Tag Archives: teachers

My guest blog for Oriel Square Publishing

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By John Howson, chair of TeachVac and County Councillor in Oxfordshire. *This blog was written before the DfE’s announcement on 2nd January 2021 of a new Institute of Teaching.

2020 didn’t prove to be a happy 150th anniversary for state education in England. Hopefully, we will be able to look back on 2021 with better memories. One clear outcome from 2020 was the need to review methods of teaching and learning as pupils were forced to interact with their teachers remotely.

Teacher preparation

The oversight of the school system might have been better managed had there been a strong middle-tier between schools and policymakers.

For many years, too much of the preparation and professional development of teachers has been focused on looking backwards at the past rather than at understanding the possibilities offered by a very different future. The Covid-19 pandemic changed that approach overnight. Parents discovered the reality of teaching and school leaders had to invent new patterns of dialogue between their staff and pupils; often with little help from the government.

Indeed, the planning and oversight of the school system, fractured as it is between local authorities, stand-alone academies and Multi Academy Trusts, might have been better managed had there been a strong middle-tier in operation between schools and policymakers at Westminster.

The role of schools in teaching training

In the course of the past fifty years, the labour market for teachers has oscillated between periods of shortage and times of oversupply.

For many years, I have been an observer of the workings of the labour market for teachers. In the course of the past 50 years that I have been involved with schools in England, the labour market for teachers has oscillated between periods of shortage – occasionally of severe shortages of teachers – and other times where there has been an oversupply.

Under the coalition government, and especially under the stewardship of Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education, schools were encouraged to be at the forefront of teacher supply. Traditional higher education routes of teacher preparation were out of favour, and narrowly missed disappearing altogether when faced with recruitment controls.

At its zenith, the ambitious School Direct salaried route into teaching accounted for 12% of postgraduate entrants into teacher training.

The ambitious School Direct salaried route into teaching reached its zenith in 2016/17 when such trainees accounted for 12% of postgraduate entrants into teacher training. By the government’s 202/21 training year census the same route only accounted for five per cent of trainees, despite a larger number of trainee places being available. …

To read the rest of the blog go to https://www.orielsquare.co.uk/blog/index.php/2021/01/05/teacher-training-putting-the-past-behind-us/

Reflections on half a century of education

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Half a century ago this week I started my teaching career at a comprehensive school in Tottenham. I have before me, as I write this blog, the actual letter, dated 4th December 1970 from the Chief Education Officer’s representative, appointing me to the unestablished staff of Haringey Council, as an assistant teacher at Tottenham School for the spring term of 1971. Interestingly, it was during the only period of the Council’s history when it was under Conservative control (1968-1972).

The letter from the council also contained the phrase ‘or such other school maintained by the Council to which you may be called upon to serve’. In practice, I remained at the school until December 1977, when my journey to Oxford and a very different future began. I also have the letter detailing my starting salary of £1,325 per year including a London Allowance payment of £85 per year and the grant of one increment for post-18 study! As I marvelled at the level of my father’s starting salary in 1936, so readers of this blog just starting out may wonder at such an apparent paltry sum of little over £100 a month before stoppages.

At least one regular reader of this blog will recall, Tottenham School had a reputation for music and drama that continued from the selective school from which the comprehensive school had emerged. The comprehensive school was a tough baptism for a new and untrained teacher, because many of the staff had never before taught those that had not passed the 11+ examination and had previously been educated in secondary modern schools, where the class teacher model rather than the subject teacher approach had been the norm. Both pupils and teachers found it difficult to adapt to the new situation.

My appointment had come about as a result of a staffing crisis facing schools as pupil numbers were on the increase, as now, and insufficient people were being trained as teachers. I joined as an untrained graduate, expecting to stay until the summer and then to undertake a higher degree course, perhaps at a Canadian university. The departure of the Head of Geography for a deputy headship at the end of May changed all that, especially as the other full-time geography teacher was expecting to emigrate to Australia the following December. Suddenly, I became acting head of department after two terms of teaching. Not a promotion that I would now encourage, but one that I was happy to take at the time.

