Labour’s style over substance

I woke up this morning to news that the Labour Party had some new proposals to end the teacher supply crisis. Strangely, the press release section of their national website hasn’t posted anything, so I am reliant on what the BBC has said for the following thoughts. Labour plan to give teachers £2,400 to stop them quitting – BBC News

In passing, the Labour Party website generally doesn’t seem to be up with events, something that surprised me for a national Party aiming for government. But there are some issues, such their relationship with other political parties, and stories of suspensions and expulsions of members that I am sure they would want to bury. Still, that is all for another day and another place.

What are Labour suggesting and why do I say that it is style over substance? Firstly, there is nothing to ease the pain of training. No fee payments, as agreed when Tuition Fees were introduced by Tony Blair’s government. This would have been an excellent opportunity for a headline along the lines -well it’s not up to me to do Labour’s work for them.

Instead of targeting trainees and entrants, we get a survivor bonus according to the BBC story

The plans to improve retention rates, announced by Labour’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson on Sunday, would see new incentive payments awarded once teachers had completed a training programme known as the Early Career Framework, which covers their first two years in the classroom.

Apparently, the payment would be £2,400 or only between a gross one-off five to ten per cent payment of what a teacher would be earning at that point in time, before tax, national insurance and pension deductions. Less, with a £30,000 starting salary. Paying this to all survivors, regardless of the help or salary they received during training would according to Labour cost £50 million. I wonder what paying fees and a training salary to make all trainees equal, and it easier for career changers to become a teacher, would cost?

Labour’s other key promise is welcome, but even more hollow when you burrow down into what it means in reality.

The [Labour} party says it would also make it compulsory for new teachers to have a formal teaching qualification or be working towards one – a requirement scrapped by the coalition in 2012.

Sure, Gove made a headline announcement that academies did not need to employ qualified teachers: and most academies ignored this freedom, as they often did with the freedom to pay classroom teachers different salaries. However, it hasn’t stopped all schools employing unqualified teachers when they cannot find a qualified one to fill a post. After all, it was the Labour government that changed the name of these staff from ‘instructors’ that clearly demonstrated that they were not qualified teachers, to the more positive term ‘unqualified teachers’, and also created a pay scale for them.

Curiously, there were fewer unqualified teachers by headcount working in schools last Novermber (2022) than in November 2010, the first census after the end of the last Labour government – 14,389 in 2022 compared with 15,892 in November 2010 according to the DfE’s Workforce Census.

Ensuring all teachers are qualified, and qualified in teaching their subject or phase, something the Labour announcement doesn’t offer, must be a requirement. However, Labour doesn’t say what schools, faced with a vacancy, should do if a qualified teacher isn’t available: send children home? The lack of a credible answer to this question makes the policy no more than idle rhetoric about trainee teachers not about solving the teacher supply crisis.

I would offer emergency certification with a required training programme from day one for unqualified teachers, including those not qualified in the subject that they are teaching.

Labour final policy on staff development is again good in principle; this area has been neglected by the present government, despite the limited experience of much of the teaching force. However, the policy lacks detail, and detailing who will be responsible for implementing and paying for it?

Taking tax breaks away from private schools would probably affect the special school sector, where local authorities mostly pay the fees, more than schools where parents are responsible for the fees. Such saving would also probably be stretched thinly to pay for all the mooted changes.

Retention can be cheaper than recruitment, but by making training more attractive for all, there is more chance that schools currently unable to recruit teachers would fill their vacancies. All too often these schools are situated in the more deprived areas. These are the schools any policy should be tested against: does it improve the education of children in these schools?

For those that don’t know, I am a Liberal Democrat County Councillor in Oxfordshire

Snippets from the STRB Evidence

The DfE has released their evidence to the Teachers’ Pay Review Body, the STRB. The government doesn’t shy away the problems with recruitment into teaching and departures from the profession, but, as might be expected, it does put the best possible face on the data. For instance, it noted that primary pupil numbers were now falling, and that secondary pupil numbers were likely to peak soon. However, it also noted challenges with the number of new graduates likely to be entering the labour market.

