Tag Archives: teacher supply

Come clean on teacher recruitment

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The latest data from UCAS on the numbers recruited to most teacher preparation courses starting over the next few weeks show mixed signals. On the first look at the data https://www.ucas.com/corporate/data-and-analysis/ucas-teacher-training-releases there is support for the conclusions this blog has been publishing over the past couple of months: IT, mathematics, music, physics and Religious Education won’t meet their target as set by the Teacher Supply Model, after the removal of Teach First numbers, but other subjects ought to do so. So, there is nothing new or very surprising in these figures.

However, delve a little deeper and the anxiety of the increase in ‘conditional placed’ numbers over ‘placed’ candidates that this blog has been worrying for the about for the past few months may still be a cause for concern. Take English as an example. Last August, there were 990 placed candidates and also 990 conditional placed candidates. In mid-August 2016, there are 860 ‘placed’ and 1,180 ‘conditional placed’ candidates. That represents a loss of 130 or so (due to rounding we cannot know the exact difference from year to year) in placed candidates, but an increase of 190 in conditional placed applicants. This is all well and good if those conditional placed candidates convert to placed candidates and turn up on the first day of the course. But, why are they still listed as conditional placed as late as mid-August? Is the system of reporting a change of status not working properly? There must be similar concerns about the difference between placed and conditional placed applicants in other subjects, including geography and mathematics.

The difference is even more interesting when the numbers on the different routes into teaching are considered. Higher Education, as expected, has seen a decline of 280 in placed applicants for secondary subjects as places have moved to other routes. However, SCITTS have taken up just 100 of these and the School Direct Fee route only 50. There appear to be 90 fewer School Direct Salaried route ‘placed’ candidates than in mid-August last year. As a result, the fate of the ‘conditional placed’ and the conditions they need to meet before starting their courses will be critical in determining the outcome of this recruitment round and the numbers of new teachers available to schools looking for teaching staff for September 2017. The number ‘holding offers’ and awaiting decisions on places across all routes is basically the same as at this point last year and will make no meaningful difference to the eventual outcome.

The number of men ‘placed’ is also down on last August by some 220, with fewer numbers in the youngest age groups not entirely offset by an increase in men over the age of 30 offered a place. There are more ‘conditional placed’ men in most age groups, with 250 more over the age of thirty. However, total applications from men are down by a couple of hundred.

In November, when the DfE publish their ITT census, these figures will be able to be put into perspective and that will help with interpretation of the same data next year, assuming the rules of the game don’t change in the meantime. we will also be monitoring the effect by tacking vacancies thorugh TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk the free recruitment service for schools,teachers and trainees

 

Back to the future?

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According to a report in the Daily Mail, as quoted by the LGiU at the weekend, the Teaching Schools Council wants to see the first teaching apprenticeship scheme for 18-year-olds, which would see these youngsters go straight into the classroom as trainee teachers. Now if you are not familiar with the Teaching Schools Council, a government backed organisation, Schools Week did a good background story on the organisation in June this year that can be found at:  http://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-closer-look-at-the-teaching-schools-council/

The Daily Mail story, coming as it does in August, looks a bit like government kite flying. However, is it worth considering further? Take Physics as a subject where schools struggle to recruit enough teachers. Even though most of the degree courses are no longer concentrated in Russell Group universities, many other courses are four years in length necessitating extra tuition fee debt. There are also a very small number of undergraduate QTS courses in Physics or Physics with mathematics on offer for 2017. All this means that students missing the points score necessary to attend most Russell Group universities do have opportunities to Physics at university. However, whether there are enough places to satisfy demand outside of the teaching profession is something that needs to be considered.

So, does the Teaching School Council’s idea have merit? It certainly seems worth discussing further. However, an apprenticeship not linked to a degree as an outcome isn’t likely to find much favour across a profession that struggled so long and hard to move away from the pupil-teacher apprentice model that operated for so long in the elementary school sector that was the main type of schooling for the masses before the 1944 Education Act created the break at eleven.

