Tag Archives: AI

Classroom teacher turnover in London needs watching

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Historically, the turnover rate for classroom teachers in London has tended to be higher than elsewhere in England

YearInner LondonOuter London
2016/1714.9%12.5%
2017/1813.1%11.9%
2018/1912.8%11.4%
2019/209.9%8.4%
2020/2111.1%9.6%
2021/2212.8%11.1%
2022/2312.3%10.7%
2023/2412.5%10.7%

Source DfE evidence to STRB October 2025 Data annex

In 2016/17, turnover for classroom teachers in the Inner London boroughs reached 14.9%, or around one in seven classroom teachers either leaving the profession or moving school. Three years later, in the year where covid disrupted the summer term, turnover rates dropped below 10% for the only time in the last eight years. Once the pandemic subsided, turnover quickly returned to over 12%, or one in eight teachers.

In Outer London turnover rates have followed a similar pattern to those in Inner London, but a couple of percentage points lower than in the Inner London boroughs.

By way of contrast, in the North East, during 2023/24 turnover for classroom teachers was just 7.7%, some 4.8% lower than in Inner London schools.

Leaving aside the two years where covid affected the recruitment round (2019/20 and 2020/21), the national turnover rate for all levels of posts (classroom, leadership and headship) has generally been between 9-10%, but has been falling. In 2023/24 it was 9% compared with 10.6% in 2016/17.

Rates of turnover for assistant head and deputy heads probably reflect demand side issues more than what is happening on the supply side. When school rolls are rising, new schools may be created increasing demand: falling rolls may mean posts are cutback, and demand reduced, so less turnover.

Headship turnover is very closely linked to the age profile of headteachers. When a cohort of new younger headteachers has replaced a generation that has retired, turnover is likely to fall for a few years. However, turnover tends to be within a narrow range of between 9.5-10.5% per year. There is now no discernible London effect on headteacher turnover, as there used to be many years ago when headteacher salaries were more tightly controlled.

Might we now be entering a period of stability, with lower turnover rates for classroom teachers , especially should the possible upheaval in the graduate job market created by the AI revolution coincide with the period of stable rolls in the secondary secto,r and falling rolls in the primary sector?

YearPrimarySecondarySTEM subjectsNon-STEMAll Teachers
2016/1786.3583.1%81.2%84.5%84.9%
2023/2490.0%89.4%88.0%90.2% 89/7%

The table taken from various tables in the DfE evidence to the STRB shows a consistent trend of improved retention for teachers at the end of the first year of service. However, the same tables show that there is still a job to be done to retain these teachers in larger numbers beyond their first few years of service. The government needs to be aware that teaching is now a global career, and teachers from England can easily find work overseas.

‘Stuck’ schools – who teaches in these schools?

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The DfE has today updated the ad hoc data about schools eligible for RISE support. Schools in the RISE programme are those with support from the Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence advisers and teams. According to the data, some 50 schools have been eligible for the programme for 11 years or more.  Schools eligible for RISE intervention – GOV.UK

To become eligible for RISE a school must be a ‘stuck’ school.

A ‘stuck’ school is defined as a state-funded school that was graded Requires Improvement – or equivalent – at its most recent Ofsted inspection and was also graded below Good at its previous Ofsted inspection.

Where inspections have been completed subsequent to the removal of single headline grades in September 2024 (and in the interim before report cards are introduced), for the definition of stuck schools and for the purpose of its intervention policy, DfE treats a sub-judgement of Requires Improvement for leadership and management and/or quality of education for a school inspected in 2024/25 academic year as equivalent to a previous single headline grade of Requires Improvement.

Following the introduction of Ofsted school report cards, the definition of stuck schools will be updated to “schools which receive a ‘needs attention’ grade for leadership and governance, which were graded below good, or equivalent, at their previous Ofsted inspection”. 

At 30 June 2025 there were 639 stuck schools, and 292,000 pupils in those schools.

