Tag Archives: teachers

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.

Labour’s sexist jibe

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This blog has been relatively quiet lately, partly because there have been few new numbers coming out of the DfE over the past month, and partly because the launch of TeachVac has been taking up a lot of my time. On that front, the team at TeachVac have now issued an amber warning in respect of English and Business Studies because we believe there will be insufficient trainee numbers to meet the demand from schools during this recruitment round. Design and Technology may join this list of subjects with such a warning this week if current trends in the advertising of vacancies continues.

As more trainees and teachers sign up for the matching service we are able to start identifying parts of the country where problems may be especially acute later in the recruitment round. The team at TeachVac have also identified that, as expected, independent schools and selective schools are more likely than other schools to advertise for teachers of the separate sciences rather than a teacher of science. As TeachVac is free to schools and trainees, all schools can try both and see what happens without fear of having wasted their money. For anyone unsure about the process there are helpful videos on both the schools and teacher pages demoing the system: just visit www.teachvac.co.uk and hit the demo button.

TeachVac is a long way from members of religious orders as teachers: one of the issues of the moment. I cannot think why Labour’s Mr Hunt – does he really want the job he is doing or is he just going through the motions – talked or nuns and ignored the many men in Roman Catholic orders that have given their lives in the service of education throughout the world.

Until the early 1970s, the Roman Catholic Church along with the Anglicans and free churches in this country ran a number of training colleges for those wanting to become teachers.  By the way, Mr Hunt, the term training college went out of common use when university departments took over most of the colleges in the 1970s in a bid to improve academic standards for would-be teachers. Previously, there were some teachers that learnt on the job, and they weren’t restricted to members of religious orders as I have pointed out in relation to my own career history in education. Now there may be some untrained teachers left in the independent sector, and no doubt many parish priests that come into Roman Catholic schools haven’t had any formal training in teaching, but in the state-funded sector I am sure Ofsted would have commented if it had come across a large group of untrained staff acting as teachers.

The withdrawal of religious orders from headships in the primary sector over the past 30 years I have been studying the issue has undoubtedly been one of the reasons why Roman Catholic schools, especially in the primary sector, have struggled to recruit head teachers from the laity in sufficient numbers. The selfless devotion of those that take vows often allowed them to tackle the burden of headship with single-minded devotion. No doubt they were also willing to go where asked regardless of the type of school or its location. Teachers with families, partners and other community ties don’t have such freedom and it has affected the supply of head teachers in recent years. To date, we have seen no results from the government’s national leader scheme announced in the autumn of 2013 to overcome this problem. No doubt time will tell if it can succeed.

Grim news on teacher training

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The first figures for applications to teacher preparation courses starting in September 2015 were released by UCAS earlier today. As far as providers in England are concerned, applications overall are down from 71,980 to 60,890 a drop of around 11,000. Assuming every applicant makes the maximum possible of three applications, this would be a drop of more than 3,500 applicants compared with the same point last year. In fact the drop in applicants domiciled in England is actually 4,540 compared with last year. This suggests not all applicants use their full number of possible applications; presumably some are location specific and can only apply to providers in particular areas. The decline in applicants is reflected across the country and in percentage terms is greatest for higher education courses, where applications are down from 43,000 to 32,000 between January last year and January this year. This is despite the application process opening earlier than last year and running more smoothly, so that the number of applicants placed is running about a month ahead of last year in most subjects. However, some of the fall in higher education applications will have been due to reduced government allocations, especially in the popular subjects.

The decline in School Direct is not as marked as for higher education, but with more places allocated to that route any reduction in numbers must be a worry. Applications to SCITTS are actually above where they were last year, but again that reflects greater provision and a significant number of new SCITTs having joined the system.

Any drop of this magnitude must be of concern even at the start of the recruitment round, especially as it reflects a decline in applications from all age groups, with both new graduates and career changers seemingly not applying in such large numbers as in the past.

The January numbers reflect the size of the cohort that knew they wanted to enter teaching and applied in the early stage of the recruitment round. An analysis of more than 20 years of applications to teacher preparation courses by graduates suggests to me that in those years when the economy is doing well it has proved almost impossible to reverse any early decline in applications without significant inducements to train. The exception was the year that the bursary was introduced in the March when applications rose subsequently.

