Teaching in China: bright future or end of the road?

How will the Chinese government’s ruling that International Schools in China must teach the same lessons as Chinese-run schools affect the market for international schools in China and as a result the demand for teachers from Britain? Westminster School abandons plans for sister sites in China amid concerns about communist curriculum (inews.co.uk)

At least one school seems to have scrapped expansion plans in China, and it will be interesting to see how other UK schools with investments in China respond. There is also the question of how those Chinese citizens that can afford private education will respond to the government’s decree. Will they embrace boarding school education and ship their offspring to British schools elsewhere in Asia or even negotiate places in the ‘home country’ original school of the brand or will they think that the brand will remain a draw even if the ‘hard curriculum’ is mandated by the Chinese government. After all, private schools teach the same A levels as are on offer for free in the state system in England but parents still pay large sums for their children to attend private sixth forms. No doubt class sizes will be a consideration for parents in China just as it is in England. Access to wealth buys access to smaller classes whatever is being taught in them.

The outcome of this policy change may have ripples in the labour market for teachers in England. Fewer overseas openings may reduce the ‘brain drain’ of teachers leaving this country.  Any closure of school sites overseas may well also see teachers returning to the UK. If their former employer feels a responsibility to offer them employment on their return, then the number of vacancies in the independent sector available for new entrants to the profession will drop. This ought to be good news for the state school sector as there should be more teachers entering the profession that would need to find a teaching post in the state sector.

Of course, if the Chinese pupils just migrate to schools outside of China, then the demand for teachers will remain at present levels, and the state sector will continue to see teachers leaving for more lucrative and less burdensome teaching posts overseas.

It is probably time for the DfE to research the international transfer of teaching skills. Writing that line reminds me that in September 1968 I attended a student-run conference on ITOMS – The International Transfer of Management Skills- organised by AIESEC. Do we now need to discuss ITOTS?

Of course, there are other teacher flows than just the one from England to the rest of the world. There used to be internal transfer within the African continent and between the Caribbean and the USA.

Teaching is now a global profession as the DfE has recognised with its new approach to QTS and how it can be obtained. Should England take the lead in setting international standards for teacher preparation much as it did in the market for English Language teaching Qualifications?

Recruiting into teacher preparation: the DfE website

Now that the DfE have taken over recruitment to postgraduate teacher preparation courses I have been looking at their web site of providers. On the whole it is a pastiche of the former UCAS offering, with the same faults and good points.

The key good point is that it is comprehensive and has a lot of different filters. Whether or not they are the filters applicants will want to use is another matter. On the downside there is no map of either location of courses availability of places.

Many years ago, universities leant that not having a place name in your title could be a disadvantage, as applicants might not consider you if they didn’t know where you were located. As a result, Trent became Nottingham Trent, and Brookes, Oxford Brookes. Of course, some universities can manage without a place name such as King’s College, London and University College, but they are both technically colleges and not universities.

How many applicants know that Orange Moon Education is offering Classics courses in Nottingham and Bristol and possibly Bradford as well unless they delve into the Orange Moon site or where The South East Learning alliance is offering training?

The last time the DfE was involved in the application process, when the School Direct Scheme was first established, the DfE included more data on the number of places still on offer from each course and the number filled on its web site. I always thought that was a useful tool for applicants as places filled to know the possible risk of applying to a nearly full course against applying to one with more places available.  However, long-time readers of this blog from 2013 will recall the difficulties that resulted from my use of the data on applications and places filled.

Some years ago, Chris Waterman worked with me to produce a book of maps showing the location of providers and their different type of provision. As a former geography teacher, I still think that some visual representation of provision would be useful. Such mapping might show potential trainees where the competition for jobs might be fiercest, especially if it was overlayed with vacancy rates for the different subjects and sectors.

