Tag Archives: supply teachers

‘A drop in the ocean’

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Much has been made of the government’s campaign to recruit ex-teachers back into the classroom as supply teachers to help out during the latest phase of the covid pandemic.

Here is the actual wording from the DfE about the success of the campaign by early January 2022:

Findings

• There were at least 585 ex-teachers coming forward to either Teach First, or 47 of the estimated 400-500 teacher supply agencies, between the 20th December 2021 and 7th January 2022.

• Of this total, over 100 expressions of interest have been reported by Teach First.

• A further 485 sign-ups of ex-teachers were reported by the 47 supply agencies who responded to the DfE survey.

• Given this survey response only covers a small number of agencies, this will not reflect the true total as other agencies not surveyed, or which did not respond, are likely to also have had sign-ups, and the call for ex-teachers to return is still ongoing. The true number of sign-ups since the call was launched will be larger.

Number of ex-teachers coming forward to join the school workforce (publishing.service.gov.uk) 12th January 2022

Interestingly the government doesn’t so far seem to have spent much money on the campaign. In answer to a written Parliamentary Question Robin Walker, the DfE Minister replied that:

As of 5 January, the spend relating to marketing and communications in support of the national appeal for former teachers to return to the profession is £3,882.69. This amount consists of:

  • Design work for a toolkit of assets to be used by partners of the department: £2,227.80.
  • Paid Search Advertising: £1,654.89.

Written questions and answers – Written questions, answers and statements – UK Parliament

To their credit, the government recognises that the 485 sign-ups don’t account for the whole total. Now assuming the 10% response rate can be grossed up, the national figure might be around 5,000. (The DfE footnote to editors said that ‘We estimate this number of responses represents around 10% of the agencies operating in the market. This figure is based on estimates provided by trade bodies. Agencies will vary in size and so this figure should not be taken as an indication of market share.’)

Now, we don’t know the geographical spread of these new supply teachers. We don’t know whether they are willing to work in both primary and secondary schools. We don’t know whether they will work five days a week or just for a couple of days.

We can assume that like other teachers the normal stock of supply teachers are affected by covid in the same way as the rest of the population. The 2020 School Workforce Census identified that there were 11,574 ‘occasional teachers’ in schools at the time of the census. So, and additional 5,000 to the stock is clearly a useful number. But, with a teaching force of 461,000 it only takes just over one per cent of the workforce to be absent due to covid to use up the whole of the possible new recruits to supply teaching.

Could the government have done more. Certainly, the cash spend seems low compared to other campaigns. What of unemployed history and PE teachers that completed training last summer, but couldn’t find a teaching post. Has the government worked with training providers to identify those still wanting to enter teaching and offered some support to help them do so even on a temporary basis?

No doubt as this term unfolds more information will become available about how successful the government was at helping schools to stay open, and the part the national campaign played in achieving that end compared with the actions taken locally by schools, Trusts and Local Authorities.

Supply Teachers left out in the cold

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Last May, on this blog, I suggested that NQTs without a job could be hired as supernumerary staff to help schools with pupils that had fallen behind in their education during the first lockdown. Now we are into a new period of lockdown where schools are struggling to operate two parallel learning systems; one for pupils in schools – and there are many more of those – and the other for those still remote learning. As a result, if we really want to ensure high quality schooling for all, there seems to be good reason to boost the staffing of schools, lest the overload on the existing staff of trying to manage two distinct learning regimes at one time causes the system to collapse.

Intelligence is reaching me that although teachers on long-term supply contracts could be furloughed, they are often not being offered that option, possibly because employers are now required to pay National Insurance and Employer Pension Contributions. So, the risk is that instead of a win-win situation, we have the opposite where both teachers and schools lose out, and pupils’ education also suffers: all for the want of a small amount of cash.

Where a supply teacher is replacing a member of staff, then that contract should be honoured. During the autumn term supply teachers in parts of the country were reporting even less work than normal. When schools are fully staffed for September, the first part of the autumn term can be a lean time for supply work. However, I was told of one local authority where demand was higher than normal, as high attendance rates meant staff self-isolating needed to be replaced.

This term, has been shambolic, but the basic point needs to be reiterated, if schools need to run two systems to teach all pupils, either physically or remotely, then the funding arrangements need to make this possible. There is only so much goodwill that can be drawn upon. Supply teachers offer a pool of teachers that can help, but they must be funded.

There is also the more general issue of pay for supply teachers. This has never been good, especially where agencies need to make a profit on what they can charge schools. The teacher is the loser in this market, especially where there are several companies competing to cut prices to schools to secure work.

Indeed, supply teaching is a very cyclical business, and one with high fixed overheads for those companies operating on a traditional model. When schools are fully staffed, as they will be for the next few years, it is even more difficult to make money, and I expect to see some consolidation across the industry, and less work for teachers, especially in the primary sector where rolls are also falling.

I have long wondered why teachers don’t form cooperatives and take over the market themselves. They could also offer tutoring, where hourly rates are often higher than for classroom teaching, despite being one to one and not having to handle a whole class of pupils. A good cooperative could also offer coaching, mentoring, professional development and even adult learning, but it requires someone with an interest in running a business to set it up.

But, if you leave it to others, then what you get is what they are prepared to give you.

