Tag Archives: teacher supply

Canards

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In the 1990s when Chris Woodhead became head of Ofsted he mentioned a figure of 15,000 poor quality teachers that needed removing in an early interview. That figure became stuck in the minds of journalists and was trotted out for many years even though it wasn’t often supported by any evidence. We now have a similar situation with the 40% of teachers that allegedly quit the profession in their first year of teaching. This figure goes right back to an interview Mike Tomlinson gave, I think but haven’t checked, to The Guardian when he took over from Mr Woodhead. Recently, it gained a new lease of life when used by ATL’s general secretary at their annual conference this spring. Here’s what I wrote on May 8th

Teacher supply was an area of interest following the teacher associations annual conferences. I was surprised, and not a little disappointed, to see the General Secretary of ATL use data from 2011 – data from during the height of the recession – to discuss recruitment and staying-on rates for teachers in 2015. It may well be that in London and the South East more teachers will leave during their first year, but in 2011 the problem for many teachers was finding a job in the first place. This year the problem for some schools has been finding a teacher at all.

Although Sam Freedman and I don’t share the same political views we do share a regard for the accurate use of data and his comments at http://samfreedman1.blogspot.co.uk/ say what I think, although the statistics he mentions for secondary trainees are in Table 6 with table 5 covering undergraduate courses.

That at least two leading recruitment agencies have used the 40% statistic to support their promotional campaigns is disappointing, as I would have hoped for a little more maturity from them.  Anyhow the figure is now firmly in the public consciousness and will reappear from time to time when thoughtless commentators discuss teacher supply problems. as this is an issue likely to remain in the headlines we can expect to see the figure used regularly.

But, there is no use just moaning. We need an agenda for action on teacher supply. Here are some suggestions;

– Pay the fees of all graduate trainees from 2015 entry onwards – this will be especially helpful to career changers that have paid off previous fees and will need to repay the £9,000 as soon as they start teaching

– Look to how those training to be teachers that have links to communities can be employed in those communities and more mobile students can be encouraged to move to where they are needed.

– Make sure teacher preparation places are more closely linked to where the jobs will be. This means reviewing places in London and the Home counties – not enough – and the north West – probably too many in some subjects and sectors.

– look at trainees that cannot find a job because we trained too many of them and see whether with some minimal re-training they might be useful teachers. This applies especially to PE teachers this year – some might re-train as science teachers or primary PE specialists and art teachers if they can work in design part of D&T.

– ramp up the 2015 autumn advertising campaign spend, including an early TV and social media advertising spend that at least matches that of the MoD.

– split the teacher preparation part of the National College away from the Leadership and professional development elements and put someone in charge that understands the issues- Sir Andrew Carter springs to mind as an obvious choice.

– look at the NQT year support now that local authorities don’t have the cash to help. This may be vital in keeping primary teachers in the profession, especially if anything goes wrong at the school where they are working.

None of these are new idea, and many were in my submission to the Carter Review that can be found in an earlier post. What is clear is that the new government cannot continue with an amateurish approach that marked some of the tactics towards teacher supply during the last few years. With many thousands more pupils entering schools over the next few years we cannot create a world class school system with fewer teachers.

Has the ship steadied?

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Data released from UCAS this morning shows that total applications for postgraduate teacher preparation courses still lags behind the same point in 2014. By mid-March 2014 there had been over 102,000 applications from more than 33,500 applicants. This year at roughly the same mid-moth point in March applications were around 85,500 and applicant numbers were approaching the 28,000 mark. In terms of applicants, the gap has widened by around a further 200 applicants during the mid-February to mid-March period. With around 34,000 places on offer there are still not enough applicants to fill every place, even if all were suitable.

