I am not a great fan of the new way of presenting statistics, and especially of the challenges it present when trying to create specific tables. However that aside, the key points are that as expected: trainee numbers are up, but that not all subjects met the Teacher Supply Model number for the year. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised by that fact as I had predicted that would be the case, despite the increase in applications in the March to September period.
Higher Education, no doubt helped by the offer of both undergraduate and postgraduate places, increased its share of the market from 38% to 41%. Still way off its former levels, but no longer on a downward trend. School Direct Salaried route, the classic employment based route, was the big faller; down from 7% to 5% this year. Teach First took 4% against 5% last year. SCITTs held steady at 12% as did the Fee-based School Direct route at 23% of the total.
Some tables produced today by the DfE may include the small number of trainees forecast to join courses after the census date, but the differences are small.
Future blogs will explore the data in more details, but arts and humanities, and some subjects that have recruited poorly in recent years, have done well, even if in the case of Design and Technology and Physics and Chemistry, mathematics and Modern Languages they still did not meet the Teacher Supply Model number for the year.
The increase in Physics from 42% to 45% of the TSM number was especially disappointing, but not surprising.
Of more concern to those on courses and HM Treasury must be the over-recruitment in history –up from 115% to 175% of target and Physical Education, up from 105% to 135%. In these subjects, all trainees will struggle to find teaching posts in England in 2021 and it would be ironic if the government is funding teacher preparation for teachers forced to work overseas to practice their professional skills due to a lack of teaching posts in England.
Primary courses also over-recruited to target, and some may struggle in some parts of the country to find teaching posts for September or at the end of undergraduate courses if the decline in school rolls continues.
The DfE is once again showing signs of wanting to progress its review of the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) market, first announced nearly two years ago as a part of a Recruitment and Retention Strategy, if an article in SchoolsWeek is to be believed. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-to-reboot-itt-market-review-to-slim-down-sector/.
Does it make sense to slim down the teacher preparation market sector to a smaller number of providers? Well, certainly, those providers that shut up shop at the end of June and leave the heavy lifting of recruitment over the summer to others might be considered as not fully participating in ensuring that all places on teacher preparation courses are filled.
With the DfE aiming to take over the application process, it may also make sense to have to interact with fewer larger providers in order to more easily manage the market.
On the other hand, as NASBITT has pointed out, the ITT sector is performing exceptionally well. Ofsted inspections have 99% of providers rated good or better. On this basis, it seems odd that any DfE officials should think too much provision is of poor quality, especially without providing the evidence for that judgement.
As NASBTT makes clear, smaller SCITT providers very often serve a very specific need in recruitment cold-spots and rural/coastal communities. Often, in the past, larger central providers did not manage to service the needs of schools in these areas, which is often why the smaller providers emerged in the first place in order to to fill the gap.
Smaller local providers can also meet the needs of career switchers that are unwilling to move long distances to undertake their course to become a teacher. This was, after all, the thinking behind the School Direct Salaried Scheme and its predecessor Employment-based routes of the past thirty years.
Large providers in the wrong place don’t meet the needs of the market and the DfE has always wrestled with the need for both quality provision and the recruitment of around 35,000 trainees each year that are willing to train to meet the needs of all schools.
Perhaps, any review might focus on those schools that find recruiting NQTs a challenge and explore how within a market system of recruitment, schools can recruit their fair share of NQTs?
A compromise might be for the DfE to engage with a few larger providers – perhaps NASBTT could even be one of them and UCET another – and these wholesalers of places would then handle the smaller units actually undertaking the training. There are some examples of national providers in the past, of which The Open University was perhaps the most well-known. Indeed, might this be an opportune moment for that University to reconsider returning to providing initial teacher preparation courses across England?
What the DfE must not do is undermine recruitment to the profession at this extremely sensitive moment in time. The ITT core content framework has only just been rolled out, as have the expectations under the new ITE inspection framework. As NASBTT point out, providers need time to embed and consolidate this before any further changes are thrust upon them. If it isn’t broke, be careful about how you fix it.
Earlier today UCAS released the first data on the 2021 recruitment round for postgraduate teacher preparation courses. The data are for applications up to the 16th November. Last year the data were for Monday 18th November 2019. In addition, there are applications through the DfE’s new service for which no data are yet available.