It is interesting to see that as I write this blog in early November there is already a difference between the total number of courses available and the number of courses with vacancies on the DfE site. In design and technology, there are 443 courses listed, but only 426 have vacancies: 17 apparently don’t have vacancies. For physics, the numbers are 736 and 716, a difference of 20. This begs the question of, if there are only around 1,100 places to train as a physics teacher how many of the 736 courses are real opportunities and how many sub-sets of an offering with some slight difference, and does this matter? Around 8% of primary courses are currently not on the list for courses with vacancies.

By Christmas, the DfE will have a good idea of how the recruitment round is shaping up. With the international school job market opening up again, training teachers will become as important as filling the vacancies for lorry drivers for the future of our economy.

Teaching is a wonderful career

The DfE has today announced the 2022 summer programme for interns in certain subjects that want to consider teaching as a possible career. It is interesting that to the obvious STEM subjects has been added Modern Languages. However, other subjects with significant shortages such as design and technology and business studies still don’t feature in the list. The bias towards an academic curriculum still seems firmly planted in the minds of Ministers. However, at least IT is included, so there is a nod to the future.

In reality not all STEM subjects are included. As the DfE notice makes clear, the aim of the internship programme is to enable undergraduates studying for a degree in STEM-related subjects the opportunity to experience teaching maths, physics, computing or modern foreign languages before they commit to it as a career.

The programme is school-led. Only school-led partnerships can apply for funding. School partnerships can choose to collaborate with an accredited Initial Teacher Training (ITT) provider to develop and deliver their programme.

The partnership lead should submit the application as they will have overall responsibility for the budget. However, they should work in collaboration with partners to develop the proposal.

DfE welcome applications from school-led partnerships across England, however especially welcomes applications from schools in geographic areas where there have previously been gaps in provision, including:

• Bristol
• Cornwall
• Cumbria and north Lancashire
• Devon
• East Anglia
• London
• Merseyside
• Oxfordshire

Applications must be for a minimum of 5 participants. Teaching internship programme: summer 2022 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The DfE has also announced that the ITT Census of current trainees will be published on the 2^nd December. This will allow schools to understand what the supply of new entrants into the labour market for next September will look like in each subject.

Interestingly, the number of vacancies being advertised by secondary schools this November is much higher than in recent years, with more than 700 new vacancies listed last week alone. Early data from today suggests there is no let up in the trend to advertise vacancies in what is normally a relatively quiet month. Normally, the most distinguishing factor about vacancies in November is the high number of those that result from a teacher taking maternity leave.

Maybe we are seeing the early signs of the increase in departures of school leaders that have borne the brunt of the handling of the pandemic in schools over the past 18 months. TeachVac will track that trend and report in its annual round up of trends in leadership vacancies.

The DfE is now handing applications for the 2022 entry into teacher preparation courses and the first data from that source that has replaced the monthly UCAS data of past years will provide an interesting insight on how teaching is viewed as a career at this stage of the pandemic.

At the same time rumours abound that the DfE is reviewing how it will handle the vacancy web site it created a couple of years ago and also that the tes is once again might possibly be seeking another new owner.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I wonder why schools continue to pay millions of pounds to a private American owned company instead of investing a few thousand in creating a low-cost site that is jointly owned by the profession and the government.

But then the talk of scare resources is often an easier approach than the actions necessary to overcome the conviction that the status quo must always be funded.

With 7 million hits this year and 50,000+ vacancies at no cost to either the public purse of teachers, TeachVac has shown what can be achieved.

Education and climate change

Today is education day at COP-26. This blog first mentioned climate change in a post on 17^th September 2019 and most recently did so in a post about school buildings Zero Carbon Schools | John Howson (wordpress.com) a couple of months ago.

I am delighted to say that the issue of school playgrounds as a possible resource for renewable energy is being taken forward by a multi-national company. Their idea is to inset PV tiles into the surface rather than have extending panels that was my suggestion. Any change to the surface must be safe for children in any weather conditions and must not become contaminated with anything that would reduce the effectiveness of the tiles as a source of energy. The process must also be cost effective.

