TTR0125

Written evidence submitted by School of Global Studies and School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex

Education Committee - Call for Evidence:

Teacher recruitment, training and retention

The following submission draws on qualitative research undertaken with primary school teachers, headteachers and governors by researchers at the University of Sussex Schools of Global Studies and Education and Social Work. Our interdisciplinary team used audio diaries to gather teachers responses to their roles through the Covid-19 pandemic, and are thus well placed to respond to this inquiry to scrutinise the government’s capacity to recruit, retain and train teaching staff, specifically in primary schools.

 

Executive summary

Our research identified three key factors that have intensified teachers’ workloads and eroded their sense of their role’s recognition, contributing to problems with retention and. These three factors and related recommendations are synthesised in the below summary, and elaborated through this document.

1. Under-resourcing in both education and social care has intensified the workload of teaching staff, pushing staff to their limits.

  • In the immediate term, we recommend that the government supports paid peer support to offer teachers space to process the complexity of their role in structured ways that reflect the remit of their roles
  • In the longer term, we recommend longitudinal, mixed-method research to fully understand the scope and intensity of teachers’ roles, with the ultimate aim of ensuring these roles are attractive and sustainable livelihood options.

 

2. The retention and recruitment of qualified teachers has been made more difficult by a lack of consistent support for, and trust in, teachers, as communicated by the government and the media through the pandemic. In addition, relationships between teachers and senior school leaders have become increasingly strained due to external pressures. We recommend the government:

  • Build trust proactively with schools by acknowledging publicly, through official communication channels and also through the media, a clear and direct message of retrospective support for teachers’ work during the pandemic.
  • Support senior leadership teams to rebuild trust within their staff bodies and with their local educational authorities by offering training to leaders on practices for rebuilding trust in schools[i][ii], with an emphasis on the structural factors to avoid implications of personal blame.

 

3. Burdensome managerialism has both intensified teachers’ workloads and reinforced the lack of trust between schools and the government. Ofsted is currently under scrutiny because it has failed to make adequate provision/adaptations for the ongoing impacts of the pandemic on both the school environment and learning outcomes. Our findings offer rich insights into how assessment processes were experienced by teaching staff, demonstrating how these processes can undermine trust, increase the workload of already overburdened staff, and, in doing so, push teachers to the edge. We recommend:

  • The government should support longitudinal mixed-methods research on the ongoing impacts of the pandemic on schools, teaching staff and new/additional learning requirements to understand the educational landscape and the workload of teachers.
  • The findings of this research should inform a reformed external assessment process (Ofsted, or whatever replaces it) that better reflects the post-pandemic reality in whicht schools operate. 


The current situation regarding teacher recruitment and retention: What are the main factors leading to difficulties recruiting and retaining qualified teachers?

The qualitative data we collected in 2021 revealed that the unsustainable stress levels for teaching staff and heads were exacerbated and revealed by the Covid-19 crisis, and that emerging from the pandemic has not removed these issues. While the government’s education recovery programme has focused on children, significant work is required to address the challenges faced by teaching staff that the pandemic compounded and brought to light.

In many ways, the pandemic intensified already untenable levels of stress for many teaching staff and school leaders, and deepened and reshaped inequalities in how such stress was distributed. Many of these patterns have been sustained since the pandemic as teachers grapple with new crises. We see a direct connection in our data between intensified stress levels and burnout and teacher retention.

For example, one of our respondents handed in their notice during the short research period, seeking other roles in education but outside schools. This teacher spoke of being very anxious and very stressed”. In their next diary, they reported having handed in their notice.

Another respondent, a head teacher, spoke of the pressures of being the person ultimately responsible in a school, where any release of responsibility was exceptionally difficult. After a particularly stressful week in school, while grieving a recent bereavement but unable to take any real time off, they spoke of their choice to “rest” in relative terms by being out of the school environment for three days working from home: “You need to rest not to quit because otherwise I think I probably would quit this job.

Overall, respondents spoke of the pressures that made it difficult to stay in their profession despite, or potentially because of, the huge sense of care they felt for pupils. Below, we explain the three key factors that appeared to drive these unmanageable levels of stress for teaching staff and school leaders in our research.

1) Intensified and expanded responsibility related to under-resourcing in both education and social care, as exacerbated and normalised through the Covid-19 pandemic

Retaining and recruiting qualified teachers is made more difficult by teachers’ awareness that they are increasingly expected to be responsible for work that goes beyond the technical boundaries of their role, with additional labour required to make up for gaps in education and social care budgets and programmes.

Our research with teaching staff in 2021 clearly highlighted these issues. Teaching staff understood that their role spanned safeguarding, facilitating key workers, supporting the health services and skeletal economy, teaching in the classroom and online, all with a reduced staff body due to shielding and extended sick leave/quarantines.