Higher education institutions. long the butt of government attacks over their role in ITT might take heart from table C3 that shows them outperforming schools in the percentage of men recruited onto both primary and secondary postgraduate ITT courses. SCITTs seem to have had a poor year in 2022/23 in that respect. High Potential ITT (Teach First to the rest of us) had a good year in 2022/23, after three poor years of recruiting men to their programme. However, their overall recruitment fell from 1,661 in 2019/2020 to 1,393 in 2022/23, although that was not as dramatic a fall as for the School Direct Salaried programme; down from 2,492 to 661 during the same period.

Salaried schemes accounted for 10% of entrants in 2019/2020, but only 6% in 2022/23. This is despite the growth in apprenticeships for graduate entrants.

Despite the anxiety about the departure of heads, leaver rates fell between 2016 and 2020 across England, from 10.6% to 8.9%. However, I expect the 2021 figure to show an upturn to reflect the fact that many heads stayed in post in 2020, to see their schools through the worst of the pandemic.

The teaching force in England is one of the youngest in the OECD, with a quarter of classroom teachers, and a third of unqualified teachers under the age of 30 in November 2021. There are still disproportionally more men in senior positions than there are women. However, at the classroom teacher level, three out of four of all teachers were women, across all sectors covered by the STRB.  

The number of newly qualified entrants fell from 26,780 in 2015 to 20,435 in 2020, presumably due to a combination of factors including the pressure on school funding; the start of the decline in primary school rolls and the problems with recruitment onto ITT courses in some secondary subjects, leaving schools having to make other arrangements.

Perhaps the most worrying figure in the DfE evidence is the fact that 8% of teachers in special schools in 2021 were unqualified. This compares with 2% in primary and 3% in secondary schools. Although the actual number is only a little over 2,000 people, compared with the 6,100 working in secondary schools, this is a disappointing situation for a sector where research earlier this week also showed teaching conditions to be poor.

Surprisingly, only 1,753 schools were using recruitment payments in 2021, although they were concentrated, as might be expected, in London and the South East. However, one wonders why the 66 schools in the North East needed to use such payments, and whether it might be a coding error in the Workforce Census? Maybe, they were all trying to recruit physics teacher or design and technology staff?

It will be interesting to see what the STRB makes of this evidence and how the current pay dispute is settled.

Phoenix rising

The DfE has today published a Policy Paper putting more bones on the body of the idea of a career development framework for teachers Delivering world class teacher development policy paper (publishing.service.gov.uk) To those of us with long memories it reads a bit like the early 1990s justification for the creation of the Teacher Training Agency. At that time QUANGOs were fashionable, nowadays government departments like to keep a tighter hold on policy, and don’t let the overall control of this sort of structure outside of the Department’s oversight.

Today’s document is a bit of a curate’s egg. The clickthrough for the Institute of Education on page 8 goes to the document New Institute of Teaching set to be established – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) not updated since January 2021, and containing quotes from (Sir) Gavin Williamson, the then Secretary of State and Nick Gibb, the former Minister.

Strangely, for a Policy Paper, readers are told to contact their local Teaching Hub to find out more than is in this relatively slight document. I hope that there is a coordinated response for those that do take the trouble to make contact.

The different strands linking together career development paths are ambitious, but necessary. However, it all looks a bit artificial and lacking in both sticks and carrots. Should teachers be required to recertify every few years or would such a move reveal the inability of the system to properly train those asked to teach our young people.

The lack of any mention of special needs, the sector with the highest percentage of unqualified teachers is disappointing, and the numeracy lobby will wonder why literacy is singled out for a specialist NPQ, but they do rate a mention?

In the end, the success of the project will come down to the cash on offer, and how career development will be paid for. The offering in today’s document is still a long way from Mrs Thatcher’s sabbatical term idea based upon the James Committee Report that was scuppered by the 1970s oil crisis. Indeed, it might be worth having a look in the library for a copy of that White Paper; Education – a Framework for Expansion that appear half a century ago.