The academic content issue of an apprenticeship must be dealt with to satisfy organisations such as the Institute of Physics. If they allowed student membership for these apprentices that might go a long way to guarantee standards and reassure the profession as a whole. However, there may well be other objections. Does the single apprentice model work or are apprenticeships more likely to succeed where there are a group of young people studying together, helping each other and challenging themselves to continue with the programme when they feel down, as inevitably happens from time to time.

If you start putting groups of these apprentices together in a teaching school, does that start to look like the old monotechnic training colleges that the Robbins Report was so concerned about in the 1960s and that led to the policy of moving employer-controlled training into higher education and away from the local authorities and the churches? The roots of that system can still be seen in the heritage of universities such as Worcester and Lincoln’s Bishop Grosseteste university.

So, is it ‘back to the future’ as with grammar schools? It is worth noting that Sir Andrew Carter is, according to the Schools Week article, on the Council of the Teaching Schools Council. He is certainly an advocate of the ‘grow you own style’ of teacher preparation, so the suggestion needs to be taken seriously. Perhaps it marks a new direction for School Direct and a new role for Teaching Schools?

Hopefully not a fool’s paradise

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At this time of year we start to expect to see the conditional offers for the various ITT places made by providers turned into firm ‘placed’ students. After all, degree results should have been confirmed by now and the bulk of those offered places should have taken and passed the pre-entry skills tests, so there ought to be nothing to stop candidates confirming that they will be taking up their place. As a result, it is a little worrying to see in the UCAS data published yesterday that the percentage of those with offers regarded as ‘placed’ is in some secondary subjects is below where it was at this point last year. There are also more than 100 fewer candidates holding offers than at this point last year. Now that shouldn’t matter in subjects where recruitment controls mean few applicants have been offered places in recent months, but lower numbers holding offers in physics and IT might mean these subjects will struggle to fill all their available places.

After analysing the available data, it seems to me, barring any last minute hiccups, that languages, PE, history, geography, English, biology and art should meet their targets for recruitment. On the other hand, RE, physics, music, mathematics and IT look as if they are unlikely to do so. The jury is out on chemistry and business studies. The latter may well meet the government target, but that target is woefully short of the demand for these teachers in the real world.  It is difficult to know what is happening in design and technology because UCAS have reported the data in a different way this year to previous years, so we have no real comparison to judge application by.

There is a serious question to be asked by the new ministerial team about how well the present arrangements are delivering sufficient trainees on the different routes into teaching. The following data looks only at the secondary sector. The diversion of places away from universities means 200 few placed candidates, but 700 more conditional placed applications compared with this point last year among He providers. Fortunately, there are 250 more applications in the holding offer status. SCITTs have more placed and conditionally placed than at this point last year, but fewer holding offers than this point last year.

Among School Direct, the fee route has 30 fewer placed trainees, but 750 more conditionally placed and about the same number holding offers. For the School Direct salaried route, there are 100 fewer placed, but 210 more conditionally placed and 30 fewer holding an offer.

What happens to the ‘conditionally placed’ applications over the next month will determine the shape of the 2017 recruitment round for schools, since these are the new teachers entering the labour market next year. Overall, there are 270 fewer applicants across all countries than at this point last year, with the majority of the reduction being in England. The good news, well relative good news, is that the gender balance has remained the same as last year at about one third men to two thirds women. UCAS don’t provide data on ethnicity of applicants.

Something for everyone

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As I reported last week, TeachVac has submitted updated evidence to the House of Commons Education Select Committee Inquiry into ‘the supply of teachers’. Perforce that evidence was of a general and summary nature. However, it does seem to have been the only comment so far on the 2016 recruitment round. There is also little discussion about what 2017 might look like on the evidence of applications to train as a teacher.

Over the weekend, I took the opportunity of looking in more detail at where the secondary and all-through schools with the most number of recorded advertisements for classroom teachers so far in 2016 are located. Now, this first look is very crude, as it doesn’t standardise for the size of a school and it stands to reason that larger schools are likely to have a greater turnover, as are new schools. Other factors affecting the number of adverts a school might place could be the result of an adverse Osfted inspection or a sudden growth in popularity and hence an increase in pupil numbers requiring more teachers to be appointed.

