London needs teachers

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An analysis of the first 5,600 vacancies recorded in TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the free service for schools and teachers that allows schools to place job announcements and those vacancies to be matched with trainees, teachers and returners looking for a classroom teaching post in a secondary school, has thrown up some interesting information.

Firstly, it looks likely that any secondary school looking for a teacher in the autumn term will have to rely either upon returners or using the services of agencies of others prepared to search for applicants. The trainee pool in most subjects is likely to be exhausted by the summer if the current level of advertisements continues, especially if April is the peak month for recruitment advertising, as it has been in past years.

Of course, the rumblings from the ASCL conference about schools budgets may mean that schools have fewer vacancies to advertise than they would wish. But that may be counter-acted by above average wastage from the profession if other surveys from the teacher associations are correct.

Anyway, what is clear from TeachVac is that around half the vacancies in many subjects recorded so far this year are in just three regions of England; London; the South East; the East of England. This is despite the over-representation of Teach First in London compared with the rest of the country even though it now has a role across the country.

The presence of above average numbers of private schools in and around London may account for the higher levels of posts in the separate sciences and in many vacancies for teachers of specific languages in this part of the country. Elsewhere, the tendency is still to advertise ‘science’ vacancies and for ‘language’ teachers. Although numbers are small, London and the South East account for two thirds of recorded vacancies for teachers of classics.

Unless they are just advertising locally, and not using their own web sites, schools in the North West of England have advertised around 25% fewer vacancies than schools in London so far during 2015. It may be that the large number of trainees in that part of the country means that more schools can offer more posts directly to trainees without needing to advertise a vacancy. Before the advent of academies such behaviour might have been regarded askance in some quarters.

Teachers of PE may struggle the most to find a new job for September unless vacancies increase sharply in the remainder of the year, as may teachers of RE looking for a teaching post in the south West.

Next week will see the publication of the March data on applications through the UCAS unified admissions system for teacher preparation courses starting this autumn. These courses will provide the bulk of new entrants to fill secondary classroom teacher vacancies in 2016. Hopefully, the new TV campaign will have boosted applications, although it may be April before any effect can really be noticed. Without more applicants 2016 looks likely to be an even more challenging recruitment round than this year, especially if dropout rates from preparation courses are also on the increase, as has been suggested to me.

Can a leopard change its spots?

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It was interesting to see Michael Gove, he of the Academies Act 2010 and comments about blobs, launch the new ‘Conservative Right’ think tank recently. Students of the history of the past two hundred years will enjoy his selective pickings from the past. Here are a few about education;

Arthur Balfour introduced an Education Act which dramatically extended state support for schooling and helped emancipate working class children from the prison house of ignorance.

No mention of the 1870 Act that first introduced State Education presumably because that was an outcome of Gladstone’s Liberal government

In Churchill’s Wartime Government it was Rab Butler who extended yet further the reach, and liberating power, of state education.

Of course, the government that introduced the 1944 Education Act was a grand coalition. That fact doesn’t rate a mention either.

Here is Michael Gove’s summing up of his stewardship in of education.

But now, thanks to this Government, there are new schools – academies and free schools – based in our poorest neighbourhoods which are sending more children to top universities than some of our most famous private schools.

The academies programme has ensured the country’s best head teachers have been given responsibility for our most challenging schools. The free schools programme has meant that some of the best primary schools in this country have been set up in just the last few years – and in some of our toughest areas. Alongside these new schools a new curriculum that sets high standards for all and the investment of more than two and a half billion pounds in the pupil premium have helped raise achievement for all children. And that is a progressive achievement of which we can all be proud.

Not a piece of data on his achievements anywhere in site in this bit of his speech apart from the figure for the Pupil Premium. But, then numbers and statistics were never Mr Gove’s strong point. You can judge for yourself whether he can really take responsibility for the Pupil Premium and its extension to the early years. The introduction of the Service Children’s Premium was, I suspect something that came from the Prime Minister and so doesn’t rate a mention here..

I will leave readers to decide whether Mr Gove is a different type of Tory than many had thought he was or whether, just perhaps, this might be an attempt to broaden his appeal ahead of a leadership challenge if the Tories lose the general election.

Teachvac moves forward

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Teachvac http://www.teachvac.co.uk the free site where schools and trainee teachers can register and be told about vacancies for classroom teachers in secondary schools has taken the first step towards enlarging its scope while remaining a free service to both schools and teachers.