The figures issued today explain why I started the campaign for the government to once again pay the fees of graduates entering training by whatever route. Unless the government either agree to pay the fees or offer some other solution then I fear that we are headed not just for the seven per cent shortfall of last autumn’s training numbers but possibly a shortfall of 10% of even more this year.

The government may point out that offers are up on January last year, but that is only because the system is operating a month ahead of last year.

A failure to recruit trainees in 2015 will mean an even greater job crisis in 2016. With more pupils in schools by then that must not be allowed to happen.

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.

 

Schools rebuff call to use unqualified teachers

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The DfE tables in the 2013 Teacher Workforce Survey that reveals the changes in pupil teacher ratios over time. The data also says something about the use of qualified and unqualified teachers by the different types of school. Despite the increase in pupil numbers, PTRs in the maintained primary sector appeared to have improved between 2012 and 2013. However, they worsened in primary academies. This may well be down to the mix of schools in the two groups and it is more instructive to note that PTRs across the whole primary sector remained unchanged for the second year in a row at 20.5 for teachers of all descriptions, despite schools adding to their cash reserves during this period.

In the secondary sector, where more schools are academies of one sort or another, PTRs for qualified teachers worsened from 15.5 to 15.7 after improving in the previous year. The overall PTR for the secondary sector is still 1.5 pupils per teacher better than in 2000, so the support for funding in schools during this parliament seems to have helped, at least with staffing levels.

The DfE also published data on the difference in the ratio between qualified teachers in schools and all teachers, qualified and unqualified. As the latter include Teach First and probably some School Direct trainees on the salaried route ‘unqualified’ isn’t the same as the former ‘instructor’ category. As this data is two recruitment rounds after Michael Gove freed academies to employ anyone as a teacher it is interesting to see what signs there have been of any change in the balance between qualified and unqualified teachers being employed.

In primary maintained schools the difference between qualified and all teachers remained at 0.4 of a pupil between 2012 and 2013. In primary academies it reduced from a gap of 0.8 to 0.7 of a pupil; so no dramatic swing towards unqualified teachers there. In the remaining maintained secondary schools the gap between qualified teachers and all teachers widened from 0.5 of a pupil to 0.6. In academies it also widened by 0.1 of a pupil from 0.7 to 0.8.

Among the different types of secondary academies, in free schools the ratio between qualified and all teachers widened from 1.3 to 2.3, a noticeable change in the ratio in a single year. However, in converter academies there was little change in difference between the PTR for all teachers and for just qualified teachers increasing by just 0.1 of a pupil.

In UTCs and Studio Schools serving the post-14 age-group the gap was largest of any group of schools, with a difference of 3.4 pupils per teacher between the all teacher PTR and the qualified teacher PTR. This was up from 1.7 in a year, possibly because of the number of these schools opening had increased.

Overall, there doesn’t seem to have been a large swing towards the use of unqualified teachers and much of the change may be down to the expansion of Teach First and School Direct between 2012 and 2103. Rejecting the unprincipled use of unqualified teachers is sensible. Whether, as a recruitment crisis develops, there will be enough qualified teachers to go around is another matter. As regular readers know, we are tracking that situation in secondary schools through TeachVac at http://www.teachvac.co.uk if you are interested. The February newsletter to be issued next week will reflect our latest finding.

Carter and after

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Launched into the expectant world on the day the World Education Forum opened in London, The Carter Review of Teacher Training seems to have passed by much of the national media largely un-noticed. That’s a shame as a lot of hard work went into the Report even if its recommendations were hardly earth shattering and probably won’t do much to help solve the teacher supply crisis schools are facing.

I don’t see it as my place to critique the Report in detail, but to highlight the bits that interest me. These are; the return of an understanding of child development; subject knowledge and its importance in teaching; the issue of qualification versus certification; and finally the question of a quart into a pint pot – sorry, that shows my age; a litre into an eighth of a litre jug.
But first, Carter reaffirms that those preparing to be a teacher need both practical experience of the task and an under-pinning of theoretical knowledge. This really reasserts the partnership model developed in the 1990s after Kenneth Clarke’s reforms that established the TTA. To that extent there is really not a lot that is new in the Carter Report, only nuances reflecting the manner in which the system has developed over the past 20 years.