Teaching Hubs and Regional School Commissioners are no real substitute for a coherent middle tier that can manage the local career development offering for teachers across a local area.

I would like to think that a career framework for all teachers wanting to make the profession their career for the whole of their working life will counter the notion of everyone having several different careers in a lifetime, but it is difficult on the basis of past outcomes to be anything other than sceptical about the needs of individuals rather than the wishes for a system. Will Phoenix make it out of the ashes of past attempts at career development for teachers? I am not sure based upon this Policy Document.

How many unqualified teachers are there?

One of the questions that has exercised educationalists during a time of teacher shortages is whether or not there is a growing number of teachers without Qualified Teacher Status working in State School? Mr Gove, when Secretary of State for Education, changed the rules, from allowing all schools to employ unqualified staff only when they were unable to find a Qualified Teacher, to allowing academies and free schools to employ such individuals as core staff members.

Did this change open the flood gates? Data from the School workforce Census for 2019 and previous years suggests probably not, although there is a worrying figures in the data. Overall, some five per cent of teachers, as measured by the Full Time Equivalent number of teachers, did not possess QTS in the 2019 Census. In total, the figure in November 2019, was 25,078 compared with 25,860 in November 2016. Overall, the trend has been downwards. This may be because it is clearer to schools completing the census how to classify ‘teachers’ on either Teach First or School Direct Salaried contracts within schools.

Looking at the different sectors is illuminating. In the primary sector, there were 7,673 non-qualified teachers in November 2016, and 7,528 in November 2019. However, the bulk of unqualified teachers were in the secondary sector. In November 2016 the number was 25,860, but by November 2019 the number had fallen slightly to 25,078.

However, in the special school sector, where many of our most vulnerable learners are educated, the number of teachers without QTS increased from 3,033 in November 2016 to 3,729 in November 2019. By the latter date, such ‘teachers’ accounted for 14% of teachers working in the special school sector.

Now, hopefully, these are experienced teachers that bring special skills to bear to help with the education of these children. Sadly, the data doesn’t allow that to be more than a ‘hope’.  Should this not be the case, and many might lack specialist teaching as well as other qualifications, this must be a matter for concern? It would be interesting to see a regional breakdown of the numbers, to see if certain parts of the country ha percentages even higher than the 15% national figures for England.

Since the term ‘teacher’ isn’t a reserved occupation term, anyone can style themselves as a teacher. Indeed, as I have pointed out in the past, these individuals without QTS when working in schools were once categorised as ‘instructors’. However, the Labour government changed their designation to that of ‘unqualified teacher’.  I still think, in recognition of the preparation teachers have to undergo that the term ‘teacher’ should be reserved solely for use by those with QTS and that a person in training should have a separate designation such as trainee teacher. But, that’s a personal opinion.

Of course, few schools tell parents whether there child is being taught by either a teacher with QTS or one with appropriate subject or other specialist knowledge. Should there be more transparency?

What’s happened to our young teachers?

Last week the publication of the DfE’s School Workforce Census data revealed the lowest number of Qualified Entrants into the profession in England since 2011/12. The number given for 2019/20 was 43,405 and for 2011/12 42,434. In 2014/15 the number was just over 50,000.

Now, there may be several possible reasons for the low number this year. There might be more unqualified teachers in classrooms. Although possible, the decline in School Direct Salaried route into the profession and an absence of significant growth from Teach First makes this unlikely to be the reason. Are school rolls falling, meaning less demand for teachers. Well, they are at the bottom end of the primary school, in Reception, but not elsewhere and, in the secondary sector, intakes were higher in September 2019 than the previous year.

Perhaps existing teachers were staying put? It is certainly true that fewer teachers retired or left the service than in the previous year, so that might possibly have produced less demand for new teachers. Of course, that is a complex picture, especially in the secondary sector, where demand may alter by subject.

