Category Archives: technology

Re-learning the role of Recruitment Strategy Managers

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The DfE has published some useful research papers about Education opportunity Areas. The one of immediate interest to me is on recruitment in the Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area. Inspire by Teaching Recruitment evaluation North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area Intervention Level Evaluation Report (publishing.service.gov.uk) At one point, although the report doesn’t mention it, TeachVac provided a report on vacancy trends at specific schools.

There is much re-learning in this report. More than 20 years ago, the DfEE the government Department at that time responsible for schools provided funding for local authority Recruitment Strategy Managers to help specific areas manage a recruitment problem in a period of teacher shortages. A report on their effectiveness was prepared in October 1999 and I have a copy before me as I write this blog.

Nearly a quarter of a century later and there is the evaluation of this project called the IBTR (Inspire by Teaching Recruitment (IBTR) project) that dealt with not only teaching vacancies, but also non-teaching roles.

Some 20% of the vacancies were filled from outside the local area. That raises interesting questions about the cost of national recruitment that this blog has discussed before – Teacher Vacancy Platforms; Pros and cons, 7th December 2020 – and the report does discuss this issue

‘Prior to the project, headteachers would typically take out an advert in the local or national press for their vacancies. A national advert might be in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and could cost up to £1500, while a local advert could be on a local authority site and cost up to £50. The DfE teacher vacancy website was being established in 2019 around the same time as this evaluation. No headteachers mentioned the DfE teacher vacancy website unprompted during any wave of the fieldwork7’.

Footnote 7 ‘Teaching Vacancies, the DfE’s free search and listing service for state funded schools in England, now plays a larger role than when this report was drafted. As it stands today, Teaching Vacancies is used widely across the region with 220 vacancies in the last year. The website actively directs users to Teaching Vacancies and schools in this region actively use Teaching Vacancies to advertise their vacancies.’  Page 27 and footnote.

Interestingly, TeachVac doesn’t rate a mention in the report even though we were asked to supply staff in the Opportunity Area with a custom-made report on vacancies. Taken together, TeachVac and the DfE site do make the case for a low-cost on-line job board. The issue with the DfE but not with TeachVac is that the DfE only handles jobs from state schools and requires schools to upload vacancies twice, to their site and the DfE site. Teachers want a site with a guarantee of almost universal coverage as a one-stop shop for vacancies, as do those seeking non-teaching posts.

However, back to the issue of what needs to be managed locally and what centrally? Paying £1,500 for national advertising seems these days wasteful of scare resources. If 80% of vacancies are filled either locally or from the region then locally managed projects do seem like good value for money and better value than every school doing their own thing.

TeachVac has now launched its premium service for vacancies based upon a no match: no fee model. We believe that offers a sensible way forward at a low cost of £1 per match and an annual maximum of £1,000 per school – less than the cost of one TES advert quoted in the report. Finally, it is worth noting that the costs of marketing promotion, advertising and web portal for this one Opportunity Area were more than the annual cost of running TeachVac for the whole of England for a year.

How much to advertise a teacher vacancy?

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Should a foreign owned company earn around £50 million from recruitment advertising largely paid for by schools located in England? I previously wrote about the published accounts of the tes a couple of years ago Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) This morning, Companies House published the TES GLOBAL Ltd accounts for 2020-21 covering the period up to the end of August 2021. The turnover in the UK of the Group was some £54 million; up from pre-pandemic levels of just under £52 million. Most of the income comes from subscription advertising, where schools pay the company an annual fee. Transactional advertising income continued to form a much smaller part of the company’s turnover.

Now, as regular readers of this blog are aware, I am not unbiased when it comes to the issue of recruitment advertising and the teacher vacancy market, having helped create TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk  well before the DfE started their job board.

There is an interesting question as to why schools are prepared to use TeachVac and the DfE site, but still pay shedloads of cash to the owners of the tes job board? For some it will be just inertia: nobody ever got fired for using the established player in the market. For some it will no doubt be a belief that tes has more teachers looking for vacancies than any other platform. TeachVac requires registration, so we know a lot more about our active job seekers than job boards that don’t require a sign-up. Interestingly, there seems little data in the tes accounts about usage of their platform by teachers. TeachVac regularly publishes data on matches, having passed the one million for 2022 earlier this week.

