Written evidence submitted by Teacher Development Trust

About TDT

1. Founded by teachers in 2012, the Teacher Development Trust (TDT) is the national charity for effective professional development in schools and colleges. TDT has led the way in commissioning and publishing guidance around effective CPD, including the Developing Great Teaching report in 2015, which underpinned the development of the Department of Education (England)’s and the Standard for Teachers’ Professional Development in 2016. The development of this Standard was led by an Expert group Chaired by our CEO, David Weston.

2. TDT provides school support and training and has been a Lead Provider of National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) since 2021, training around 4,000 leaders.

Summary

3. It is clear that we are reaching a point where the issues around recruitment and retention are having tangible impacts on the pupil experience and ultimately on pupil outcomes.  The evidence is clear that the single biggest in-school influence on pupil outcomes is the quality of teaching - what happens at the front of the class matters.[1] High-quality CPD for teachers has a significant effect on pupils’ learning outcomes. CPD programmes have the potential to close the gap between beginner and more experienced teachers: the impact of CPD on pupil outcomes (effect size 0.09) compares to the impact of having a teacher with ten years’ experience rather than a new graduate (0.11)[2].

4. The recent Teacher Development Trust paper, A Culture of Improvement: reviewing the research on teacher working conditions[3], noted that there is significant evidence both from England and around the world that teacher retention is significantly linked to the quality of school leadership and staff culture, with another study[4] finding that “a one standard deviation increase in the Leadership/Management score is associated with a reduction in the probability of leaving the school by the next academic year from 4.1% to 2.3% and a reduction in the probability of leaving the profession altogether from 1% to 0.5%”. Additionally, elsewhere we find that “student disciplinary problems, administrative support, and professional development, strongly influence whether teachers stay or leave teaching.”[5]
    
5. The same leadership and culture factors above are also found to correlate with improved outcomes for young people, suggesting that a focus on improving leadership and staff culture could both improve retention as well as improving outcomes, particularly for the most disadvantaged. An end point that all teachers are motivated by. This is illustrated by this study from Kraft and Papay[6] that shows school leadership and culture makes the difference between teachers either plateauing in effectiveness after 3 years, or continuing to improve their effectiveness so that after 10 years in a high quality environment they are helping students make 40 per cent more progress year-on-year.

6. Although high quality professional development, leadership and staff culture are necessary, they are not in themselves sufficient. Although significant investment in providing high quality training for new teachers through the ECF and school leaders through NPQs is a good thing, just offering professional development isn’t going to solve the problem given the scale of the crisis and the current context in which schools operate. Wellbeing, workload and working conditions, including a culture of high stakes accountability, limit the impact that professional development can reasonably have on improving teaching and retaining teachers.

The current situation regarding teacher recruitment and retention

7. Teacher recruitment and retention has been a significant issue for some time as the government has consistently failed to meet its overall recruitment targets for a number of years, with some subjects performing particularly poorly, and as the number of teachers leaving the profession has continued to rise.  This is against a backdrop of rising pupil numbers, initially in primary but now moving into secondary, which means that we need more teachers than before.

8. The job of teaching isn't what it says it is on paper.  Teachers and leaders are spending more and more of their time responding to wider societal issues (not least post-pandemic), all whilst under increasing accountability pressures and receiving negative press attention. Teaching is often described as a vocation, but the expectation of staff to consistently go above and beyond, often at personal cost, means that it is failing to attract and retain good teachers.  Recent polling undertaken by Public First on behalf of Education Support shows the extent to which teachers are increasingly involved in wider issues around poverty alleviation and childhood trauma.[7]

9. Teacher experience becomes particularly important for these wider societal issues. For example, Ladd & Sorensen (2016) found that “One year of experience enables an English Language Arts teacher to reduce the proportion of students with high absenteeism by 2.0 percentage points, and these reductions increase as she continues to gain experience. A teacher, of given quality, who obtains over 21 years of experience on average reduces the incidence of high student absenteeism by 14.5 percentage points.” and "Two years of experience allows a math[s] teacher to reduce “the proportion of students with high absenteeism by 3.8 percentage points, an effect that rises to an 11.5 percentage point reduction for teachers with extensive experience.”[8] - this is particularly crucial in a post-Covid environment in which pupil absence has jumped.