The highlight of my six years at the school was seeing the first comprehensive sixth from students win a prestigious adult drama festival with a production of The Bald Prima Donna by Eugene Ionesco. The low point, probably the classroom stabbing in January 1977.

There were many great colleagues and pupils that I came into contact with during those years. Some, sadly no longer with us. There were many things that happened that would be more than frowned upon today, but a happy accident of chance set me on a road I still enjoy travelling.

DfE announcement on a Saturday!

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The decision to announce both a new Institute of Teaching and the recommencement of the review of the ITT market, following a pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic, wasn’t something I expected to read this afternoon.

DfE announcements on a Saturday afternoon are rarer than hen’s teeth. So rushed seems the announcement on the recommencement of the ITT Review that it is unclear whether the statement that ‘The review is expected to report in summer 2020.’ Should have read summer 2021?

Anyway the announcement of,

‘A new Institute of Teaching is set to be established in England to provide teachers and school leaders with prestigious training and development throughout their career.

… with the Institute being the first of its kind in the world.’

DfE https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-institute-of-teaching-set-to-be-established

May raise some eyebrows and questions about hyperbole in places as far apart as Singapore and Ontario.

This idea for this new Institute doesn’t seem yet to have the structure of the Area Training Organisations that existed across the country in the post-war period or even of the short-lived regional structure for leadership training in the days before GRIST and its derivatives.

Indeed, what of the wonderful National College created under the Blair government only to be axed by the Conservatives?  Admittedly that started with senior leadership and then expanded into other areas? Has it been air-brushed out of history?

To claim that the new Institute ‘will revolutionise teacher training and make England the best place in the world to train and become a great teacher’ will raise the question in many minds of what have the Tories been doing for the past ten years of trying to create a school-led training system. Is this an acknowledgement of failure?

There is no way that I believe the present system of ITT, or ITE depending on your point of view, is anything but high quality, but there is room for innovation, not least around technology and learning, as I have written in a recent blog.

The numbers quoted in the announcement also seem suspect. There are around 40,000 trainees teachers each year, so 1,000 represents about three per cent of the total. A higher percentage, of course, if targets for recruitment are not met. 2,000 early career teachers is an even smaller percentage and no figures are provided for the essential development of middle leaders where a national programme has been sadly lacking.

Where will the existing Teaching Schools fit into this new order, and how will geographical gaps be filled? Who will have oversight, and will there be a National Director of Training and Development with the ear of the Secretary of State?

A cynic might say this was an attempt to end a run of bad news for the DfE and its Ministers, and an attempt to regain the initiative. If so, I hope what emerges really does help develop the teaching profession.

Perhaps the Secretary of State can start by changing the rules about employing unqualified people as teachers. There is, after all, no point in an Institute focusing on initial teacher programmes if academies are free to employ anyone as a teacher.

A better announcement would have been that the term ‘teacher’ had become a reserved occupation term only allowed to be used by those with QTS.

Thank a Teacher or perhaps not?

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When is a holiday for teachers not a holiday? Perhaps when announced by a government Minister. In my book, an in-service day is not a holiday. The Schools Minister’s announcement of an extra day before Christmas to allow teachers to have a “proper break” from working with test and trace to identify Covid cases doesn’t seem like a real holiday to me. More of a political announcement where a Minister hopes that nobody will read beyond the headline.

Apparently Mr Gibb told the Education Select Committee earlier this week that: “We are about to announce that ‘inset days’ can be used on Friday December 18, even if an inset day had not been originally scheduled for that day.

“We want there to be a clear six days so that, by the time we reach Christmas Eve, staff can have a proper break without having to engage in the track and trace issues.”

How seriously will school leaders take the additional opportunity for in-service training? Hopefully, they will suggest training at home rather than requiring attendance at the school site. Of course, some supply teachers stand to lose a possible day’s pay as a result of this announcement.  

