News story
OTS looks to recruit further staff to join its team.
The OTS is currently looking to recruit 1 full time and 2-3 part time tax professionals who have current or recent private sector experience to join the team.
Published 11 March 2022
This is a dangerous moment for freedom-loving people around the world. By launching his brutal assault on the people of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has also committed an assault on the principles that uphold global peace and democracy. But the people of Ukraine are resilient and we will continue to support the Ukrainian people as they defend their country. By choosing to pay for a war instead of investing in the needs of Russians, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will be a strategic failure for the Kremlin and ravage the future of the Russian people.
The world is taking action to hold Russia accountable. As a result of unprecedented global sanctions coordination, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Japan have removed selected Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system and imposed restrictive measures on the Russian Central Bank. After Putin began his invasion, the ruble hit its weakest point in history, and the Russian stock market plunged. Severe sanctions have been imposed on the architects of this war, including Putin himself. We recognize and applaud Guatemala’s early and strong support and leadership in ensuring the international community holds Russia accountable in multilateral fora, including the Government of Guatemala co-sponsoring resolutions in the UN General Assembly and the Organization of American States.
In response to Putin’s war of choice, the vast majority of countries have stood by Ukraine and its people, and countries continue to support them economically, politically and defensively. Measures have been implemented to welcome Ukrainians who have fled the armed conflict and huge humanitarian aid programs and mechanisms have been launched to reduce the suffering of the displaced. Russia’s ability to do business using the international banking system has been restricted, stunting Russia’s ability to finance and grow its military. And we are prepared to do more.
Russia is advancing an invasion of disinformation based on lies, it is therefore of the utmost importance that we remain vigilant against the proliferation of disinformation or false news.
This was an attack that Vladimir Putin has planned for a long time. He methodically moved more than 150,000 troops and military equipment to Ukraine’s border. He moved blood supplies into position and built field hospitals, demonstrating his intentions all along. He rejected every good-faith effort to address his fabricated security concerns and to avoid needless conflict and human suffering by engaging in diplomacy and dialogue.
Russia continues to justify its military aggression by falsely claiming the need to stop “genocide” in Ukraine – despite there being no evidence that genocide was occurring there. We saw Russia use these tactics before, when they invaded Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia in 2008.
At almost the very same moment the United Nations Security Council was meeting to stand up for Ukraine’s sovereignty and forestall disaster, Putin launched his invasion in violation of international law. Missiles began to rain down, striking historic cities across Ukraine. Then came air raids, columns of tanks, and battalions of troops, all riding a renewed wave of disinformation and outright lies.
Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now his people will bear the consequences of his decision to invest in war rather than in them.
Putin’s goal of dividing the international community has failed. In the face one of the most significant challenges to democratic ideals since World War II, we have joined together in solidarity. We have united, coordinating intensively to engage as one with Russia and Ukraine, to provide assistance to Ukraine and develop a broad and massive response.
Putin has failed to divide us. Putin has failed to undermine our shared belief in the fundamental right of sovereign nations to choose their destiny and their allies. And Putin will fail to erase the proud nation of Ukraine.
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will cost Russia profoundly, both economically and strategically. The Russian people deserve better from their government than the immense cost to their future that this invasion has precipitated.
Liberty, democracy, and human dignity are forces far more powerful than fear and oppression. In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake: Freedom will prevail.
| Rajani Alexander | AMBASSADOR OF CANADA |
| Jose María Laviña Rodríguez | AMBASSADOR OF SPAIN |
| William Popp | AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED STATES |
| Hans Magnusson | AMBASSADOR OF SWEDEN |
| Nick Whittingham | AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED KINGDOM |
| Ricarda Redeker | AMBASSADOR OF GERMANY |
| Yamamoto Tsuyoshi | AMBASSADOR OF JAPAN |
| Odile Roussel | AMBASSADOR OF FRANCE |
| Paolo De Nicolo | AMBASSADOR OF ITALY |
| Thomas Peyker | AMBASSADOR OF THE EUROPEAN UNION |
| Juan Hurtado Cano | AMBASSADOR OF COLOMBIA |
One of the ironies of surveillance is that it’s such a fast-moving area it’s hard to keep an eye on.