Of those:

  • 372 are primary schools, 235 are secondary schools, 21 are special schools and 11 are pupil referral units
  • 90 are local authority maintained schools and 549 are academies or free schools (although some of these were not academies at the time of their most recent inspection)
  • Across the spring, summer and autumn RISE cohorts, 396 academies and local authority maintained schools have been identified for targeted RISE intervention. As of 31 July 2025, 377 schools remain in the programme, 349 of which are stuck and 28 of which are academies in a category of concern.
  • Of the remaining stuck schools, some have changed responsible body since their most recent inspection and are therefore not eligible.  Others will be considered for inclusion in later cohorts.

On average, as at 30 June 2025, the 639 stuck schools were graded by Ofsted as below Good or equivalent for 5.6 years.

  • The 372 primary schools that are stuck have been rated below Good or equivalent for an average of 4.7 years.
  • The 235 secondary schools that are stuck have been rated below Good or equivalent for an average of 6.9 years.
  • On average, as 31 July 2025, the 377 schools in receipt of targeted RISE intervention from the RISE advisers and teams, were graded by Ofsted as below Good or equivalent for 5.8 years. Of these, 50 were below Good for more than 11 years.

As might be expected, ‘stuck’ schools as a group exhibit lower outcomes and higher absence and suspension/exclusions than other school of a similar type.

This data concentrates on pupil outcomes. What I think would be more interesting is information about staffing. How often has the headteacher changed during the past decade in a ‘stuck’ school. What is the turnover of teaching staff, and how many are ‘unqualified’ or on programmes to become qualified compared with other local schools?

Until it is possible to match data about staffing to outcomes, we are not likely to learn anything new. I started my career in the 1970s in a school that undoubtedly would now be one of the 50 with eleven years of issues with performance. Staffing was always an issue throughout the seven years I spent at the school. Not surprisingly, when falling rolls became an issue, it was one of the schools to be amalgamated out of existence. I wonder whether that will be the fate of some of these schools over the next few years?

 I am also remined of the book edited by Paul Marshall in 2013, and call ‘The Tail’ that discussed the issue of under-performance in schools across England. In the introduction he wrote that:

‘.. for good teachers to be deployed in the most challenging schools… reforms to the delivery and accountability of child and adolescent mental health services; and perhaps new types of dedicated provision for the tail.’ The Tail page 17.

No doubt RISE was one outcome, and it would also be interesting to know if any of the 50 schools with the longest eligibility have had access to support from the Teach First programme? We know almost everything there is to know about the pupils, but nowhere near enough about the teachers. Time for a rethink on the workings of the labour market for teachers?

Schooling and the relentless march of technology

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Teachers will not have been happy to read of employers paying workers the same money for a four day week where they used to earn for working for five days. I assume that productivity or output or company profits remained the same, so the company could afford to be this generous while not upsetting its shareholders.

Unhappy teachers might reflect on two things. As technology improves, so workers can produce the same output in less time: think handwriting letters, then dictating them to someone that then typed them and then word processing them. Of course, rewarding those workers that benefit could come at a cost to productivity and growth for all. Why not continue the five day week and produce more?  

My parent’s generation worked a five and a half day week, with Saturday working being commonplace. Teachers have not benefitted from these changes, partly because their job has largely been unaffected by significant changes in technology that improve productivity. Now this may be because teaching is a public sector good and there is no profit element to spur on change for the benefit of both owners and workers.

As we can see from the imposition of VAT on private schools, the reaction of many was to increase fees, not to improve productivity, even by adding one pupil per class to their already small classes – special schools excepted – and absorb the cost.

However, it is the second implication of technological change and its effect on teachers and society that worries me just as much. Here’s another example. Driverless vehicles will become mainstream. Sure, there will be accidents, as there were when railways and aeroplanes were being developed. And these days society knows more about preventing those sorts of accidents happening to the same degree – think of the space race and the ratio of deaths to achievements. But, what of the many drivers that will join the ranks of porters, stenographers, bank tellers, coal miners and many others whose jobs have disappeared. Will technology create another set of new jobs for those with skills to do the jobs of today?