Originally launched this January, Teachvac developed to understand the market for trainees both by tracking vacancies and by recording where trainees were looking for vacancies. The site is now able to handle registrations from any teacher looking for a mainstream classroom post in a secondary school across both the maintained and private sectors. The TeachVac site will still track the requirements of trainees, but will also consider the characteristics of other teachers seeking this type of vacancy. In the future, the site will expand to include promoted posts and take in both the primary and special school sectors.

For those curious about how the site works, there are demonstration videos on both the teacher and school registration pages. The Teachvac site is now gearing up to handle the large increase in vacancies expected between now and the end of April. Schools that register receive notification of the state of the market in the subject where they post a vacancy. Each month a review of the trends over the previous month is published.

There is a growing body of data  from Teachvac about the trends in this part of the Labour market that will be of interest in the debate about teacher recruitment. Why, for instance, are so many PE teachers being trained and why did the Teacher Supply Model seemingly underestimate the need for teachers of English for a number of years? There is currently no formal mechanism to discuss these issues with government in any formal sense. I hope that after May the new government will rectify this deficiency.

News on the pay front

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The latest report from the School Teacher Review Body was published today. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-teachers-review-body-25th-report-2015 The report is useful in that it brings all the data about pay and teacher supply issues together in one place. Whether teachers will find it helpful will depend very much on how schools respond to the recommended changes that amount to a 1% uplift on most salary scale minima and maxima, but a 2% uplift on the top of the main scale.

Teachers looking for jobs can now bargain over salary and schools that have signed up to TeachVac are being told our view of the current status of the subject in terms of the market for classroom teachers in secondary schools every time the upload a vacancy. Yesterday, both sciences and mathematics reached the level of vacancies that suggest there have been enough jobs to remove a third of trainees from the market. Today is shaping up to be the largest since day for vacancies in some subjects so far in 2015.

But, to return to the STRB Report. What is clear is that even without taking into account the fact that teachers entering the labour market are one year older than most other new graduate entrants, pay is slipping outside London compared to other graduates. Perhaps next time the STRB will look at what graduate entrants to large firms earn after their first year and compare that salary with the rate paid to teachers after training. However, using the longer lens going back to before the recession, there is still some evidence that those teachers that joined in the early 2000s are only now starting to see their salary advantages whittled away. For me, the message seems to be; this year the 2% may just about see the government through as a pay increase, but next year, if the economy continues to grow and teaching doesn’t respond, the recruitment situation will probably become worse. The message sent out by this report from the STRB will affect the 2016 labour market if it doesn’t help recruit more teachers into training for this coming September, as the 2015 entrants are the new teachers of 2016.

Now that the TV advertising campaign has finally started, it will be interesting to see what effect it has upon recruitment. Personally, I think it is a bit late in the year and I hope that next time it runs during the autumn term when many more undergraduates are thinking about what future career to choose. Still, I suspect it may be better value for money that the banner advertising School Direct I saw outside one secondary school recently. Personally, I would have though the money spend might have had a better reach either using a social media campaign or good old fashioned press advertising. Relying on the motorists that drive by to take their eyes off the road as means of recruitment seems a risky strategy to me in more ways than one.

Jam tomorrow

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Even assuming the first entrants into David Cameron’s new maths scholarship programme that he announced today start their degrees this September, they won’t be available to teach until either September 2018 if they are allowed on TeachFirst or 2019 if they follow a traditional one-year teacher preparation programme.

Even though we might need more maths teachers by then, especially if the next government goes for a requirement that all 16-18 year olds study a maths course of some description, it is still a curious choice of subject to highlight for extra support. At present, mathematics isn’t anywhere near the worst subject in terms of teacher supply. Indeed, in TeachVac it probably won’t be flagged as an amber warning subject until today. That’s well behind, business studies, IT, design and technology, geography, English and social studies; all subjects where we have been warning schools of shortages in 2015 for some time now. See www.teachvac.co.uk for more details.

As the government is also in the process of re-training other teachers to become maths specialists it isn’t clear why there is this focus only on mathematics. There is even a risk that if it forces some physics teachers to have to teach other sciences rather than maths alongside physics it could have a negative effect on recruitment into physics. If the government intends to introduce a compulsory course in English for 16-18 year olds then monitoring teacher numbers in that subject is equally vital to monitoring maths  teacher numbers as shortages of teachers of English may be as severe in some parts of the country as they are for maths teachers.