However, with the roll out of 5G leading to the end of copper phone cables and no guarantee of phone services in a power cut as a result, some local generation and storage capacity in rural areas might well be another reason at looking into the wider role of schools and their buildings in serving local communities.

Today at COP-26 will no doubt be mostly centred around the curriculum as that is where governments can make promises that cost little to implement compared with changes to buildings already in use and setting standards for new construction.

There will also be a new award announced by the Secretary of State to encourage young people to take action against climate change, as if encouragement was needed. As I wrote in an earlier post on this blog, young people can start by conducting an audit of their school’s current actions relating to climate change and suggest some simple steps to start with. In the light of COP-26, will every governing body have an item about climate change on their agenda for this term’s final meeting?

School transport and especially the use of parent’s cars to take children to and from school can be a major source of both pollution and energy consumption. The move towards electric vehicles will help with the former and can encourage better use of the latter if the power to drive the vehicles is created from renewable energy.

So, today is a day for some celebration, much reflection and a desire to move forward. However, actions will speak louder than words in the next few years.

Levelling down?

There are suggestions of a policy towards limiting access to higher education for those without traditional qualifications. For a government that proclaims its belief in levelling up, this would seem a strange policy to even consider. Minimum entry requirements would do the opposite of levelling up | Wonkhe

Such a policy must not be allowed to drive a coach and horses through the policy of ‘life long learning’. Many that come to higher education later in life than through the traditional route had a fractured schooling, with poor outcomes. Any change in policy must not damage their ability to return to learning, especially at the level of higher education.

However, more seriously, while the government has continued to operate a policy of not providing enough qualified teachers in some subjects, notably mathematics and physics, but also design and technology and languages, the young people on the receiving end of teaching from less than ideally qualified teachers much not have their ability to attend a university jeopardised by a failure in government policy.   

By now, the government should have some indications as to whether its idea for ‘Opportunity Areas’ has borne any fruit in terms of levelling up in some of the northern areas where the scheme was trailed.

A market-based approach to teacher supply may encourage teachers to work in schools where pupils have less struggles with learning and more support from home. These schools usually have less trouble attracting teachers as the study of vacancies and free school meals reported earlier this year by this blog demonstrated.  

With the world starting to open up again for both travel and work opportunities, there must not be a large outflow of teachers from England to schools overseas. The ending of the pay freeze is welcome news, as is the recognition of the importance of professional development. However, the government does need to pay more attention to the distribution of teachers and the locations where there are shortages of fully qualified teachers.

Using professional development approaches to improve the qualifications of teachers is one route to overcoming shortages; stemming losses must be another action. The National Audit Office make it clear some years ago that improving teacher retention was a cost-effective route to solving the recruitment issue. However, it doesn’t always solve the issue of the distribution of teachers.

It will be interesting to see whether there is any correlation in Ofsted ITT reports between programmes that are deemed either ‘inadequate’ or’ requiring improvement’ and the schools used to prepare teachers?

If levelling up is to make a difference in education outcomes, then among the many strands needing to be woven together for a successful outcome is the approach to teacher supply and distribution.

Private sector not always better

The latest Ofsted Inspection Reports on ITT are certainly throwing up some interesting questions. The most recent three reports, all on London or Home counties-based providers, have resulted in two ‘Requires Improvement’ judgements and one ‘Inadequate’. In addition, two providers have been found to be non-compliant in certain aspects of their training provision.

One provider is a university; another a long-established SCITT with an interesting approach and the third is the tes Institute (part of the tes Group , better know for its news platform and recruitment advertising). 50170428 (ofsted.gov.uk)

In view of the likely shake-out in provision of primary ITT following the fall in the birth rate and the subsequent reduction in the school population any poor outcome from an Ofsted inspection must raise issues about the future of such courses unless there is a rapid improvement in outcomes. Despite rating the tes programme as ‘Requires Improvement’ overall, the judgement on the ‘quality of education and training’ was deemed as ‘Good’. It was the leadership and management that was in need of improvement.