Another reason might be that there was a demand for teachers, not met because of insufficient trainees. It is true that entry into training in 2018, the new entrants into schools in 2019, didn’t meet the expectations of the Teacher Supply Model across the board, but it wasn’t an especially poor year for recruitment on to teacher preparation courses.

Worth considering as a reason is that pressures on school funding reduced the demand for teachers and, as a result, there were fewer entrants. A quick look at changes in Pupil Teacher Ratios over time suggests that this may well be part of the reason.

Schools, especially secondary schools, are also remodelling their workforce and may be employing fewer Qualified Teachers. A glance at the DfE’s vacancy web site now shows a range of tutor and other job titles not paid on the Teachers Pay Scales. Indeed, last week, some 24% of vacancies listed by the DfE didn’t require ‘Qualified’ teachers to fill them.

A significant proportion of the reduction in entrants is among those aged under 25. These will mostly be newly qualified teachers either entering directly from their preparation course or after a short time.

Entrants to Teaching Under 25 and Qualified Teachers	2011/12		11,253
	2012/13		12,843
	2013/14		13,405
	2014/15		14,483
	2015/16		15,001
	2016/17		13,471
	2017/18		12,375
	2018/19		11,840
	2019/20		11265

Entrants to Teaching – Qualified Teachers

Source DfE School Workforce data abstracted by author on 6^th July 2020

Since 2015/16 the number of Under-25s that are Qualified Teachers entering the profession according to the DfE data has declined by around 3,700. A drop of some 20% from the peak in the past nine years. Since this is the age-group from which will come future school leaders, such a decline must be viewed with concern.

In the current world of reduced vacancies, this data, if correct, should start a conversation about the teachers schools are choosing to employ for the vacancies that there are? NQTs or experienced staff?

I have written elsewhere about the idea of a supernumerary scheme to ensure the profession doesn’t lose large numbers of new entrants, especially if many of the Class of 2020 cannot find teaching roles. They are a valuable resource and should not be overlooked. Without their services, schools might not be able to survive a second wave of teachers taking time out due to the need to self-isolate following local lockdowns during the autumn and winter.

Employing NQTs

Recently, I asked Ofsted if they could provide me with a list of schools not allowed to employ NQTs, following an inspection of the school, so I could have a look at a range of job advertisements to see how the recommendation was being presented to possible applicants, including NQTs. Following an FOI request, Ofsted informed me on Friday that

‘… we do not record collated information relating to the appointment of NQTs. Each inspection is regarded as a standalone inspection event, and statements regarding the appointment of NQTs are made in the individual reports and subsequent monitoring letters for each inspection.’

They suggested that I use the published data on inspections, last updated to August 2018.

The appointment of NQTs differs between maintained schools and academies because maintained schools provide a period of induction. Thus, with regard to maintained schools, induction may not be served in a school that has been judged to require special measures, unless HMCI has given permission in writing. School Inspection Handbook paras 98 and para 121.

For all schools, a school placed in special measures following a full Section 5 inspection, the report must include a judgement (or recommendation in the case of academies and presumably free schools) about whether a school should be permitted to employ NQTs. School Inspection Handbook Section 8 para 173. This judgement can be changed at subsequent monitoring reports.

Now this raises two interesting issues in my mind. Firstly, maintained schools declared inadequate these days must normally become an academy and part of a multi-academy trust or committee. The inadequate school is closed, and no Ofsted report is available for the new school. Presumably, the new academy is perfectly entitled to hire NQTs from day one, since the new school has no recommendation resulting from an inspection report. This seems a little concerning. In one case the report on the closing schools said ‘strongly recommend do not appoint NQTs’. Should the new academy recognise and act on this judgement?

The second issue emerged from looking into what is happening on the ground. Viewing records for some of these schools converting to become an academy after an ‘inadequate’ judgement by Ofsted, has identified a concern about the amount of time an academy emerging from an ‘inadequate’ judgement on a maintained school is taking to receive an inspection report. The school that received an inspection report ‘strongly recommending do not employ NQTs’ seemingly had not received a published monitoring report more than a year after it opened as an academy.