TeachVac has been dedicated to prove the concept that job boards don’t need to be expensive, and its current pricing model of £1 per match up to a maximum of £1,000 per school per year for secondary schools, and less for primary schools, is much cheaper than a subscription to tes.

Interestingly, tes has admin expenses of around £60 million, not all spent on the recruitment side of the business. However, it is vastly more than the £150,000 TeachVac costs to do a similar job of matching vacancies to job seekers. With the possibility of 75,000 vacancies on TeachVac this year, that’s a cost of little more than £2 per vacancy for TeachVac, compared with perhaps £4-500 per vacancy listed by the tes extrapolating from the information in the published accounts. This despite the company further reducing its headcount from 191 to 160 at the end of the accounting period.

In their accounts, tes’s owners cite software and development costs of £43,000,000. I wonder what that values that  places on TeachVac’s software when we come to do our annual accounts later this year?

Overall, TES GLOBAL Ltd has returned to losses in 2020-21, after a profit in the year before, when they sold their teacher supply business. The company still has a large interest burden effectively being serviced by schools.

The question, as ever, is, how long will schools be prepared to pay these prices for recruitment advertising when cheaper options are available?

New Service for schools

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TeachVac

The National Vacancy Service for Schools

Advanced matching service

Schools pay for matches with interested teachers to be highlighted

No match made; no charge

£1,000 per annum maximum for all matches

on all vacancies by a secondary school in 2022

£100 sign-on fee, with 100 free matches, then £1 per match

TeachVac has already made 800,000 matches in 2022:

1.2 million matches in 2021

A cheap, but cost-effective service for schools

from the free job board covering state and private schools across England

email enquiries@oxteachserv.com for full details

Opportunity for All?

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The government published it Education White Paper today. They didn’t make it easy to find the whole document, but it can be accessed at Opportunity for all – Strong schools with great teachers for your child (publishing.service.gov.uk) For younger readers, it is called a White Paper because when such documents first appeared they had white covers. Later when documents with suggestions and not proposals appeared they were called Green Papers as they had a green cover.

Enough of the history, although it is worth looking back to the last education White Paper. It promised to look at returning in-year admissions to local authorities, but nothing happened. This time on page 53 there is a graphic that just says LAs will ‘manage’ in-year admissions. It is not clear where the management role will have sanctions to back it up. I hope so.  If local authorities are provided with ‘backstop’ powers to direct in-year admissions that will be a step forward and should be put into place as soon as possible. The intention is summarised in paragraph 163. As a final safety net to cover rare circumstances where collaborative working breaks down, we will consult on a new backstop power for local authorities to direct trusts to admit children. Trusts would have the right to appeal this to the Schools Adjudicator. Please start the consultation as soon as possible – Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com)

The news in the White Paper that local authorities can run academy trusts is to be welcomed as correcting one of the wrongs of Mr Gove’s original 2010 Academies Act. However, in the spirit of strong schools, will schools in existing academy chains be able to make a transfer either to another chain or to a local authority trust, and will local authorities be able to include schools outside their boundaries in a Trust, such as Swindon schools in a Wiltshire trust or Blackpool schools in a Lancashire Trust? Will there need to be Chinese walls between an LA Trust officers and other officers with powers to direct Trust, as over admissions?

The White Paper downgrades Regional School Commissioners to Regional Directors, a less threatening title to local democracy. However, the amount of power local authorities can wield will depend upon funding. At least local trusts should have the same financial powers as the present trusts to manage central costs.

Perhaps the biggest change in policy terms in the White Paper is the ending of the freedom of parents to control the education of their children as paragraph 77 make clear, the government will also introduce legislation to establish a register for children not in school, exploring how this data should be used by local authorities and multi-agency teams to undertake their duties and support children’s education. The 1870 Act required parents to educate their children. The 2022 White Paper now also requires them to tell the authorities how they are doing that education. Will the next step be to ensure that all children receive high quality education of id the white Paper’s real time ‘Opportunity for all in state funded schools?