With the looming pay freeze for next year facing teachers, I wonder how teachers will receive this badly wrapped present. A pay freeze may send some teachers overseas next year and others looking for promotion, so ‘churn’ may increase next year. At TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk we also expect more leadership vacancies than in recent years, especially in the primary sector, as leaders decide they have had enough of muddle and mixed messages about the handling of the pandemic.

The National Education Union has published a useful set of maps showing how covid-19 cases have ebbed and flowed for primary age pupils and the 10-14 age-group during the course of the autumn term between September to the first week in December. It is not clear what moves the government has taken to ensure vulnerable staff are properly protected. Looking back over this blog, I notice I made a suggestion about identifying possible staff ‘at risk’ and ensuring that they weren’t in contact with pupils. Figures for the cost of supply staff suggests that this wasn’t taken up as an idea.

Certainly my idea of employing NQTs without a teaching post as supernumerary staff wasn’t acted upon. I wonder whether this would have been a cheaper option than boosting the profits of the supply agencies.

Finally, I was struck by this paragraph from the report of an Ofsted virtual visit to a secondary school in early November

Teachers have checked what pupils remember and used this knowledge to help them plan lessons. Overall, they have found that the areas pupils needed help with before lockdown are even more of a priority now. For example, pupils who previously found reading tricky now need extra help. You are using some of the COVID-19 catch-up premium to address this by employing extra staff and purchasing additional resources.

Recovering the damage done by covid-19 to children’s education is going to be a key task for 2021 and beyond.

Reflections from a round table presentation

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Foundation for Education Development Round Table

Part of 150th Anniversary of the 1870 Elementary Education Act

A synopsis of my presentation

Education workforce

Teacher supply over the past 150 years, and certainly since World War Two, has been a perpetual cycle or more accurately a sine wave, moving from shortage to surplus to shortage, mostly governed by the coincidence of the economic and demographic cycles.

 All schools are often only fully staffed when pupil numbers are low and the economy is in recession. A buoyant economy; rising birth rates and increases in length of education have created shortages that have most affected schools serving our more deprived communities.

The current situation

What are some possible issues within the workforce? Here are three dichotomies to consider:

Career Development

Personal Goals v System Needs

At every stage there can be tensions between the career goals of teachers and the needs of the system to fill vacancies at every point in the system from classroom teachers to head teachers in schools and the many roles beyond schools that need expertise in teaching. For example, the tension over seen in supporting candidates for headship when a school may lose a highly able deputy.

However, schools with a good track record of staff development attract staff that want to work in such environments and the turnover is more than compensated for by the staff attracted.

Teachers need support at every stage of their careers and currently CPD is not treated with the attention it deserves.

Where to work

Market v Direction

England has a very market-based approach to teaching jobs. A teacher is in charge of their own career and there is still little advice available. When should you seek more responsibility? Is it ever too late to look for a new post? Is there hidden discrimination in appointments?

In some countries, teachers are civil servants, and are directed where to teach. New teachers may serve early stages of their careers in challenging locations that contain posts that are otherwise hard to fill.  Governments in England have dabbled with the idea of ‘direction’ from Fast Track to the coalition government’s desire to parachute heads and middle leaders into certain schools and the discussion of ‘super-heads’, but the market system has so far triumphed. That triumph has been at a significant financial cost to schools and teachers. 

Both approaches have advantages and challenges. As noted, one approach is expensive, with schools spending millions of pounds on recruitment advertising for a process that should cost less than £3 per vacancy. (TeachVac data) The other takes away freedom from individuals – that freedom was a reason I became a teacher not a civil servant. But, as teaching is becoming a global career, can we afford to lose large numbers of teachers overseas?

Making teaching an Attractive Career

Intrinsic v Extrinsic Factors

Teachers don’t usually join just for the pay, but there are few other ‘perks’. Teachers work an ‘employer-directed form of flexitime and on balance have seen other workers catch up on the holiday front, This year has revealed how important teachers are as key workers and how well regarded they are by sections of society. Their workload needs to be constantly monitored and the implications of the changes in technology on re-training are not insignificant.

