Tag Archives: Gatsby Foundation

Gatsby Survey confirms importance of pay and working conditions for would-be teachers

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A Gatsby funded study by a team at London’s UCL has researched assumptions about why people do -or do not- choose to become a teacher in the UK and the US. The findings were that extrinsic rewards drive career choices. The report found that in both countries, extrinsic factors such as salary, working hours and paid leave were the most powerful drivers of career choice. Altruistic motives did play a role – participants were willing to accept lower pay for roles with higher social impact – but these were consistently smaller than the influence of pay and workload.’ New research reveals what really attracts graduates to teaching  | Gatsby Education

These factors were even seen among those undergraduates who already said they were already considering becoming a teacher.

Replies to the UCL study suggested that increasing working hours beyond 40 per week to that of a typical teacher reduced attractiveness of teaching by 15%, and that teachers holiday entitlement increased attractiveness by 11%. Increased salary raised job attractiveness by 9%.

How do these findings compare with previous research? In May 1997, almost 20 years ago, and during another period of challenges in recruiting graduates into teaching, The School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) commissioned the agency BMRB to investigate what factors influenced the attitudes towards teaching shortage subjects/ This was a small-scale study involving only 82 graduates compared with the 2,000 undergraduates, in both the UK and the US, surveyed by the UCL team.

BMRB students said that

  • Teaching should be a vocation
  • Those sampled felt not all were suited to be a teacher
  • There were serious concerns about both working conditions and stress levels
  • Pay was acknowledged to be a significant factor – although not a deterrent to those determined to teach, a better pay structure would make teaching more attractive to those considering other options.

The views BMRB found ‘were not specific to those studying the shortage subjects … but were common across the different subject areas. ‘

So, the common message from both studies, nearly twenty years apart, and of different participant sizes and survey methods, is that teaching must be competitive in regard to pay and working conditions to attract graduates in a competitive labour market.

Another study, in 2000, for the Office of Manpower Economic (OME), by Whitmuir Research, reported similar finding to the BMRB list, but added, disruptive pupils; lack of parental support and the cost of tuition feed to the list.

A large-scale study of 1,880 final year undergradues across 26 HEIs for the TTA in 1999, distributed through careers services, found more interest amongst women than men in teaching as a career, and amongst those in post-1992 higher education institutions.

A review of where applicants to teaching come from, based on DfE data through the common application process would be a sensible annual outcome in order to see if there are changes in the key undergraduate market with regard to teaching as a career.

It seems likely that the STRB knows the issue around recruiting into the teaching profession. The question every year is – will the STRB stand up to government on behalf of the children of this country and ensure that teaching is an attractive career for graduates across all subjects?

Keeping science teachers in schools

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This is an interesting article written with the support of The Gatsby Foundation on the effect of special retention payments on keeping mathematics and science teachers in state schools Paying early career science teachers 5% more keeps significant numbers in the classroom | Education | Gatsby Personally, I wish researchers would not talk about teachers leaving the profession when they mean no longer working in stated funded schools. These teachers might be working in private schools, the further education sector or Sixth Form Colleges whose employees are not captured in the annual Teacher Workforce Survey.

My other concern with this interesting piece of research is the regional bias to the data. As a result of using specific payments rather than the generic use of retention payments, most of the areas surveyed are in either Yorkshire and The Humber region or in the North East of England. The latter region offers teachers few opportunities for transfer between schools due to the limited number of vacancies each year compared with other regions according to TeachVac data www.teachvac.couk .

The fact of reduced numbers of vacancies on offer might mask a group of teachers staying in state schools, but moving to a different school. In Constable et al (1999) a research report for the University of Northumbria on the supply of teachers of physics, the ability to teach ‘A’ level physics early in a teaching career was an important motivation for teachers, as was the opportunity to teach mathematics rather than the other sciences for physicists when not timetabled to teach physics.

In a part of the country, such as the North East, with relatively little other graduate opportunities, especially compared to say the London region where not only are they many private school vacancies but also a buoyant graduate market, it would have been interesting to review the cohort in this Gatsby funded research with say a similar cohort of Teach First trainees to review any differences in the economic benefits between classroom based salary supported training and post-training retention incentives.