A year into my appointment I thought it might be helpful to highlight 4 themes from year, each is followed by a surveillance question for you:
David Fuller was convicted of two counts of murder at Maidstone Crown Court last December. Fuller reportedly videoed himself sexually abusing 100 corpses over a period of decades, from very young children to elderly women, retaining the images in his home.
DNA played a key role in the investigation but that’s not why I’ve put him up here. Had he conducted a DPIA and followed policies for capturing and retaining sensitive personal data Fuller would have been 100% compliant with the letter of the law – because our DP only protects the living.
Fuller’s conduct was just about the most egregious and intrusive imaginable, violating elemental levels of human dignity and respect. The trial judge told him: “Your actions go against everything that is right and humane”. Indeed – but they don’t go against GDPR.
There were calls for mandatory installation of CCTV in hospital mortuaries – but any DPIA would be the same and cameras wouldn’t even be covered by the Surveillance Camera Code as they’re not in public space and not operated by a ‘relevant authority’ (currently limited to the police and local authorities).
Biometric surveillance is not just data protection. If people think they’re being watched or having their conversations listened to by the state and therefore decide not to speak, not to protest, not to meet up in public, not to travel – that effect on their fundamental human rights is profound but it’s nothing to do with data protection.
What do Fuller’s grotesqueries tell us about wider Human Rights? Well again the case raises some interesting questions – Art 3 ECHR for example creates an absolute right to be protected from inhumane and degrading treatment – including by the police. But again it only extends to the living – last year also saw a case of police officers taking photos of murder victims – hideous professional conduct issues yes, but a Human Rights Impact Assessment would have produced similar results to a DPIA.
Legitimate and accountable surveillance is about what’s legally permissible yes, but increasingly it’s about what’s acceptable – to us as citizens and communities. In my view the point at which legality and acceptability converge is ethics – where we find the second key surveillance concept to dominate last year.
Most of our public bodies have ethics committees, ethics champions – the Policing Minister asked the House of Lords in January “aren’t we the national ethics committee?” Some organisations even have strap lines about putting ethics at the heart of everything they do. In policing we know ethics is at the centre of the National Decision-Making Model and, according to the College of Policing, that means it’s at the heart of all policing decisions – including presumably procurement.
These facilities spread across the Xinjiang Province in Northern China are designed, built and operated to deal with one group of people: Uyghur Muslims. In order to carry out their functions they rely heavily on surveillance, state-of-the-art surveillance, designed and sold by state-run surveillance companies.
Last December, giving the judgment of the Uyghur Tribunal, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC found that “Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs – with some estimates well in excess of a million – have been detained and subjected to acts of unconscionable cruelty, depravity and inhumanity. Sometimes up to 50 have been detained in a cell of 22 square metres, observed at every moment by CCTV.”
The judgment went on “Many of those detained have been tortured – detained men and women have been raped – one detainee was gang raped by policemen in front of an audience of a hundred people all forced to watch [while others] were raped by men paying to be allowed into the detention centre for the purpose.”
Not everyone agrees with me, but I think this raises some ethical questions. Let’s pause and look at a few.
You wouldn’t employ an individual surveillance operator who had designed, built and worked in one of these appalling places so why would you employ a company that designed, built and operated them?
How much public money is it ethical to contribute to the design, building and operation of these facilities? How much tax revenue should we hand to the surveillance companies that are owned and controlled by the same State which the Tribunal found to have been directly responsible for genocide using their surveillance technology to perpetrate it? How is partnering with such companies and enriching their owners “putting ethics at the heart of everything we do”?
Many public authorities have bought and installed surveillance systems from such companies – largely, it seems to me, on the basis that the cameras offer “value for money”. Well, I suppose it’s an exchange of values for money – but that isn’t quite the same thing and there are different ways of counting cost. I’d like to know from those authorities “how does this sit with the professional and personal ethics of your own officers and staff? Have you asked them?”
It’s interesting how our supermarkets have been very successful at driving improvements in animal welfare. By insisting suppliers meet minimum standards in relation to the humane treatment of animals the retail sector has made ethics a condition of entry to that market. Next time you’re in a supermarket you might want to look up and check whose camera system is monitoring your every moment – and then reflect on the ethics of having commercial contracts which properly include very high standards for the supplier’s treatment of free-range hens but absolutely nothing about human rights abuses. This seems somewhat asymmetrical.