Overall, the White Paper is not as dramatic as it was thought it might be.

Some reflections on the NfER webinar on teacher supply

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Regular readers of this blog that listened to this webinar will have learned about some interesting data from Jack Worth’s presentation, not least the effect of bursaries on recruitment into training.

Here are some of my reflections

Keep in Touch Scheme

Absolutely needed. I drafted an idea for such a scheme earlier this year.

Part-time and flexible working

Good idea, but only if it increases recruitment. Needs research into balance between those working full-time and those only working part-time and effects on pupils and school ethos. Still, it is a better option than a procession of supply teachers.

Diversity and protected characteristics

It is 25 years this year since a Minister at the Department first addressed a conference on attracting a wider range of individuals into teaching. I have produced two significant reports for government and one for a teacher association during that time, both highlighted the issues that were discussed today. London is doing better than the rest of the country, but ‘young, White and female and able-bodied’ still seems to characterise the majority of those accepted into teaching. Some groups still find it disproportionally hard to become a teacher. There is a need to review where ITT places are located in relation to under-represented groups, and what happens if a particular group applies in large numbers for a particular course?

Here are some issues not mentioned this afternoon

Middle leadership and teacher shortages – discussed in the previous post on this blog

Teaching as a global profession – good or bad for recruitment into schools. No mention of iQTS this afternoon.

Tutoring as a career alternative to teaching or combined with flexible working in schools?

Many years ago, I wondered whether groups of teachers could band together to increase their pay by offering their services not as employees but as consultants. A group could take on teaching contracts alongside tutoring, delivery of professional development and creation of teaching resources as well as adult training and research to provide a varied career. The contract could specify the delivery but not the person delivering it. However, most people that enter teaching aren’t entrepreneurial, so such an idea probably wouldn’t work.

Underlying all the points being made during the webinar was the issue of the free market in teaching. Teachers can decide where they want to teach and if lucky can be paid a bursary to train to teach in a private school. As one speaker said, and has been apparent whenever there is a teacher shortage, teachers are more likely to end up in ‘good’ schools rather than challenging schools when demand exceeds the supply of teachers. Unless there is a change of attitude, levelling up is an impossible dream or a political con trick.

Should we link training places to schools on an expanded Teach First model whereby entrants to training are linked to schools and paid a salary from day one with pension contribution on top. Preparation, like the famous Project X of UCLA, should be linked to the demands of teaching in challenging schools and not how to teach in successful schools.

Finally, the new model of mentoring reminds me of what were once called Advisory Teachers. Mentoring might work better if the issue of the Middle Tier had been worked out rather than in the same disjoined way that school placements are created.   This is another area where a discussion of free market versus planned provision might be useful.

It will be interesting to see what the White Paper has to say on any or all of these issues. However, White Papers can often identify problems, but may not lead to solutions.

Labour Market for Teacher: don’t overlook the middle leadership needs of schools

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The labour market for teachers can be divided into three main segments: classroom teachers; middle leaders and senior leadership. The first and last receive the most attention from researchers, but middle leadership needs are often overlooked and can be under-researched. This seems to be the case in the latest NfER research into the labour market for teachers published today. Teacher Labour Market in England – Annual Report 2022 – NFER

The market for middle leaders is closely tied to the classroom teacher market because middle leaders start off as classroom teachers. How quickly they will be promoted depends upon the subject or specialisms. In some subjects, where there are lots of part-timers, promotion can come swiftly. Music teachers working in small secondary schools have been known to be in charge even as NQTs, but hopefully such a state of affairs is rare these days.

Of more concern are the subjects where there has been chronic under-supply of new entrants into the profession. Last week, I talked to a group of headteachers under the auspices of the Corporation of London about this issue.

Here were my findings in relation to the possible supply of middle leaders in just one subject: design and technology.

