Tag Archives: teacher recruitment

Teaching in China: bright future or end of the road?

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How will the Chinese government’s ruling that International Schools in China must teach the same lessons as Chinese-run schools affect the market for international schools in China and as a result the demand for teachers from Britain? Westminster School abandons plans for sister sites in China amid concerns about communist curriculum (inews.co.uk)

At least one school seems to have scrapped expansion plans in China, and it will be interesting to see how other UK schools with investments in China respond. There is also the question of how those Chinese citizens that can afford private education will respond to the government’s decree. Will they embrace boarding school education and ship their offspring to British schools elsewhere in Asia or even negotiate places in the ‘home country’ original school of the brand or will they think that the brand will remain a draw even if the ‘hard curriculum’ is mandated by the Chinese government. After all, private schools teach the same A levels as are on offer for free in the state system in England but parents still pay large sums for their children to attend private sixth forms. No doubt class sizes will be a consideration for parents in China just as it is in England. Access to wealth buys access to smaller classes whatever is being taught in them.

The outcome of this policy change may have ripples in the labour market for teachers in England. Fewer overseas openings may reduce the ‘brain drain’ of teachers leaving this country.  Any closure of school sites overseas may well also see teachers returning to the UK. If their former employer feels a responsibility to offer them employment on their return, then the number of vacancies in the independent sector available for new entrants to the profession will drop. This ought to be good news for the state school sector as there should be more teachers entering the profession that would need to find a teaching post in the state sector.

Of course, if the Chinese pupils just migrate to schools outside of China, then the demand for teachers will remain at present levels, and the state sector will continue to see teachers leaving for more lucrative and less burdensome teaching posts overseas.

It is probably time for the DfE to research the international transfer of teaching skills. Writing that line reminds me that in September 1968 I attended a student-run conference on ITOMS – The International Transfer of Management Skills- organised by AIESEC. Do we now need to discuss ITOTS?

Of course, there are other teacher flows than just the one from England to the rest of the world. There used to be internal transfer within the African continent and between the Caribbean and the USA.

Teaching is now a global profession as the DfE has recognised with its new approach to QTS and how it can be obtained. Should England take the lead in setting international standards for teacher preparation much as it did in the market for English Language teaching Qualifications?

Recruiting into teacher preparation: the DfE website

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Now that the DfE have taken over recruitment to postgraduate teacher preparation courses I have been looking at their web site of providers. On the whole it is a pastiche of the former UCAS offering, with the same faults and good points.

The key good point is that it is comprehensive and has a lot of different filters. Whether or not they are the filters applicants will want to use is another matter. On the downside there is no map of either location of courses availability of places.

Many years ago, universities leant that not having a place name in your title could be a disadvantage, as applicants might not consider you if they didn’t know where you were located. As a result, Trent became Nottingham Trent, and Brookes, Oxford Brookes. Of course, some universities can manage without a place name such as King’s College, London and University College, but they are both technically colleges and not universities.

How many applicants know that Orange Moon Education is offering Classics courses in Nottingham and Bristol and possibly Bradford as well unless they delve into the Orange Moon site or where The South East Learning alliance is offering training?

The last time the DfE was involved in the application process, when the School Direct Scheme was first established, the DfE included more data on the number of places still on offer from each course and the number filled on its web site. I always thought that was a useful tool for applicants as places filled to know the possible risk of applying to a nearly full course against applying to one with more places available.  However, long-time readers of this blog from 2013 will recall the difficulties that resulted from my use of the data on applications and places filled.

Some years ago, Chris Waterman worked with me to produce a book of maps showing the location of providers and their different type of provision. As a former geography teacher, I still think that some visual representation of provision would be useful. Such mapping might show potential trainees where the competition for jobs might be fiercest, especially if it was overlayed with vacancy rates for the different subjects and sectors.

It is interesting to see that as I write this blog in early November there is already a difference between the total number of courses available and the number of courses with vacancies on the DfE site. In design and technology, there are 443 courses listed, but only 426 have vacancies: 17 apparently don’t have vacancies. For physics, the numbers are 736 and 716, a difference of 20. This begs the question of, if there are only around 1,100 places to train as a physics teacher how many of the 736 courses are real opportunities and how many sub-sets of an offering with some slight difference, and does this matter? Around 8% of primary courses are currently not on the list for courses with vacancies.

By Christmas, the DfE will have a good idea of how the recruitment round is shaping up. With the international school job market opening up again, training teachers will become as important as filling the vacancies for lorry drivers for the future of our economy.

Teaching is a wonderful career

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The DfE has today announced the 2022 summer programme for interns in certain subjects that want to consider teaching as a possible career. It is interesting that to the obvious STEM subjects has been added Modern Languages. However, other subjects with significant shortages such as design and technology and business studies still don’t feature in the list. The bias towards an academic curriculum still seems firmly planted in the minds of Ministers. However, at least IT is included, so there is a nod to the future.