Finally, the importance of both

Morale and Accountability

These are not alternatives, but essential considerations for an effective teaching profession. Overload accountability and create low morale and there is a problem. At present we need to ensure teachers and leaders feeling drained by their efforts don’t leave the profession because they feel under-valued, especially by government.

To end with a personal plea: To celebrate the 150th anniversary of State Funded Schooling

Make ‘TEACHER’ a reserved occupation term

And as a bonus, create some Regis Professorship of Education as well, to demonstrate the status of the profession.

No Tsunami of Applications

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Earlier today UCAS released the first data on the 2021 recruitment round for postgraduate teacher preparation courses. The data are for applications up to the 16th November. Last year the data were for Monday 18th November 2019. In addition, there are applications through the DfE’s new service for which no data are yet available.

Now, it is always dangerous to read too much into the first month’s figures, but thirty years of looking at the numbers does allow me to make some observations.

Firstly, the increase in applicants domiciled in England, from 6,290 in 2019 to 7,420 in 2020, does not include large increases in applicants from the younger age groups, and  is skewed towards applicants domiciled in the London Areas.

Change in applicant numbers by age of applicant

Age        2020 round         2021 round         change

21 and

Under   1510                       1550                           40

22             970                       1040                           70

23             630                         730                         100

24             420                         570                         150

25-29     1200                       1490                         290

30-39       940                       1160                         220

40+           620                         890                         270

All           6290                       7420                       1130

Source UCAS Reports A 2019 and 2020 November data

For example, in the North East, applicants in November 2019 totalled 380. This November, the number is 390. In London the total was 890 in 2019, and is 1,300 this November. Similarly, in the South East Region, the increase is from 910 to 1,150. So, over half of the increase in applicants is accounted for by just two regions in England.

Although early days, should we be concerned that the number of male applicants aged 21 or under, final year undergraduates, has dropped from 360 last November to 300 this year? One to watch as the number of men over 40 applying has increased from 160 to 250. Overall, there are just fewer than 200 more male applicants this year compared to last year at this point in time.

More applicants means more applications, and the total increased from 17,840 in November 2019 to 21,710 this November. Again, as expected, London has done well, with an increase from 2,740 applications by last November to 4,120 this November. In the North East applications only rose from 1,090 to 1,110.

Both primary and secondary sectors have benefitted from the increase in applicants. Applications for primary sector courses are up from 7,980 to 9,890, and for secondary courses, from 9,860 to 11,790.

All types of provider have seen increases, but one of the smallest increases is in secondary SCITT applications, up from 1,320 to 1,360.

Almost all subjects have seen an increase in applications – data on applicants by subject isn’t published in the main reports.

Arts and humanities subjects has seen some of the largest increases in applications.  Even Physics has 240 applications this year, compared with 180 at this point in 2019. Art has seen applications double from 240 to 540, and even Design and Technology has 190 applications this year compared with 140 in November 2019. But, this might mean an increase an applicants from 50 last year to no more than 70 this year. Still, an increase is to be welcomed.

How long will this increase in interest in teaching last? There has been an article in SchoolsWeek recently suggesting it might be short-lived. After the start of the financial crisis it took just three years before teaching was starting to struggle to attract applicants to the profession. This time, with the pay freeze, who knows? More thought when the next set of data are published.

Report to the APPG Teaching Profession November meeting

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This report to the APPG notes the state of the labour market for teachers during September and October; a report from the EPI on men and teaching and the section of the Migration Advisory committee Report that dealt with teaching as a career.

Teacher Labour market – current thoughts

Teacher Shortage over: well almost

The latest data from UCAS about postgraduate ITT numbers for September provides a first view of what the outlook for the year is likely to be. The September data will provide the basis for the likely supply of teachers into the labour market for September 2021 and January 2022 vacancies.

In view of the shock to the economy administered by the covid-19 pandemic, it is not surprising that there were nearly 7,000 more applicants in 2020 than in 2019. Up from 40,560 to 47,260 for those in domiciled in England. The number placed or ‘conditionally placed’ increased from 28,500 to 33,800. This is an increase of around 20% on last year.