10. The latest data show teacher recruitment down compared to last year, following a trend since the brief respite in applications during the pandemic:

[9]

11. Given the growth in pupil numbers in secondary (as the ‘primary bulge’ of the last decade grows older), the failure to recruit to target one year creates even greater pressure in subsequent years to bring new entrants into the profession.  This is especially true of subjects like physics, MFL, maths, where recruitment has been particularly poor.

12. The issues of teacher supply mean we now have more teaching out of subject.  Last year, 62 per cent of schools struggling with recruitment reported that at least some maths lessons were being taught by non-specialists, 55 percent reported the same for physics, and 29 per cent for MFL[10].  This decreases the amount of time teachers have to focus on their own subjects, as well as non-teaching tasks such as lesson planning.

13. There is some evidence to suggest that retention in some subjects is more important than others. For example Blazar (2015) found that the impact of each additional year of experience teaching primary mathematics was larger than that for teaching primary reading, although when teachers were asked to teach year-groups they were unfamiliar with, their effectiveness dropped in both subjects[11]. This suggests that when high teacher churn forces teachers to teach unfamiliar groups and subjects then their effectiveness is likely to be significantly impaired, i.e. poor levels of retention and high levels of staffing churn are likely to be bad for pupil outcomes and particularly those of the most disadvantaged pupils.

14. Alongside the recruitment issues, retention is becoming an increasing problem.  10 per cent of teachers don’t make it past their first year.  30 per cent don’t make it past their fifth year.  40 per cent of those who qualified in 2011 had left the profession a decade later.[12]  This rate of attrition creates an additional pressure on the recruitment cycle - more teachers need to be recruited to replace those who are leaving - and also suggests a poor return on the investment made in teacher training and professional development in the earliest years of a teacher’s career.

15. This also poses a challenge with the school leadership pipeline. The recently published report “Working live of teachers and leaders – wave 1 research report” [13] found that “The most common reason for not considering promotion in the next 12 months was a concern about the potential impact on work/life balance, cited by three in ten (31%)…. Teachers were significantly more concerned about the potential impact promotion would have on their work-life balance than leaders (33% vs. 20%)”. Recruitment to leadership positions is becoming increasingly difficult - there are fewer candidates for leadership positions as more are leaving the profession earlier, and the perceived pressures of the job of Head are putting people off applying[14].

What action should the Department take to address the challenges in teacher recruitment and retention?

16. Teachers and leaders are spending increasingly more time providing non-teaching services, for example supporting families through the cost of living crisis, supporting pupils who are waiting for a referral to CAMHS, and facilitating meetings with child and family social workers. Teachers and leaders either need to be supported to do this well, with resourcing, or these services need to be properly funded elsewhere.  At the present time, teachers are too often caught in the impossible position of lacking the capacity and capability to help children they can see desperately need support, but with no way of accessing that support from other services (for example with regards to mental health issues).

17. The 'golden thread' of support is positive - especially the investment in the ECF and NPQs – but it needs to take better account of the practicalities schools are facing, in particular finding the time and space for mentors to do their job properly in supporting ECTs. If the ECF and NPQs fail to stay relevant to the actual tasks facing teachers, or if they become too rigid and burdensome, their impact will diminish. 

18. In addition, we think there is merit in looking at greater and more relevant support for school leaders that better reflects the job they are being asked to do.  The content of the NPQH (and to a lesser extent the NPQSL) is too often idealised - preparing for the job as we might wish it to be rather than the job it actually is - meaning it can feel less helpful than it should, and repetitive based on other NPQs.

19. Greater flexibility in working practice is a must.  Teaching is too often stuck in a traditional mindset about working patterns, and that is putting people off joining and forcing people to leave where flexible working has swiftly become an expectation in other sectors.