However, one new aspect is the mention of child development. Ministers in the Thatcher governments of the 1980s didn’t think that knowledge of the ‘ologies were important for those training to be teachers and sometimes seemed to equate them with views that weren’t acceptable to free market Conservatives. The recognition of the importance of an understanding about child development for trainee teachers is a welcome change. An understanding of their social settings might also be a useful addition to the curriculum. But, adding anything to the overcrowded curriculum and classroom experience for trainee teachers is fraught with difficultly as there is no spare time in the present preparation period on whatever route a trainee takes.

To that end, the discussion about subject knowledge while welcome reflect the concerns raised ever since the 1990s when the Clarke reforms effectively removed subject knowledge development time from most secondary courses in favour of extra time in schools. There just wasn’t time for both within the 38 weeks of a course. To allow for subject knowledge to be re-introduced would mean extending the course, and changing the funding structure. This could allow fees to be replaced with a grant from central funds as was the case before tuition fees were introduced, but would bring new challenges. However, even more important to government is that if subject knowledge is vital during the preparation period it is obviously as important in schools. This raises the question of why Carter didn’t ask whether QTS once gained should continue to allow a teacher to teach anything to anyone as is the case at present. After all, what the point of subject knowledge in geography if you spend two thirds of your timetable teaching history and RE as part of a Humanities programme and you dropped history before GCSE and have no training in RE. Not to address this issue raises questions about how coherent the Carter Review actually was in trying to develop a strategy for the teaching force.

Finally there remain the issues around certification and accreditation. Again, this is not new a new debate. In the original Bill establishing the TTA in 1994, the famous Clause 13 was about whether trainees would be required to have a higher education qualification as well as QTS. It was accepted that QTS was the licence to teach and the issue, as today, was whether or not it required a university qualification as well. In those days, it was just about SCITTs, as employment based routes were in their infancy. Realistically what matters is, if government is going to control the supply of places on training routes, how those places are allocated, and to what type of providers, rather than qualifications. As I have suggested before, uncapping university numbers means that if teacher training is within that same fee regime as other university fee programmes then the government has to establish why the removal of the cap doesn’t apply to teacher preparation courses as well.
Carter could have been more radical, but seems to have chosen a path where most can agree with many of the recommendations while leaving something for everyone to take forward. Sadly, his terms of reference didn’t allow him to explore the real question of the day, how to recruit enough trainees of the right quality in the right places. The next government won’t be able to duck that question quite so easily.

Unqualified Teachers: where next?

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On the day before the Carter Review is expected to publish its awaited report there has been a flurry of interest in the use of unqualified teachers. Since the data from the DfE is nearly a year old and relates to data collected from schools in November 2013 it might not be expected to be a topic to attract much interest. However, perhaps it has been a slow news day ahead of Carter and at least one post on another bog appeared on the subject this week.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the DfE definition of an ‘unqualified teacher’. Such a person is: ‘a teacher in an LA maintained school is either a trainee working towards qualified teacher status; an overseas trained teacher without QTS or an instructor who has a particular skill who can be employed for so long as a qualified teacher is not available.’ Now an academy may employ such people according to the doctrine of the former Secretary of State. Michael Gove but the DfE definition doesn’t seem to have caught up with that change in their School Workforce Survey, at least in the 2013 edition.
However, it probably doesn’t matter because the total number of unqualified teachers in November 2013 was still below that in the early 2000s during the Labour government’s period in office. In November 2013 there were 17,100 unqualified teachers in all state funded schools in England compared with 18,800 in 2005 and 18,200 in 2006. The 2013 figure will have included both those on the first year of Teach First, a programme introduced by Labour, and probably those on the School Direct salaried route where they are employed by schools. As their predecessors on Labour GTTP Scheme were also included in the totals there is little change methodology there, although the supposed popularity of the scheme might have been expected to boost the numbers. But, this blog has already pointed out that there are fewer School Direct salaried trainees this year than there were GTTP trainees in secondary schools a few years ago.
It would be helpful to know how many instructors are being employed in schools by returning to the separate categories for trainees and ‘instructors and other unqualified teachers’ employed by the DfE until a few years ago. This would allow commentators to check trends in genuinely unqualified staff that had no intention of obtaining a teaching qualification. Such numbers are important to know with a looming teacher supply crisis and mixing up school-based trainees and staff recruited to fill vacancies otherwise unfilled or because a schools doesn’t believe in the present preparation methods for teachers isn’t helpful, but perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.
Tomorrow is the official launch of TeachVac our free service for schools seeking secondary classroom teachers and trainees looking for their first job. http://www.teachvac.co.uk has already attracted sufficient trainees to make over 1,000 matches in the first two weeks of January and provide valuable information about the state of the job market. Do take a look at the video on the site if this is an area of interest.

