Tag Archives: teachers

Even in a coalition Ministers are Party politicians

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The good news from David Laws at the ATL Conference this week was that the Lib Dems back the need for qualified teachers in all state funded schools, unlike their Tory coalition partners. How far they are prepared to support the principle as a Party, as opposed to a Conference where delegates voted for a wide-ranging motion on the subject in the spring of 2103, only the Manifesto will reveal, but it would be helpful to see a return to at least the 2005 position of the need for appropriate preparation to teach that included subject knowledge plus pedagogy for all teachers, with a more restricted permanent licence to teach than the present un-restricted QTS that in practice is little different to sanctioning the use of under-qualified if not un-qualified teachers without letting on to parents what is allowed.

Now it is becoming more of a challenge to recruit new entrants into the teaching profession, it does seem sensible to keep track of what is actually happening post-training. We won’t achieve a world-class schooling system by letting some schools return to a position where they have insufficient trained staff. Personally, I hope that someone somewhere at either the DfE or the National College is asking the unthinkable questions about supply, and how the newly diversified system would respond to a severe shortage. One scenario that has already arisen in Oxfordshire is that of academies with spare capacity refusing to take local children, and putting the local authority in the position of having to find other places for them, even if that means paying for unnecessary transport. If schools felt they might not recruit staff, as academies they might trim their admission numbers even though it caused extra expenditure for others.

David Laws also told the ATL Conference he wanted stability in the system after the next general election. Personally, I want predictability ahead of stability. Michael Gove is increasingly looking like his Labour predecessors of the 1960s who wanted a universal comprehensive system for all, but failed to impose their will on local authorities, leaving a legacy of secondary education that was little more than a geographical lottery when it came to the type of school system. There was some explanation then for the reticence of the Labour government in that schooling was seen more as a local responsibility. There is no such excuse in the new nationalised world of schooling in the Labour/coalition era of the last decade. At least make all secondary schools academies, so that parents know the rules they will play by, even if the rules are set in Westminster. A failure to take this action will leave a legacy of school organisation that is different across the country, and also with local government still struggling to know its role in education. The position of the primary sector is more complicated, and there is a need for the faith communities to engage more in the debate since they manage a significant proportion of primary schools, especially in the rural areas. Are they happy to see power transfer to Whitehall from the local town or county hall?

Sufficient teachers, of the right type and quality in a school system that is sound in organisation seems like a good recipe for moving the education system forward, especially if some of the more idiotic curriculum changes are also addressed.

A rose by any other name

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One of the interesting things about language is that it has the ability to be both precise and vague at the same time. As a wordsmith, the Secretary of State, who always seems more comfortable within the literacy domain than the numeracy world, has made two interesting statements this week. As already reported in an earlier post on this blog, he told the House of Commons on Monday that Osfted inspected Academy Chains. This fact was news to many who thought that Ofsted inspected only the schools in such chains, and that although the Funding Agency could look at the books of academy chains, Ofsted didn’t have the power to inspect their overall performance as they can with local authority support for school improvement orChildren’s Services.

And then, yesterday, the Secretary of State was interviewed by pupils experiencing the life of reporters as part of the BBC’s annual School Report exercise. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/26768138

During the interview the BBC reported that Mr Gove said:

“Teachers should definitely be paid more than they are at the moment,” But he added that his department paid off the debts of some teachers at the start of their careers in the form of bursaries or additional support – particularly those teaching key subjects such as maths, physics or chemistry.

Now the idea of using bursaries to pay off student debt – at the same time as requiring the trainee teachers to take on further student debt as part of their PGCE or Tuition Fee School Direct course – is a curious one. In fact they could only voluntarily pay off existing student debt using the bursary if they were allowed to: it seems pretty unlikely that the Student Loans organisation would be able to offer a new loan with one hand will taking payment on an earlier one with the other. Perhaps the Secretary of State meant that the bursary allowed those trainees not to take out further loans (and thereby increasing their debt) to study to become a teacher.

He may, of course, have been mixing up what happens on Teach First with the situation faced by the much greater number of trainees on the other routes into teaching. In my view, working towards a salary for all trainees, to encourage the best in all subjects to become teachers, would be a positive policy development. After all, graduates that enter most private sector training programmes are now normally paid a salary and don’t have to pay for their training. Most employers recognise that making possible entrants pay for training puts off some applicants.

