Tag Archives: recruitment

Incentives to train as a teacher

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There have been two recent announcements from the DfE that are of interest. Firstly, the support levels for postgraduate ITT students on courses in 2022-23. These bursaries are designed to encourage recruitment into subjects where targets are being missed. The DfE has made the following announcement:

For 2022 to 2023, we are offering bursaries of:

  • £24,000 in chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics
  • £15,000 in design and technology, geography and languages (including ancient languages)
  • £10,000 in biology

Applicants may be eligible for a bursary if they have 1st, 2:1, 2:2, PhD or Master’s.

These bursaries sit alongside the scholarship programme that DfE persuaded the Learned Societies to offer some years ago.

Business Studies still doesn’t appear in the list. This is despite it being one of the subjects where schools can struggle to recruit teachers. However, it is encouraging to see design and technology back on the list, albeit not at the £24,000 level where the bursary really might make a difference.

Now that the DfE is managing recruitment, they will have nowhere to hide if the scheme doesn’t produce results. While there should always be sufficient trainees in history and physical education, some of the other subjects such as music and religious education may suffer from not being included in the bursary list. But, I guess, the bursary is a backward looking recruitment tool not one designed to prevent a possible future shortage.

The other announcement from the DfE was on the access to the National Professional Qualifications. These will now be available to all teachers and not just those in the originally designated areas. As the funding remains the same, there is a risk that the contribution that this scheme will make to the ‘levelling up’ agenda will be diluted by now being offered to all teachers. We won’t know until the curriculum and selection criteria and availability of courses are compared with the original objectives.

Whatever the outcome, it is good news to see attention being paid to professional development once again. Leaving professional development up to individual schools as employers at a time of financial constraint is a risky business as this is a budget line that can all too easily become a victim of cutbacks. Expecting schools to fund professional development that advances the career of a teacher and may well take them away from the school on promotion is always a big risk. Indeed, it is one reason for dealing with this funding stream on a regional or even national basis.

The news from the labour market is that across some parts of England vacancy levels have been higher than usual for the autumn in some subjects. Is this a catching-up exercise or are some teachers re-thinking their futures in the profession in a world where covid is likely to be endemic.

Few signals from Manchester

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An extract from the Secretary of State’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference

‘Every child deserves a great teacher. And every teacher deserves great training.

” I will bring forward a schools white paper in the new year outlining plans to tackle innumeracy and illiteracy “

So as the foundation of the next decade of reform during this parliament we will deliver 500,000 teacher training opportunities. We are carrying out a fundamental overhaul that will make this country the best in the world to train and learn as a teacher.’

50,000 training places a year will be hard to achieve under any regime, especially if some universities decide to pull out of ITT or ITE because of the government changes to the curriculum for preparing teahcers

.Interestingly, the Gatsby Foundation has published a pamphlet of essays on the topic of reforming teacher education in response to the government’s market review. itt-reform-expert-perspectives-2021.pdf (gatsby.org.uk) I was especially taken by the essay by Ben Rogers of the Paradigm Trust about the distribution of ITT places, something that featured in the previous post on this blog

With a government now seemingly committed to a high wage; high skill level economy, education will be an important player in driving forward the success of that policy. Now, of course, the government having seen the outcome of the tutoring programme, might want to turn over the skills agenda to the private sector and leave schools with the basic curriculum centred around literacy and numeracy to teach. May be that will be the focus of the White Paper that seems to hark back to the Blair government’s education play book.

However, there are other problems facing the Secretary of State. This blog has recently reminded readers that the lorry driver shortage is as nothing compared to the shortage of design and technology teachers, not to mention business studies and physics teachers.

It is no use telling the private sector to ‘get its house in order’ when the public sector, where the Conservative Party has been in control of government for the past decade, has failed to deal with teacher shortages. The DfE site for teaching now explicitly shows whether a course provider will handle visa applications.