It is possible to understand a small SCITT having to improve leadership and management, but a large provider in the private sector with more than 300 trainees and a significant contribution to the Assessment only route to QTS needing to improve management and leadership might raise eyebrows.

In view of the current American ownership of the tes Group as a whole, it is interesting to wonder how such a state of affairs has come about? Will this porgramme now follow the teacher supply business into the exit as a non-core strategy for the Group? Do the soundings made to me by investors asking about the recruitment market presage yet another passing of the parcel?

On the wider picture, ‘Outstanding’ judgements for ITT are now thin on the ground. FE and primary sectors seem to be the areas of most concern to Ofsted, with secondary provision seemingly faring somewhat better so far; but it is still early days.

The government is sticking to its ambitious targets for trainee numbers, but is no longer keeping the world informed about actual need in specific subjects and by the different programmes. The next hard evidence will likely be the annual ITT Census of trainees, scheduled for publication before Christmas. This is likely to confirm the ending of the covid boom of last year that was seen in many subjects, and a continued under-shoot against probable target in some key subjects.

As this blog has pointed out, the shortage of lorry drivers is as nothing to the shortage of Physics teachers.  You cannot fully staff all schools if there are not enough teachers to go around. History tells us which schools are most likely to have under-qualified staff or not to offer specific subjects to all pupils.

I doubt that the changes in the Budget will help much to improve teacher supply, but the ending of the pay standstill shouldn’t make matters worse, especially if the secondary sector receives the bulk of the additional cash on offer outside the Early Years Sector. Life may be challenging for the primary sector for the remainder of this decade.

Incentives to train as a teacher

There have been two recent announcements from the DfE that are of interest. Firstly, the support levels for postgraduate ITT students on courses in 2022-23. These bursaries are designed to encourage recruitment into subjects where targets are being missed. The DfE has made the following announcement:

For 2022 to 2023, we are offering bursaries of:

• £24,000 in chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics
• £15,000 in design and technology, geography and languages (including ancient languages)
• £10,000 in biology

Applicants may be eligible for a bursary if they have 1st, 2:1, 2:2, PhD or Master’s.

These bursaries sit alongside the scholarship programme that DfE persuaded the Learned Societies to offer some years ago.

Business Studies still doesn’t appear in the list. This is despite it being one of the subjects where schools can struggle to recruit teachers. However, it is encouraging to see design and technology back on the list, albeit not at the £24,000 level where the bursary really might make a difference.

Now that the DfE is managing recruitment, they will have nowhere to hide if the scheme doesn’t produce results. While there should always be sufficient trainees in history and physical education, some of the other subjects such as music and religious education may suffer from not being included in the bursary list. But, I guess, the bursary is a backward looking recruitment tool not one designed to prevent a possible future shortage.

The other announcement from the DfE was on the access to the National Professional Qualifications. These will now be available to all teachers and not just those in the originally designated areas. As the funding remains the same, there is a risk that the contribution that this scheme will make to the ‘levelling up’ agenda will be diluted by now being offered to all teachers. We won’t know until the curriculum and selection criteria and availability of courses are compared with the original objectives.

Whatever the outcome, it is good news to see attention being paid to professional development once again. Leaving professional development up to individual schools as employers at a time of financial constraint is a risky business as this is a budget line that can all too easily become a victim of cutbacks. Expecting schools to fund professional development that advances the career of a teacher and may well take them away from the school on promotion is always a big risk. Indeed, it is one reason for dealing with this funding stream on a regional or even national basis.

The news from the labour market is that across some parts of England vacancy levels have been higher than usual for the autumn in some subjects. Is this a catching-up exercise or are some teachers re-thinking their futures in the profession in a world where covid is likely to be endemic.