The ITT Census for 2013, conducted by the DfE, recorded some 410 people preparing to teach design and technology via a range of different routes.

After one year of teaching, the number left in the profession was no more than 340 or, allowing for some dropout before completion of their courses, perhaps 5%, then only 320 would still have been in teaching.

Fast forward five years, and using the DfE wastage rates as reported to the STRB, then the remaining numbers of this cohort left in teaching might be in the range of 250-320 teachers.

Using TeachVac data on vacancies, something not available to NfER, recorded vacancies for design and technology teachers with a TLR were 390 in 2020; 470 in 2021 and 230 to date in 2022. Now some of these might be ‘recruitment’ TLRs with little leadership demands, but if even half are genuine middle leadership positions, then they will make a significant demand upon the remaining teachers from the 2013 cohort.

When a single cohort is not large enough to provide sufficient middle leaders there can be a temptation to require leadership of teachers before they are secure in their grip on teaching and learning. It should be possible to use the DfE’s databases to check how soon TLR2s are awarded to teachers in shortage subjects and in what type of schools?

The need for challenging schools to appoint inexperienced teachers to middle leadership positions in the teacher shortages of the early 1970s was the topic that led me to start my research into the labour market for teachers, and also to establish in 1978 an early leadership development course for middle leaders in Haringey’s secondary schools.

Professional development for middle leadership is as important as ever as is ensuring a sufficient supply of teachers with the knowledge and experience to take up middle leadership roles.

Labour Market for Teachers

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Tomorrow the NfER will publish their report on the Labour Market for Teachers. I assume it will say very similar things to the TeachVac Report published in January. A copy of which is available on request

Of more concern at present is not the 2022 labour market – lots of vacancies; not enough applicants in many subjects – but the outlook for 2023.  For more on 2022 see Recruitment 2022: a rough ride to come | John Howson (wordpress.com)

A quick analysis of the DfE’s ‘Get into Teaching’ site reveals that there are still high percentages of courses with the ‘vacancies here’ flag waving. Top of the list is the small number of ‘science’ courses, with 96% of those courses showing vacancies earlier today. Not far behind is Physics, with 93% of the 783 courses showing vacancies.

Interestingly, on 6th March, there were only 777 courses listed. Even though the DfE provides a range of filters, how do you select the best course from 783 varieties? One interesting factor is that a search on Physics ‘QTS only’ courses willing to consider those with a Third-Class degree, such a search brings up 47 courses. Most of the providers of these courses are located in or around the London area or are located in the wider South East region.

When is the government going to provide a strategy that allows all training places in Physics to have a realistic chance of being filled? It isn’t possible to level up, especially in areas with selective schools and many private schools, if there are insufficient teachers in a particular subject or phase. That’s been obvious for many years, but, apart from bursaries, little has been achieved, especially with the failure of the salary scheme option within School Direct.

The good news, well comparatively good news, is that only 42% of the 104 psychology, as opposed to physics, courses currently have vacancies. In PE, two thirds of courses still have vacancies, higher than might be expected for mid-March.

Even 1,412 out of the staggering 1,677 course options for those wanting to train to teach in the primary sector still have vacancies.

Of course, applicants don’t know whether a course has one vacancy or many from the DfE website. These days adding such a feature should be relatively easy to do, even if only in the form of a set of traffic lights: green for lots of space; amber ably quickly; red few spaces left and course might be full by the time your application is received.

I hope the DfE is conducting some evaluation of how the users find the DfE’s site listing courses. Perhaps a map of locations for the course’s teaching base and schools used for practical elements might be another useful addition?

Of course, if the DfE makes any changes to places available all the current evidence might be of little more than historical value. Postgraduate initial teacher training targets: 2022 to 2023 – Official statistics announcement – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) There will apparently be an announcement in April.

TeachVac launches new service for schools

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The DfE Vacancy site for teachers is still a muddled mess. Eight years ago, well before the DfE woke up to the idea that the internet could be used for low cost but effective job matching, I helped create TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk and made it a free service for schools and teachers.