Of course, keeping teachers in schools is only part of the battle. Such policies help the schools where these teachers work but do nothing for other schools suffering as a result of the overall shortage of teachers in say, physics. Do subject enhancement courses that attract more recruits have a better economic return or could perhaps retaining other science teachers or even mathematics teachers to teach physics be more cost-effective than offering higher salaries to those that have chosen to teacher physics. Understanding, as Constable et al tried to do, what motivates physics teachers either to stay or to leave ibn more general terms might help devise new policies to overcome teacher shortages.

Tracking expertise might also be helped if Qualified Teacher Status was tied to specific subjects and only temporary accreditation to teach a subject was granted to those without the appropriate training and subject knowledge.  This might help keep better track of where shortages are to be found.

Increasing Science Teacher Capacity

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The Gatsby Foundation has continued its contribution to the debate about how to solve the shortage of science teachers with a new pamphlet entitled: ‘Increasing the Quantity and Quality of Science Teachers in Schools: Eight evidence-based principles’. The on-line version can be found at: http://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/increasingscienceteachers-web.pdf

Although the document is primarily about science teachers, it has some generally applicable points that can apply to some other subjects as well. However, it is a bit potentially limited in its application in places, in that it doesn’t seemingly put the points into any order and it doesn’t discuss what might be the best scenario if some of the suggestions are impossible to implement. Take the second suggestion of ‘Providing Stable Teaching Assignments’ where the document suggests that:

‘Heads of Science should consider increasing the stability with which teachers are assigned to specific year groups. This may be particularly valuable in science departments that do not have enough staff to specialise across the three sciences. Assignment to specific key-stages is particularly important for early-career teachers, who are still gaining fluency in planning (Ost & Schiman, 2015). Where staffing pressures make it necessary to add new year groups to a teacher’s timetable, departments should provide additional support such as materials and mentoring.’

Ost, B., & Schiman, J. C. (2015). Grade-specific experience, grade reassignments, and teacher turnover. Economics of Education Review, 46, 112-126

There is good sense here, but how do you protect the only qualified physics teacher if that is what the school has?

Teachers in other subjects where staffing levels do not permit this type of approach; religious education, music and often the humanities, for instance, might well ask how any school will compensate for the necessity of teaching across all year groups. Should non-contact time differ by subject and the amount of lesson preparation and marking required of a teacher?

In science, we seem to be returning, if indeed we ever left, to a situation where there are far more teachers in training with a background in biology than in the other sciences. The House of Commons Education Select Committee recently discussed the 4th Industrial Revolution, and the needs for the future of British Society. If there is a lack of balance in the abilities of teachers of science to cover the whole gamut of the science curriculum, how might the needs of the future influence how the skills of those teachers the system does possess are most effectively utilised?

The Gatsby pamphlet also suggests flattening the pay gradient in the early years of a teacher’s career. However, if every school did this it might nullify the effects. There is an argument for looking at pay differentials and calculating the cost of turnover of staff and recruitment challenges against paying part of the recruitment costs to the existing workforce. Recruitment and Retention allowances make this a possible strategy for schools with the available cash. However, many schools would say that at present they do not have the cash to take such an approach to solving their staffing issues.

 

Using TeachVac data to understand the market for science teachers

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The Gatsby Foundation today published an interesting report that shows how TeachVac’s detailed data on the labour market for teachers can be used to illustrate a range of different points about the recruitment of science teachers during 2016 and 2017.

http://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/specialist-science-teacher-recruitment-2016-2017-310118.pdf

TeachVac can provide similar data across other composite subject areas such as languages and design and technology. TeachVac has recently published a report into the leadership market in the primary school sector during 2017. The data from TeachVac is much more recent than that provided through the School wWorkforce Census and may well be more accurate given the percentage of schools that complete the census in full. TeachVac will be publishing a report into the labour market for secondary school classroom teachers during 2017 sometime in February.

TeachVac Global, the site for international schools, is preparing a report on recruiting teachers from England in 2018. This will be provided free to participating international schools.

TeachVac’s ITT index tells schools how easy they may find it to recruit a trainee to fill a classroom teacher vacancy. The index is updated daily. As regular readers know, Business Studies has already been coded amber for September 2017 vacancies, meaning some schools will face difficulties recruiting such teachers. Some may already being facing challenges in other subjects, but that may be because trainees don’t want to work in their area rather than because of an overall shortage. However, TeachVac staff are watching design and technology and English to see how soon these subjects will switch from green to amber.