Teacher supply will be the number one crisis facing whoever is Secretary of State after the election and a piecemeal approach to the problem may attract headlines but won’t produce enough teachers in every subject to allow schools to make progress on the Attainment8 measure.

In two weeks we will see the current recruitment figures for trainees for graduate courses starting in September. They will be the last numbers likely to feed into the general election debate. If they remain poor, as seems likely, teacher supply may be the only issue in education to make waves during the campaign despite the many other policies that need discussion.

Another manifesto for teacher education

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Yesterday the Million+ group of universities launched their Manifesto for Teacher Education in a dining room at the House of Commons. The Chair, the VC of Staffordshire University was flanked by two leading teacher association officials and Labour and Tory party speakers, albeit the Labour member of their education team was Welsh and the ATL speaker was bilingual and had taught in Wales: the debate was wide ranging.

The manifesto itself highlights the need for teachers to have an academic and professional qualification and seeks to restore the pre-eminence of universities in both the preparation of new teachers and in their professional development throughout their career. The manifesto view that Osfted should inspect all providers is sensible, as it the promotion of a workforce that represents society as a whole. Adding a point about the Teacher Supply Model and a need for regional variations in demand to be taken into account is an interesting development and reflects a wider concern about allocations. Especially where targets aren’t being met.

There was a point when the Tory speaker challenged the need for a teaching qualification albeit starting his remarks by saying that there were fewer unqualified teachers now than there were a few years ago. A bit like a position of ‘wanting to have your cake and eat it.’ This led to a debate about whether HE lecturers should also be trained and, at least from me, a question about whether that applied to FE teaching staff as well?  Most seemed in favour of preparation for all that teach at whatever level.

The elephant in the room that nobody addressed, despite a direct question from me, was about whether graduates training as teachers should be expected to pay fees? This isn’t mentioned in the manifesto either. Despite their recent announcement, the Labour speaker didn’t mention anything about whether trainees would be expected to pay fees. As regular reads know, my position is clear, there should be no fees for graduate trainees preparing to be a teacher by whatever route they choose and the present position is discriminatory. However, I have yet to win Lib Dem support for this position.

On the teacher supply position it was humbling to be referred to by two of the speakers as a leading authority. However, I had many years of following the trends and TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk was set up to collect data about the interface between training and employment and thus help improve the modelling of where teachers need to be trained.

The fact that it also offers a free service bring together vacancies and trainees looking for jobs is a bonus that will shortly be extended to all classroom teachers in secondary schools and if discussions underway are successful eventually to the primary sector and to include all promoted and leadership vacancies as well. Next month we hope to publish data on where trainees are looking for vacancies; and just as importantly, where they aren’t. This could provide a lively debate about the very regional needs Million+ highlighted. At present, secondary schools in Yorkshire and the Humber have posted around a third fewer vacancies per school than schools in the South East of England. Despite the presence of TeachFirst, London schools aren’t far behind their neighbours in the South East in seeking new teachers. This is something Million+ will need to bear in mind.

Tory muddle over new schools?

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Free Schools Good: UTCs bad. Is that the latest message about schools coming from the Tory Party?  If so, where does that leave studio schools, converter academies and regular sponsored academies. Frankly, I haven’t got a clue.

Readers will recall that UTCs are 14-18 schools created by this government along the lines of the City Technology Colleges championed by Kenneth Baker when he was Education Secretary. Not surprisingly, he is in favour of the UTCs as well. One might have expected that the Tory Party having invented these schools would be in favour of more of them in the next parliament, but no, in January, as this blog reported in a post on the 6th January, the Tory Party attacked Labour’s costings for 100 new UTCs during the life of the next parliament. At that time it didn’t offer any suggestion that extra schools would be needed to cope with increased pupil numbers. Depending upon your view of how large schools should be come, new schools may or may not be necessary to deal with the growth in pupil numbers.

If we do need new schools, are 14-18 schools now off the Tory agenda or only going to be present if there is local demand and hang the problems that might be caused for existing schools. It is one thing to protect the education budget from cuts, but surely that doesn’t mean wasting money on creating schools where they are not needed.