The basic rationale was simple – modern technology can cut the cost of finding a job and schools could save money as a result. After the Public Accounts Committee complained that the DfE didn’t have a grip on the labour market for teachers, the DfE set about creating a job board of their own.

At the start of the pandemic, I offered to share vacancies that the DfE didn’t upload with them to help to create a single free platform for teachers. Go away, I was told.

So, TeachVac still offers a free service, but is now launching its premium service whereby a school can ensure its vacancies are at the top of the list of matches a teacher receives each day. The service also provides a reminder after a few days so that teachers see the job more than once. Schools also receive labour market updates each month. All this for £500 per year for secondary schools and even less for primary schools across both state and private sectors schools.

Contact enquiries@oxteachserv.com for more information or to sign up and receive an early bird discount.

But, back the DfE site. Where, of course, teachers can only search for jobs in state schools. So, the site isn’t useful to those that don’t mind whether they work in state or private schools.

The front page of the DfE site is a real muddle. There are lists of ‘towns/cities and ‘counties’ although Chester West and Chester East aren’t counties, but unitary authorities. Towns within shire counties such as Oxford, Exeter, Chelmsford and many others don’t have a listing on the front page.  London has a single listing, not even split into the different pay area: not helpful if there are lots of vacancies in the Capital’s schools.

Milton Keynes receives a mention, but the rest of Buckinghamshire doesn’t. Still, there is a search buttons for key words and locations. A search on ‘secondary’ and ‘Oxford’ brings up 12 results. Four are non-teaching posts; two are in special schools or PRUs and only six are in secondary schools.

There is an alert function, but if it sends non-teaching posts as well as teaching vacancies it doesn’t do the job for which it is intended, unless the civil servants at the DfE think teachers that cannot find a teaching post will consider non-teaching roles and have the appropriate qualifications for such positions.

TeachVac is breaking records each month with 500,000+ matches so far in 2022, and over one million in this school year to date.

The earlier a school signs up for the premium service, the higher up the daily list of matches it will be placed. Don’t delay: sign up today by emailing enquiries@oxteachserv.com to express interest.

Teachers need CPD in using technology: nothing new there

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The DfE has published an interesting survey about the use of Educational Technology in schools. These days, unlike when I first started teaching, EdTech usually means IT related equipment. The survey can be found at Education Technology (EdTech) Survey 2020-21 (publishing.service.gov.uk) It is worth noting that the Review is based upon a survey of a limited number of schools and teachers and that classroom teachers views may less visible than views from IT specialists and school leaders.

Many years ago, in the days of the Labour government, the early use of IT equipment in schools was chronicled in a number of surveys. I recall writing about some of the results, for instance, in the TES on 4th January 2002 when government data suggested that the average secondary school already had more than 120 computers, and the average primary school more than 20.

In those days, the internet was still new and smart phones were only for enthusiasts. I also recall commissioning a Java app for the 2005 General Election based upon the cost of the War in Iraq: but that’s another whole story.

Schools these days take IT equipment for granted, but there are still differences between the primary and secondary school sectors. The Review rightly suggests that the need for ‘A review of the digital technology used for supporting pupils with SEND.’ (Page 22).  All too often the need for accessible technology can be overlooked.

Schools clearly need more support, not least in the area of cyber security training and safeguarding pupils and staff. The decision to abolish rather than update the national support for Education Technology in the great bonfire of the QUANGOs instituted by the Conservative Ministers in the coalition government really does look like a short-sighted move, whatever the shortcomings were at the time. This lack of on-going support is recognised in the suggestions for future development contained in the Review.

Schools indicated a range of barriers to future effective use of EdTech including

Financial barriers were by far perceived as the biggest barriers, especially cost and budgetary constraints, although availability of technology in school (which is also likely to be linked to school budgets), was also cited.

Pupil barriers were perceived by teachers to be major barriers and the availability of technology (94%) and internet connectivity (90%) in pupils’ homes were perceived to be the biggest barriers to increased uptake of EdTech after cost and budget. Secondary school teachers (in particular those from local authority ‘maintained’ schools) perceived these factors to be ‘big barriers’. Pupils’ digital skills were also perceived as a barrier, although to a lesser degree.