So, using the phrase ‘paid off the debts of some teachers’, if indeed the transcript shows that those were the words used by the Secretary of State, seems like a somewhat loose use of language. Perhaps Mr Gove could explain both what he actually meant about paying of the student debt of teachers and the inspection of academy chains, so we can all be clear.

He might also like to elucidate on the statement about ‘paying teachers more’, perhaps in his next remit letter to the Pay Review Body.

 

Be a teacher: earn £12-15 per hour?

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After an absence of a number of years, the DfE has once again conducted a diary survey of the workload of around 1,000 teachers. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285941/DFE-RR316.pdf  That’s about 0.2% of the workforce. On average, all the school teachers surveyed reported working over 50 hours during the survey week, primary classroom teachers averaged 59.3 hours per week, slightly longer than the 55.7 hours averaged by secondary classroom teachers, and the 55.2 hours worked by classroom teachers in academies: both primary and secondary school head teachers reporting working more than 60 hours per week.  Classroom teachers in most school types reported teaching 19 to 20 hours a week. The exception to this was teachers in special schools who reported teaching 16.8 hours.

Teachers of all types worked around 12 hours a week outside what might be regarded as their normal working week. Head teachers spent around half of this time on school and staff management while classroom teachers spent at least three quarters of it on planning, preparation and assessment (PPA). Time spent on PPA was as common for classroom teachers in primary, secondary and academy schools as teaching at around a third of their total workload. The fact that despite the introduction of non-contact time in the primary sector some years ago teachers still report having to send time outside of the normal working week on these activities shows how intense the job has become.

However, as the dairy recorded a term-time week it would be different in weeks outside of the 190 days when pupils are present. As I have said in the past, teachers are required to work a form of employer directed flexi-time, with part of their so-called long holidays really being compensation for the extra hours worked during term time.

Teachers and heads generally thought the amount of time they spent on unnecessary and unnecessarily bureaucratic tasks had increased over the last 12 months, with 35.8% of head teachers and 44.6% of deputy and classroom teachers surveyed expressing this opinion.

The fact that preparation for Ofsted took time out of the working week for some teachers should be no surprise to anyone. The other big issue was over the data collection necessary for individual pupil tracking. There is clearly some way to go in some schools where the survey group worked to stop this becoming a tiresome burden for classroom teachers. Several years ago I advocated a new grade of data technician for schools to both collect and analyse data on behalf of classroom teachers. Despite handing budgets to schools, there still seems to be a way to go before this type of assistance permeates the sector as a whole.

If a classroom teacher works 60 hours a week for the 40 weeks of term-time then they will clock up 2,400 hours a year before counting any time spent on school work during the rest of the year, such as secondary teachers being present when examination results are handed over, or the five INSET days that are compulsory for all teachers. By contrast, an admin assistant working for 46 weeks a year at 40 hours per week will only work 1,840 hours a year. This means that if a teacher does work 2,500 hours per year, and earns £30,000, then their hourly rate is just £12. Even at 2,000 hours the rate is just £15 per hour.

Expect some hard pay bargaining in schools where this is the case now that national scales have been abolished. Many teachers might well be better off doing regular supply work rather than working at the bottom of the current scale. Indeed, it might be time to reassess the way that teachers’ contracts are established.

Lotteries for teachers not pupils

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This blog has already registered the fact that tomorrow, the 3rd of March, is ‘national admissions day’ when parents in England will hear about whether their offspring have been offered a place at the secondary school of their choice. As has already been revealed by the media, more schools are using lotteries to select pupils where there is over-subscription, often as part of a ‘banding’ system, eroding the number of schools merely using distance as a criteria.

Now the whole issue of lotteries for school places was comprehensively discussed by Conall Boyle in his book ‘Lotteries for Education’, published in 2010 by Imprint Academic. In those days, most academies were parts of chains, and local authorities still had responsibility for admissions to the majority of other schools, so the issues raised in my earlier post about unsuccessful lottery entrants were largely dealt with in theory by Boyle.