What are the implications for schools and their role in society? This should be the key question at the Festival of Education? What steps are politicians and the think tanks that provide them with research doing to consider the role of schooling in the second half of this century. After all, those that start school at age five this coming September will likely not retire on a state pension until 2090 or possibly even later.

Primary schooling with the acquisition of vocabulary and the social skills of living together in communities will become even more important than it has been seen by politicians in the past. Secondary education and subject skills might even become less important.  The recently announced government inquiry into White working-class kids might want to think about this issue during their deliberations. Solutions for the problems of the past won’t help the kids facing an uncertain future.

Is AI bigger than the internet revolution?

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During my lifetime, I have experienced three major revolutions driven by technology; the microprocessor revolution of the 1970s and 1980s; the internet and social communication revolution of the 1990s and 2000s around the internet and phones and gaming, and now the Artificial Intelligence revolution: or AI as it almost universally known.

Over the past week, I have set three different AI sites three different tasks, all using free versions of the software. The tasks were: draft a script for a play; create a website of this blog and turn a poem into a song and add new verses.

I was amazed at the results for all three tasks, and especially how quickly they were performed so early into the AI revolution.

I asked for a script for a play about a closure of a college, and ‘The last assembly’ gave me 5 key characters, four themes for the play and even some possible dialogue for a final speech and how the other characters reacted to its delivery.

In its way, even more impressive was the website created to market this blog. In under 5 minutes, and after a bit of interplay with the AI agent there was a useable website that those, I have sent it to thought was an attractive website. Sure, there were a few wrinkles to iron out, such as the wrong date being assigned to some posts used as examples, and the first version being just in monochrome. But, 5 minutes, and free, and perfection is expected!

The third task took a poem I had written to celebrate a music festival’s 40th anniversary and created a song for primary school-children based upon a first two verses from the poem that I had created.

Here was the poem’s first three verses.

Sing for the sound of singing

Sing for the joy of singing

Sing for the harmony of singing:

So, sing we all together.

As we sing together here,

Different schools, but single purpose,

Combining in this special place

For forty summers since.

Forty years of many pupils,

staff and parents, come all to

Celebrate in song and sounds

Old, new, would be traditional.

And my attempt at a song, something I have never tried to do before.

[C] Sing, sing, sing

[F] Sing for the joy of singing

[C] Sing, sing, sing,

[G] Sing for the sound of singing

  • So we
  • sing to·[C] gether.

[Am] Let us sing as one

[F] Different schools,

[C] but single purpose,

  • Let us
  • sing to·[C] gether.

Here’s what AI added

[C] Raise, raise, raise

[F] Raise up your voice in chorus

[C] Loud, proud, strong,

[G] Let every heart sing with us

  • So we
  • sing to·[C] gether.

[Am] Every voice belongs

[F] Every note a story

[C] Blending dreams

[G] in shared harmony

  • Let us
  • sing to·[C] gether.

[C] Hope, hope, hope

[F] Hope in the songs we’re sharing

[C] Shine, shine, shine,

[G] Shine with the love we’re bearing

  • As we
  • sing to·[C] gether.

I was also offered platforms where the backing track could be created. Now, the poem was written in an hour after receiving the invite, and isn’t great literature, so the song isn’t a work of art, but AI was asked for something primary school children might sing, and I think that’s what was created.

If I can do these three things with no tutorial support in less than half an hour all told, then we have to take AI, and its implications for our school system seriously now.

These three tasks were relatively value-free, but AI has the power to drive thinking, values and morals.

With the government extending the franchise to those aged 16 or above, what we teach in school is now of vital importance, and it must no longer be just a diet of facts or an attempt to create a purpose for handwriting other than as an art form. Politicians of all parties need to think seriously and quickly about what we need to teach in schools.