Now, it is always dangerous to read too much into the first month’s figures, but thirty years of looking at the numbers does allow me to make some observations.
Firstly, the increase in applicants domiciled in England, from 6,290 in 2019 to 7,420 in 2020, does not include large increases in applicants from the younger age groups, and is skewed towards applicants domiciled in the London Areas.
Change in applicant numbers by age of applicant
Age 2020 round 2021 round change
21 and
Under 1510 1550 40
22 970 1040 70
23 630 730 100
24 420 570 150
25-29 1200 1490 290
30-39 940 1160 220
40+ 620 890 270
All 6290 7420 1130
Source UCAS Reports A 2019 and 2020 November data
For example, in the North East, applicants in November 2019 totalled 380. This November, the number is 390. In London the total was 890 in 2019, and is 1,300 this November. Similarly, in the South East Region, the increase is from 910 to 1,150. So, over half of the increase in applicants is accounted for by just two regions in England.
Although early days, should we be concerned that the number of male applicants aged 21 or under, final year undergraduates, has dropped from 360 last November to 300 this year? One to watch as the number of men over 40 applying has increased from 160 to 250. Overall, there are just fewer than 200 more male applicants this year compared to last year at this point in time.
More applicants means more applications, and the total increased from 17,840 in November 2019 to 21,710 this November. Again, as expected, London has done well, with an increase from 2,740 applications by last November to 4,120 this November. In the North East applications only rose from 1,090 to 1,110.
Both primary and secondary sectors have benefitted from the increase in applicants. Applications for primary sector courses are up from 7,980 to 9,890, and for secondary courses, from 9,860 to 11,790.
All types of provider have seen increases, but one of the smallest increases is in secondary SCITT applications, up from 1,320 to 1,360.
Almost all subjects have seen an increase in applications – data on applicants by subject isn’t published in the main reports.
Arts and humanities subjects has seen some of the largest increases in applications. Even Physics has 240 applications this year, compared with 180 at this point in 2019. Art has seen applications double from 240 to 540, and even Design and Technology has 190 applications this year compared with 140 in November 2019. But, this might mean an increase an applicants from 50 last year to no more than 70 this year. Still, an increase is to be welcomed.
How long will this increase in interest in teaching last? There has been an article in SchoolsWeek recently suggesting it might be short-lived. After the start of the financial crisis it took just three years before teaching was starting to struggle to attract applicants to the profession. This time, with the pay freeze, who knows? More thought when the next set of data are published.
If you are involved .din bidding to become a Teaching School Hub and require data about the local teacher labour market over the past three years do make contact.
Teachvac, where I am the Chair of the board, has extensive data covering up to 30 secondary subjects and the primary sector for main scale; posts with TLRs and leadership scale vacancies. Data for 2018-2020 available on request at local authority level.
email enquiries@oxteachserv.com or contact me personally on dataforeducation@gmail.com
By Monday 17th August some 45,210 people had applied for postgraduate teacher preparation courses through the UCAS Scheme. This was an increase of 6,000 on the number recorded in August 2019, for these courses in England. This represent a 15% year on year increase. However the number is still well below the record levels of more than 60,000 witnessed during the previous recession caused by the banking crisis. No doubt, this is in part due to the fact that it wasn’t until March that the world was turned upon its head.
The 2020/21 recruitment round may well see much high numbers of applicants right from the start of the cycle later this autumn. There are also Teach First numbers to be taken into account, although they don’t publish regular figures on total applicant numbers.
Every region of England witnessed increases in applicant numbers over 2019, with more than 1,000 additional applicants in the South East, and 1,500 in London: good news for both regions. There were also more applicants from all age-groups, as well as from both women and men.
As many of these new applicants have arrived relatively late in the recruitment round, and while schools and universities have been enduring ‘lockdown’, it is, perhaps, not surprising that ‘conditional placed’ numbers are up on last year, whereas, in some cases, ‘placed’ numbers are down.
For instance, for men in the age 21 and under category, there were 340 placed this August compared with 400 in August 2019. However the conditional placed number this year was 760, compared with 530 in August 2019. The number of applicants in this age group increased from 1,300 in August 2019 to 1,450 this August. While four of the seven age-groupings for men recorded fewer placed numbers than last year, only two age groups, the youngest and oldest groupings, for women recorded placed numbers below last year. This may give credence to the suggestion that male applicants for teaching tend to apply later on average than women.
