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Opportunity areas – more details emerge

Government policy Careers guidance Work experience
Six more ‘opportunity areas’ have been unveiled, with the DfE promising action to raise social mobility, but critics have pointed to the elephant in the room – funding. Pete Henshaw reports

The Department for Education (DfE) has doubled the number of “opportunity areas” and has set out further detail of how it intends to overcome the social mobility challenges in these areas.

There are now 12 official opportunity areas across England with education secretary Justine Greening this week repeating her promise to invest £72 million to support local education providers and communities.

A key aim is to build young people’s knowledge and skills and to ensure they get effective careers advice and better opportunities.
However, critics were quick to point out that with 12 opportunity areas now in existence, this will equate to just £6 million per area – an amount that will be swallowed up by the funding cuts facing schools between now and 2020.

Ms Greening has unveiled the six new opportunity areas in Bradford, Doncaster, Fenland and East Cambridgeshire, Hastings, Ipswich, and Stoke. They join the six previously identified areas unveiled in October: Blackpool, Derby, Norwich, Oldham, Scarborough, and West Somerset.

These social mobility “coldspots” have been identified using the Social Mobility Index as published by the government’s Social Mobility Commission. The Index sets out the differences between where children grow up and the chances they have of doing well in adult life.

Key strands of the opportunity areas initiative are:

  • Ensuring children get the best start in the early years.
  • Building teaching and leadership capacity in schools.
  • Increasing access to university.
  • Strengthening technical pathways for young people.
  • Working with employers to improve young people’s access to the right advice and experiences.

Students in schools in these areas have been promised at least four encounters with employers during their secondary education, work that is to be led by the government’s Careers and Enterprise Company (CEC). They will also be targeted by the government’s National Citizen Service volunteering initiative.

The CEC has already pledged £1 million to focus its work on the first six opportunity areas. Chief executive Claudia Harris said: “We look forward to working with government and the Local Enterprise Partnerships, alongside business, voluntary organisations and schools and colleges in these new opportunity areas to offer more young people valuable experiences with employers and mentors to help prepare them for the world of work.”

Ms Greening has previously said that business would have a vital role to play in the opportunity areas and the DfE this week said it would be working with the Confederation of British Industry and the Federation of Small Businesses.

The DfE is also to fund the establishment of a research school in each of these areas to help develop and spread evidence-based best practice to overcome local challenges and barriers to education.

The £3.5 million research school programme is to be led by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), curators of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit.

The EEF has already appointed five research schools across the country. Its website states: “Research Schools will become a focal-point for evidence-based practice in their region, building affiliations with large numbers of schools and supporting the use of evidence at scale. Research schools will engage with local schools in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of intensity.”

Furthermore, as well as the £72 million investment, the DfE has said that opportunity areas will get “priority access” to its Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund, which is to be worth £75 million over three years and focuses on supporting the development of teachers and school leaders in challenging areas.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) this week pointed out that the investment in opportunity areas would “not go far” when taken in the context of the recent National Audit Office forecast of a £3 billion real-terms cut to school funding by 2020.

The School Cuts website, which is being run by the NUT and other unions and shows the impact that current proposals for school funding reform will have by 2020, also predicts notable losses for schools in the 12 opportunity areas when funding is rebalanced.

General secretary Kevin Courtney said: “The sad and bitter irony is that those areas will collectively lose £115 million in real-terms cuts under the current plans for school funding. Bradford alone was set to lose £37.5 million as a result of the funding squeeze. Seven-figure losses also confront Oldham (£16.8 million), Doncaster (£14.2 million) and Stoke-On-Trent (£10.9 million).”

Mr Courtney also said that the cuts of £600 million in the next two years to the Education Services Grant will also hit local authority school improvement support.

He added: “The £72 million will not go far compared with the impacts of the worst funding crisis in decades for all schools and sixth form colleges. It is misleading in the extreme to present this funding as somehow ‘extra’.”

Ms Greening said: “I want to see more disadvantaged young people attending the very best universities, winning places on Apprenticeships, entering the top professions, and progressing through the most rewarding careers – and I want employers to do more to draw out the potential and talents of all.

“Opportunity areas will help local children get the best start in life, no matter what their background. Ensuring all children can access high-quality education at every stage is critical. We will focus not just on what we can do to help inside schools, but also create the opportunities outside school that will raise sights and broaden horizons for young people.”

Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF, said: “Improving educational standards in ‘coldspots’ is one of the biggest challenges we face in our drive to improve social mobility. While evidence of ‘what works’ is one of our most useful tools to do this, we know that research on its own is not enough to make a difference in the classroom.

“Our new research schools will use their own expertise and experiences to provide strong leadership and guidance to schools in each opportunity area, supporting their colleagues to use research to improve pupil outcomes.

“No-one is better placed to support schools in doing this than teachers themselves.”

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