And this isn’t about product boycotting – the bigger point here is that the systemic nature of our surveillance capability means people need to have trust and confidence in all of it – not just in the police or public bit, but in the whole ecosystem of surveillance. And that means we have to be more vigilant if we’re to maintain public trust for our own State surveillance. We need to be careful whose corporate company we keep. Lawful, ethical, publicly-acceptable surveillance needs a systemic approach – and a systemic approach means focusing on the integrity – of the surveillance systems and practice as a whole – and the standards of everything and everyone in it. Because, in a systemic setting, if you infect one part, you infect the whole.
The past year has shown as never before that what’s acceptable to the citizen matters – not just here but globally. And what’s acceptable to the citizen is changing – so too is your surveillance relationship. This has been understood by a celebrated son of this great city we’re in today, someone who’s arguably done more to promote discussion of contemporary public issues than most – of course I’m talking about Banksy.
The headline behind this slide is “terminally ill dad arrested by 6 police officers for mooning at a speed camera.”
Darrell Meekcom, 55, reportedly protested against a speed camera in Kidderminster last year. His wife and carer conducted her own surveillance and filmed officers wrestling the terminally ill man to the ground and handcuffing him. Footage of the incident went viral. Shortly afterwards this mural appeared in his home town.
Whether this was the real Banksy or one of his followers as rumoured doesn’t matter – this story provides a powerful illustration of a few surveillance issues:
Not all public space surveillance is welcomed – the COVID 19 pandemic provided some very good examples last year – the public reaction to it can be instant and enduring.
The “surveillance relationship” between the police and the citizen means that the citizen is often surveilling you, sharing images at a speed and scale we’d never have imagined a decade ago.
In addition, the police and public services are increasingly dependent on citizen-generated images from a whole range of devices and sources.
The first public communication from many police forces now is often an appeal, not ‘for witnesses’ but for surveillance images.
We now see the police needing not just images of the citizen but images from the citizen. This has profound implications for the ‘surveillance relationship’. Investigations might use extracts from high street CCTV, but they also rely on image captures from dashcams, GoPros, ring doorbells and car parks. Increasingly the police are reliant on the product of an aggregated surveillance capability made up of hundreds of sources, most of them privately owned.
If one part of the system has been alienating the citizen with what are perceived to be unethical partners, untested technology, untrusted processes, mass retention of photos – or generally disproportionate intrusion into their lives they may be less inclined to assist when another part of the system needs their help.
And another aspect of this new surveillance relationship is to remember that citizen generated data may be unreliable, deliberately misleading or even maliciously intended.
You can’t do a surveillance conference without mentioning AI which brings me to the 4th and final thing from my first year. The importance of transparency and explainability. AI in surveillance comes in many forms and excites a mixture of fascination and fear. There are many reports of genies getting out of their bottles, the rise of the machines and a dystopian future running out of control.
The lawful and ethical application of AI is much wider than a surveillance issue – if you want a brilliant summary and haven’t already done so, maybe listen to the BBC Reith Lectures, also from last year.
But of all the use cases, novel applications and scare stories, just about the most terrifying thing I’ve come across in AI surveillance capability is this:
Forget Harpy and other ‘loitering munitions’ this is the most frightening thing I’ve seen in AI exploitation full stop.
An interactive doll produced for the English-speaking market, equipped with speech recognition systems and AI-based learning features, operating as an IoT device!
Mercifully this toy is no longer marketed owing to concerns about system and device security and you could run an entire conference on smart toys alone – but for now just think about the issues raised by having an interactive, AI-enabled doll connected to a developing child at one end and to the internet at the other. If you’re struggling to see why that is so ghastly from a surveillance perspective read Nicole Perlroth’s “This is How They Tell Me the World Ends”.