Ahead of the Spending Review, a Review that is unlikely to be kind to education, the Secretary of State would have been hard put to announce costly new policies, especially since he has little control over how schools actually spend their cash. There are saving to be made still in the school sector. These range from cutting recruitment costs that might save £40 million or so to a major rethink about the diseconomies of scale of the academy programme.

Now the Conservative Party has created a Labour style NHS model of central control for the school system, shorn of local democracy, it is surely time to look seriously at what the system now costs to administer. Local Authorities may have had their faults, but a high cost structure wasn’t generally one of them. Time for a savings task force?

DfE ITT courses site now viewable

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Those that have looked at UCAS ITT site searches for postgraduate ITT courses in past years won’t be surprised by the new DfE site that opened for viewing earlier today of courses for 2022 entry. They might be disappointed, depending upon their point of view.

A search for physics courses in London with a salary attached produced results for 42 courses. However, some 20 of the course providers are located outside the 32 boroughs that make up the generally accepted definition of the capital. Now, those 20 providers, including the National physics provider may well have schools registered in London offering places.

There doesn’t seem to be a reminder of Teach First, presumably the site thinks viewers will already have researched that route if a salary is important. But, in my view, it is always worth reminding viewers of the other possible routes.

I was also struck by how few of the courses were run from schools within inner London. This is especially important as today Lewis Hamilton, the racing driver launched a campaign to train more Black teachers in STEM subjects. If, as the IFS study discussed in a previous post is right about mobility of trainee teachers this may be an issue worth considering.

Then there is the issue of multiple listings for what is in essence the same course. One version of a course has QTS; another version QTS plus a PGCE. As yet, it isn’t clear how many places are available on each course. I have always maintained this is a key piece of information for candidates.

Interestingly, in the year the DfE ran application process for the School Direct programme they included the information and how many places had been filled. The research from that data led to my suggesting we were heading for a teacher supply crisis in some subjects and the subsequent exchanges with the DfE via the media.

A search of the DfE site reveals some areas where there are few or even no courses available. Thus, there appears to be no provider in Oxfordshire of Computing ITT courses after a search on Computing with or without vacancies. Curiously, a search on Oxford by providers brings up four courses for Computing at the SCITT that didn’t appear in the previous search.

Each provider has a listing for whether they can sponsor visas for overseas applicants. Of the 8,000+ course combinations, just fewer than 1,300 sponsor visa applications. I assume that the government thinks this is a good idea, even if in the past that route has failed to ensure all ITT places required were filled.

Over the next few months this system will bed down and be the ‘go to’ place for those wanting to train as a teacher in our new high skill, high wage economy. Whether some applicants will be prepared to train without a salary, while other have that advantage and all it brings with it, will be an interesting discussion if the data is provided to measure any different rates of interest.

Does pay matter for potential teachers?

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The DfE has recently published a Research Report commissioned from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Higher-education-geographical-mobility-and-early-career-earnings.pdf (ifs.org.uk)

The report concludes, as far as Education as a subject is concerned that:

All else being equal, there are no large earnings differences between movers and non-movers who graduated in nursing, education and social care. This is likely to reflect the fact that wages in these occupations are set nationally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, graduates in education and social care are also least likely to move away from their area of origin, conditional on characteristics.

Education students have some of the lowest mobility levels shown in Figure 9 within the Report. This is an area where what the Report defines as ‘Education’ is important. Does it include only undergraduate ITT – almost all preparation courses for primary school teaching? Does it include non-ITT Education degrees and PGCE courses as well or are they excluded? If PGCE courses are included do they include students on SCITTs and other school-based courses validated by universities? I have emailed the IFS to ask these questions as they may have an impact on the data.

An email exchange with the lead author reveals that ‘Education is undergrad [in the study] and so does not include PGCE. So yes you are correct, it is mostly primary. The secondary teachers are going to be mixed in amongst the other subjects.’ As a result of this exchange, I am still not certain about the location within the study of non-ITT Education degree courses. There is more work to be undertaken on the mobility of trainee teachers.