The Tory Party is no doubt relying on the Policy Exchange review of Free Schools published today to support the case for more of these schools. The evidence in the report is debatable to say the least and might support more than one conclusion as a Policy Exchange spokesperson agreed on the Today programme this morning when debating with Rebecca Allen of the FFT’s new datalab research centre. I guess if you take out the religious free schools, such as those opened by members of the Jewish community, the data on performance by free schools might be even more questionable.  With a drive to raise standards in all schools, the fact that some high performing schools near free schools apparently saw their performance decline is worth unpacking as in most situations those tested didn’t have the option of the choice between a free school or their current school when deciding on school choice.

Probably the most distressing aspect of the announcement today is that in a time of austerity the Tory party still seems to want to favour the few over the many. Spending all available funding on raising standards for all rather than wasting time and energy on the few parents that want their own form of education will surely do more to help England plc in the future.

Anyway, as Policy Exchange have shown, more and more free schools are being opened by academy chains and other established groups rather than by parent or teacher groups. Why not rebadge them as voluntary schools, for that is what many of them increasingly are, but under a new guise.

Election manifestos are starting to appear

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Right of centre think tank Policy Exchange this week published its education manifesto. Not quite in the league of Kenneth Baker’s call for a coalition with Labour in terms of headline grabbing policies it did however have some surprises. I am delighted that they recognise that charging fees for trainee teachers is wrong. Their solution is slightly more nuanced than mine which regular readers will know is to make training free at delivery. Policy Exchange only want fees paid off for those working in state schools. This presumably means that the private sector will have to pay extra to attract teachers as such teachers would still be required to repay their fees. That’s an interesting idea, but it leaves a third group, including possibly many PE teachers where government training numbers are too high, in limbo. What of the trainee that wants to work as a teacher but cannot find a job: should they be penalised for training if they have to take a job outside of teaching because the government mis-calculated training numbers? For those reasons I am still personally in favour of remitting fees for all trainees.
Policy Exchange also wants to allow city regions to create incentives for teachers to work across the country. This seems like a thinly disguised version of regional pay and I wonder whether it is based on serious research since most of the teacher shortages that don’t affect the sector as a whole are likely to be in and around London where teacher turnover is at its highest. A more radical move would have been to hand the training to regions or even local authorities to administer.
The think tank’s idea that all 16-18 year olds should study maths, but not seemingly English, is a sensible proposal that most would now agree is worth implementing once an acceptable curriculum can be devised.
Earlier this week I attended the launch of the DataLab project funded by the Fischer Family Trust. This initiative should be a useful source of independent research into education using the large databases on pupils and teachers that are now available. Their first projects showing that learning isn’t a linear process but has its ups and downs and their work on pupils that just gain a place at a selective schools and those that just miss out is well worth reading. The fact that those that just miss out on a grammar school place often outperform those who just gain a place must give pause for thought to the lobby wanting to expand selective schools on academic grounds.
Next week is national apprentice week and it is really good to see the focus on those young people not going to university. One of the great failings of the Blair Labour government was to cast aside the Tomlinson Report without really understanding what it was trying to do. Perhaps if there were a Labour/Tory coalition we might see some more progress. But, we might also see a Liberal Democrat as leader of the opposition facing the PM every Wednesday: now there’s a thought to cheer me up.