One notion that he does discuss in the book is whether it might be cheaper and more efficient to assign teachers to schools by lottery, and place pupils at their local schools. He credits The Guardian article of the 1st April 1998, by Martin Wainwright, who picked up on Boyle’s mention of the idea by a blogger – an early exponent of the art – who had suggested it as a way of saving parents having to shop-around.

Now, where teachers are a scare resource, it might be an interesting way of ensuring some schools don’t hoard say Physics or Mathematics teachers in order to ensure good results throughout their schools. It might also sort out any price competition for these scare resources resulting from the abolition of national pay scales, and the introduction of a market derived free-for-all in wages.

To achieve this end would require a radical ditching of the philosophy of parental choice, and the unfettered use of markets, and the introduction of the notion of a national teaching stock. Is this something already being considered by parts of the DfE since it is not a million miles away from David Laws idea of national leaders of education assignable to particular schools, although he is looking to place these leaders in failing schools rather than randomly.

Taking the concept further might be too radical a step at present, but there does need to be a discussion about the national requirement for higher quality education, and the current use of the market to allocate teaching resources, especially if the winners are teachers able to enhance their earnings because of their scarcity even though they were content to enter teaching and work for a national wage. Allocating teachers by lottery would also be against the philosophy behind the School Direct training route, where schools are encouraged to train and recruit staff. School Direct doesn’t overcome the issue of the allocation of new teachers unless all schools are involved. Even then it may just move the problem to the selection stage from the current end of training job market.

If the emphasis is switching from allowing parents to choose schools to a desire either to create a fairer system or better still to raise the standard of schooling across the country, there is certainly a need to discuss how teachers are distributed through the system. Might a lottery be the answer?

Teachers neither Widgets nor fee earners

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Earlier this week I sat down to write a blog about the recent Policy Exchange pamphlet that discussed how to reward teachers, and in particular the use of performance related pay; or PRP in shorthand.  However, as my last posting showed, I became sidetracked into discussing the use of the media by politicians, and the debate about World War One.

To return to my original theme, there is a growing consensus that teaching is no different to any other activity in the sense that if you want success you must attract those that are good at the job. Indeed, if a highly educated workforce is a prerequisite for economic success, then a country cannot afford to have a poorly educated workforce; especially if it is unwilling to make up any educational shortcomings in the labour market through immigration. As a result, it needs good teachers. But, so the Policy Exchange thesis runs, there are ‘good’ and ‘less good’ teachers, so how do you incentivise the good but ensure enough overall numbers to provide sufficient teachers to staff our schools?

The authors of the Policy Exchange pamphlet major on how to reward the effective teacher, but do acknowledge the wider issue of recruitment to the profession, even if they don’t have a real solution to the problem. That’s a pity, because teacher supply overall is more likely to be a policy dilemma in the next few years than devising new schemes of reward for a few. The fact that the author’s don’t look at the funding of schooling makes any suggestions they may make largely theoretical. Indeed, it is already possible for a classroom teacher in Inner London to earn the £70,000 figure they suggest from this September if they are a Leading Practitioner with a TLR for SEN, and a SEN allowance. They also don’t really quantify what percentage of the workforce should be eligible for PRP: an essential debate in non-profit related occupations.

Neither is it new ground for different teachers to be paid according to the laws of economics. In my early days in the teaching profession I recall two teachers would now be NQTs both going to the head at the end of their first year of teaching and asking for a salary increase. You could do that in those days. To the historian, the head said a firm ‘no’ secure in the knowledge that he could recruit another teacher. To the home economics teacher he automatically said ‘yes’ because he couldn’t be sure of replacing her, and it was cheaper not to have to try.

This year, I would urge all 400 Design & Technology PGCEs to get together and demand a starting salary of M6 since they are likely to be in short supply and by doing so can test how free market economics works in practice. Indeed, they might like to find an agent to do the negotiations for them. I am sure one of the placement agencies might like to research this as a new line of business.

The authors of the Policy Exchange pamphlet also either don’t understand the original rationale behind a main scale or chose to ignore it. At one time, the main scale had 14 points, and many teachers left the profession before reaching the top of the scale. This was a money-saving device for the government, since the lowest points on the scale under-valued teachers, and only the mid-point or above represented fair value. There is indeed, something to be said for abolishing the scale completely as there is also something to be said for PRP for a school’s work and not the individual teacher’s efforts.