However, the fact that wages are set nationally may well be an important factor, especially if the report standardised for London Weighting and other geographical pay scales. This is important in towns with good commuting links to inner London such as High Wycombe- a town cited as losing a lot of its graduates in the early years of their careers.

The incidence of work may be as important as national pay scales. There are primary schools located across the length and breadth of England, so offering the ability to receive the same pay as elsewhere and remain in your locality may be a strong draw to teaching for certain groups of students.

Last year, the IFS conducted a study into Postgraduate earnings that specifically included a section on PGCE students by their degree subject Earnings returns to postgraduate degrees in the UK (ifs.org.uk) There are important messages within the data and analysis of that study for those currently thinking about the future shape of secondary teacher preparation courses and whether, when the economy is performing well, subjects such as mathematics and physics will always be ‘shortage subjects’ for teacher supply and the consequences of that fact for the ‘levelling up’ agenda.

Twenty years ago I conducted some market research for the then TTA that showed where the strongest recruiting grounds for potential teachers were to be found. Teach First also recognised that Russell Group universities without a School of Education were a potentially source of entrants to teaching, but these numbers of graduates proved insufficient to meet the growing number of places on offer as the scheme developed.

Pay may not be the key driver for some entering teaching but it can seemingly be a deterrent to others. Solving that problem and cracking the teacher supply issue is nothing new.

Thank You UCAS

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Today marks the final set of monthly data from UCAS in relation to postgraduate teacher preparation courses. From Next month the DfE takes over the application process for all such postgraduate routes into teaching. The remaining undergraduate courses will still be part of the UCAS process.

Thirty years ago, in the days of PCAS, UCAS and the Clearing House for Teacher Training, I started monitoring the monthly data produced to study the implications for teacher supply of recruitment levels for courses starting each September. So, this may well be my final report on the subject. With readership of this blog falling away in recent months, that probably won’t be an issue. For many

At some point, I may write a blog about the highlights of thirty years of looking at the data, but enough of looking backward: what are the implications of today’s data? Primary courses should have more than sufficient trainees to meet demand in 2020. Applications were at their highest levels this September since the 2016/17 cycle.

Across the secondary sector, the picture is more mixed. Overall applications remained high, although some 10,000 below last year’s surge that was a result of the response to the covid pandemic and the shutting down of the economy. This year, subjects can be divided into three groups.

Firstly, those where applications are sufficient to ensure there should be no shortages of teachers in 2022. These subjects include, Art, PE, history and chemistry. Music may also be in this group, but might be on the cusp of the second group where applications are high by past standards, but may not be enough to meet demand in 2022 and will need watching when the ITT Census appears for the numbers that have actually made it onto courses. This group of subjects includes, RE, mathematics and business studies.

The final group is those subjects where the number of recorded acceptances will not be enough to meet likely demand next year. This group includes some regulars such as physics, IT and design and technology as well as biology, English, a subject that might also be in the second group depending upon demand in 2022, geography and modern foreign languages.

Many of these subjects are those thought important by the former Minister of State, although during his tenure at Sanctuary Buildings the supply crisis in these subjects was never solved.

Design and technology deserves especial mention as it is facing its worst crisis ever in terms of numbers offered places. The 320 recorded as placed or conditionally placed is half the number of September last year and the lowest level recorded since before 2010. No doubt the possible surplus of teachers of art and design will help stave off complete catastrophe in the staffing of the subject.

There is some evidence that bursaries do matter. Both biology and geography have seen numbers accepted drop sharply following changes in financial support. Chemistry has been a beneficiary in the sciences, suggesting that some possible biologist have switched subjects to chemistry and the more attractive finance package during training.

So, farewell and thank you to everyone at UCAS. We may not have seen eye to eye all the time, but I appreciate you work and the data you have produced.