A third issue is that not all inspection reports declaring a school ‘inadequate’ appear to mention in the report anything about employing NQTs. Almost half of the inspection reports on secondary schools in London identified as ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted inspectors that I viewed didn’t seem to mention anything about employing NQTs in the report. That’s also a worry. Indeed, recording use of Pupil Premium seemed of more concern in reports that statements about employing NQTs.

Arising from this is a fourth issue. If a school cannot employ an NQT, should it be allowed to employ any unqualified teachers? There must be a presumption that if a school cannot support NQTs, then they also cannot support an even less qualified person in their classrooms?

Am I worrying unduly or can readers tell me of instances where they didn’t know Ofsted had said ‘don’t employ NQTs’, but the schools had gone ahead and employed them.  Did it work out?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unqualified ‘teachers’

Let me start by stating my position on this important issue raised today by the opposition. In my view, the term teacher should be a reserved occupation term only allowed to be used by those appropriately qualified. Those on an approved training programme aimed at achieving licensed status could be designated as trainee teachers. Everyone else should use terms such as instructor; tutor; lecturer or any other similar term, but not be able to call themselves a teacher.

The data on unqualified teachers that has fuelled today’s discussions comes from the school level information collected through the School Workforce Census (SWC) by the DfE. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/school-workforce-in-england-november-2016 There are two sets of tables in the regional dataset of the SWC for 2016 that are of interest; the percentage of teachers with Qualified Teacher Status and the percentage of unqualified teachers on a route to QTS: presumably either Teach First or School Direct Salaried route, plus a small number of overseas trained teachers or those on other accreditation only routes to QTS.

REGION	Teachers with Qualified Teacher Status (%)	Unqualified Teachers on a QTS Route as a Proportion of the Total Number of Unqualified Teachers (%)
North East	97.6	15.3
North West	97.4	10.3
South West	96.9	10.3
Yorkshire and the Humber	96.0	9.3
West Midlands	96.0	10.1
East Midlands	95.0	4.4
South East	94.8	14.1
East of England	93.9	9.9
Outer London	92.5	19.0
Inner London	92.4	18.1
ENGLAND	95.3	12.6

The SWC data show as strong correlation between the percentages of unqualified teachers employed by a schools in a region and the difficulty of recruiting teachers in that region. There is a 5.2% difference between schools in Inner London and schools in the North East in terms of the percentage of unqualified teachers employed. If one buys the argument that such staff are employed because of their special skills, then presumably their distribution would be similar across the country rather than showing this marked difference between regions. In London around 6-7% of teachers, and presumably more in terms of classroom teachers, don’t have QTS.

Part of the difference can be explained by the percentage of trainee teachers employed in schools. The range is between 4.4% of unqualified teachers on a QTS route in the East Midlands and 19% in the Outer London boroughs. This goes some way to explain why, in the SWC, 66 secondary schools in London revealed a measurable percentage of unqualified teachers on routes to QTS compared with just 98 in the rest of England. However, these figures obviously underestimate the number of schools involved in QTS preparation. This is due to the suppression of the data in many schools where such trainees were present, but not in sufficient numbers to be reported publically. There are also a number of secondary schools where the data was not reported.

Clearly, with recruitment being an issue, it is always going to be a challenge to recruit enough qualified teachers to staff schools, especially where the school population is growing fast. I am sure that parents expect pupils to be taught by those who understand the job at hand and have been prepared for it by achieving QTS.

There is, of course, a much larger issue that isn’t being addressed by the discussion about qualified teachers and that relates to the degree of subject knowledge required to teach any particular subject. This blog has raised that issue as matter for concern on several occasions. In some subjects, such as mathematics, steps are now being taken by the DfE to ensure post-entry subject knowledge enhancement for those teaching the subject. This may offer a better way forward than just trying to achieve sufficient subject knowledge from all entrants. However, ensuring all entrants are properly trained in the skills associated with teaching and learning should not be negotiable whatever their role in the process might be.

 

 

Unqualified Teachers: where next?

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.