In reality not all STEM subjects are included. As the DfE notice makes clear, the aim of the internship programme is to enable undergraduates studying for a degree in STEM-related subjects the opportunity to experience teaching maths, physics, computing or modern foreign languages before they commit to it as a career.

The programme is school-led. Only school-led partnerships can apply for funding. School partnerships can choose to collaborate with an accredited Initial Teacher Training (ITT) provider to develop and deliver their programme.

The partnership lead should submit the application as they will have overall responsibility for the budget. However, they should work in collaboration with partners to develop the proposal.

DfE welcome applications from school-led partnerships across England, however especially welcomes applications from schools in geographic areas where there have previously been gaps in provision, including:

  • Bristol
  • Cornwall
  • Cumbria and north Lancashire
  • Devon
  • East Anglia
  • London
  • Merseyside
  • Oxfordshire

Applications must be for a minimum of 5 participants. Teaching internship programme: summer 2022 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The DfE has also announced that the ITT Census of current trainees will be published on the 2nd December. This will allow schools to understand what the supply of new entrants into the labour market for next September will look like in each subject.

Interestingly, the number of vacancies being advertised by secondary schools this November is much higher than in recent years, with more than 700 new vacancies listed last week alone. Early data from today suggests there is no let up in the trend to advertise vacancies in what is normally a relatively quiet month. Normally, the most distinguishing factor about vacancies in November is the high number of those that result from a teacher taking maternity leave.

Maybe we are seeing the early signs of the increase in departures of school leaders that have borne the brunt of the handling of the pandemic in schools over the past 18 months. TeachVac will track that trend and report in its annual round up of trends in leadership vacancies.

The DfE is now handing applications for the 2022 entry into teacher preparation courses and the first data from that source that has replaced the monthly UCAS data of past years will provide an interesting insight on how teaching is viewed as a career at this stage of the pandemic.

At the same time rumours abound that the DfE is reviewing how it will handle the vacancy web site it created a couple of years ago and also that the tes is once again might possibly be seeking another new owner.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I wonder why schools continue to pay millions of pounds to a private American owned company instead of investing a few thousand in creating a low-cost site that is jointly owned by the profession and the government.

But then the talk of scare resources is often an easier approach than the actions necessary to overcome the conviction that the status quo must always be funded.

With 7 million hits this year and 50,000+ vacancies at no cost to either the public purse of teachers, TeachVac has shown what can be achieved.

Private sector not always better

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The latest Ofsted Inspection Reports on ITT are certainly throwing up some interesting questions. The most recent three reports, all on London or Home counties-based providers, have resulted in two ‘Requires Improvement’ judgements and one ‘Inadequate’. In addition, two providers have been found to be non-compliant in certain aspects of their training provision.

One provider is a university; another a long-established SCITT with an interesting approach and the third is the tes Institute (part of the tes Group , better know for its news platform and recruitment advertising). 50170428 (ofsted.gov.uk)

In view of the likely shake-out in provision of primary ITT following the fall in the birth rate and the subsequent reduction in the school population any poor outcome from an Ofsted inspection must raise issues about the future of such courses unless there is a rapid improvement in outcomes. Despite rating the tes programme as ‘Requires Improvement’ overall, the judgement on the ‘quality of education and training’ was deemed as ‘Good’. It was the leadership and management that was in need of improvement.

It is possible to understand a small SCITT having to improve leadership and management, but a large provider in the private sector with more than 300 trainees and a significant contribution to the Assessment only route to QTS needing to improve management and leadership might raise eyebrows.

In view of the current American ownership of the tes Group as a whole, it is interesting to wonder how such a state of affairs has come about? Will this porgramme now follow the teacher supply business into the exit as a non-core strategy for the Group? Do the soundings made to me by investors asking about the recruitment market presage yet another passing of the parcel?

On the wider picture, ‘Outstanding’ judgements for ITT are now thin on the ground. FE and primary sectors seem to be the areas of most concern to Ofsted, with secondary provision seemingly faring somewhat better so far; but it is still early days.

The government is sticking to its ambitious targets for trainee numbers, but is no longer keeping the world informed about actual need in specific subjects and by the different programmes. The next hard evidence will likely be the annual ITT Census of trainees, scheduled for publication before Christmas. This is likely to confirm the ending of the covid boom of last year that was seen in many subjects, and a continued under-shoot against probable target in some key subjects.

As this blog has pointed out, the shortage of lorry drivers is as nothing to the shortage of Physics teachers.  You cannot fully staff all schools if there are not enough teachers to go around. History tells us which schools are most likely to have under-qualified staff or not to offer specific subjects to all pupils.

I doubt that the changes in the Budget will help much to improve teacher supply, but the ending of the pay standstill shouldn’t make matters worse, especially if the secondary sector receives the bulk of the additional cash on offer outside the Early Years Sector. Life may be challenging for the primary sector for the remainder of this decade.

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.