Higher education seems to be bearing the brunt of the reduction, with applications down from more than 53,000 in 2014 to fewer than 40,000 in March 2015. That said, although applications to SCITTs have risen, but there are more of them this year, applications to School Direct are down in both categories. The reduction is not a localised issue, but appears in all age groups and across all regions of England. This will make the downward trend more of a challenge to reverse in the remaining period of the recruitment round as it is difficult to know where to focus advertising to gain the most effect. We must just hope that the TV advertising campaign makes a difference by next month.

Although at this stage of the year interpreting ‘offers’ under the system that allows multiple offers to be made is more difficult than in the past, it does seem that in the primary sector the total number of ‘offers’ currently in the system is down on the same point last year by  possibly as many as 400 candidates.

The situation in the secondary sector is more challenging to unravel because of the manner in which UCAS present the statistics. However, it seems likely that there may be slightly more ‘offers’ in the system than at this point last year. The anxiety is that they may not be in the traditional ‘shortage’ subjects but in languages, where there seems to have been a large increase in applications, and possibly in physical education. Physics and mathematics have probably reached a level that is sustainable with present bursary and scholarship arrangements if applications continue at the current rate, but the numbers won’t be high enough to meet the level of training places allocated. In many other subjects, demand still remains at levels that are worryingly low and will be insufficient to improve on recruitment totals from last year unless the ratio of acceptances to applicants is altered, especially on School Direct where relatively more applicants weren’t offered places than on other types of course in 2014.

Next month the figures will be affected by the Easter break and, although this is less of an issue in these days of electronic applications, it is still a factor to be taken into account. Thus, the next set of data that can form a realistic comparison between 2014 and 2015 will come in May, after the election. The data will no doubt be an early headache for the new Secretary of State, assuming we have one by then.

London needs teachers

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An analysis of the first 5,600 vacancies recorded in TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the free service for schools and teachers that allows schools to place job announcements and those vacancies to be matched with trainees, teachers and returners looking for a classroom teaching post in a secondary school, has thrown up some interesting information.

Firstly, it looks likely that any secondary school looking for a teacher in the autumn term will have to rely either upon returners or using the services of agencies of others prepared to search for applicants. The trainee pool in most subjects is likely to be exhausted by the summer if the current level of advertisements continues, especially if April is the peak month for recruitment advertising, as it has been in past years.

Of course, the rumblings from the ASCL conference about schools budgets may mean that schools have fewer vacancies to advertise than they would wish. But that may be counter-acted by above average wastage from the profession if other surveys from the teacher associations are correct.

Anyway, what is clear from TeachVac is that around half the vacancies in many subjects recorded so far this year are in just three regions of England; London; the South East; the East of England. This is despite the over-representation of Teach First in London compared with the rest of the country even though it now has a role across the country.

The presence of above average numbers of private schools in and around London may account for the higher levels of posts in the separate sciences and in many vacancies for teachers of specific languages in this part of the country. Elsewhere, the tendency is still to advertise ‘science’ vacancies and for ‘language’ teachers. Although numbers are small, London and the South East account for two thirds of recorded vacancies for teachers of classics.

Unless they are just advertising locally, and not using their own web sites, schools in the North West of England have advertised around 25% fewer vacancies than schools in London so far during 2015. It may be that the large number of trainees in that part of the country means that more schools can offer more posts directly to trainees without needing to advertise a vacancy. Before the advent of academies such behaviour might have been regarded askance in some quarters.

Teachers of PE may struggle the most to find a new job for September unless vacancies increase sharply in the remainder of the year, as may teachers of RE looking for a teaching post in the south West.

Next week will see the publication of the March data on applications through the UCAS unified admissions system for teacher preparation courses starting this autumn. These courses will provide the bulk of new entrants to fill secondary classroom teacher vacancies in 2016. Hopefully, the new TV campaign will have boosted applications, although it may be April before any effect can really be noticed. Without more applicants 2016 looks likely to be an even more challenging recruitment round than this year, especially if dropout rates from preparation courses are also on the increase, as has been suggested to me.