The number of applicants placed increased across the country, although in the East of England the increase of only 120 was smaller than in the other regions. In London, the increase was in the order of an extra 1,000 trainees placed on courses compared with 2019.

More applicants from all age groups were placed this year, although the increase was smaller among the youngest age group of new graduates. This might be a matter for concern. Over, 2,000 more men were placed this year, compared to 4,500 more women. This is proportionally a greater increase in the number of men placed.

There was much more interest in secondary courses, where applications increased by nearly 14,000 to more than 81,000. For primary courses, the increase was near 6,000 to just over 53,000. The difference may be down to the date the pandemic struck home, and the availability of courses with places still available at that point in the cycle. Many primary courses will already have been full by March.

Higher education seems to have been the main beneficiary of the wave of additional applications. Applications to high education courses increased from 55,000 last year to nearly 65,000 this year. Applications for apprenticeships reached nearly 1,600 and there were 1,800 more applications to SCITT courses. The School Direct fee route attracted nearly 6,500 more applications. However, the School Direct Salaried route only attracted 200 more applicants this year, and the number placed actually fell this year, by around 300 to just 1,470. Does this route have a future?

In most secondary subjects, more applications are recorded as placed this year than last. Geography, languages (where classifications have changed) are the key exceptions, with fewer recorded as placed than last year. Even in physics, there has been a small increase on last year. However, the increase in design and technology is not enough to ensure the DfE’s Teacher Supply Model (TSM) number will be reached. This is also likely to be the case in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Fortunately, in the sciences, there are far more biology students than required by the TSM number.

I am also sceptical as to whether all the history and physical education trainees will find teaching posts in their subjects next year, because the excess of students placed to the TSM number is such that it is difficult to see sufficient vacancies being generated even in  a normal year. If fewer teachers leaves than normal, then the excess may be significant and these trainees might well want to look to any possible second subjects they could teach.

At this point in time, it looks as if 20202/21 round will start with a significant increase in applications over the numbers at the start of the last few years: we shall see.

Seealso:. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/4143/the_impact_of_covid_19_on_initial_teacher_training.pdf

The data on vacancies recorded during September and October 2020

The recorded level of vacancies during October was around 30% below the number recorded during October 2019 with less than 4,000 vacancies recorded during October this year compared with more than 5,000 during October 2019.

As with other months this autumn, primary vacancies have been holding up better than those posted by secondary schools with the vacancies across the primary sector down by only some 13%. In the secondary sector, English, down by 50% on October 2019 and mathematics, down by more than 45% are amongst the subjects recording some of the largest declines in vacancy totals. By contrast, music has only recorded a fall of around 14% and art a fall of 24%. However, with not even 150 vacancies between the two subjects, these are not major recruiters of teachers.

Traditionally, the end of October marks the conclusion of the annual recruitment round. Most vacancies appearing from now onwards will normally be geared towards appointments for September. In this case that will be September 2021. In a normal year there are few vacancies advertised for an April start. It is too early to tell whether 2021 will be different in that respect.

Leadership vacancies remain another bright spot in an otherwise challenging recruitment market for job seekers. Head teacher vacancies have remained at very similar levels to October 2019. While there have been slightly fewer deputy and assistant head teacher vacancies across the secondary sector, this has been offset by higher vacancy levels in the primary sector for posts at these levels.

Most notable at this time of year is the high percentage of temporary and maternity leave vacancies advertised in the primary sector. During October 2020, some 20% of recorded primary vacancies were listed as a result of a teacher taking maternity leave and a further 28% were listed as temporary positions, some of which may also have been as a result of a teacher taking maternity leave. Overall, only just over half of the primary posts were offered as permanent positions during October 2020.

Although the percentage of vacancies resulting from a teacher taking maternity leave was similar in the secondary sector, at 19% of October vacancies, there were far fewer temporary vacancies advertised. Such vacancies only accounted for 10% of the total vacancies during October. This meant that permanent vacancies accounted for more than 70% of vacancies in the secondary sector during October. A much higher percentage than in the primary sector.

