extra functionalities make them, it seems, increasingly popular among most age groups. There are risks of course and the report points to scammers and the sharing of harmful content which it’s hoped the Online Safety Bill will help tackle. Either way, as the report concludes, ‘two-thirds of 16-44 yr olds would rather go without mobile phone calls for 24 hours than forgo their messaging app.’ A link to the report can be found here

• Dictionary update. Last month, the Oxford English Dictionary added over a thousand new and revised words, phrases and senses as part of its latest Update. Two entries that might prove useful currently include ‘freshers’ flu,’ apparently first coined in the 1990s by the Times Higher, and ‘spidey sense,’ dating back to 1960s Spider-Man and having supernatural powers. Useful perhaps for Halloween. A link to the full list can be found here

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Steve Besley

Disclaimer: Education Eye is intended to help colleagues keep up to date with national developments in the education sector. Information is correct at the time of writing and is offered in good faith. No liability is accepted by Steve Besley or EdCentral for decisions made on the basis of any information provided.