Where Policy Exchange is correct is in assessing the current woeful state of professional development. With a young, and relatively inexperienced, profession at the present time, there is a need to invest more in the teaching force.

My priorities would be, ensure salaries are sufficient to recruit enough teachers, both into training and into the profession; provide much more investment in professional development; and then, if there is any cash left over, try and beat market forces through some form of PRP. Even then, spending the money on better recruitment and training might be far more effective than creating a divisive PRP scheme.

The real issue is not QTS, but how it is achieved

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There is clear water developing between the three main political parties at Westminster over the need for teachers in state funded schools to be qualified only after a period of training. Regular readers of this blog will know where I stand on the issue as I have made clear my belief in the need for QTS to be backed by a preparation course – see my last blog ‘Teachers are made not born’.

This afternoon the Labour Party at Westminster have an opposition day debate in the main chamber around the topic. This is the sort of debate that normally passes relatively without comment, but what is interesting is the amendment put down by the government in the names of the prime minister and his deputy; and Michael Gove and David Laws. I have reproduced it below with the key section underlined:

Line 1, leave out from ‘House’ to end and add ‘notes that this Coalition Government is raising the quality of teaching by quadrupling Teach First, increasing bursaries to attract top graduates into teaching, training more teachers in the classroom through School Direct and providing extra funding for disadvantaged pupils through the pupil premium which schools can use to attract and reward great teachers; notes that the part of the Coalition led by the Deputy Prime Minister believes all schools should employ teachers with Qualified Teacher Status, and the part of the Coalition led by the Prime Minister believes free schools and academies should retain the freedom to hire teachers without Qualified Teacher Status; further notes that funding agreements with academies and free schools will not be altered in relation to Qualified Teacher Status prior to the next election; and regrets the findings of the recent OECD skills report which revealed that those young people educated almost entirely under the previous administration have some of the worst levels of literacy and numeracy in the developed world, underlining the need for radical schools reform and demonstrating why nobody can trust the Opposition to protect education standards.’

Of course, the really disingenuous of you may reflect that QTS could be awarded after a period of service in the classroom untrained, and that period, as in the past when it was the route into teaching I used, could be two years. The subtle change to the Staffing Regulations in 2012 allowed for schools to confirm that there had been no competency proceedings against a teacher in the past two years. This might permit an unqualified person to be granted QTS as in the past after two years of successful service or at least develop a career in different schools. So long as QTS can only be granted after a period of prescribed training, by an approved route, this is not an issue, but as ever the devil is always in the detail. The real issue is not QTS, but how it is achieved.

There are also matters for those in favour of QTS needing to be backed by training to resolve, especially around training for specific types of school now funded by the State that follow a particular philosophy of education not covered in the present training arrangements. But that should be possible to resolve once the key principle of mandatory preparation has been agreed.

Finally, the Liberal Democrat position on Qualified Teacher Status owes much to the motion passed at their Spring Conference that David Laws thought last week he had proposed – actually it was Lord Storey that proposed it, and Baroness Brinton who seconded it – that had its genesis in the work of Liberal Democrat education activists including the late Andrew Bridgwater who had a hand in the drafting of the motion’s wording. It would be a nice gesture, and a fitting memorial, if a Lib Dem MP recognised that fact during the debate this afternoon.

Food, glorious food

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By sheer happenstance I was being interviewed by a BBC local radio station at 5pm on Tuesday when the story about free school lunches for all 4-7 year olds was released. The news that 16-17 year olds studying in further education will also be eligible for free meals on the same terms as their colleagues in schools was rather lost in the bigger announcement.

As a result of being in the BBC’s Glasgow conference set up I received a full briefing just by listening to those around me reciting their pieces to the different radio channels and stations news bulletins around the country. Consequently, I was able to respond to my interview’s questions with rather more fluency that might otherwise have been the case, and indeed with more fluency than on the story about reading that was the reason I was ‘on air’ in the first place.

But, enough about me: this is a policy that is a game changer. No creating sheep and goats in the primary schools of the future; no worry for those parents who dip in and out of poverty about whether they qualify for free meals if they take a particular job; no rows about packed lunches and what might be in them today, and where to find the time to shop for them and then put them together. And, on the positive side, children will be learning social habit together; children being introduced to new types of food; less exposure to unhealthy food; better concentration in the afternoon; and every child with at least one hot meal a day.