Leaving all these factors aside, a clear national trend stand out for the second year in succession: London dominates the top of the table for schools with the most advertisements so far in 2016.

Top 50 schools for recorded number of advertisements in 2016 by region where the school is located

  • London                  23
  • South East             11
  • East of England     6
  • West Midlands      6
  • South West             2
  • North East               1
  • North West              1

There were no schools in either the East Midlands or Yorkshire & The Humber recorded as in the top 50 schools with the most recorded advertisements.

This pattern backs up the data TeachVac provided exclusively for the BBC regional radio and TV stations in June.

So, for many schools in the north of England, concerns, where they even exist, are often limited to recruitment issues in specific shortage subjects, whereas in London and the Home Counties the problem looks to be more of a general one of finding classroom teachers in many subjects.

This data is confined to secondary school classroom teacher vacancies, as that is the area of greatest concern. The fact that our survey last week also revealed schools in London were still advertising a substantial number of School Direct vacancies on the UCAS web site must be a further cause for concern, and a worry for the 2017 recruitment round.

These numbers also suggest that trialling the National Teaching Service in the North West and Yorkshire might have been sensible, because a smaller number of schools might be looking for teachers, but there might also be fewer teachers looking to move schools in those areas, so the supply of experienced teachers willing to work in challenging schools might indeed be less than elsewhere.

Over the rest of the summer I will drill down into the data and I hope to report some findings at the BERA Conference in Leeds this September. In the meantime, if anyone wants to ask a question do get in touch.

26th STRB Report published

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The School Teachers’ Pay Review Report, sent to the government at the end of April, was finally published today. I posted a blog on the 24th May wondering about its non-appearance. My speculation was that it might contain some facts and conclusions on teacher supply, recruitment and retention that would make uncomfortable reading for Minister. In one sense this has proved to be the case.

Although the STRB finally conclude:

Taking all these factors into account, and balancing risks to recruitment and retention against the importance of giving schools time to plan for managing a higher uplift, we judge there would be significant risks associated with a recommendation this year for an uplift of more than 1% to the national pay framework.

However the next paragraph provides something of a warning to Ministers by commenting:

However, if current recruitment and retention trends continue, we expect an uplift to the pay framework significantly higher than 1% will be required in the course of this Parliament to ensure an adequate supply of good teachers for schools in England and Wales. Accordingly, we recommend the Department, and our consultees take steps to help schools prepare for such an eventuality

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535042/55621_School_Teachers_Accessible.pdf

It is difficult to make a clearer statement than that about what’s happening to teachers’ pay. The Report is mostly silent on the issue of conditions of service. Whether government will listen is another matter.

The Report was, of course, prepared before the Referendum vote and the economic shocks that are beginning to affect the markets. In that respect, I am reminded of the consequences of the oil price shock in 1972 and what it did for the British economy. In those days the London Stock Exchange had but one index of share price movement, the FT 30 Index, made up of 30 leading shares. It used a geometric rather than arithmetic mean as the basis of its calculations, thus in some cases understating the magnitude of any change. Even so, the market collapsed from a high in 1972 of 543.6 to a low on January 6th 1975, when most traders returned after the holiday break, of just 146. This was a slide in under three years of some 80% in real terms after inflation. It also followed the two general elections of 1974

Hopefully, the departure from Europe won’t create such a fall in the value of shares and the knock-on effects on the rest of the economy, but if it does, then who knows what will happen to teacher supply? The pound dollar rate has already fallen from the 1.40s:1 rate before the referendum to under 1.30:1 as I write and there is an emerging consensus it will end 2016 at around 1.16:1 or $1.16 per £1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36721278 There are even some pessimists predicting the £ will fall below parity with the dollar.

All of this is a way of saying that the STRB Report, although interesting, could be consigned to the dustbin of history. Economic downturns have a history of attracting recruits into teaching and persuading those already there to stay. Will that happen; who knows. An alternative scenario is that with a relatively young profession, many abandon teaching here and head for jobs overseas where their skills might be better rewarded and they can save for a return sometime in the future. I guess we will all have to watch and wait, that is except for those that take action and do something.