Cottage Industry or Modern Workplace

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There has been a lot of chat about the resumption of Ofsted inspections of ITT settings following the suspension during the first year of the covid crisis. In the past, ofsted has tended to see ITT providers as reaching a high standard in preparing the next generation of teachers. However, the early inspection outcomes under the new framework have ruffled feathers with some providers being judged as either Requiring Improvement or even Inadequate.

Further education provision, often seen as the overlooked child of teacher/lecturer preparation, has come in for the most concern from inspectors, with two university curses flagged as Inadequate and two Further Education based courses seen as Requiring Improvement. As a former teacher educator that doesn’t surprise me. This area of preparation often doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves.

From these first round of inspections there has only been one Outstanding grade, for a provider in South West London. Three universities have received Requires Improvement grades for part of their provisions. All are post-1992 universities with a long tradition in teacher preparation. None are in areas where there is a teacher shortage. Two other providers of courses for teachers in the school sector have been graded as inadequate. Both in the North West, an area where there is no overall shortage of teacher supply.

Is there an agenda here? Data suggests that there are too many training places in the primary sector for future needs if the intention is to match training numbers with perceived need and not to regard the training of teachers are an open choice course not related to market need. With the shambles over lorry driver numbers and other shortages, matching need for workers to supply may move up the government’s agenda in the future.

In teaching, because the government has always met the initial costs of training, whether by grants in the past or now through student loans, the Teacher Supply Model has always attempted to match the supply of teachers with expected demand: not always successfully, as this blog has noted in the past.

Adverse inspection outcomes in areas where teacher supply is less of an issue, especially in the primary sector, could be a means of flagging up courses where accreditation might be removed. It will be interesting to watch the data as it emerges from further inspection reports.

Neither of the two providers with ‘national’ in their title were rated as Outstanding. Both the mathematics/physics course that involves a large number of independent schools, and the Modern Foreign Language course were rated as Good. Surely such specialist provision ought to be Outstanding in their preparation of new teachers? No doubt they will be at their next inspections.

How do small courses manage issues such as introducing trainees to recent research and creating a balance between generic teaching skills and subject knowledge acquisition where there may be only one or two trainees in a particular subject. Additionally, how do some schools handle an introduction to diversity issues in largely mono cultural locations? In respect of the levelling up agenda, this might be an issue for courses located only in schools with strong parental support or excellent outcomes.

These are early days, but there is much discussion about the landscape for initial teacher preparation courses as there was in the mid-1970s; late 1990s and no doubt will be again in the future when change is being mooted. This blog has been in existence long enough to contain a detailed submission to the Carter Review. I will watch the future with interest.

School Funding: looking for savings

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Either schools are under-funded or they are not. They certainly say that they are. The IFS Briefing Note  https://ifs.org.uk/publications/15588 lends credence to that view.

But what do they do about it? As a business owner, I need to use my resources in the most effective manner. Schools it seems to me can afford to complain about their funding while still spending in a manner that doesn’t bring a sensible return on the outlay.

Let’s take recruitment spending. And let’s narrow that to spending on teacher recruitment by secondary schools – the most lucrative part of the market for the private sector. This is also an area where I know quite a bit about how the market works having established TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk some seven years ago as a job board for teaching vacancies and where I am still the current Chair.

Now, using TeachVac’s extensive database, we can calculate that the average secondary school recruits around eleven teachers a year. Some recruit fewer, and new schools may recruit more in their first few years.

Some teachers are easy to recruit, such as history teachers or teachers of physical education. Other teachers, such as teachers of business studies or physics, are difficult to recruit at any time, and virtually impossible to recruit for a January vacancy unless a school is exceptionally fortunate.

So, let’s assume over a five year period, a third of vacancies a school may advertise are easy to fill; a third a bit of a challenge and a third very difficult. How do you spend your cash wisely as a school to meet your staffing needs?