The way the policy is to be paid for is yet to be announced, and local authorities will be asking about the capital costs for kitchens, and the delivery expenses for rural schools where meals are prepared centrally. These are important consideration to be overcome, but small in proportion to the good that the policy can deliver.

There are those who decry the use of universal benefits even when, as  in this case, the benefit is both financially and socially useful to society as a whole, but better off parents can choose to donate the cost of the meals to charities such as Children in Need or their local food bank. For others is is like an annual cash boost of around £500 per child on the wage packet.

Eventually, I hope that the cash can be found to extend the policy to all at the junior stage of education, up to age 11. Habits are reinforced at that stage, and the link between the endless TV programmes on food and the reality of lunches can be made even more apparent as children begin to question what is put before them.

One other question that will inevitably arise is whether teachers will be expected to eat with the pupils or to be allowed a clear break at lunch-time? Many may choose the compromise of eating the actual meal together, but then retiring to the staffroom for a deserved bit of ‘me’ time. So, there may be some extra staffing costs in lunch-time supervision as all children stay on site.

Nevertheless, this to me is one of the best achievement for the whole of our school system in many a long year. I cannot recall the last time I felt so good in front of a BBC microphone. It was a strange feeling.

The transfer window and teachers’ pay

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The football transfer window closes tomorrow. This is not something that directly affects schools, but it does raise two questions in my mind. Firstly, could all this money be better used tackling (sorry for the pun) youth unemployment. It does seem somewhat obscene that a football club in Spain may well pay a world record fee for a player while youth unemployment in that country is devastating a whole generation. UK clubs have spent lavishly this summer and, although our unemployment rate isn’t as high as in Spain, I do wonder whether that cash could have been better employed in other ways. The rich are happy to indulge in buying and selling football players and indeed whole clubs while leaving many young graduates with nothing more to do than stay at home and watch an endless succession of matches from around the word. If you read the history of Liverpool and Everton football clubs you will find the suggestions that they grew out of church teams. Now the church is no longer the force it once was in society, but if we could find a way into diverting some of the transfer cash into job creation schemes it might surely do a bit more good for society. How about a transfer tax for youth job creation?

The second question is closer to home. Will the ending of the teachers’ national pay scales, like the ending of fixed wages in football all those years ago, have any effect on teachers’ pay? Perhaps the Secretary of State hopes it will depress wages, but, as I have suggested before, it might just have the opposite effect.

Even now there could well be the educational equivalent of player’s agents plotting how they will get a group of mathematics teachers together in a hotel early in 2014, and sign them up. The agent would then approach schools asking if they wanted a mathematics teacher, and how much they would pay for them. They could point out that advertising a job, and going through the recruitment and selection procedure, is both risky and expensive, and this is a cheaper option at say 5% of salaries. Perhaps Universities might see it as a way of attracting trainees to their courses, and away from School Direct by saying, ‘don’t be tied down too soon to one school’. ‘We will offer you a wider range of training and negotiate the best salary for you at the end of your training.’ It would be interesting to see how Teach First would react to such an outcome. Even those, such as history teachers, whose skills are traditionally not in short-supply might benefit from a bit of group action on pay.

The first step is discovering how supply and demand across the country might affect opportunities. Anyone interested the answer to that question might start by looking at the Report I did for the Pearson think tank almost exactly a year ago. For the position since then, you would have to contact me directly.

Half Our Future: A tribute

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I couldn’t let August pass without recognising the 50th anniversary of one of the least remembered but arguably key reports of the post-war period of education consensus. On August 7th 1963, John Newsom, Chairman of the then Central Advisory Committee on Education, submitted his Report entitled ‘Half Our Future’ to the Minister, Edward Boyle. Half a century later this group of young people are still too often overlooked in the debate about our school system.

However, they did benefit from the raising of the school leaving age to 16 in 1972, and should be beneficiaries of the current raising of the age of participation to 18; although I doubt whether all of them will immediately recognise the benefit.