School Direct seems to have suffered this year, with fewer placed applicants for both primary and secondary courses, and quite markedly fewer for School Direct Salaried places. This year only 610 applicants have been recorded as placed against 890 last year. Conditional placed numbers for School Direct Salaried this year are 1,550, compared with 1,710 in August last year. No doubt funding arrangements and school closures have affected this route more than some others.
Some subjects have seen significant increases in the number of applications. Art and design has increased to 3,570 this August compared with 1,890 in August 2019. Business studies, a shortage subject, now has 1,720 applications compared with 770 in 2019. By contrast, geography only has 3,740 applications this year compared with 4,380 last year at this point in time.
Mathematics has seen an increase from 8,600 to 11,000 applications, but only 770 of these are placed and with just 1,750 holding a conditional place it seems less than likely that the Teacher Supply Model number will be reached. The same is true for physics, where applications are up from 2,220 to 2,450, but only 550 are recorded as either placed or conditionally placed: not sufficient to meet the requirement.
So, 2020 looks like being better than recent years, but not yet a great year. Hopefully, the 2020/21 round will see all places filled. Since secondary pupil numbers will still be on the increase, this will be important to ensure adequate staffing for our schools.
One of the joys of using WordPress is that site owners are told details of the various posts being read each day. Now the blog is several years old, it helps to remind me of what I wrote often many years ago. One visitor recently picked up on a post I wrote for a conference in Oxford almost five years ago, in November 2015.
1.1 Over the past half century teacher supply has been through a number of different cycles during which there have been short periods of over-supply interspersed with longer periods of shortages. Within these macro cycles there have been other periods where particular subjects or parts of the country have been affected by more local supply problems.
1.2 Since 2013, the recruitment into teacher preparation courses has become more challenging as numbers enrolled have declined. This would likely have been the case despite the fact that this period also witnessed a shift towards a more school-led approach to teacher preparation programmes. The development of new programmes has been a feature of periods of teacher shortage from the Articled Teacher scheme of the late 1980s through the SCITTS of the 1990s to the GTTP and Teach First of the early years of this century and now the school-Direct programmes.
1.3 With a significant increase in pupil numbers over the next few years it seems likely that staffing schools will become a serious problem over the next few years. We will know more on Thursday when the 2015 ITE Census is published by the DfE. I expect some improvement over last year as a result of the better marketing campaigns, but still insufficient new entrants in many subjects to meet the Teacher Supply Model numbers that historically have been seen as targets. The NCTL allocations merely blur the understanding of numbers needed, but may have helped keep higher education alive in teacher preparation. Without such over-allocation against the TSM in 2014, as I pointed out to the Minister, the loss of most English and history places from higher education would have made many more vice-chancellors question the viability of their PGCE courses.
Now we are at the start of another cycle of teacher supply, with shortages likely to be replaced by unemployment among qualified teachers seeking to return to teaching and newly qualified teachers affected by the significant short-term drop in vacancies since March 2020.
The 2015 piece went on to discuss possible typologies for whether the sector was facing a ‘crisis’ or a ‘challenge’. Both are terms still used without any agreed definition as to the difference between them. The original post offered some suggested definitions.
The post concluded that the root causes of the lack of supply of teachers was:
4.1 Assuming that no issue is taken with the modelling undertaken by the DfE to determine the number of training places and also that the deterioration of the percentage of teachers teaching a subject that have a post ‘A’ level qualification in the subject they are teaching indicates a lack of supply, then the root causes may be regarded as: insufficient recruitment into training; undue levels of early departure from the profession; a growing school population and the development of teaching as an international career and schooling in England developing as an export industry.
The final point was a new factor not present to the same degree is presently in affecting teacher supply. Will the present pandemic see a return to the United Kingdom of a large number of teachers currently working overseas? There are arguments that can be put forward for views both for and against the proposition that these teachers will return in large numbers. However, it is too early to tell.
The conclusion in 2015 reflected the changes the teacher preparation scene had undergone over the previous five years since the arrival of the Coalition government in 2010.