More thoughts on school funding

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Earlier this week I listened to the head of a leading group representing private schools tell us how much they saved the State, Their assessment of the amount was based upon the fees they received from parents.

Now, of course, the figure quoted was probably an exaggeration as even if it didn’t include income from overseas students, and the sector is a significant export earner in normal times, then the fees received for pupils resident in this country are higher than the State would be prepared to pay to educate these young people, except in the case of SEND places in specialist schools.

Even allowing for these caveats, if the unemployment associated with the pandemic really does slow down the economy, then, inevitably, some parents may decide that private schooling is something they can no longer afford. There will be bursaries and scholarship and grandparents will offer help, but every child that switches from the private sector to the State sector creates winners and losers and is an additional cost to the State.

Schools that gain pupils will receive extra funding in the fullness of time. However, unless the overall pot of cash increases, there will be less for everyone. With school rolls overall still increasing, especially in the more expensive to fund secondary sector, this possible demand for extra cash could not come at a worse point in the demographic cycles. Any switch to funding for vocational skills, and especially for the Further Education sector, will also make finding additional funding for schools more of a challenge for the Secretary of State in his talks with The Treasury. With pressure to pay the least well-off in society more, increasing teachers’ pay rather than that of support staff may well be a real challenge unless class sizes increase and teacher numbers are reduced.

So, how might schools react? Finding saving won’t be easy, but here are a couple of suggestions. Firstly, and not surprisingly, cut back on recruitment costs. The DfE vacancy site isn’t doing the job it was set up to do. As a result, the profession should create a working party to attack the recruitment costs with the aim of saving schools perhaps £20 million a year. A really effective scheme could save even more.

Secondly, take the profit element out of supply teacher costs. Thirty years ago, local authorities were inefficient and uncoordinated in carrying out this function for schools. Costs have been driven down, but market economics has created a business with a profit element. Removing this element by either taking it back in house or creating a fixed price model could again help save cash for schools.

The third, and most radical suggestion, is around the funding of teachers’ salaries. In the education governance revolution of thirty years ago, decisions about salary bills were delegated to individual schools, with each schools funding being based upon a notional average salary bill. Previously, schools had their salary bill paid for by local authorities based around a framework of school Group Sizes that generated numbers of promoted and leadership posts for each school.

These days. MATs can set salary policies for all their schools, but local authorities cannot for maintained schools. Such policies can affect wage bills, and especially the cost of promoted posts and leadership positions. Young teachers are cheap; older more experienced teachers cost more. Do we want our more experienced teachers leading our more challenging schools? Could a more logical system that took the wage bill for teachers away from schools save money? I don’t know the answer. But, the wage bill is the largest cost in education and it is worth asking the question: how can we protect the income of teachers and other school staff in a time when pressure on the public purse is immense and are their efficiencies that can be made? A notional staffing model that school could test themselves against might be a start. Now is surely time for some radical thinking around the goals we want education to achieve for Society. Depriving the deprived is not one of them.

The author is Chair of TeachVac, the job board for teachers http://www.teachvac.co.uk

How efficient are our schools?

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Now I always enjoy reading DfE documents that tell schools how to do things, and their recently published Review of efficiency in the schools system https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/209114/Review_of_efficiency_in_the_schools_system.pdf has some delightful gems within it. My favour is the quote taken from a 2009 McKinsey report that said ‘Second only to the quality of teaching is school leadership. Replacing an ‘average’ principal with an ‘outstanding’ principal in an ‘average’ school could increase student achievement by over 20 percentile points’. I am sure that this shouldn’t be used solely as a reason for governing bodies of all schools not regarded as above average this week by a passing Ofsted team to give their head notice at the end of term celebrations. But it does raise the issue of how we can improve school leadership now that an increasing number of schools don’t have local managers with senior education experience they can easily contact to discuss problems.

There is a lot about staffing and the effectiveness of spending on teachers over support staff in the DfE’s report. For instance, in the high spending school category, school in the top 20% spend 58% of their budgets on staffing whereas schools in the bottom 20% of attainment among the high spenders only spend 51% of their budgets on staffing. I guess the latter may have more NQTs and a high staff turnover. It would also be interesting to see how Teach First fits into this scenario as it is a relatively low spending programme for staffing even though it is an expensive way to train some types of teachers.

On Saturday I talked to an NUT conference for supply teachers, many of whom are a very under-valued and underpaid resource. The DfE report did note that those schools that employed their own supply staff (presumably mostly large secondary schools) saved money, although the debate about the need for subject expertise can also be an important factor. However, schools do need to recognise that the cheapest option isn’t always the best solution to improving standards, and you may well get what you pay for. The best supply teachers do the job because they want that type of life whereas others do it because it is the only work that they can get in teaching. There is room for the professional associations to take more interest in the fate of this group of workers, especially as the government is seemingly trying to de-professionalise teaching as a career. Implicit in the DfE report is the view that ‘cover supervisors’ and ‘teaching assistants’ aren’t the same as teachers and, despite the rhetoric from Ministers, teachers who are qualified do make a difference.

The challenge for the next decade may well be how to entice the most able at teaching to enter the profession when the wider economy is once again offering a range of job opportunities. Ensuring those that do enter teaching are fairly distributed between schools will also be a challenge that won’t just be about money.