This blog was created by a human except for the verses of the song that were created by AI

AI in education: tackling the third revolution

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Earlier this week, I sat in on a webinar hosted by the Education Policy Institute about Workforce Sustainability in the modern school system. The recording of the webinar can be accessed at Workforce sustainability in the modern school system Inevitably, much of the discussion was around how AI might make a difference to schools. AI is the third wave of the IT revolution, after the initial microprocessor revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the arrival of the web and the development of means to access it from desktops to mobile phones, and even watches, from the mid-1990s onward. AI has the possibility to significantly impact on the school system as we know it even more than the previous two ‘revolutions.

The impact might be in four areas

Recruitment – this will be cheaper, faster and more complex as both candidates and recruiters strive to make use of AI to help them secure either the perfect job or the best candidate, whether it be a teacher or any other post in a school.

Administration – compared to the days of pen and paper, typewriters and adding machines, technology in the past 50 years have vastly changed how processes are handled, and especially how data can be analysed. EPI even have a Model, described in the webinar, for assessing how MATs are operating. AI offers much more power to create systems with less need to burden teachers. Tracking individual learning will be far enhanced, well beyond what is possible even today.

Learning – AI could transform how students learn. No longer will teachers need to worry about coping with a range of abilities in the same learning setting: AI will tailor the learning package to the individual and make the learning experience stimulating enough to motivate every child. In doing so it could fundamentally change the role of a teacher, removing some of the drudgery and enhancing the personal interactions with learners. But, will the lightbulb moments teacher value so much disappear?

The contract between The State and families – will the current 190-day requirement to attend a ‘school’ or face sanctions that has existed since 1870 in England be replaced by a different sort of model where learning is at the pace of learner, and qualifications are obtained when ready. Could AI be used to identify those children not making progress, and offer support that families would be required to accept? I don’t expect such a radical change anytime soon, but it would be worth looking at how different groups in society see schooling today and what they want from it as the twenty first century enters the second quarter of the century.

What is certain is that the State needs to participate, and not leave everything to the market. There is a lot of profit to be made from AI, and schools represent a large potential market. The first step will probably be to agree on standards and certification for learning materials so individual schools and teachers can be sure what they are using are high quality learning materials. This is much more important that the debate over banning mobile phones in schools, but receives much less attention from politicians.

Four-day week for teachers?

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A Labour MP has called for a four-day working week to be introduced across the public sector.

Lib Dem-run South Cambridgeshire District Council’s cabinet will meet today to approve the continuation of the trial for all desk-based staff as well as extending it to cover caretakers and binmen. 

These are just two of the headlines from an article that I read this morning. What would be the implications for teachers of the introduction of a four-day week? The answer depends upon whether the same amount of face-to-face contact with pupils was maintained as at present and whether that was contact time spread over four or five days? What effect would four longer school days have on pupils, especially younger pupils? After all, some early years settings already offer wrap around care that is much longer than the traditional school-day.

What would the psychologists and those that study brain development in children have to say about putting five days of work into four? Perhaps a model would develop of four days of taught time and the fifth for ‘homework’ or supplementary activities.

On the plus side, parents also working a four-day week would have an extra day with their children: on the downside, parents whose working week did not coincide with the school four-day week would have to deal with the need for extra childcare.

Any change would come with a cost both to individuals and to the State. If there wasn’t sufficient funding, schools might be tempted to cram the teaching into four days and use the fifth day to generate income from their school sites and playing fields.

In a sector struggling to recruit enough teachers at present, would a four-day week make the profession more or less attractive to potential teachers. Certainly, if the bulk of graduate careers moved to a four-day week, teaching, already operating an employer-driven form of flexi-time, might be unattractive without some other boost to conditions of work.

A four-day working week might be a real challenge to the private school sector, where the additional costs would most likely have to be passed on to parents through increased fees. An increase of this magnitude might drive more parents back into the state sector, upping the cost of state education to the government. Add VAT on to the costs, and such numbers switching might increase still further.

During the Corbyn era, Labour proposed four additional bank holidays for workers; all during school holidays, so teachers would have seen no benefit from them. The implications for the teaching profession and others working in schools of the widespread introduction of a four-day working week do need to be considered.