Men in teaching EPI Report

EPI, the Education Policy Institute, published a short report entitled ‘Trends in the Diversity of Teachers in England’ that is largely about gender diversity in teaching. The report brings up to date some of the data that can be found in m post on this blog from April 2020 at:https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/are-new-graduate-entrants-to-teaching-still-predominantly-young-white-and-female/

Interestingly, although the report does put the issue into the wider context of the attractiveness of teaching as a career, and the lack of women taking degrees in some subjects such as physics, it doesn’t really consider the fact that some of the change may be down to teaching also becoming relatively less attractive to women, especially primary school teaching.

The EPI paper, while revealing the genuine concern about the issue, doesn’t point out that at the end of the 1990s when the economy was also doing well, the percentage of male graduates accepted into teaching through the UCAS graduate entry system (then administered by the GTTR) was as low as it is now, and possibly even lower in the primary sector.

Percentage of men accepted onto graduate teacher preparation courses

1998       31%

1999       30%

2000       29%

Source GTTR annual Report for 2000

The EPI paper is also correct to draw attention to the fact that men generally decide to apply later in the recruitment round than women, suggesting possibly that the attraction of teaching as a career is less strong for some male applicants. This is possibly also borne out by the higher departure rates from teaching for men, although some may remain in teaching, just outside of state-funded schools.

Linking the evidence to wage rates, where public sector workers have not fared well compared to other graduates in the South East, is interesting but doesn’t explain why Inner London schools have the second highest percentage of male teachers. Perhaps, this is the Teach First effect?

So what might be done? EPI have some good suggestions. In taking over the admissions to teacher preparation courses, the DfE might want to look at how the process across the year might be more neutral in terms of encouraging diversity among both applicants and those placed.

However, one issue has always been that some course providers attract a disproportionately high percentage of applicants from certain groups. Male Black African applicants at one time largely only applied for places on four courses, and some early years courses rarely if ever saw a male applicant.

Finally, the media has a role to play in stereotyping certain careers. The anguish of those that suffered child abuse, mostly at the hands of men, may have deterred some men from choosing careers such as teaching.

But, that’s not something just looking at statistics as both EPI and my blog does, can tell you.  As the EPI paper concludes, ‘it is important to understand the root cause of why more male graduates don’t choose teaching.’

Migration Advisory Committee – teaching conclusions

Teachers of all Modern Languages struggling to find a teaching post may be surprised to discover that the government’s Migration Advisory Committee believes that their subject should be added to the list of shortage subjects. The Report from the MAC https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/922019/SOL_2020_Report_Final.pdf tackles the issue of secondary teaching on pages 606 onwards.

For anyone familiar with recruitment patterns in teaching, using data on job posting in August collected by a company called Burning Glass may raise some eyebrows. August is after all the least representative month for teaching vacancies, except perhaps in Scotland where school return from their summer break up to two weeks earlier than in England and Wales. Previously, Mandarin was on the list of shortage subjects, but not teachers of other languages.

TeachVac has recorded fewer vacancies for teachers of modern languages this year compared with last year since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, so the data from Burning Glass seems curious to say the least.

There is no mention of business studies as a shortage subject in the MAC report even though TeachVac has consistently pointed out that the subject tops the list of subjects where schools have found recruitment a challenge. Perhaps there is a pecking order of subjects that typifies their status. Following the Prime Minister’s announcement this summer about a focus on skills, it is even more difficult to see why business studies is not even considered by the MAC in their report.

The fact that the MAC doesn’t even seem to have taken into account the DfE’s own vacancy site is also curious. As a result the outcome of the data analysis on secondary teaching must be open to discussion.

The MAC decision seems based on the fact that The APPG on Modern Languages was concerned about shortages and that an above average number of EEA nationals made up part of those students on teacher preparation courses. The fact that these courses filled more of their places than say, design & technology isn’t mentioned.

