CONTRIBUTORS


New year, new approaches?


In her regular column for Education Today this month, NAOMI HOWELLS, Managing Director for recruitment specialists, Class People, takes a look at what the new (financial) year might bring


For most, January means the start of all things new: a time of rejuvenation and renewal. In schools, the sense of renewal for senior leaders will likely be driven by the new financial year deadline, with January attention turning to what is coming, what can be afforded, and how best the finances can be allocated to serve the needs of the pupils and teachers for which they are responsible.


The Autumn Budget at the very end of October has given schools some scope for change, with news of £2.3 billion to increase funding per pupil, as well as £1 billion funding for SEND provision; £30 million funding for primary school breakfast clubs, and £1.8 billion high quality early-years education. The total investment across education is £11.2 billion, a 3.5% real term increase against the 2023-24 academic budget, the government states. While on paper this seems encouraging, many of the headteachers we support are already expressing concern for the impact of other budgetary policy, including the National Minimum Wage (NMW) and National Living Wage increase (and their potential need to keep parity with other wage increases), and the changes to taxation and National Insurance. Each of these has the potential to increase the cost base, and while the government has cited additional funding to support these cost pressures, some senior leaders are rightly concerned that the changes will exacerbate the outflow of teachers to higher paid, more flexible roles outside the sector, before the government’s pledge of 6,500 more teachers comes to fruition.


There are strategies that senior leaders can employ to maximise their budget and offer enhanced flexibility, but they must be carefully considered against the cost for education quality. Job shares are one approach that can offer reduced tax burdens without compromising pay, as well as providing better work-life balance. Another is in increasing the ratio of newly qualified teachers within the staffing to reduce the overall costs, and for early years settings, connecting with the new Childcare T-Level students at your local college. In the coming months, senior leadership will need to review existing three-year budget and investment plans against the NFF factor values (provisional at the time of writing) to test assumptions on expected grant payments the school will receive. Other key activities include approaching your local authority to check their timeline for when the local funding formulae will be released; monitoring the DfE resources for confirmation of the distribution methodology for additional National Insurance funding; and estimate the potential value increase in employer costs through NMW from April.


One other major area of change is the addition of £1 billion in funding for SEND education support. Subject to an EHCP for each pupil, schools providing SEND support will soon have additional budget available to improve provision. The challenge here is that there is already a shortage of SEND teachers and assistants, so our advice is to prioritise early decision-making, and to estimate the number of additional pupils likely to be given an EHCP within the next twelve months, giving schools more time to recruit in anticipation.


24 www.education-today.co.uk


Learning from the success of Duolingo


This month, journalist and editor SAL McKEOWN tells Education Today about a brand-new geography-focused learning app and examines its potential as a useful tool for teachers in UK classrooms.


Unless you are a football fan or a nerd, you probably look at pictures of flags and dredge your memory to come up with the name of a country. This particular mental torture is not just confined to pub quizzes, it often occurs on Pointless and other game shows. But help is at hand. Felix Olszewski lives in Vienna. He wanted to learn programming and decided to create an app to help those arriving in the city to find their way around. This expanded into a quiz app covering Austria. Then he decided to go the whole hog and make an app to cover the entire world.


GeoChamp has a Training Mode where you learn about countries and a Quiz Mode to find out how much you have remembered. The content covers capitals, cities, oceans and other water sources, mountains, volcanoes, deserts, population and of course, flags.


Felix analysed Duolingo to see why it was so popular. It is the most downloaded language app in the world and has made its creator, Luis Vaughan Ahn, a millionaire. Every day, 34 million people log in. Its popularity is largely due to mass migrations to the USA. Competency in English is essential for those who want to get a job. It offers a hybrid model: free to all users but with the option to pay for extra features. Its key characteristics are very short lessons, gamification and frequent alerts to keep users motivated and on task: ‘The difference between GeoChamp and Duolingo at that time was that my app was very plain. I decided that I would incorporate a gamification aspect into the app to make it feel more like a game and less like a chore.’


He tested the revised app with pupils aged 10 -18 at Gymnasium Wasagasse in Vienna to see if it would appeal to a school-aged user group. They were keen to know why some questions reappeared while others were only asked once. As with Duolingo, an algorithm schedules the questions and revisits the ones which learners find hard. The app is designed to get information into the short term memory and then to use repetition and gamification to embed the knowledge in long- term memory. Copying the Duolingo option, GeoChamp is free, but there’s also a premium offering which is advert free and allows users to play against family and friends.


While it is useful to have an app for geography, GeoChamp will prove useful in other areas too. When children arrive in your class who have come from another country, it is good to have a quick snapshot of information you can draw on. You can show the map to the child to see if they are willing to talk about where they have come from - and to the rest of the class to extend their knowledge of the world outside the UK.


GeoChamp is available from the App Store and Google Play. January 2025


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68