‘We need more black headteachers in our schools’

‘This blog was founded on the idea that data was important. Had the Labour government of Blair and Brown not abolished the mandatory qualification for headship, this issue of who becomes a head teacher would have been visible much earlier and more widely debated. Sadly, it has been relegated to regular research studies and the data that the DfE collects from the annual census of the workforce. The issue of ethnicity has been ignored for too long.

It may be the Workforce data that has convinced the Secretary of State to pay attention to the fact that of nearly 69,000 teachers recorded as from minority groups -including white minorities – only 1,530 were headteachers. Over the past few years, the number has barely altered.

year	Ethnic minority Head teachers (including white minorities)
2015/16	1,473
2016/17	1,480
2017/18	1,512
2018/19	1,531
2019/2020	1,530

Ethnic Minority Headteacher Numbers- England

Derived from DfE School Workforce Data

Between the 205/16 school-year and the last school -year there were only 57 more headteachers from minority groups across all types of schools. The DfE data does allow evidence of where these headteachers are located.

Looking back at a Report that I wrote for the NAHT in 2001, I find that I said even then that:

‘it is of concern that in such a multi-cultural society as Britain has become, these posts are still so unrepresentative of the groups that make up that society.’

The same view appeared regularly in the future reports written for the NAHT during the remainder of that decade. It is, therefore, of interest that the secretary of State made his remarks to an NAHT Conference.

The Conference was told that less than 0.2% of school leaders were Black and female. Lack of black headteachers ‘not good enough’, says Education Secretary | Metro News

The data for appointments to headship in the first decade of the century can be found in Table 3 of The leadership aspirations and careers of black and minority ethnic teachers by Olwen Mcnamara, myself, Helen Gunter and Andrew Fryers. The research was conducted for the NASUWT and the then NCTL. The report still remains, along with the reports on entry to the profession conducted for the College, some of the most detailed research into the issues of ethnic minority teachers in England and their careers.

Most headteachers for ethnic minority backgrounds have been located in areas where there are higher concentrations of pupils with similar backgrounds. Thus, there are large areas of rural England where headteachers from ethnic minority backgrounds are rarely to be found, especially the further north and west from London the school is located.

To encourage headteachers from ethnic minority backgrounds there needs to be more teachers to fill the pipeline to leadership. The Secretary of State might like to consider the issue of recruitment into teaching now the DfE has full responsibility for managing the process.

Teaching must be representative of society as a whole. As I wrote in an article nearly 30 years ago, teaching must not become a profession that is ‘young, white and female’.

From porter to software engineer

I was interested in the Prime Minister’s conference speech today, so looked out this post from 7 years ago when the blog was still in its infancy. Absence rates were an issue even then as was teacher supply. I don’t think the maths and science teacher premium, an old policy re-invented will be the answer, not least because we need to solve the problem by creating a successful early years framework. Perhaps the cash might have been better invested in children’s Centres?

Anyway here is my previous post, like some government polices given a reprieve and a new title.

Posted on June 18, 2014

The Report on achievement by white working class boys published today by the Education Select Committee makes clear what educationalists have known for some time: this group underperform in school compared with almost all other groups except perhaps traveller children, and have been falling behind as other groups have improved at a faster rate. Why this is, and the solutions proposed by the Committee, reveals the complexity of the problem.

No doubt the one solution highlighted by many commentators will be the lengthening of the school day to provide both wraparound care and somewhere for older pupils to do their homework and participate in after-school activities. The homework facility is a good idea where pupils lack space and facilities at home. But, it will only work if pupils are motivated to learn, and there is a risk that this is too often not the case.

Absence rates for schools serving white working class communities are often above the national average, and it is well known that pupils falling behind early on in their education struggle to catch up. As a result, it might be worth exploring how we ensure the best quality teachers are working in the early years of schools serving these communities, and also how we create learning opportunities that cope with a less than perfect attendance pattern. This would be the opposite of the big stick, fine for non-attendance route that anyway doesn’t take into account the ability of a family to pay any fine.