Back to transparency and explainability. I have heard people say the AI in their surveillance tech is just “too complicated” to explain, and that even their designers and programmers don’t really understand how it works. Well, if you’re spending the public’s money on it and you’re abiding by your legal obligations to demonstrate that you’ve avoided bias – and discrimination – that won’t do. If you’re relying on automated decision-making that won’t do, and if you’re claiming ethics to be at the heart of your every decision, you’ll need to prove ethical functioning of your AI.
Transparency and explainability are two keystones of public accountability – if your tech is too opaque or unintelligible for the citizen who’s funding it – and purportedly benefiting from it, the problem isn’t the citizen.
What about all your other data-intensive systems that collect mobility data and drive behavioural information (GPS; Wi-Fi tracking devices; RFID technology; Intelligent Transport Systems and “event data recorder” devices)?
There’s a significant element of data protection and human rights engaged in biometric surveillance. But it’s not just data protection – any more than facial recognition is just photography or DNA sampling is just chemistry.
Be careful whose corporate company you keep – Conduct ethical pen tests as often – and sincerely – as your technical ones – and be as attentive to the ethical standards of your contractors as you are to your own.
Take care with your Surveillance Relationship with the citizen – you’re going to need each other. Remember – you’re only a part of a much larger system of surveillance capability – no one wants to be responsible for the weakest part of that ecosystem. Look after your bit.
Never connect dolls to the internet.
Press release
Joint statement following consultations between the United Kingdom and United States Government officials on the Indo-Pacific.
On 7-8 March, the United Kingdom and United States held high-level consultations on the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. delegation was led by Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell and included representatives from the Department of State, Department of Defense, and National Security Council. The UK delegation was led by Deputy National Security Advisor David Quarrey and included representatives from across Her Majesty’s Government. Officials from both governments resolved to broaden and deepen their alignment and cooperation on and in the region. They welcomed growing coordination among allies and partners across the Atlantic and the Pacific. In particular, they noted unprecedented commitments from Indo-Pacific countries—including Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, and Singapore—to support Ukraine and to impose costs on Russia for its brutal and unprovoked attack. They also noted that these steps come at a time when the U.S., UK and European partners are enhancing their engagement with the Indo-Pacific and preparing to meet the challenge of systemic competition with China.
U.S. and UK officials committed to coordinate implementation of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy and the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt, as set out in its Integrated Review. They noted progress made on AUKUS and reaffirmed their commitment at the highest level to ensuring the delivery of conventionally-armed nuclear-powered submarines and other advanced capabilities to promote security and stability in the region. They agreed to pursue positive economic engagement in the Indo-Pacific, including through supporting just green transitions as part of the Clean Green Initiative and Build Back Better World agendas; to collaborate on critical and emerging technologies; to ensure economic security; and to oppose economic coercion. They reaffirmed the importance of the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. They also discussed Hong Kong. In the coming months, the U.S. and the UK will work together to invest in partnerships with the Pacific Islands; to support the centrality of ASEAN and to advance concrete cooperation with ASEAN and its member states; and to enhance ties with India.
To reinforce their commitment and sustain it in the long term, the United States and the United Kingdom agreed to inaugurate a continuing dialogue on the Indo-Pacific. The dialogue will be led in the U.S. Government by the National Security Council and the Department of State and in Her Majesty’s Government by the National Security Secretariat and the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office.
Published 11 March 2022
Ladies and gentlemen, I am really pleased and honoured to be here for my first ASCL conference.
I have been looking forward to being with you.
As we gather today, the Ukrainian flag flies over the Department for Education. It does so because we stand shoulder to shoulder with all Ukrainians against the barbaric, criminal invasion of their sovereign, democratic country.
For us in our country, it is almost impossible to imagine the horror they are going through, because we know that more unites us than separates us, and we are lucky to live in a safe, secure country where we resolve our differences through debate, discussion and of course through and the ballot box.
We will continue to support Ukrainians in any way we can. I know schools and colleges are doing what they can to support their students make sense of what they are seeing on television.
And we have a team that’s already making plans for a capacity of 100,000 Ukrainian children that will come in and take their places in our schools.
To support schools’ efforts, I asked Oak National Academy to roll out an auto-translate function across all 10,000 of its online lessons. And I can share with you today that they have delivered on this, meaning Ukrainian children arriving in the UK can access education in their native language as they transition into life and safety here.