The MAC noted that: We recommend, in addition, adding all modern foreign language teachers within SOC code 2314 (secondary education teaching professionals) to the SOL. Overall the occupation has a relatively low RQF6+ shortage indicator rank and is less reliant on migrant employees than the UK average. Statistics show a gradual rise in the number of entrants to ITT (England only). However, there is also some evidence of shortage, particularly for MFL teachers, a subject more reliant of EEA employees. Page 610

Interestingly, the MAC see no reason to add either primary teacher or FE lecturers to the list of shortage subjects. The former is understandable, the latter strange in view of some of the skills areas on the list. Did the MAC ask whether there was any difficulties in recruiting lecturers in these areas? On the face of their report it seems they treat FE like primary teaching as a single sector, whereas secondary teaching was looked at in more detail down to subject level.

New book

Exploring Teacher Recruitment and Retention

This book is sub-titled Contextual Challenges from International Perspectives, and is jointly edited by Tanya Ovenden-Hope and Rowena Passy, and was published by Routledge on the 2nd October. The ISBN is 9780367076450 The first chapter in this collection of essays was authored by myself

£3 a vacancy

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Finding, matching and linking teacher vacancies to interested applicants for just £3. This seems unbelievable, especially if you add in all the benefits of the data collected to help with expanding our knowledge of the teacher labour market.

But, less than £3 a vacancy is the cost TeachVac’s accountants are telling me as Chair that we spent in the school year 2019-2020 handling more than 50,000 vacancies during that time. Adding teacher capacity comes at negligible cost to the system, and with well over 90% coverage of schools across England, in both state and private sectors, and a five year track record of success, the brand is now well established in the market and offers great value for money.

However, to some extent, TeachVac has been a victim of its own success, the DfE now has a site that carries a fraction of the jobs TeachVac finds. The DfE site also requires schools to do far more work to upload jobs to the site than Teachvac requires.

So it is free to the DfE, free to teachers, but not as free to schools as Teachvac. Indeed, assuming there are development and hosting costs it isn’t free to the DfE. Does it cost the taxpayer more than £3 per vacancy?

School leaders are still happy to see schools spend millions of pounds on recruitment, while complaining that education is under-funded. I don’t subscribe to the argument that education funding must help prop up private sector profits, and I wonder why others with more authority than I will ever have are happy to turn a ‘Nelsonic’ eye to such expenditure.

TeachVac’s latest accounts will soon be visible to all on the Companies House website. They are filed by Oxford Teacher Services Ltd, the holding company. If you would like a sight of the latest accounts before they appear there, do make contact and I will be happy to send you a set.

We have come a long way since the days of hot metal and the moves, firstly from column inches to display advertising, and then to the introduction of colour into vacancy advertising. Shifting recruitment advertising to the web has offered opportunities, not fully exploited by the profession, to cut costs and innovate.

TeachVac has been happy to show the way, and is now looking to expand its expertise gained with teacher vacancies into non-teaching roles. Who knows, we might be able to offer all jobs in schools across England for less than a quarter of a million pounds: now there’s a thought.

Of course if you want to sponsor the site, TeachVac is happy to engage in discussions with you. Imagine, 50,000 vacancies brought to say 60,000 job seekers across the year and around the world as teaching has become a global profession. You can do the arithmetic.

I am proud of what the small team on the Isle of Wight have created over the past five years. Please tell us how we can do even better.

World Statistics Day

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Today we recognise the power of statistics for both good and evil. Many years ago, when I was teaching geography in a school, I would ask my A level groups to at least audit, if not actually take, a course in statistics. As well as informing their general education, the course also helped with their understanding of the geography syllabus of the 1970s that was rapidly changing from mere descriptive and clerical tasks to a more analytical approach to the issue of ‘place’.

At the same time I was persuading my Year 7s to play games. The farming game and the railway game were two favourites. Both helped instil collaborative learning skills plus discussion about issues such as risk and probability.

One spin off from this interest in statistics was the ability to help students remember that temperature was continuous and rainfall intermittent, and thus one was represented by a line on the graph and the other by columns. There is an interesting debate to be had about when discrete data becomes continuous because of the length of the time series? Good question for today.