Many schools and MATs take out a subscription to an on-line platform that can run into a six figure sum each year. That’s a lot of cash to spend on an easy to fill job and even more cash for a job you cannot fill. So, maybe the cash pays for the third of vacancies in the middle group, possibly an average of 4 vacancies a year. Is that value for money?

TeachVac can fill those vacancies at much less cost to schools, and so can the DfE vacancy site. With TeachVac a school doesn’t have to do anything other than put a job on its website. TeachVac matches candidates looking for the type of vacancy and can report on the size of the market.

With the DfE site, a school must enter the job and hope it can be seen among the plethora of non-teaching posts cluttering up the DfE site.

The DfE site also has the disadvantage of only offering state school posts, so teachers that want a teaching post regardless of whether it is in the state or private sectors probably won’t bother to use the DfE site. TeachVac doesn’t suffer from this constraint.

TeachVac is reviewing its services to ensure better value for money for schools. After all, out technology costs a fraction of historical costs of advertising and at TeachVac we have always thought these saving should be passed on to schools. Do tell us what you think.

August lull in teaching jobs

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The announcement that vacancies across the economy have picked up will be good news for those teachers unable to find a teaching post. As is normal, August is a quiet month for teaching vacancies, although there are some new vacancies still being posted every working day, as those registered with TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk can testify.

Of course, with many of their administrative staff working term time only contracts, schools in some cases will be saving jobs for the return of those staff who can then post them on the school website and elsewhere.

The return of jobs in the wider economy is likely to affect recruitment into teaching as a career, especially if the bounce in wage growth were to continue while wages in public sector positions were affected by a government imposed wage freeze. The first real evidence on how the wider economy is impacting upon teaching as a career will come with the new recruitment into ITT season, although that will be further complicated by the new arrangements controlled by the DfE. Data should be available by late autumn.

Evidence from TeachVac shows that it is growing in use as a platform for teachers looking for teaching jobs and still has many more teaching jobs on offer than the government site run by the DfE. Registrations at https://www.teachvac.co.uk/ continue to grow

Mutterings about the changes to the ITT curriculum and the degree of DfE control over the sector may have an impact, especially if some universities decide to offer ITT outside the government envelope and continue with research and professional development activities as their main focus.

Although the country will need to train fewer teachers in the years to come as the fall in the birth rate impacts on schools, the system cannot withstand too high a degree of uncertainty and reorganisation with there being some effects on the labour market for teachers. No doubt the private sector will be watching carefully what happens as it still draws on the government funded university sector for many of its new teachers.

A look back at history

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Eight years ago this month I wrote a post on this blog pointing out my concerns that not all places on ITT courses were likely to be filled that year. My views made it into some national newspapers and resulted in me writing the blog post that I reproduce below. We still have issues with teacher supply in key subjects, but we do possibly have a review of how we train teachers. Whether the outcome will be more trainees filling gaps in schools where they are needed is still an open question.

Scaremongering!

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So now I know I am officially a scaremonger. A DfE spokesperson, helpfully anonymous, is quoted by the Daily Mail today as saying of my delving into the current teacher training position that there was no teacher shortage, adding: ‘This is scaremongering and based on incomplete evidence.’

Well the first thing to note is that I haven’t said that there is a teacher shortage, just that training places are not being filled: not the same thing. Indeed, I have said a teacher shortage is less likely than in the past in the near future because Mr Gove has mandated that qualified teachers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the whole of the USA can teach here as qualified teachers with no need to retrain. With an oversupply of teachers in parts of both Canada and Australia that should prevent any short-term problem developing even though another part of the government isn’t very keen on importing workers from abroad, presumably including from within the Commonwealth and a one time colony.

More serious is the charge of using ‘incomplete evidence’ in reaching my conclusions. If the DfE has figures to show that more places will be filled this September on teacher training courses than I am predicting, then please will they share them with the wider community, if not, will they please justify what they mean.