With a looming teacher shortage in some parts of the country, addressing the problem of who teaches where is vital if the gap between white working class pupils and the rest of society isn’t to widen still further. Such school cannot be allowed to struggle to find teachers.

However, there is much to be done to motivate the parents, many of whom underachieved at school, and don’t see the reason for forcing a regular pattern of attendance on their offspring. But, society must engage with them, and offer help so their children can benefit from our future economic success as a nation.

With the structural changes to the labour market that have taken place over the past few decades many of the jobs that didn’t need much education have disappeared, and those that remain are often not well paid. Some years ago I noted an educationalist that had said that ‘the porter of yesterday had become the fork lift truck driver of today and the operator of a computer managed warehouse of tomorrow’. Well tomorrow has arrived. White working class boys with no qualifications sometimes have a choice between perhaps either window cleaning or driving white vans; and even window cleaning is becoming more skilled, and there are no jobs for van boys any longer.

Whatever society does to attack this problem of underachievement is likely to cost money, and reassessing how schools are funded, especially those offering the early years of schooling, remains an important consideration.

Now that schools are no longer the total responsibility of local authorities, the government must come forward with a programme to help address the underachievement: keeping schools open longer is only a small part of the solution; fining parents is no real solution, but ensuring the right teachers work in the schools where they will make the most difference is something worth trying. Achieving it will either cost money or mean a total rethink of how teachers are employed, and a challenge to school autonomy.

Few signals from Manchester

An extract from the Secretary of State’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference

‘Every child deserves a great teacher. And every teacher deserves great training.

” I will bring forward a schools white paper in the new year outlining plans to tackle innumeracy and illiteracy “

So as the foundation of the next decade of reform during this parliament we will deliver 500,000 teacher training opportunities. We are carrying out a fundamental overhaul that will make this country the best in the world to train and learn as a teacher.’

50,000 training places a year will be hard to achieve under any regime, especially if some universities decide to pull out of ITT or ITE because of the government changes to the curriculum for preparing teahcers

.Interestingly, the Gatsby Foundation has published a pamphlet of essays on the topic of reforming teacher education in response to the government’s market review. itt-reform-expert-perspectives-2021.pdf (gatsby.org.uk) I was especially taken by the essay by Ben Rogers of the Paradigm Trust about the distribution of ITT places, something that featured in the previous post on this blog

With a government now seemingly committed to a high wage; high skill level economy, education will be an important player in driving forward the success of that policy. Now, of course, the government having seen the outcome of the tutoring programme, might want to turn over the skills agenda to the private sector and leave schools with the basic curriculum centred around literacy and numeracy to teach. May be that will be the focus of the White Paper that seems to hark back to the Blair government’s education play book.

However, there are other problems facing the Secretary of State. This blog has recently reminded readers that the lorry driver shortage is as nothing compared to the shortage of design and technology teachers, not to mention business studies and physics teachers.

It is no use telling the private sector to ‘get its house in order’ when the public sector, where the Conservative Party has been in control of government for the past decade, has failed to deal with teacher shortages. The DfE site for teaching now explicitly shows whether a course provider will handle visa applications.

Ahead of the Spending Review, a Review that is unlikely to be kind to education, the Secretary of State would have been hard put to announce costly new policies, especially since he has little control over how schools actually spend their cash. There are saving to be made still in the school sector. These range from cutting recruitment costs that might save £40 million or so to a major rethink about the diseconomies of scale of the academy programme.

Now the Conservative Party has created a Labour style NHS model of central control for the school system, shorn of local democracy, it is surely time to look seriously at what the system now costs to administer. Local Authorities may have had their faults, but a high cost structure wasn’t generally one of them. Time for a savings task force?