In that same spirit of unity and support, after the two years we’ve just been through, I’d like to thank you on such a well-chosen and positive theme.
I think all leaders should aim to be ambitious but there has never been a more critical time for leaders to make ambition really count.
Actually, ambition is what gets me racing to the office in the morning …
And before you say it, well there’s a surprise… he’s another politician…
My ambition isn’t for me, but for every child, every teenager, every adult learner to get the absolute best chance to succeed in life.
Which I know is exactly what you want for every child.
So, with that in mind, as I speak to you, I want us to ask ourselves, why are we here today?
Before I go any further, I just want to say thank you for the magnificent way you have responded to Covid – I know the past two years have been absolutely bruising.
Now, typically when you hear from an Education Secretary, you might expect to hear about accomplishments in the sector – and certainly, in this room, there are enough accomplishments to fill the entirety of my speech.
I will in a moment talk about what we have achieved together.
But before I do that, I want to tell you why this is so important to me personally.
I came here aged 11, unable to string a sentence of English together. I hid at the back of the class.
Even the thought of going to school was a scary one.
If my parents hadn’t had the wherewithal to push me to take advantage of the education this great country provides, I don’t know where I would have ended up.
And if my teacher Bob Hiller hadn’t reminded me to funnel my – how should I put it – creative, disruptive energy into something good, I certainly wouldn’t be here today. Bob, wherever you are, thank you.
Skills, schools, families. These are my priorities, and these are informed in many ways by my own life story.
They are what made the difference to me and what I think can make a real difference in the lives of children across our country.
Because there are children in our country, right now, who need the support that I needed.
And those children will achieve incredible things if given that chance.
Colleagues, we are going on a journey – I hope together – to do exactly that.
The next chapter of this journey is the Schools White Paper.
Since 2010 we have been on a mission to give every single child a great education, and I think we’ve made huge progress, but we have not yet achieved every goal that we need to.
Too many children still do not get the start in life that will enable them to go on and fulfil their potential.
Even before the Covid pandemic, about one in three primary school students did not reach expected standards in reading, writing and maths.
And we all know that children who are on free-school meals or who have special educational needs are less likely to achieve the standards we want for them, and that gap widens as children get older, making it harder and harder for them to catch up…
I know you’ll agree with me that this has to change. This is going to change.
I want us to really come together… work together… so that we can work out how we are going to achieve this.
The biggest asset we have in changing the lives of children for generations to come is the energy and expertise of our teachers, and of course the school and college leaders in this room and around the country.
You can’t have a great education if you don’t have a great teacher.
You will already know that I have set an ambitious target that 90% of children leaving primary school should meet the expected standards in literacy and numeracy, up from 65% today.
Every child must be able to read, write and do basic maths fluently.
They’re important in their own right, but also act as a door to other wonderful and joyful subjects that can inspire young minds as they make their way through school, college and beyond.
Let me be clear: these are ambitions for the whole system. They are about making sure that we are ambitious for every child across our country.
The White Paper sets out a plan to deliver on this strategy, and it is an achievable vision only because I know that in this room, we have the excellence and leadership to make it a reality.
I know that investing in teachers and leaders – in you and your staff – is the single most important way to improve pupil outcomes.
I am determined to make our system of training and support for teachers and school and college leaders world-class.
We will deliver our promised 500,000 teacher training opportunities to make sure that every teacher, in every corner of our country, benefits from evidence-based professional development at every stage of their career.
I am proud to be able to confirm today that more than 25,000 teachers and almost 23,000 mentors have taken part in our flagship Early Career Framework programmes this year.
This is beyond even my most optimistic estimate, and, I think, testament to the support you as leaders are providing.
But I also know that embedding this programme has been a huge undertaking for you and your colleagues, particularly mentors. We are listening to your feedback and we will be making improvements in areas that you have told us are causing real difficulties.
And I want to keep working with you now and in the future to make sure we take forward this shared priority and to ensure that we achieve our shared goal of giving every early career teacher their entitlement to a high-quality, structured induction to the teaching profession.
Building on this success, our golden thread of high-quality teacher development programmes includes a new Leading Literacy National Professional Qualification, available from this autumn.