Teacher Numbers and the consequences

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Earlier today I did the round of several regional BBC radio stations talking about the latest TeachVac data on advertised vacancies for classroom teachers in secondary schools. I think it fair to say that he DfE were not impressed with our data.

Interestingly, the DfE also released the results of the School Workforce Census data for 2015 this morning. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/school-workforce-in-england-november-2015

This survey is taken on a day in November each year. I am delighted to see that recorded vacancies and temporary filled posts in November 2015 were below those recorded in 2014, albeit the fall was from 1,730 to 1,430 in secondary schools and this was still the second highest number since 2010. This should mean that schools are finding it easier to recruit staff,

However, of more interest, is the worsening situation in terms of the percentage of teachers with no relevant post A level qualification in the subject that they are teaching that was recorded in several subjects contained in the School Workforce Census. Since schools can employ anyone to teach anything, this isn’t illegal. The change may also partly be down to how trainee teachers on School Direct and Teach First are recorded in the census data. There are also several different means of looking at this data.

Nevertheless, even with those caveats, it is worth noting that between the 2013 and 2015 census days, the percentage of those teaching mathematics with no relevant post A level qualification in the subject increased from 22.4% to 26.3%. In physics, another subject where very attractive bursaries have been available for trainees, the percentage with no relevant post A level qualification in the subject increased from 33.5% to 37.5%, an increase of 4.0% over three years.

In design and technology not only has there been a 4.3% deterioration in overall qualified teachers, this decline is despite a fall of 1,900 in the recorded number of teachers of the subject, so that the smaller workforce of 11,500 is now less well qualified on this measure than the 12,700 teachers recorded in the 2013 census. Not good news for a subject I maintain is vital in creating enthusiasm among the school population for many of our important wealth generating industries.

These figures come against the background where the total number of secondary school teachers was falling between 2014 and 2015, by around 4,000, this despite an increase of 800 in the number of unqualified teachers, many of who are presumably trainees.

There are clear age differences among the teaching force. Teachers under 30 account for 28.4% of FTE teachers in the primary sector but only 23.1% of secondary teachers. However, only 16.95 of primary teachers and 17.7% of secondary teachers were recorded as over the age of 50 when the census was compiled.

There has been some discussion about the growth in part-time working in the teaching profession. The figures for the census were 26.1% of primary and 18.2% of secondary teachers worked part-time. The percentage for the secondary sector may be higher than many imagined and might be worth exploring in more detail.

 

 

 

Hard Facts

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Some things won’t change following last Thursday’s vote. The school population across most of England will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. Schools will come under more financial pressure, especially so if there is an economic downturn. Whether a new funding formula for schools will still be on the agenda in the short-term is a matter of ‘wait and see’. In a period of uncertainty, will Ministers want to provoke possible losers into action, especially if among the winners most will probably have voted overwhelmingly for a Tory government in 2015.

There is far more uncertainty over the direction of teacher supply. One the one hand, should there be a downturn in the economy and a resultant reduction in demand for graduates, teaching as a career should benefit, as it has done in the past during any downturn in the economy. On the other hand, teaching has depended in recent years on an increasing number of women choosing it as a career. Since many of them have partners that aren’t in education, how these significant others react to the economic and political scenes will be as important as how the teachers themselves react.

With a significant portion of the profession under the age of 40, we will know the exact proportion in a couple of weeks’ time when the 2015 School Workforce Census results are made public, it is the actions of the younger age groups of teachers that will be of most significance. Will they go or will they stay? To some extent this may depend upon whether the economic fallout from the referendum vote only has local implications for the economy of the United Kingdom or whether it helps trigger a wider slowdown across the world. My betting is on the former, with a crisis similar to that seen in South East Asia in 1997, but I might be wrong.