However, I don’t think that the present model of schooling will continue as it has for the past 150 years. The AI revolution may well turn out to be as profound for society as the microchip revolution that started in the 1970s and transformed the world of work beyond recognition in many areas, but only to a limited degree in schools.

 Technology and its interaction with the process of schooling has further to go in the future. Perhaps the pressure for a four-day working week for humans might be the catalyst for major changes in schooling?

Technology and Education

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A recent event I attended, ahead of BETT 2020, led me to think about the place of technology in education. A simple typology would be to look at teaching, learning and support as three different areas where technology can be involved in schools. Of course, the first two are an arbitrary distinction, and technology can cover both teaching and learning at the same time.

I was interested to see the use of the term AI by many exhibitors at the HMC deputy heads conference I addressed last Friday about teacher supply matters. After all, TeachVac uses sophisticated and proprietary AI to handle job vacancies much more efficiently that say the DfE vacancy site that requires schools to upload every vacancy they have created.

AI is still at an early stage, and as a phrase can raise false hope of a new era for learning that are generally not yet justified. However, one only has to think of the rise of ‘contactless’ in the payment field to see the speed of change.

Contactless, as with smart phones and especially their cameras, demonstrates the problems of technology and inter-generational use. How many heads use contactless payments; how many teachers above 40, and how many teachers below the age of 40 don’t? The same can be asked about any photos taken during the summer break, and also how they were swapped; displayed or generally archived.

The speed of change has an important relationship to the power structure in schools. Are head teachers aware of what is happening and what represent good investment for the future and are they prepared to delegate downwards to those that understand technology and can make the case?

My first job as a teacher involved responsibility for hard technology in the school – 16mm and slide projectors, plus reel to reel tape recorders – and I recall asking for a video tape recorder to help both the drama and PE departments with their work. The first time the kit was used, the 6th form group entering the local one act paly festivals swept the board. They were a great group, but I hope seeing their rehearsals played back made them even better.

In the 1990s, I wrote that we were on the cusp of a revolution as profound as the introduction of printing in the 15th century. Looking back to the changes in the past quarter century, and how it has affected power relationships across the globe, I don’t think I was wrong. You only have to compare what is going on with Extinction Rebellion now with the CND protest of the 1950s and 1960s.

Scrapping BECTA in the Tory bonfire of the Quangos was probably the right thing to do; not replacing it with an advisory body on technology and education was a serious mistake.

I suspect that unless this blog post attracts attention, technology and the role of big tech and start-ups in education won’t feature in the general election: it should do so. Will 5 days a week and 40 weeks a year be the norm for schools for another 10 years, let alone for another 150 years it has been the framework for learning in this country?

More or less: which way for the future?

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The BBC has recently run an interesting piece about the relationship between class sizes and teachers’ salaries, based upon some OECD data. The article headed ‘when class sizes fall so does teachers’ pay’ is an interesting thesis. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47281532 However, how does it relate to the first law of economics that when there is a shortage of supply, and demand remains consistent, either the price will rise or substitution will take place?

The nightmare scenario for government is that facing the secondary sector in England at present. Pupil numbers are on a rising curve, at least until the middle of the next decade. This means more funding will be required, even if the unit of funding per pupil falls in real terms. At the same time, there is a labour shortage that is growing worse in some parts of the curriculum.

Hence, demand for more cash for schooling since, as the BBC pointed out, it is a fact of school life that staffing costs, and especially the cost of teachers, consumes the largest part of any school budget. However, schools are competing with other government services for cash and it seems likely that in England, however hard the teacher associations press their case, the cash needed for the extra pupils will come before any significant uplift in funding per pupil.

So, to that extent, larger classes is one way to fund better pay for teachers. However, most schools, and especially secondary schools, are constrained about how far class sizes can be increased, due to the physical nature of their buildings and the dependence on a classroom based building model.

In England, there may be the space to increase pupil-teacher ratios, perhaps back to where they were around the turn of the century, but that is likely to come from altering contact ratios – the amount of time teachers spend in the classroom – as much as from increasing class sizes. The trade-off of worsening contact ratios will almost certainly be a rethink about workload, since making the job of a teacher look even harder won’t help recruitment into the profession.