This will mean every school can have a trained literacy expert, driving higher standards of literacy teaching, kick-starting our 90% literacy mission.
With this, as with the rest of the reformed suite of National Professional Qualifications, these will be freely available to all teachers and leaders in state-funded schools and colleges.
What I ask, for those here or watching this speech, is that every leader here today walk away from this with a commitment to enrol their staff on a National Professional Qualification from the autumn.
Alongside world-class training, we will also continue to invest in top graduates with generous bursaries and scholarships for those who choose to train to teach.
And we will deliver on our manifesto commitment to the £30,000 starting salary.
As an engineering graduate, I know the wonders of science and I want more children to be exposed to and inspired by science – not least to help save the planet.
I want them to be taught by well-trained science teachers, equipped to give future generations of scientists the knowledge they need to tackle climate change, develop new vaccines and maintain our place as a scientific superpower.
Through our Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 tax-free for maths, physics, chemistry and computing teachers, we will retain more teachers in some of the most important subjects and of course in places where they are needed most.
And because teaching is an increasingly global profession, I want to attract the very best teachers from across the world.
That is why we will also introduce a new relocation premium to help with visas and other expenses for teachers and trainees moving here from abroad.
But even this is not enough: I want our country to be known around the world as the place to train and practise teaching, rivalling the likes of Shanghai, Canada and of course Finland.
But of course, great teachers need support.
I want to empower teachers to focus on delivering the best possible lessons, and support schools by giving them access to resources and approaches that have proved their effectiveness.
Oak National Academy has certainly been one of our great achievements.
It was created by teachers, for teachers, and showed brilliantly what the profession was capable of in the hour of need.
Over 500 teachers from over 50 schools, trusts and partners worked together, delivering over 140 million lessons during the pandemic.
Building on this success, we will now establish Oak as a new arms-length curriculum body, working independently of government and collaboratively with the sector.
Why is this important?
The data backs up what you all know anecdotally: a recent survey showed 46% of primary teachers plan lessons from scratch. This is a drain on teachers’ time and I want to help fix that.
Curriculum design is complex, and we want to share the very best practice so teachers can draw inspiration from examples of evidence based, carefully sequenced curriculum design.
Instead of each teacher reinventing the wheel, they will be able to access content, for free, that continuously evolves and gets better and better on the back of feedback from teachers across the country – saving time and of course improving lessons immeasurably.
Under the framework already provided by our excellent national curriculum, the curriculum body will lead the creation of curriculum maps and thousands of downloadable lessons and resources… and all freely available to all teachers, parents and children.
These will help schools in a variety of ways depending on their needs. They will be also entirely optional and of course these materials will not be mandated by Ofsted.
Teachers, who know their pupils best, can then adapt these, and the curriculum body will work closely with teachers to ensure it is meeting their needs, including those supporting children with additional needs.
And the body will continue work with the Education Endowment Foundation – the EEF – to ensure its work is informed by the best available evidence and aligns with best practice.
At the heart of this body will be collaboration and partnership, I am committed to building on the “by teachers, for teachers” approach that has been a key success factor for Oak National Academy.
And with the same motivation to use evidence wherever we can, we will permanently put evidence at the heart of the teaching profession by re-endowing the EEF.
As independent evidence guardians in the system, they will continue to generate and spread world-leading education evidence. The EEF will lead an ongoing cycle of reviews of the underpinning frameworks for teacher development at all levels to make sure they’re always based on “what works” to improve pupil outcomes.
They will keep these frameworks updated in line with the best available evidence from this country and of course from abroad, giving an independent badge of assurance to our teacher development programmes… and all the while making sure teachers in England get the cutting-edge training they need to drive up standards.
And we will continue to work with the EEF to scale up and spread effective teaching practice in literacy and numeracy to ensure pupils have the best chance of catching up following the pandemic.
Colleagues, we must be sky-high in our ambitions for every pupil. If we don’t aim for excellence, we’re not going to achieve it by chance.
I’ve listened to you, acted on your insight, and looked at the evidence across the whole educational landscape. And evidence shows that a family of schools that are tightly managed and well supported achieve the right outcomes for their students and deliver those important opportunities for staff.