20. The accountability system is undoubtedly part of the problem.  Although we at TDT make no direct claims about the benefits and drawbacks of the wider system of accountability and the specifics of the Ofsted inspection regime, it is undeniably true that teachers and leaders feel that the high stakes nature of Ofsted discourages longer-term thinking and development, drives teachers out of the classroom, and is reducing the appetite for people to become leaders.  Whatever your view on Ofsted and accountability more broadly, the current approach is having a negative impact on recruitment and retention.

21. Alongside the recruitment and retention strategy and the efforts on culture, pay is obviously a key issue, with teachers’ pay declining in real terms and against the average over the last decade and more, as this NFER chart[15] shows:

22. Pay is unlikely to be the answer in itself to solving the teacher recruitment and retention issues, but it is hard to see how significant progress can be made without addressing the implications of such a fall in real terms and relative pay over the last 10 years.  This is likely to include a combination of changes to pay, bursaries, and incentives, but could also be part of a wider look at teachers terms and conditions to reflect other issues (e.g. flexible working as noted above).

How well does the current teacher training framework work to prepare new teachers and how could it be improved?

23. The work undertaken to create a consistent approach between ITT and the ECF is very welcome, and the investment in the implementation of the ECF has been positive. The quality of the evidence that underpins the framework and the 2 year programme means that ECTs are starting their careers with a robust grounding in evidence-informed practice, as well as an expectation of engaging in continual professional development.  This follows on from their ITT experience in a way that is consistent.  We have some anecdotal evidence that some ECTs find the ECF repetitive rather than supportive, reflecting different experiences at ITT and levels of competence and confidence.

24. We need to recognise that this is a major change to the education system and it has not had time to bed in, so any evaluation must be initial and incomplete.  And, due to the wider context that schools are operating in (funding pressures, recruitment challenges, and the post-Covid world), the impact of the ECF has been limited. With the recruitment and retention crisis and staff shortages in schools, not all schools have the capacity to manage the mentoring requirements and we are increasingly hearing of schools who have previously invested significantly in ECTs making the choice not to recruit ECTs due to being unable to manage the workload.

How do challenges in teacher recruitment, training and retention compare to those being faced in other professions/ sectors of the economy, and is there anything that can be learned from other professions/ sectors of the economy?

25. The public education system remains largely unchanged in the way it operates from its Victorian origins.  No other area of public service, let alone industry or business, has had the luxury of doing this (just think about the significant organisational changes undertaken by the NHS, or the unrecognisable working practices in place today in business compared to even 20 years ago thanks to the march of technology).  Periodically ideas come along to change things - ranging from policies to extend the school day through to more radical ideas to change the school year) but change is hard to land.

26. The pandemic forced new ways of working in schools, some of which were handled well and some less well.  Rather than seek to build on that momentum, the education system has quickly tried to snap back to a ‘business as usual’ model as quickly as possible.  Not only does this mean not learning from new approaches around digital working, etc., but it also means the differences with other professions and industries become even more stark.  For example, the changes to working patterns and the ability for employees to negotiate flexible working patterns has accelerated in recent years in almost all sectors, but the expectations on teachers and leaders have not changed and adapted at the same pace, and this contrast will continue to grow if the sector is not able to respond and offer more flexible ways of working.

27. The quality of school culture and leadership are a fundamental part of this. Sustained investment in developing skilled leaders and ensuring there is a healthy leadership pipeline must be prioritised, not only in leadership qualifications but in ongoing support and communities of practice that support leaders to make schools places where teachers gain expertise and thrive professionally.  This is likely to include reviewing the traditional model of ‘heroic’ school leadership which assumes a single head as the expert in all areas, rather than a more distributed (and sustainable and healthy) leadership model where staff with expert knowledge (say, in behaviour having completed an NPQLBC) are trusted and supported.  This is more in keeping with the leader as CEO model rather than the leader as a superhero.

April 2023

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