Do the numbers behind the government’s Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund add up?

Education journalist Warwick Mansell takes a deep dive into the numbers behind the government’s Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund.

To critics, it will seem a classic example of where government has gone wrong in recent years. Too much money going towards projects, sometimes fronted by those close to ministers, which turn out to have questionable impact, and with value for money not seemingly given enough emphasis by those holding the purse strings.

Since 2018, I’ve had the chance to look at one probably-now-little-remembered education policy in a bit of depth. And those investigations, culminating in the publication of a string of articles published in recent weeks (£), have given a rare insight into some troubling tendencies as described above.

In 2016, Justine Greening – England’s eighth-most recent holder of the post of Education Secretary – launched an initiative called the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund (TLIF).

Billed as costing £75 million, this was promoted as a bid to improve social mobility by supporting projects which would transform on-the-job training for teachers and school leaders in some of England’s more disadvantaged areas. Aspects of professional life to be supported varied from school leadership to the teaching of science and reading and the management of pupil behaviour.

That sounds impressive enough. But, as the scheme panned out, questions emerged.

For example, why did the eight TLIF schemes which were funded in its first round seem to contain a high proportion of organisations with close links to the government? For among those eight, although there were some bodies with no obvious alignment to ministers, others much more well-connected had been chosen.

In particular, Tom Bennett and Ruth Miskin, two individuals which were name-checked in a recent TES interview with the long-serving schools minister, Nick Gibb, as having been particularly influential with him, ran companies which had won TLIF contracts.

By contrast, a freedom of information response helped reveal that, while 15 universities and two local authorities had bid for funding to run TLIF schemes, none had been successful. These are institutions, of course, which have tended to find less favour with recent Conservative-led governments.

Those projects which were funded were duly rolled out over the years 2017 to 2020, concluding long after Ms Greening had left her post.

What was their impact? Well, an evaluation report, commissioned by the Department for Education from academics at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and Sheffield Hallam University on a contract initially said to be worth £1 million, offered reasonably reassuring findings on the surface.

All TLIF projects evaluated had met or nearly met targets set for them by the government in terms of the number of teachers recruited, while six of the eight studied had seen training participants emerging satisfied with their experience.

And yet, closer investigation for my website revealed a more troubling picture. I looked at contract information, published on the government’s “Contracts Finder” site, which showed how much each project had cost. This revealed what seemed like very large per-participant costs for several of the projects. For example, the government had paid £3.9 million to the teacher education institution Teach First for TLIF courses for school leaders. This worked out at £11,000 per person trained.

I asked NFER whether it had assessed value for money of these projects, based on the information in the contracts. Staggeringly, it answered “no”: this had been the intention, but then the DfE had cut back on the evaluation’s £1m funding – as TLIF’s overall initial £75m funding pot was also cut – so this aspect had been removed.

The evaluation had also ended up not assessing TLIF’s overall aim, to improve social mobility, for reasons to do with exams having been abandoned during the Covid lockdown period.

Detailed information in the contracts had proven particularly interesting in relation to Tom Bennett’s project, to train teachers in improving pupil behaviour. Mr Bennett’s was the smallest organisation to be funded by TLIF, but it still got what looked like a large pot: it would receive £920,000 over three years to run its courses.

The Tom Bennett contract itself predicted that up to 5,400 participants would take part, with training “delivered by a team of three trainers” and “supported by a team of six tutors”.

In the event, only 756 teachers were recruited. The evaluation, though, did not note this much-lower-than-hoped-for outcome, NFER having told me that it did not look at the contract documents. It did report that the government’s recruitment target for the scheme had been met.

While it did note that most participants were generally very positive about the Tom Bennett training, its evaluation also raised questions as to whether the project could ever be expanded to operate to reach more teachers. It was sceptical because, it found, Mr Bennett himself had been at the heart of much of the training, as “Tom Bennett led delivery on all” of its two-day workshops.”

This then begged the question: if, in the end, this project was not capable of being expanded to influence more teachers beyond the small number taking part, what was the point of the government having funded it?

Ruth Miskin’s part of TLIF did not end up getting evaluated at all, after a separate scheme by the government-funded Education Endowment Foundation wound up being abandoned . This was despite it having received £1.6 million from the government.

All in all, then, this seems like a sad tale, which to your correspondent seems indicative of some fairly fundamental failings of policymaking and its associated over-centralisation, as perhaps epitomised over the past 13 years.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist, who founded and writes for the investigative website, Education Uncovered. 

The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author as an independent contributor. They are not endorsed or necessarily shared by Prospect.