There is one helpful point for the government in England, but probably not for parents, and that is the fact that in England children have no right to be taught by anyone with knowledge and training in the subject they are teaching. Indeed, in extremis – nowhere defined except in very vague terms – children can be ‘taught’ by those with no background knowledge or training in what they are asked to teach. So long as there are enough people willing to be teachers, then pay can be kept under control. And, as everyone knows, there are plenty of arts and social science graduates for whom a teaching salary can still look attractive.

Today The Pearson Group published its annual results. Might their experience point to another way forward? The substitution of capital – in the form of IT and AI – for labour? So long as the learner is engaged, as there are in higher education, this may well be part of the way forward. But, for those that see schooling as a struggle between the generations, rather than the development of future wealth and happiness, the physical presence of a teacher overseeing learning has much to recommend it.

Who that teacher might be, and how well they will be paid, will, I am sure, still feature large in the future debates about the economic of education.

 

AI and education – The view of the House of Lords Committee

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The section on education in the recent House of Lords Report on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was one of the more confusing sections in terms of understanding exactly what was being suggested as the way forward. You can read the Report, published earlier this week, at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldai/100/10010.htm#_idTextAnchor094

Not surprisingly, industry representatives told the Committee how badly prepared young people were in this country and more needed to be achieved lest we fall further behind. Then, there was the counter argument about not cutting other subjects to make time for developing these new skills and knowledge. If you want creative industries then you need to include creative subjects in the curriculum not to relegate them to some cultural backwater and just treated by schools as an afterthought.

The Committee heard that there is the downside of our modern digital world, once it was the bad effects of posters and newspaper adverts and video nasties on children, now it is reduced attention spans, shallower cognitive capabilities and experience a loss of identity as a result of time online and using social media. One witness warned the Committee, “that the idealised world represented on social media “leads to many illnesses including eating disorders … and serious mental illnesses”.   The implication being that schools must put in place strategies to prevent such outcomes among future generations exposed to the perils of the modern world.

The Committee recognised that the 2014 change to the curriculum on IT in schools across England needed time to take effect. However, the removal of any consideration of moral and ethical issues to do with social media and digital technology from the curriculum was regretted by some witnesses; no doubt more so over recent weeks as the various concerns over social media and the handling of personal data have emerged. Personally, I think the downgrading of Religious Education at examination level, where there was a real opportunity to discuss issues of ethic, morality and philosophy, by excluding the subject from the EBacc was a mistake.

The Committee went on to welcome the projects outlined in last autumn’s budget for more computer science teachers and the establishment of a National Centre for Computing with industry to produce training material and support schools with the teaching of computer science. But, they didn’t really seem to probe very deeply on what is actually happening on the ground in our schools. IT and computer science teacher vacancies remain at the lower end of range seen over the past four recruitment cycles according to TeachVac’s data http://www.teachvac.co.uk; so perhaps those already in post are staying put and there aren’t large numbers of new posts being created. Whether there would be jobs for 8,000 extra teachers by the end of this parliament as envisaged in the budget seems highly unlikely.

As I wrote in my blog post when the number was leaked the weekend before the budget:

If the 8,000 number does make it into the budget, then so as not to look as if the Treasury doesn’t talk to the DfE there will have to be some form of explanation. Personally, I would add 10% to the Teacher Supply Model and split the rest between for professional development for existing teachers: spending 40% on those on professional development for secondary school teachers already teaching computer science and not fully qualified; 40% for lead teachers in the primary schools, starting with a programme for MATs and dioceses and the allocated the remaining 20% for programmes for teachers of other subjects to embed areas such as geographical information and other subject-related techniques into curriculum development. I might keep a small pot of cash back for new methods of preparing teachers that don’t rely upon face to face contact.

Finally, the Committee said: “the Government should explore ways in which the education sector, at every level, can play a role in translating the benefits of AI into a more productive and equitable economy.”

You try and work out what that really means.