As part of the School Workforce Census data it would be helpful if the DfE could release the number of EU teachers granted QTS over the past five years. What countries they came from, what phase and the subject they are teaching and also where would also be useful information for those of us thinking about the future. ITT providers are making requests for 2017 allocations at this time, a process TeachVac www.teachvac.com is helping with for those that have requested data, but it would also help to know what other factors might affect the labour market in 2018 and through to January 2019 when the 2017 trainees are required to fill their share of vacancies.

There is also the question of how to handle the shortfall in expertise generated by up to four years of under-recruitment into training in some subjects. Does the DfE just leave it to schools to sort out, a favoured policy in the past by governments of all complexions, or does it look to a policy of CPD to improve the skills of those teaching subjects where they lack appropriate knowledge and expertise? Not to do so might be to abandon the challenge laid down by the retiring Chief Inspector of helping to close the attainment gap between the different sections of our nation. I support that aim and would not want it lost if education comes off badly in any turmoil during the next few years.

 

Changing the Guard

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One of the last vestiges of the coalition government is disappearing from the DfE. Sir Paul Marshall, the recently knighted Lib Dem donor and chairman of ARK, has announced his resignation from the DfE Board. Should you wish to apply for the £20,000 a year post – 24 days of work officially required, but probably more expected – you have until the 4th July. The advert is on the Cabinet office website at https://publicappointments.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/appointment/lead-non-executive-director-department-for-education/ I am sure you will need experience at a high level and need to be in sympathy with government proposals for education.

With a new Permanent Secretary, a new Chief Inspector and relatively new Head of OfQual, the Secretary of State will have a relatively new team around her. Of course, after Thursday and the resulting fallout, whatever the outcome of the referendum, there might also be a new ministerial team as well.

All these changes can mean the start of a new era for education in England, especially if they are accompanied by changes in personnel in the leadership of some of the associations representing staff working in the sector. Or, they could mean a period of uncertainty as the new team takes up the reins.

Nowhere may change be needed more than in the supply and training of teachers. The fig leaf of the NCTL, with its chairman without a Board; the recent unfavourable reports from the NAO and Public Accounts Committee about the training and recruitment of teachers; not mention a White Paper with lots of ideas, but short on detail, means this is an area that needs urgent attention.

The creation of the long-awaited National Teaching Service and a decision on what to do about a national recruitment site as well as a consideration of the future shape of the teacher preparation market all require urgent attention in Whitehall. It is interesting to note that in asking for bids from providers for the 2017 teacher trainee cohort the NCTL has required bidders, whether schools, higher education or private providers, to include evidence of local demand in support of their bids. TeachVac is offering a service to providers to help with the evidence they need. (Interested organisations should email data@teachvac.com).

An announcement on the next stage of the National Teaching Service must surely follow quickly after the ending of purdah if timescales for the service to be any use in 2017 are to be met. Of course, the cutting of funds for schools through increased NI and pension costs may reduce the need for teachers, as many any slowdown in the economy, should it arise for any reason, with the possible effect of making recruitment less of an issue than it has been over the past two years.

However, the fact that Ofsted are now apparently looking at recruitment issues in their inspections http://schoolsweek.co.uk/ofsted-judging-schools-negatively-for-teacher-shortages/ suggests action is being taken to consider what schools and MATs are doing about recruitment. As a result, schools being inspected will be in need of comparative data for their area and they should contact data@teachvac.com about what is on offer.

Needless to say, one defence must be: we could have recruited if the government had met its target in Design & Technology (or insert appropriate subject or phase), so it is not entirely our fault. But it will help to have the evidence.

 

Teacher Supply: a national issue

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The publication today of the Report into teacher training from the Public Accounts Committee that arose out of their consideration of the National Audit Office Report published in February finally brings to an end a period of mounting concern over teacher supply, with the recognition that there is an issue to be resolved. Regular readers of this blog will recall that in a seminal post on the 14th August 2013, I wrote that ‘It is time for a radical overhaul of teacher preparation to really meet the needs of a 21st century education system.’ The post had been headed ‘scaremongering’ after the government had said there wasn’t a problem.