How? There are three things I want to highlight.
A resilient profession… because high performing families of schools support leaders and give great opportunities to teachers for training and career progression.
Collaboration… because schools can benefit from working together, creating opportunities to share resources and reduce workload, while reinvesting back into frontline teaching.
And Freedom… because leaders spend less time worrying about managing facilities and more time making sure children learn and teachers teach.
I’ve been clear before that I see this future as involving all schools being part of a strong trust – and I will say more about this in my White Paper.
But I will say now that I underline the word strong because, and we mustn’t sugar coat this, some trusts are not high performing. The White Paper will set out how I plan to deal with that challenge as well.
You are the future my friends, and you are going to produce other leaders of the future. We need you – I need you – on this journey.
I know that everyone in this room will have an opinion on this – I’d expect nothing less, but I ask you to consider the data, the evidence, with an as open mind as possible.
What I will pledge to you is that I will be guided by the data and the evidence.
I want evidence to be our watchword, just as it was mine as vaccines Minister and continues to be now as Secretary of State for Education.
In fact, following what the data tells me has shaped the new Schools White Paper.
But that doesn’t mean I expect everyone to agree with me all the time. I am not afraid to disagree with you, and I know you – certainly Geoff – are not afraid to challenge me.
What is important is that we follow what the evidence says. If we have a divergence of views on the evidence, then we will have a healthy debate and I will make my case as I am sure you will make yours.
But no matter what, the priority must be working together.
Because we can’t level up, we can’t deliver for children, if we don’t work together.
Everything we are doing as a government comes back to one core mission and that is that we make life fairer for every child, in every school in our country.
One of the most effective tools we have at our disposal to meet our ambition is targeted support.
A huge part of that is tutoring, which I know will be going on in all of your schools right now.
It’s important to step back and look at what we’ve achieved with the National Tutoring Programme.
Tutoring used to be something only richer parents could afford.
Thanks to the NTP, today it’s benefitting all children who need it, from Bristol to Blackpool and Newquay to Newcastle, helping them realise their potential.
I am proud to be able to say that more than one million tutoring courses have been delivered since we rolled out this programme last year. ASCL, this is incredible.
But there are still children who need this targeted tuition, and I know that many of you have had challenges with the programme. I have listened and I have heard you, and we are making improvements as I speak to you today.
This includes the immediate transfer of up to £65 million into School Led Tutoring from the other two routes. It’s become clear to me that by far the most popular route is the one run by you – the school.
I hope you will agree with me that what we are doing together on tutoring is an invaluable addition to our education system, and I am continuing to look at how we can make sure it is having as big an impact as we can make it.
In addition to this, one of my priorities in the White Paper will be the schools and areas of the country most in need of support.
Areas including County Durham, Cornwall and Hartlepool will get extra investment, to build strong trusts, enabling them to retain and recruit the best teachers and tackle those problems that have stopped them achieving what they should be achieving.
I want to get this right, and I want you to have your say, so I will be announcing a consultation shortly on tackling school underperformance.
Ahead of that, we must build on what we have already accomplished.
We must make the most of the £7 billion increase in core spending 2024-25 – with an increase in real terms per pupil funding of 4% next year alone – really count.
And, we cannot say we care about children’s education if we ignore those most in need. So, we must protect the pupil premium to support schools in improving outcomes for disadvantaged students.
Because I have the same high ambitions for children with special educational needs and disabilities as I do for every child. And I know that they benefit from excellent teaching that allows them to fulfil their potential.
I also know that headteachers are doing an incredible job at supporting children with SEND, and worked tirelessly to support them throughout the pandemic.
So, before I come to a close, I want to say that the plans I am setting out today – for teacher development, for evidence-based practice, and for high quality curriculum – will all help to support children with SEND. But there is further to go.
The forthcoming SEND Review will set our ambitious proposals for how we will deliver a system that ensures every child and young person gets the right support in the right place and at the right time.
Geoff, I began by asking everyone why we are here today.
I am here today to deliver on the promise in this room.
I am here to embark on a journey together – one that means every single child and learner gets the start in life to be the best version of themselves….
I couldn’t hope to deliver this vision if it wasn’t for you…
Thank you.