Teachvac moves forward

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Teachvac http://www.teachvac.co.uk the free site where schools and trainee teachers can register and be told about vacancies for classroom teachers in secondary schools has taken the first step towards enlarging its scope while remaining a free service to both schools and teachers.

Originally launched this January, Teachvac developed to understand the market for trainees both by tracking vacancies and by recording where trainees were looking for vacancies. The site is now able to handle registrations from any teacher looking for a mainstream classroom post in a secondary school across both the maintained and private sectors. The TeachVac site will still track the requirements of trainees, but will also consider the characteristics of other teachers seeking this type of vacancy. In the future, the site will expand to include promoted posts and take in both the primary and special school sectors.

For those curious about how the site works, there are demonstration videos on both the teacher and school registration pages. The Teachvac site is now gearing up to handle the large increase in vacancies expected between now and the end of April. Schools that register receive notification of the state of the market in the subject where they post a vacancy. Each month a review of the trends over the previous month is published.

There is a growing body of data  from Teachvac about the trends in this part of the Labour market that will be of interest in the debate about teacher recruitment. Why, for instance, are so many PE teachers being trained and why did the Teacher Supply Model seemingly underestimate the need for teachers of English for a number of years? There is currently no formal mechanism to discuss these issues with government in any formal sense. I hope that after May the new government will rectify this deficiency.

Jam tomorrow

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Even assuming the first entrants into David Cameron’s new maths scholarship programme that he announced today start their degrees this September, they won’t be available to teach until either September 2018 if they are allowed on TeachFirst or 2019 if they follow a traditional one-year teacher preparation programme.

Even though we might need more maths teachers by then, especially if the next government goes for a requirement that all 16-18 year olds study a maths course of some description, it is still a curious choice of subject to highlight for extra support. At present, mathematics isn’t anywhere near the worst subject in terms of teacher supply. Indeed, in TeachVac it probably won’t be flagged as an amber warning subject until today. That’s well behind, business studies, IT, design and technology, geography, English and social studies; all subjects where we have been warning schools of shortages in 2015 for some time now. See www.teachvac.co.uk for more details.

As the government is also in the process of re-training other teachers to become maths specialists it isn’t clear why there is this focus only on mathematics. There is even a risk that if it forces some physics teachers to have to teach other sciences rather than maths alongside physics it could have a negative effect on recruitment into physics. If the government intends to introduce a compulsory course in English for 16-18 year olds then monitoring teacher numbers in that subject is equally vital to monitoring maths  teacher numbers as shortages of teachers of English may be as severe in some parts of the country as they are for maths teachers.

Teacher supply will be the number one crisis facing whoever is Secretary of State after the election and a piecemeal approach to the problem may attract headlines but won’t produce enough teachers in every subject to allow schools to make progress on the Attainment8 measure.

In two weeks we will see the current recruitment figures for trainees for graduate courses starting in September. They will be the last numbers likely to feed into the general election debate. If they remain poor, as seems likely, teacher supply may be the only issue in education to make waves during the campaign despite the many other policies that need discussion.

Another manifesto for teacher education

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Yesterday the Million+ group of universities launched their Manifesto for Teacher Education in a dining room at the House of Commons. The Chair, the VC of Staffordshire University was flanked by two leading teacher association officials and Labour and Tory party speakers, albeit the Labour member of their education team was Welsh and the ATL speaker was bilingual and had taught in Wales: the debate was wide ranging.

The manifesto itself highlights the need for teachers to have an academic and professional qualification and seeks to restore the pre-eminence of universities in both the preparation of new teachers and in their professional development throughout their career. The manifesto view that Osfted should inspect all providers is sensible, as it the promotion of a workforce that represents society as a whole. Adding a point about the Teacher Supply Model and a need for regional variations in demand to be taken into account is an interesting development and reflects a wider concern about allocations. Especially where targets aren’t being met.