It could be that they take issue with my colleague Chris Waterman’s assessment of the number of those likely to be taught Mathematics by unqualified teachers. However, it is worth noting that earlier this year the DfE produced its own evidence to show that 17.9% of the Mathematics hours taught to years 7-13 were led by those with ‘no relevant post A Level qualification’. That was some 85,000 hours of instruction. Assuming each class of pupils has six hours of contact per week that makes more than 14,000 classes already being taught by unqualified staff, and with no programme in place to improve their qualifications if they are intending to teach the subject for a period of time. If each class has only 20 pupils, the total number of pupils already being taught by teachers with no measurable post A Level qualification in Mathematics can easily be worked out. It is also worth pointing out that the DfE showed that in November 2012 less than half of those teaching Mathematics had a degree that could be classified as a Mathematics degree, with 23% having a PGCE as their highest Mathematics qualification and a degree in another subject, hopefully with lots of applied mathematics as a apart of the degree.

As Chris Waterman has rightly pointed out the raising of the participation age to 17 this September and 18 a year later should increase the demand for Mathematics teachers as the Wolf Report endorsed the now widely held view that more youngsters should continue to study Mathematics until the age of18.

The government has taken a bold gamble with teacher education: moving training to schools; introducing pre-entry tests in literacy and numeracy; raising the cost of training in many subjects to £9,000 for fees plus living costs. It is important that there is a credible debate about how these changes are working.

After all, in 2010, Mr Gove promised 200 teachers of Mandarin would be trained each year, and although some providers such as the London Institute offer it as an option I doubt that target was ever reached. It is time for a radical overhaul of teacher preparation to really meet the needs of a 21st century education system.

Eight years on and who really cares about the qualifications and subject knoweldge of those that teach all our children across England?

Sorry to read this

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https://www.tes.com/news/statement-future-fe-coverage-tes So the tes – once The Times Educational Supplement – is now focusing on schools and ending its coverage of the Further Education sector. I imagine that there will be staff in the sector that will still follow the tes because their work is similar to that of their colleagues in schools. But, they will no longer have a dedicated focus on their varied and interesting sector.

I wonder where this leaves the main publication. Looking at the accounts submitted for the year to last August by the American owners – available for all to see on the companies’ house website – recruitment advertising still plays a very large part in the tes’s revenue stream.

At this time of year, schools are reviewing their subscriptions to the tes. Most of the tes income on recruitment comes from subscriptions these days, rather than placed advertisements for specific posts. As TeachVac steadily increases its teacher base, and thus both ‘hits’ and matches. More than 6.7 million of the former in the past twelve months and more than a million matches made so far in 2021, schools might want to evaluate TeachVac more closely. After all, cash is tight for many, if not most, schools and funding won’t become any more generous with a funding formula linked so closely to pupil numbers.

In the past falling pupil numbers had less effect of school incomes. Now there is a direct relationship between funding and pupil numbers it can make sense to take our unnecessary costs. Comparing TeachVac with the hopeless DfE vacancy site is a no-brainer, especially when TeachVac has more than four times the number of teaching posts this week than are listed on the DfE site. To allow users to compare the site, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk now has a live jobs counter on its front page.

As tes owners finalise their accounts for the 2020-21 financial year that ends at the end of August their first priority must be to ensure sufficient income to pay their bondholders. That’s why recruitment subscriptions for schools in England are so important. We won’t see these accounts until perhaps May of 2022, but those running the company already know what is happening to their income stream.

The ending of a FE offering by tes must tell watchers something. A concentration of effort on the core school sector or a need to further prune peripheral activities that don’t pay their way.

With fewer pupils in schools in England, demand for teachers is likely to fall unless more teachers can either be enticed to work abroad in the international schools or quit teaching for other professions. Either way, jobs in key subjects are down so far in 2021 in the lucrative secondary school market, but up in the primary sector where tes traditionally had more competition, not least from local authority job boards.

The next twelve months are going to be an interesting time in the teacher recruitment market. As its Chair, I look forward to the par that TeachVac will play in shaping future trends.