Even today, in their response to the PAC, the DfE spokesperson has rightly alluded to the fact that the government has upped its game; with better marketing, more bursaries and improved levels of recruitment: all true, but if these measures still have not solved the basic problem of not hitting correctly determined training targets, then what are the consequences for pupils in our schools? Asking that question has always been at the forefront of my attempts, now successful, to ensure teacher supply matters didn’t slip below the radar. The issue is now regularly discussed, but has still to be resolved.

At the heart of the matter was the long-standing debate about quality training versus training where it was needed most to address teacher supply concerns. Ideally, the answer was to create sufficient high quality places where they were most needed, but that just didn’t seem to happen, as the NAO’s Report showed in its table of training places per 100,000 pupils in each government region. The East of England, an area with a fast growing population, had barley half the number of training places as there were in London, this despite both regions have significant demands for new teachers.

Readers will know that although Ofsted can conduct surveys, as it has recently, my view is that nationally we need regular on-going management information on the labour market in schools whether for classroom teachers, middle leadership or for senior leadership posts. That’s why TeachVac www.teachvac.com was created.

Over the next few weeks the TeachVac team will analyse the results of the 2016 recruitment round for September and compare it with the 2015 round. The outcome should be reported by early July at the latest. By the next recruitment round we hope to be able to look at the labour market more widely as TeachVac collects data on posts at all levels and in all types of school.

The DfE now has a large team working on the teacher supply issue, but it probably needs some more senior staff at the policy level to become more involved with the issue. I don’t know who has responsibility at the DfE Board level, but if it isn’t an explicit responsibility then perhaps it ought to be.

As the Chief Inspector said, those that suffer most when there is a teacher supply problem aren’t those that can help themselves, but those without the least social or actual capital to remedy the situation. These pupils can be found in almost every school. As a result, teacher supply is a national problem that needs a national solution.

Management Information and Statistics

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The session of the Education Select Committee held this morning was an interesting one. Clearly, the mention of TeachVac www.teachvac.com  as a data source in both a question and answer will help draw attention to the team’s  aim of creating a free vacancy web site for schools that helps free-up cash for teaching and learning. To that end, the TeachVac team are delighted with early take-up of the new free Vacancy Portal announced last Friday (see earlier post). This is especially useful to primary schools that have no place on their school web site to list any vacancies.

However, to return to the issue behind the title of this post, the difference between management information and statistics. The DfE is very good at collecting statistics and there was much discussion among the witnesses at the Select Committee about the data in the School Workforce Census, completed every November by all schools. Much of it is available to everyone and the 2015 data should be published next month. However, the data down to individual teacher level is rightly only available to bone fide researchers. By its very nature this data is of historical interest in terms of the labour market because, by the time it is published, schools are well into a further recruitment round. By comparison, management information seeks to identify what is happening in the here and know. For example, it is useful for shops to know what they sold a year ago, but to reorder they need to know what is happening to sales now. Most have sophisticated point off sale information systems.

Now, if the labour market for teachers is stable from year to year using statistics to help decide how many teachers to train next year is fine. It doesn’t matter if the data is out of date so long as it is accurate. But, if the market is changing, it might help to know what is happening in the current recruitment round. Hence my question in yesterday’s post about the business studies and PE trainee numbers providing a shortage and an over-supply. You cannot easily aswer those questions from the Workforce Census data, but you could from the ITT destinations data. Joining up the information still seems to be something of an issue between different parts of the DfE.

Without the data, you often don’t know the questions to ask. It wasn’t until I started monitoring leadership vacancies that I discovered the difference in re-advertisement rates between Roman Catholic schools and community schools. Similarly, TeachVac has brought into sharp focus the regional differences in adverts placed per school during the recruitment round. Turnover could be deduced from the Workforce Census, but did anyone every bother to do so and then match need to regional allocations even though, as the witnesses accepted this morning, much of the teacher supply market is very local in nature. Incidentally, I don’t think head of department posts are a sub-regional market, but are mostly constrained within a travel to work area. It is only for leadership vacancies at the more senior levels that I think significant numbers of teachers are prepared for the upheaval of a house move.

So, both statistics and management information have their place and their uses. It just seems to me we have lots of the former but not enough of the latter in education.