There was a point when the Tory speaker challenged the need for a teaching qualification albeit starting his remarks by saying that there were fewer unqualified teachers now than there were a few years ago. A bit like a position of ‘wanting to have your cake and eat it.’ This led to a debate about whether HE lecturers should also be trained and, at least from me, a question about whether that applied to FE teaching staff as well?  Most seemed in favour of preparation for all that teach at whatever level.

The elephant in the room that nobody addressed, despite a direct question from me, was about whether graduates training as teachers should be expected to pay fees? This isn’t mentioned in the manifesto either. Despite their recent announcement, the Labour speaker didn’t mention anything about whether trainees would be expected to pay fees. As regular reads know, my position is clear, there should be no fees for graduate trainees preparing to be a teacher by whatever route they choose and the present position is discriminatory. However, I have yet to win Lib Dem support for this position.

On the teacher supply position it was humbling to be referred to by two of the speakers as a leading authority. However, I had many years of following the trends and TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk was set up to collect data about the interface between training and employment and thus help improve the modelling of where teachers need to be trained.

The fact that it also offers a free service bring together vacancies and trainees looking for jobs is a bonus that will shortly be extended to all classroom teachers in secondary schools and if discussions underway are successful eventually to the primary sector and to include all promoted and leadership vacancies as well. Next month we hope to publish data on where trainees are looking for vacancies; and just as importantly, where they aren’t. This could provide a lively debate about the very regional needs Million+ highlighted. At present, secondary schools in Yorkshire and the Humber have posted around a third fewer vacancies per school than schools in the South East of England. Despite the presence of TeachFirst, London schools aren’t far behind their neighbours in the South East in seeking new teachers. This is something Million+ will need to bear in mind.

The myth of teacher wastage

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Many years ago Mike Tomlinson gave an interview with The Guardian. It was soon after he became Chief Inspector. In it he referred to a figure of about 40% of new teachers not entering the profession. Like Chris Woodhead’s earlier claim of 15,000 incompetent teachers this figure has entered the mythology of education. Helpfully, in the additional data now published with the 2013 Workforce Census tables the DfE unpick the latest data on what happens to trainees after they qualify to help us understand whether this view is correct.

At this stage it is worth setting the ground rules for understanding the data. Most trainees have to compete for teaching jobs with ‘returners’ and those existing teachers changing schools for whatever reason. There is no logic to the use of teacher resources, so a trainee in their 30s with a house and a partner with a job might not secure a teaching job near where they live, but a footloose graduate in their early 20s might take that job even though they could work anywhere. As training numbers are established some years in advance, although not as far advance as in the past, changes in economic circumstances can radically affect the labour market. The new DfE figures go up to 2011 and concentrate on the early years of the recession when secondary school rolls were also falling.

Overall, the DfE calculate there were 106,000 trainees still under the age of 60 who had never worked as a teacher in circumstances where their employment would have been recorded by the DfE in March 2012. Interestingly, 24,300, or approaching a quarter of the total, emerged from training in the years 2009-2011 after the recession hit in late 2008. Some of these will have started undergraduate degrees way back in 2006 in an entirely different economic climate. The recession matters because the GTCE that still existed then identified a large number of teachers that re-registered with them in 2009. Presumably, some were casualties of the recession and looked to re-enter teaching and were competing with newly qualified teachers for the available jobs. The three years from 2005-2008 only have around 12,000 not recorded as entering teaching, about half the number in the later years. This suggests that it might not have been from a disinterest in teaching that the numbers were higher, but that there were more candidates than jobs.

A second table produced by the DfE confirms that those NQTs that enter teaching are likely to stay. The percentage in regular service after one year has never been below 90% since 1997 and after five years generally around 75% remain in teaching. Even after ten years two thirds of entrants are still teaching. For a profession with so many young women in it, some of whom might be expected to take a career break, this is an impressive percentage. The fact that 55% of those that entered teaching in 1997 were still there 17 years later raises interesting questions about the perception of the profession as a quick in and quick out area of work. But then the DfE made this all clear some years ago in the chapter on teacher wastage in their detailed review of the 2010 workforce Census that can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-profile-of-teachers-in-england-from-the-2010-school-workforce-census The charts on pages 77-79 are especially helpful in understanding what happens.