One of the earliest research projects I ever encountered was conducted by a lecturer at LSE who was counting the number of phone calls between different settlements in South Africa and creating some form of density map. The clerical work, pre-computers, took a whole summer. Now it might take just a few minutes. However, working through the data, town by town, created a feeling for ‘rightness’ that can be lost when a computer spills out the results. The ability to estimate when a number is in the right relationship to those around it is still a key skill.

Playing with information, not statistics, led me into the world of teacher supply via the database of leadership vacancies I started in the early 1980s. Later today, I will participate in a call set up by civil servants to discuss the replacement for the Teacher Supply Model. I think this will be the fourth or fifth iteration of such models to decide how many teachers we need to train each year. Watch out for more on this in a later post.

The School Workforce Census is a great improvement on what went before. However, despite the publicity for the new approach to displaying government statistics, I have some reservations. Perhaps, this is just my age showing, and I need to find some YouTube videos to help me learn new skills.

Understanding data in all forms has never been a more important prerequisite for those making decisions about our lives as the present pandemic has clearly demonstrated. A classical Oxbridge education might have been valuable as a foundation of a career in politics during previous generations. Surely, it is not adequate for leaders in the modern world.

Let us celebrate World Statistics Day by counting the number of different statistics we see during the course of the day. More than we might imagine.

Men and teaching: only a career in a recession?

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EPI, the Education Policy Institute, has today published a short report entitled ‘Trends in the Diversity of Teachers in England’ that is largely about gender diversity in teaching. The report brings up to date some of the data that can be found in my post on this blog from April this year https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/are-new-graduate-entrants-to-teaching-still-predominantly-young-white-and-female/

Interestingly, although the report does put the issue into the wider context of the attractiveness of teaching as a career, and the lack of women taking degrees in some subjects such as physics, it doesn’t really consider the fact that some of the change may be down to teaching also becoming relatively less attractive to women, especially primary school teaching.

The EPI paper, while revealing the genuine concern about the issue, doesn’t point out that at the end of the 1990s when the economy was also doing well, the percentage of male graduates accepted into teaching through the UCAS graduate entry system (then administered by the GTTR) was as low as it is now, and possibly even lower in the primary sector.

Percentage of men accepted onto graduate teacher preparation courses

1998       31%

1999       30%

2000       29%

Source GTTR annual Report for 2000

The EPI paper is also correct to draw attention to the fact that men generally decide to apply later in the recruitment round than women, suggesting possibly that the attraction of teaching as a career is less strong for some male applicants. This is possibly also borne out by the higher departure rates from teaching for men, although some may remain in teaching, just outside of state-funded schools.

Linking the evidence to wage rates, where public sector workers have not fared well compared to other graduates in the South East, is interesting but doesn’t explain why Inner London schools have the second highest percentage of male teachers. Perhaps, this is the Teach First effect?

I also wrote about this issue during my period as a TES commentator. There was a Hot Data column in April 1999 entitled ‘Male primary teachers still elusive’ and in one of my final On the Map pieces for the TES, headed ‘Female Teachers, schools remain a woman’s domain’, published in July 2010, I looked at some international evidence. (Incidentally, at the TES, I never wrote the headlines for my pieces).

In September this year, I again headlined the issue of gender in a wider post considering the evidence from the recent OECD Education Indicators at a Glance publication https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/oecd-education-indicators-at-a-glance-2020-edition/

So what might be done? EPI have some good suggestions. In taking over the admissions to teacher preparation courses, the DfE might want to look at how the process across the year might be more neutral in terms of encouraging diversity among both applicants and those placed.

However, one issue has always been that some course providers attract a disproportionately high percentage of applicants from certain groups. Male Black African applicants at one time largely only applied for places on four courses, and some early years courses rarely if ever saw a male applicant.

Finally, the media has a role to play in stereotyping certain careers. The anguish of those that suffered child abuse, mostly at the hands of men, may have deterred some men from choosing careers such as teaching.

But, that’s not something just looking at statistics, as both EPI and my blog does, can tell you.  As the EPI paper concludes, ‘it is important to understand the root cause of why more male graduates don’t choose teaching.’