Conclusion
7.1 The various routes into teaching have been undergoing a fundamental politically driven change from a higher-education based system to a school-led system. This change has occurred as the economy has shifted from recession into a period of growth. It is not yet clear how far the changes in training routes may affect the attractiveness of teaching as a career. Indeed, salary and other associated benefits such as work/life balance and pension arrangements may be of more significance in recruitment into the teaching profession.
7.2 What is certain is that to create a world-class education system, we need not only world-class teachers but sufficient of them in the right places and right subjects with a willingness to become the school leaders of both today and tomorrow.
The final point remains as valid today as it was in 2015. The question now is, will it be easier to achieve than in recent years, thanks to the change in our economic circumstances as a nation?
How many additional teachers will be chasing the reduced number of teacher vacancies as a result of the covid-19 pandemic? The general thesis has always been that in a recession teacher vacancies reduce, as those in work postpone their departure either into retirement or for other reasons such as starting work outside of teaching. More former teachers may also be attracted to seek working in teaching once again as they are made redundant from their former jobs.
Looking back at the period between 2007 and 2010 that spans the period just before the last shock to the economy and the period where the economy leveled out and I first started predicting that there would be teacher supply problems again in 2013, soon after starting this blog, the following trends emerge.
The number of teachers available for work increased. At that time the General Teaching Council for England registered teachers each March. Their data for those listing ‘supply teacher’ as their role increased as follows:
Supply Teachers
2007
34799
2008
33531
2009
50999
2010
45996
That was an increase of some 11,000 teachers or a 36% in supply teachers between March 2008 and March 2010. Between March 2008 and March 2009, the increase was even greater at 50%. In that recession, some were no doubt precautionary re-registrations to allow for the chance to work as a supply teacher if necessary.
The increase was mostly among teachers between the ages of 25 and 44
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-44
2007
72835
72978
62635
59165
2008
76116
74287
66577
60347
2009
79163
78305
71111
62530
2010
81723
83170
74944
64501
The largest increase was in teachers in their late 30s, where numbers increased by 20% between 2007 and 2010. At this distance we cannot tell how much of the increase was down to delayed departure for the profession and how much due to re-entrants seeking to work once again in teaching?
At the same time, the numbers wishing to be teachers also increased as the figures from the UCAS GTTR Scheme, taken from their 2010 annual report make clear.
PGCE applications
2007
53931
2008
51616
2009
63138
2010
67289
This was a 30% increase between 2008 and 2010.
Might we witness the same sorts of increases between 2020 and say 2024? We won’t know about the ‘out of work ‘ teachers, because with no GTCE to collect the data, the only possible source will be increased registrations with the main teacher associations or from universal credit or Labour force data for those declaring themselves as ‘teachers’. However, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may be able to provide comparative data from their GTCs.
Applications to train as a teacher will be easier to track. With better knowledge among potential applicants of the costs of training and possible changes to the bursary arrangements, we might not see such a large increase in applications to teaching in this recession unless unemployment really does hit 10% of the workforce. Then any concerns about working with children might be outweighed by the opportunity to secure a job at all.
Whether MATs and standalone academies will use the change to the supply situation to review wage levels and conditions of employment is not yet known, but there seems no reason why schools should pay large sums to recruit teachers using traditional paid advertising, except in rare circumstances.
Is the DfE helping dumb down the teaching profession? I ask this question, not because I think there is a deliberate policy to do so, but because, having studied the 372 jobs on the DfE vacancy site this morning, I find that 20% of the jobs listed are not for teachers. Now, if the majority of these non-teacher vacancies were administrative posts, I wouldn’t worry, and would just make the point that TeachVac has more than 1,200 teaching posts in England, so why would anyone use the DfE site?
However, I am more troubled that in a buyer’s market, schools may be creating tutoring, mentoring and other roles, at either hourly rates or below the main scale for teachers, and seeking to recruit teachers to these positions. Now, I accept that a job is better than no job in the present climate, and that schools must not waste public money, but is this the way forward?
In a post on the blog on 19th May, I suggested the idea of using newly qualified teachers without posts for September as supernumerary teachers under a government scheme that ensured schools would be fully staffed and both have spare capacity to cope with a second wave of the virus and also high rick staff not working directly with pupils. This still seems to me a better idea than hiring coaches at £20 per hour, with no national determination of standards and experience.