Worrying reports for teaching

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Two new pieces of evidence that support the ‘NO FEES for trainees’ campaign launched by this web site at the beginning of January were published today. High Fliers, the organisation that has been monitoring graduate recruitment since 1995, updated its forecast for 2015 graduate recruitment to suggest the market is still growing and that Teach First will be the largest single employer of new graduates in 2015. But, they don’t count the 30,000 graduates entering training to be teachers in their survey partly because to do so would demonstrate how teaching dominates the graduate labour market.

The second piece of evidence was a research report by Income Data Services for the NASUWT on pay in teaching. This shows pay on entry falling behind. Governments have always been reluctant to accept that by imposing an extra year of unpaid preparation on would-be teachers that affects the decision of some that would become teachers when there are plenty of other graduate job opportunities. Making trainees pay fees just adds insult to injury and further reduces the incentive to teach. It have pointed out before that if the Ministry of Defence can pay trainee officers at Sandhurst, the DfE should be able to pay all trainee teachers rather than impost a levy on training through the fees.

With the labour market for graduates now recognised as buoyant, the fee remission is something that can be achieved quickly and relatively cheaply for government and could make a difference to recruitment. Yes, some individuals would have become teachers and be prepared to pay for the privilege, but the same is true for army, navy and air force officers, not to mention civil servants and many others in the public sector.  We don’t expect them to, so why teachers?

After the recruitment crisis of 2000-2003 teachers’ pay rose in relation to the private sector, partly because Ministers took the brakes off the progression through to the Upper Pay Spine. It may have been reasonable during the recession for public sector pay to be kept down, but once pay starts becoming uncompetitive something has to be done or a teacher recruitment crisis develops. The warning signs have been there since 2012, as readers of this blog know.

With most graduate jobs located in or around London traditionally it is in the capital that pay pressures have been likely to exert the greatest effect. But, with new businesses able to start in bedrooms these days and then turnover many thousands of pounds through a single computer pay and conditions have become a national issue that the government’s broadband strategy will only make worse.

Schools can offer what salaries they like these days, and we will try to monitor this trend. Schools may seek to use their reserves to offer higher salaries and savvy trainees will undoubtedly use the evidence from today’s reports to negotiate higher starting salaries, especially if they know that they are in a shortage subject. Schools that register their vacancies with www.teachvac.co.uk will be told about the size of the market and can respond accordingly.

At the end of this month we will know the initial recruitment figures for 2015 training places and can compare the situation with January 2014. Any deterioration will be bad news. Cut tuition fees now.

First data from matching

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www.teachvac.com the data information system for teachers that monitors the job market for trainee teachers* wanting to work in the secondary sector has made its first matches after going live on Monday. With trainee teachers, schools, SCITTs and local authorities all registering and the system monitoring more than 3,000 secondary schools http://www.teachvac.com is creating a real-time database of the labour market for teachers.

Schools, local authorities, dioceses and others that register jobs will receive updates of the changing state of the market as part of the registration process. This provides participants with information on how the market for classroom teachers is developing for September 2015 appointments when they register jobs.

Take the example of design and technology as a subject where the ITT census last November revealed around 420 students on one-year preparation courses. Allowing for non-completion, there are likely to be around 400 possible trainees looking for jobs for September 2015. However, as a proportion of these trainees are in schools working on the School Direct salaried scheme they may be expected to be employed by the school where they are currently training. This reduces the ‘free’ pool to less than 350 trainees likely to be job hunting. The DfE estimates that 50% of main scale vacancies are taken by trainees. If that proves the case, then after we have recorded vacancy 700 in the subject there is a risk that the trainee pool will have been exhausted.

Using data from trainee notification of where they are seeking to work we can also identify both hot spots and areas where there may be shortages even before the ‘pool’ has been exhausted. The TeachVac team are able to create reports for interested parties on request, but at a cost as the basic service is free to both schools and trainees. For information can be obtained from enquiries@oxteachserv.com

Trainees also receive a helpful monthly newsletter about recruitment and tips on how to make the most of their application. Later we hope to offer a catch-up seminar programme for trainees once they have secured their first teaching job and can identify areas where they feel they need more preparation to cover issues and topics that they didn’t expect to be teaching.