Operation Bullfinch

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The publication earlier this week of of the serious case review (SRC) into the grooming of six girls for sex in Oxfordshire raised serious questions for all professionals working with young people, including those working in schools. As an Oxfordshire county councillor since 2013, I have followed the developments after the outcome of the trial in 2013 with growing concern. The SCR has much to say about all agencies and their responses and makes uncomfortable reading.
One the one hand, schools have clearly responded with the creation of education programmes such as Chelsea’s Choice and through better working with other services. On the other hand, I am not sure that all the weaknesses identified in the SCR have been fully addressed. Are records of students changing schools forwarded promptly and in proper order? Do schools have good policies for the integration of pupils arriving outside of the September start date or can such young people easily become alienated, especially if their transfer is due to a failure to educate by the previous school.
Schools collect masses of data but, on unauthorised absences and truancy, are patterns fully scrutinised and is there a procedure for escalating concerns both upwards within the school and out to multi-agency groups? These may be early warning signs.
I am concerned if creating different administrative system for schools, whether free, academy, UTC, studio, community or voluntary has in any way hindered cooperation on the issue of dealing with troubled young people.
The recent Carter Review of teacher preparation discussed the need for teachers to know about psychology and child development whether during a child’s early years or during adolescence. This is an issue of concern to teachers even when the delivery of their subject is uppermost in their minds. I doubt the present teacher preparation programme is long enough to cover some of these issues we might expect professional to at least be sensitive to and many teachers will need to develop their knowledge during their early years in the profession.
As a county councillor, I also wonder whether the Cabinet system of government places too much authority in the hands of one councillor. Without effective scrutiny or questioning does it make it harder for others to engage with service delivery? Many elected members are tapped into a wide range of intelligence sources and their surgeries allow for ordinary members of the public to short-circuit official channels and cut through red tape. Now, I am not claiming that the families of these girls might have used that route or that officials frustrated by a lack of escalation might have sought to discuss such issues but there seems little discussion of possible whistleblowers in the SCR. However, would more involvement of elected members in effective oversight of services, although expensive compared with cabinet government, help issues to be discussed by bringing together more than one opinion? Every school has a governing body; Oxfordshire education has a single cabinet member and a scrutiny committee that meets about six times a year and hasn’t looked at truancy and exclusion rates in the past two years although it has done good work on investigating attainment levels.
Ineffective Committees in local government had a bad reputation but the risks from an ineffective single member are much greater, especially when oversight is sketchy. Now that the government is consulting on the possibly of elected members being criminally liable where there is neglect, including CSE, the attraction of more rather than less members being involved in oversight might seem persuasive.
Members of the public might also wonder why councillors in Oxfordshire haven’t agreed to meet as a Council to discuss the report on officers they employ and whose services they are ultimately responsible for to central government. A voluntary and rigidly timetabled one hour briefing wasn’t enough in my judgement and leaves at least this councillor frustrated. An agreed look across the Council by elected members to verify the steps taken and lessons learnt ought, in my view, to be the responsibility of all Councillors and not just a scrutiny committee. We all need to ensure that lessons have been learnt and see what else needs to be considered. Such actions should be a prerequisite for showing all elected members care.

Job market starts to hot up

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By the end of February the recruitment site TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk had recorded just over 4,000 vacancies for secondary classroom teachers since the 1st January 2015, including more than 1,500 during February despite the half-term holiday period.

These are vacancies suitable for trainees, returners and those moving schools, but not seeking promotion. As the DfE have a rule of thumb that 50% of these vacancies go to trainees, this means that around 2,000 trainees may have found a job by now. As there were around 13,000 trainees at the time of the ITT census in November that probably leaves just over 10,000 left in the pool after allowing for those that won’t complete the training year.

As I have suggested from last autumn, not all subjects are faring the same. The trainee pool was probably down to below two thirds by the end of February in English, business studies, design and technology, social studies and computer science. Next week, mathematics, history, geography and the sciences as a whole will probably join the list. Business studies may fall below 50% left in the pool and next week, and there have already been more vacancies recorded in the South West than there are trainees in that subject.

With the bumper recruitment months or March, and especially April still to come, I expect some schools to face recruitment challenges in these subjects.

On the other hand, PE, music and art have seen relatively few vacancies so far this year and in PE some trainees may struggle to find a post, especially if they are not especially interested in vacancies across a wide geographical area.

London and the counties around the capital have so far seen the largest percentage of vacancies relative to the number of schools in the regions even though Teach First is active in London. By contrast, the North West has seen comparatively few vacancies posted by schools so far this year.

TeachVac is free for both schools and trainees to use and offers a range of data analysis to anyone interested in the labour market for teachers in England on a real-time basis.

TeachVac will soon be expanded to allow registration by returners and teachers moving between schools as well as adding promoted posts to the vacancies on offer. However, it will remain free to both schools and teachers allowing substantial savings over other recruitment routes. The video demos on the TeachVac site show both schools and teachers how to operate the TeachVac system. All that is necessary for schools is to know the difference between their URN and their DfE number when they register.

In return, schools that register vacancies receive a real-time update on the state of the market in that subject where it is one of the main curriculum subjects tracked by TeachVac.

If you know of a trainee or teacher looking for a teaching post in England, whether in the state or private sectors, or a school wanting to post a vacancy for free, do point them to www.teachvac.co.uk