The two big associations of teacher preparation provides, NASBTT and UCET should by now have an idea of how many trainees are currently unemployed for September. With the job market having ground to a halt, not many are likely to find jobs in England now for the autumn. Do we want to risk them going overseas in large numbers as their only source of teaching jobs? I hope not.
The DfE issued its annual teacher workforce data for 2019 last week. As it is in a new form, I have taken time to consider the data before posting any blogs about the latest data, but retention in teaching was still a big issue up to last November’s census point.
The new form the DfE is using to present the data marks a radical rethink of the presentation of data that up to now was only just the transfer of the print based approach on-line with little by way of search capacity. This new approach is more helpful for the casual user, but less so for those looking at a range of the data collected.
Note: The author of this blog is the Chair at TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the largest free vacancy site for teachers and schools.
New teachers are set to receive a boost to their training and development amid a surge in applications to join the classroom since the outbreak of coronavirus.
While others will comment upon the first part of the announcement, it is interesting to note that the data released by UCAS today is not as straightforward as the DfE announcement would suggest.
Firstly, much of the surge in applications came between April and May, and was not continued into June. Now this may well be because there were fewer courses left to apply to by early June, as many had closed their doors. Thus, the total increase in applicants over June last year in the order of 2,500 or less than 10%. Of these, the majority of new applicants would seem to be for secondary subjects rather than in the primary sector. The basis for this statement is an interpretation of applications data and, if true, would be helpful.
The second thing to note is that not all secondary subjects have benefited to the same degree. Arts subjects, have seemingly seen lots more offers to applicants, but both physics and design and technology seem unlikely to meet the Teacher Supply Model number unless there are many more applicants over the next two months. The same is true for modern languages. The arts subjects also have more applications in the pipeline, so offers may rise further over the next month or so.
Not surprisingly, the increase in applicants have mainly come from career changers. New graduates don’t yet seem to have switched to teaching in a big way. Thus, applicants aged 22 or under have increased by just over 500 on a base number of over 9,000 whereas there are 550 more applicants in the 25-29 age bracket. This looks especially true for male applicants, where numbers of those 21 and under have increased by around 50 applicants, but the 25-29 age-group has increased by nearly 200 applicants.
Traditional routes into teaching seem to have benefitted the most. There are new additional applications for either apprenticeships or for School Direct Salaried routes with fewer applications for the latter route in the primary sector than in June last year and barely 100 more in the secondary sector. Higher education has attracted 3,000 more applications for secondary courses compared with June last year and now attracts not far from half or all applications for secondary courses.
It is not clear whether the furlough scheme has helped restrain possible applicants to teaching from applying in large numbers while they discover what will happen once the support scheme comes to an end. If there is mass unemployment then the opening months of the 2020/2021 recruitment round should witness some very large numbers. Later in the summer we will review what happened in the period 2008-201, last time applications grew rapidly.
Readers of this blog will know that in April I revisited an article I first wrote in 1996 about Equal Opportunities in Education.
In the 1996 article, I wrote that:
“It is clear that members of some ethnic groups are less likely to find places on PGCE courses than white applicants.” I added that “These figures are alarming” and that “If graduates with appropriate degrees are being denied places on teacher training courses in such numbers, much more needs to be known about the reasons why.” During the period 2008-2011, I was asked to conduct two, unpublished, studies for the government agency responsible for training teachers. Sadly, the conclusion of both studies was that little had changed in this respect.
In the April article that also considered the issue of gender and ageism in the training of graduates to become teachers I made the following points.
Fortunately, it seems as if more graduates from ethnic minority groups are now entering teaching. Data from the government’s annual census of teacher training reveals that between 2014/15 and 2018/19 the percentage of trainees from a minority ethnic group increased from 13% to 19% of the total cohort.
Table 5: Minority Ethnic Groups as a Percentage of Postgraduate Trainees
Postgraduate new entrants
Postgraduate percentages
Trainee Cohort
Total
Minority ethnic group
Non-minority ethnic group
Minority ethnic group
Non-minority ethnic group
2014/15
24893
3178
21715
13%
87%
2015/16
26957
3873
23084
14%
86%
2016/17
25733
3753
21980
15%
85%
2017/18
26401
4113
22288
16%
84%
2018/19
27742
4917
22825
18%
82%
2019/20p
27675
5168
22507
19%
81%
Source: DfE Initial Teacher Training Censuses
In numeric terms, this mean an increase of some 2,000 trainees from ethnic minority backgrounds during this period.