If you know a trainee or secondary teacher looking for a classroom teacher vacancy for September 2015 please invite them to register at www.teachvac.com The same goes for schools wanting to publicise vacancies. As it is free to both schools and trainees they will be helping develop an entirely new system that tracks the changing labour market for teachers on a daily basis. Sadly, at present it is only England and just secondary. If anyone wants to extend it to primary schools then I know that the team at TeachVac would be delighted to talk with them.

* I am involved with the TeachVac project especially on the data and information side so declare an interest in the contents of the post. As the service is free to users they aren’t being asked to buy anything but encouraged to use the service for free.

Figures don’t add up

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The big news story this week has been the Conservative Party’s attack on Labour’s plans for education in the next government. Specifically, the Tories have attacked the costings for three of Labour’s policies: that all teachers should be qualified; the creation of 100 University Technical Colleges; a Director of School Standards in every local authority. Of course, if you ask the Treasury mandarins to cost a policy, they will do just that. What they won’t do is ask the wider questions, such as how does this match your own policy so we can factor in those cost as well?

Nowhere is this more evident than in the costing of the UTC policy. The government paper has estimated Labour’s policy as having capital costs over the parliament of around £1.4 billion and staffing of £75 million. But, it hasn’t identified whether the present government, if re-elected, would cease to open any new UTCS or Studio Schools for 14-18 year olds and then taken those costs into account. It also doesn’t seem to have assumed any staff cost saving resulting from the transfer of these students from existing schools. If there isn’t any savings, then the present UTC policy is extremely wasteful of resources and Labour are just copying the Tories in the same manner as the Tories copied Labour over spending on academies. These figures also don’t taken into account the need for any new spending on secondary school places resulting for the birth rate increase over the past decade that will have filtered through to secondary schools by the end of this parliament. It would be legitimate to assign some of those places to UTCs if that we what was wanted.

The valuation of the Director of School standards policy is another area where the government document has assumed a worst case scenario. I am sure all local authorities already have an officer responsible for monitoring standards. The issue is whether the new Directors would be at a higher pay grade? The Tories seem to have assumed that they will be not just responsible for standards but effectively new-style Chief Education Officers and paid appropriately.  As Labour’s Blunkett Commission suggested regional commissioners, and the idea was then taken up by the Tories, it seems unlikely that Labour want to recreate split between education and social services, especially as they introduced the merger of the two departments. Personally, I think there is something to be said for a return to separate departments, but that isn’t what the costing should have been based upon.

The third policy of all teachers being qualified is one I heartily agree with and have argued for in this blog. Sadly, the government costing document is the slightest of the three, with no background information on how the costs identified were arrived at. Indeed, so shabby may be the calculations that it is possible that Teach First trainees have been counted as requiring training even though the government already funds the training for these trainees, but describes them as unqualified teachers. Indeed, the 17,000 or so unqualified teachers identified in the 2013 School Census may also have included some School Direct salaried trainees and those completing their GTP programmes that were already being funded creating more double counting.

As Labour’s policy is for new teachers, I assume that existing unqualified teachers – formerly called instructors – would not be sacked but rather allowed to acquire their qualification part-time. This would be far cheaper than any assumption the paper might have made about full-time costs. However, as we don’t know what criteria were used in reaching the nearly £400 million over the life-time of the next parliament assumed as the cost by the government  paper it is impossible to take these figures seriously at all. They could either be totally spurious or might have some meaning to them. Either way, the policy of requiring all teachers to be trained is one that should be debated. If the training is pre-entry in future, then the costs are no more than for other teachers required in the numbers agreed by the government. It may be legitimate to recognise that qualified teachers earn more than unqualified ones, but what assumptions have been made about this cost aren’t clear. With training places being regulated, and many left unfilled at present, the comment about increased numbers is training is just silly.  The real issue is, if there is a teacher recruitment crisis, who is going to teach in our schools?

These three policy documents do not do the Conservatives or The Treasury credit and sadly don’t say how much they cost the government to produce? This would be worth knowing as we can then debate whether it was a useful expenditure of scarce public resources.