 

This idea won’t solve the current problem in teacher supply

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Mr Taylor, the head of the National College for Teaching and Leadership is given to New Year suggestions that can sometimes seem extreme. A few years ago he advocated the abolition of the Teacher Supply Model process and its replacement with local decisions about recruitment into the profession. This year he appears to be suggesting some form of talent spotting of youngsters as a means of overcoming a teacher shortage that he still isn’t apparently prepared to admit has occurred on his watch. This is despite plenty of warning from those that understand the labour market for teachers.

Although a scheme, whether called cadetships, apprenticeships or even a taster scheme, won’t help alleviate the current teacher shortage, and it is naive to suggest anything to the contrary, the idea has been tried before. I recall going to visit such a scheme in North Carolina nearly 20 years ago whereby schools offered cadetship to those possibly interested in a career as a teacher. The problem was that although many potential primary school teachers identified teaching as a possible career when at high school, possible secondary subject teachers were often still more interested in their subject than in how they would use their knowledge after university. Offering tasters at university to this group is probably better than trying something at school where subject enjoyment is often seen as correlated with teacher enthusiasm and likeability. Nevertheless, helping pupils identify the positives of teaching can be useful in counteracting their over-exposure to schooling compared with their understanding of other potential careers.

As teaching is an occupation, schemes to attract youngsters mustn’t either fall foul of employment law or look like cheap alternative to fill gaps where there are insufficient numbers of trained teachers. In the 1960s, scholarship pupils where I went to school often spent two terms as class teachers in local secondary modern schools helping to fill vacancies before going on to university. I am sure that isn’t what Mr Taylor had in mind, but his Daily Telegraph interview does seem to veer towards re-introducing pupil teachers or monitors in classrooms when he refers to such children as classroom assistants. Perhaps he has modelled his idea on the football talent spotting schemes that try to identify future stars while they are still at primary school.

In the past, many young people received their first taste of teaching as Sunday School Teachers or similar roles in other faith communities and many still help younger siblings at home. Uniform organisations were also a route to learning about working with people and helping others to develop new skills. How primary pupils would act as teaching assistants without affecting their own education isn’t covered by Mr Taylor in his interview. Perhaps he just has visions of them as monitors handing out resources, although some might have opportunities to lead baffled teachers through the intricacies of computer coding that is now part of the curriculum.

Putting in place schemes to attract sufficient teachers in ten years time is a long-term project. What Mr Taylor doesn’t seem to accept, perhaps because he would need to admit his own part in bringing it about, is that we have a teacher supply crisis now. I suggested in my post yesterday that fees be abated for trainee teachers and that they all be paid a bursary. That would produce results now, which is when we need more trainee teachers.

No FEES for Trainee Teachers

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I thought I would start off 2015 with a campaign. Readers of this blog know that there is a teacher supply crisis looming partly because of the large increase in pupil numbers over the next few years. As a result, we cannot afford to miss the recruitment targets for new teachers. At present, some trainees pay fees, and they create a debt repayable when they start teaching, but others, notably those on Teach First and the salaried School Direct route, don’t. Not only is this divisive, but it is also off-putting to some would-be teachers.

Imagine a career-switcher in their mid-30s just free from repaying the debt Labour forced upon them by introducing tuition fees after they won the 1997 election. Unless such intending teachers can secure a place on either of the programmes mentioned above they will incur new debt. The Institute of Fiscal Studies was wrong to say trainee teachers won’t need to repay their debt; this group will, and immediately they start teaching.