Although UCAS no longer provides in-year data about ethnicity of applicants, there is some data in their end of year reporting about the level of acceptances for different ethnic groups.
In the 1996 article, there was a Table showing the percentage of unplaced applicants to PGCE courses by ethnic groups in the three recruitment rounds from 1993 to 1995. What is striking about both that table, and the table below for the four years between 2014-2017 that presents the data on the percentages of ethnic groups accepted rather than unplaced, is that in both of the tables, graduates from the Black ethnic group fare less well than do White or Asian applicants. Indeed, the overwhelmingly large White group of applicants had the lowest percentage of unplaced applicants in the 1990s, and the highest rate of placed applicants in the four years from 2014-2017.
In the original article I noted that “39% of the Black Caribbean group [of applicants] accepted were offered places at three of the 85 institutions that received applications form members of this ethnic group. Thirty-nine out of the 85 institutions accepted none of the applicants from this group that applied to them.” Although we no longer have the fine grain detail of sub-groups within this ethnic grouping, nothing seems to have significantly changed during the intervening period.
Table 6: Percentage Rate of Acceptances for Postgraduate trainee Teachers
2014
2015
2016
2017
Asian
39
47
44
48
Black
27
34
30
35
Mixed
49
56
51
55
White
56
64
61
64
Other
31
38
37
39
Unknown
46
53
48
52
Source: UCAS End of Cycle reports.
Using the data from the government performance tables for postgraduate trainees, it seems that a smaller percentage of trainees from ethnic minorities received QTS at the standard time when compared to those from the non-minority community, with the percentages of those trainees both not awarded or not yet completing being greater for the trainees from the minority ethnic groups.
Table 7: Success of Postgraduate Trainee Teachers by Ethnicity
2017/18
Trainees
Percentage awarded QTS
Percentage yet to complete
Percentage not awarded QTS
Teaching in a state school
Percentage of those awarded QTS teaching in a state school
Ethnicity
Minority
4,311
88%
6%
6%
3,014
80%
Non-minority
22,861
92%
3%
4%
17,022
81%
Unknown
706
90%
4%
6%
503
79%
Source: DfE database of trainee teachers and providers and school Workforce Census
However, the percentage reported as working in a state school was similar at 80% for ethnic minority trainees and 81% for non-ethnic minority trainees. As there are no data for trainees working in either the independent sector or further education institutions including most Sixth Form Colleges, it isn’t clear whether the overall percentage in teaching is the same of whether or not there is a greater difference?
So what has changed in the profile of graduates training to be a teacher during the twenty years or so between 1997 and 2019? The percentage of trainees from minority ethnic groups within the cohort has increased. However we know their chances of becoming a teacher are still lower than for applicants from the large group of applicants classified as White as their ethnic group.
Ethnicity and Leadership
For some twenty years I compiled an annual report on the labour market for senior staff in schools. At the turn of the century questions about the ethnicity of candidates were included. In the report on the 2005-06 school year I wrote:
‘Two other issues we have highlighted over the past few years, where we believe urgent steps need to be taken are the recruitment of senior staff from ethnic minorities and for faith schools. We are especially concerned about the almost complete absence of appointments in the Special school Sector of any staff from amongst the ethnic minorities. … although the position seems to be a little better in the Primary and Secondary School Sectors, we are not convinced that enough is being done to recruit senior staff from amongst these groups.’
12th Report Labour Market for Senior Staff in schools 2005-06 prepared for NAHT and ASCL.
That was a typical comment of the period.
The NASUWT also commissioned a report into Black and Ethnic Minority Teachers from a team at the University of Manchester that was published as The Leadership Aspirations and Careers of Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in January 2009. The text is available on Researchgate at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242575423_The_Leadership_Aspirations_and_Careers_of_Black_and_Minority_Ethnic_Teachers The key message from that study was that at that time ethnic minority staff did not perceive the teaching profession to be inclusive. It would be interesting to know whether such feeling were still prevalent today.
The is no doubt that progress differs across the country, with some areas more forward in both understanding and tackling the issues that other areas where they have been seen of as less concern. Hopefully, the issue will once again see discussion and action to ensure all teachers are treated equally. However, that begs the question of what is meant by equally?
John Howson 