As an aside, I participated in a local radio phone-in recently about the raising of the participation age. A caller phoned in to explain that because he had left school at sixteen he knew how to do practical things, such as change a fuse, whereas his more educated friends hadn’t a clue. Reflecting on this point later, I wondered whether the circuit breaker that has made our lives so much easier when there are electrical short-circuits or power overloads was invented by someone who left school at sixteen or with slightly more education than that. I know the original concept is credited to Thomas Edison, but I suspect the increasingly varied and sophisticated versions of recent times have emanated from research facilities.

Anyway, back to Newsom, and his important Report. Part of it featured the need for teachers. At that time it wasn’t necessary to have a qualification in order to teach if you were a graduate or were going to become a trained teacher. The latter route allowed untrained staff to work as teachers in secondary modern schools when these schools couldn’t find anyone else. In Tottenham where I grew up, in the 1960s some of the scholarship ‘Sixth’ used to become teachers in January after the Oxbridge entry process was over. Newsom said in his Report that his Committee echoed the statement of the Eighth Report of the National Advisory Council on the Supply & Training of Teachers that:

“In the primary and secondary modern schools teaching methods and techniques, with all the specialized knowledge that lies behind them, are as essential as mastery of subject matter. The prospect of these schools staffed to an increasing extent by untrained graduates is, in our view, intolerable.”

Sadly, such a suggestion is no more intolerable to some politicians today than it was half a century ago.

Newsom also recognised that as one unspecified contributor to the Report had stated, “Fatigue is already a serious and continuing difficulty to many of the best teachers.” Half a century later, there would be many in education that would still echo such a view, despite smaller classes and more non-contact time.

The misfortune of Newsom was to appear at just the point where the drive for non-selective secondary education was sweeping the country. This created the comprehensive school all too often dominated by the selective school curriculum. Half a century later we are still trying to remedy that mistake. Even more important than providing the teachers is creating the most appropriate curriculum for all, and not just for the 50% destined for higher education. Those politicians that forget that they have a duty to do the best for all, and not just the Russell Group of universities, ought surely to add the Newsom Report to their list of requisite reading.

How efficient are our schools?

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Now I always enjoy reading DfE documents that tell schools how to do things, and their recently published Review of efficiency in the schools system https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/209114/Review_of_efficiency_in_the_schools_system.pdf has some delightful gems within it. My favour is the quote taken from a 2009 McKinsey report that said ‘Second only to the quality of teaching is school leadership. Replacing an ‘average’ principal with an ‘outstanding’ principal in an ‘average’ school could increase student achievement by over 20 percentile points’. I am sure that this shouldn’t be used solely as a reason for governing bodies of all schools not regarded as above average this week by a passing Ofsted team to give their head notice at the end of term celebrations. But it does raise the issue of how we can improve school leadership now that an increasing number of schools don’t have local managers with senior education experience they can easily contact to discuss problems.

There is a lot about staffing and the effectiveness of spending on teachers over support staff in the DfE’s report. For instance, in the high spending school category, school in the top 20% spend 58% of their budgets on staffing whereas schools in the bottom 20% of attainment among the high spenders only spend 51% of their budgets on staffing. I guess the latter may have more NQTs and a high staff turnover. It would also be interesting to see how Teach First fits into this scenario as it is a relatively low spending programme for staffing even though it is an expensive way to train some types of teachers.

On Saturday I talked to an NUT conference for supply teachers, many of whom are a very under-valued and underpaid resource. The DfE report did note that those schools that employed their own supply staff (presumably mostly large secondary schools) saved money, although the debate about the need for subject expertise can also be an important factor. However, schools do need to recognise that the cheapest option isn’t always the best solution to improving standards, and you may well get what you pay for. The best supply teachers do the job because they want that type of life whereas others do it because it is the only work that they can get in teaching. There is room for the professional associations to take more interest in the fate of this group of workers, especially as the government is seemingly trying to de-professionalise teaching as a career. Implicit in the DfE report is the view that ‘cover supervisors’ and ‘teaching assistants’ aren’t the same as teachers and, despite the rhetoric from Ministers, teachers who are qualified do make a difference.

The challenge for the next decade may well be how to entice the most able at teaching to enter the profession when the wider economy is once again offering a range of job opportunities. Ensuring those that do enter teaching are fairly distributed between schools will also be a challenge that won’t just be about money.