However, if the IFS is correct, and most new graduates now with £27,000 of debt won’t ever earn enough to repay the extra £9,000 or so of debt incurred as a trainee teacher why is the government taking this debt plus accrued interest onto its books? Abate the fees, as was the case from 1997 until the new fee regime was introduced and cut the government deficit and at the same time makng teaching more attractive as a career. Indeed, I would go further and pay every trainee either the same wage as an apprentice of the same standing or even the equivalent of the salary the Ministry of Defence pays officers in training at Sandhurst.

Perhaps the churches, as the largest employer of teachers, could lead the way by inviting church schools to pay trainee fees from the reserves they hold and negotiate a price with the church universities that is appropriate for the course rather than tie the current fee linked to higher education rates. After all, two thirds of the graduate course is spent in schools, so trainees are currently paying for the privilege of learning how to teach. All other professions abolished this notion of indentured service generations ago.

I wonder if the Carter Review could be even more radical and suggest returning teacher preparation to the employers as a group, thus undoing the 50 years of progress since Robbins started the move to more fully involve higher education in the preparation of all teachers. But, we cannot sit around waiting for Carter; there is an urgent need for action now. The government should act swiftly and announce they will pay the fees for 2015 graduate entrants because the cost of a teacher supply crisis will be far greater and longer lasting than the loss of income from the fees that are repaid.

Meanwhile www.teachvac.co.uk is now up and running offering job matching for secondary trainees, and indeed teachers looking for main scale posts in England for free. Schools can now post vacancies for free as well. I look forward to reporting on the 2015 recruitment round as it develops for both trainees and schools: regular updates will be posted here and schools registering vacancies will be told the current supply situation from later this month every time that they register a vacancy.

Can we afford Carter?

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Sometime, probably in January, the Carter Review is likely to publish its report into teacher preparation. There are four possible scenarios the Review might suggest; open the market to competition based either on the present fees or on direct funding from government; return to the option of fee-based higher education as the main provider topped up by employment-based schemes at the margin; require all training to be under the control of employers; abolish the need for qualified teachers and let schools employ anyone they think will be suitable and allow them to arrange what preparation they think will be necessary within possibly some national guidelines.

As the review was established by Michael Gove when he was Secretary of State the last must be a more likely outcome than the second, with the first and third options or variations of them are possibly perhaps the most likely outcomes. The first option might see a wholesale exodus of universities, especially if private companies sought to drive down the price of preparation below the current £9,000 fee level. The government would then have to decide whether price or quality was the main driver for expenditure. For a 40 week course, the £9000 fee equates to £225 per week per trainee or less than £50 per day. So schools might want to consider the real costs of such a scheme especially if they need to use supply cover at times. The income would also need to cover marketing, admissions, administration and other overheads including a contribution to senior staff salaries.

The third option could effectively relieve the DfE of the training costs and let schools hire interns and pay for their training costs from school funds. Schools could choose to do it all themselves; work together in groups as SCITTs have been doing for more than 20 years; or hire outside contractors – including possibly higher education – to provide MOOC courses.

Although superficially an attractive proposition, this third option is risky, especially if many schools decided to try and buy experienced teachers in the market rather than bother to train new ones. We have already seen with School Direct far fewer trainees this year in schools than in HE in several subjects. This option would require someone, presumably the NCTL, to ensure sufficient trainees or risk a recruitment crisis of the levels not seen since the 1960s and early 1970s just as the school population is growing rapidly. Of course, if schools don’t need to follow a National Curriculum, except in English and Mathematics this doesn’t matter. Schools can drop subjects they cannot staff. Is it necessary to teach everyone music or art or computer science? Surely, schools will be able to recruit enough primary teachers locally so as not to need to rely on the remaining undergraduate programmes in universities.

All this is, of course, mere speculation at this stage, but it would be surprising if the Carter Review didn’t come up with some radical proposals given its genesis. The option that cuts government funding, thus making the DfE look virtuous with the Treasury, might seem attractive but it will need to be tested against the wider government policy initiative of narrowing the gap between educational outcomes of the more wealthy in society and those living in poverty, especially on the large social housing estates in our cities and town.