Staff barriers, including teachers’ skills, confidence and appetite for using EdTech also represented a substantial barrier. Almost nine out of ten headteachers (88%) and three-fifths of teachers (58%) cited teacher skills and confidence as a barrier to the increased uptake of EdTech. Teachers who mentioned this was a barrier for them were less likely to say that EdTech met their needs, saved them time and reduced their workload. These teachers were also less confident in their ability to deliver remote education.

Connectivity barriers in school were also commonly mentioned, although they were more likely to be cited as ‘small’ barriers rather than ‘big’ barriers.

Safeguarding and data concerns were also mentioned, especially by secondary school teachers, however, overall, this represented a ‘small barrier’ to the increased uptake of technology. (Page 20)

Implicit in the comments about barriers may be the different funding regimes between academy chains and local authorities, whereby it is easier for academy chains to manage development and purchasing strategies than it is for local authorities under the present funding arrangements.

The use of devices reflects the difference between class-base teaching in the primary sector and subject-based teaching across most secondary schools. This difference in teaching strategy may explain why fixed units such as PCs have greater exposure in the secondary sector and tablets and other more mobile devices are to be found in great numbers in primary schools where pupils spend the majority of their time in a single teaching base.

The past two years of the pandemic has helped change the landscape for learning in schools and the future must make the best use of the skills only teachers can bring to support the learner and the best use that can be made of technology.

Middle Leaders need attractive salaries as well as new entrants

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Contained within the DfE document to the STRB that was discussed in the previous post is the annual update on retention and wastage rates for teachers. This year, as part of a much more detailed analyses, there are tables for different subject groups and phases as well as for different parts of England.

As usual, the data are presented as percentages that need to be converted into numbers to make real sense what is really happening. The gross numbers for the profession as whole for entrant and those still in service after a year for the recent past are shown in the table.

New entrants into teachingentered serviceend Year 1loss in Year 1
201223998208783120
201324490213063184
201425927222973630
201526780230313749
201625560217263834
201723754201913563
201823872202913581
201923338198373501
Teachers in service

The number remining can vary by several thousand depending upon the starting number. Thus, 2015, a good year for recruitment into training, resulted in 23,031 new teachers in service at the end of year one. By contrast, in 2019, although nearly 250 fewer teachers departed than from the earlier entry year, the lower starting number resulted in only 19,837 of that cohort of teachers remaining. That’s some 3,000 fewer than from the 2015 cohort of starters.

Wastage doesn’t stop after the first year, and the DfE document considers wastage over time between STEM and non-STEM secondary subjects, although it doesn’t provide data for individual subjects. Taking design and technology as a STEM subject, the DfE’s 2013 ITT census had a total of 410 trainees. Now assuming the 82% STEM subjects after QTS is based for that group based upon the ITT census would leave some 336 teachers still working at end of year one.

Assuming the data is actually those granted QTS, and allowing for a 5% non-completion of the course, this brings the entry number down to 390 and those remaining after a year to 320.

From the 320/336 teachers must eventually come those to be promoted to TLRs, including as heads of department. Now, after five years of service, those with continuous service and excluding those with a broken service record, might be in the range of 220/250 teachers across the subject using the DfE’s percentage remaining in service for STEM subjects.

According to TeachVac’s database, there were 390 recorded vacancies with TLRs in 2020 across design and technology as a subject area, and 470 in 2021. Up to the end of the first week in March 2022, there had already been 228 advertised vacancies with TLRs in design and technology. Now some of the vacancies will have been repeat advertisements, and others re-advertisements. However, even if half were discounted for these reasons, it might still mean 200 or so posts each year. Such a number would be a very large percentage of the cohort of teachers in the subject and adds a further level of concern to the future of the subject.

Middle leadership is of vital importance to the successful operation of our schools, and in concentrating on the starting salary the DfE and STRB must not lose sight of the need for successful teachers willing to spend their careers in our state school system.