As well as general concerns about the health and education of the children they taught, much of their diaries focused on feelings of responsibility for vulnerable children - revealing the layers of care in their role that go beyond mere teaching.

While teaching staff dealt with their own clinical vulnerabilities, exhaustion and confusion in navigating the pandemic, they also stretched themselves to offer what was needed through a changing landscape of threat and possibility. For headteachers in particular, the scope of their work was shaped by a sense of being the last line of safety for students and feeling a lack of structural support for their role. This quote from a head teacher indicates the level of responsibility they took on during the pandemic:

If people knew how much we have been flying by the seats of our pants for the last two years, how close to the wire the whole thing has been, if they really knew that, they would be worried. We’re that close to not being able to keep kids safe, we’re that close to not being able to give them a good education. Everybody always does, in a school, everything they can to mitigate against the chronic lack of funding, the lack of investment in school buildings, not enough staff.

While our research did not extend beyond 2021, teaching staff have faced further crises in the past eighteen months related to funding - for basic school infrastructure, supplies and their own salaries. These rolling crises have brought a new set of challenges that reshape, but do not materially decrease, the expanded responsibility that teaching staff took on during the pandemic.

Recommendations

2) Breakdowns of trust at different levels: trust between teaching staff and the government and media, and trust between teachers and senior leaders at schools

The retention and recruitment of qualified teachers has been made more difficult by teachers’ direct experience of, and broader awareness of, a lack of consistent support for and trust in teachers, as communicated by the government and media through the pandemic. Much of our data related to teachers’ sense that the government did not respect or trust teachers (as evidenced, for example, through a dearth of clear and timely guidance, a lack of advance consideration for vaccinations, inadequate PPE etc). This lack of respect and trust was reinforced through the media.

For example, this teacher’s account expresses how they felt “vilified”, and experienced a “rather hostile attitude” from the government while doing “two jobs at once”:

In terms of the guidelines that we’ve been given in primary school, they’ve always just come too late and it’s been chaotic. It didn’t feel that really they were thinking about the safety of teachers at all. And some of the reporting in the media about the unions, when they were taking action to try and make sure that it was safe for staff, was shocking. I felt for a while like teachers are really sort of vilified and there were people saying, oh they’ve just had a year off, teachers haven’t done anything. But the reality was a lot of teachers were going into school, certainly during that third lockdown. We were going into school teaching keyworker children and also delivering online learning. So, it felt if anything like we were doing two jobs at once. But it wasn’t seen like that, I felt like that even a lot of people who normally would be quite sympathetic to teachers just thought teachers were getting an easy ride and I do blame the media for that a lot and the government who never particularly seemed to support teachers and have a rather hostile attitude towards them.

Our findings also showed an erosion of trust, and trust-building behaviour within schools. One of our participants, who occupied a leadership position, termed this the “hidden impact” of the pandemic:

There's been some relationship breakdowns. There's been some loss of trust. I think that's happened across all schools. That's something that is going to take us a little bit of time to rebuild, I imagine. There's the obvious impact of Covid. And then there's the hidden impact.”

It does not appear that trust has been successfully rebuilt between teachers and the government since the pandemic. In 2021, researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Birmingham noted that “the government’s failure to address the combination of issues that have led to a lack of leader trust in England seems highly risky” and this failure appears to have continued over the last two years[iii].

To compound these issues, the leaked WhatsApp messages of the Ministers of Education and Health in March 2023 confirmed the lack of trust and respect that many of the teaching staff in our research were feeling during the pandemic. The transcripts of the recent education recovery meeting show that the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, Susan Acland-Hood, refused to answer a question from the chair about whether the department was embarrassed about the WhatsApp leak. This appears to indicate a lack of remorse at a departmental level for such attitudes and the actions that accompanied them. We would suggest that proactively rebuilding trust is a key development area in terms of making teaching a desirable and sustainable livelihood choice.

Recommendations

3) Burdensome managerialism that both intensifies teachers’ workloads and reinforces lack of trust between schools and the government

Ofsted is currently under scrutiny because it has not made adequate provision/adaptations for the ongoing impacts of the pandemic on either the school environment or learning outcomes. The resulting additional additional stress caused by the Ofsted audit process and the downgrading of schools to 'requires improvement' or 'inadequate' is damaging for the whole school community (heads, staff, parents and pupils). 

Our findings offer rich insights into how assessment processes were experienced by teaching staff. The following quotes from a headteacher underscore how these processes undermine trust, require additional work from already overburdened staff, and can push teachers to the edge.

I was struck by just how strongly, how heavily, I guess, Ofsted hangs over schools, in general, but particularly now. And it really feels as if, if you haven’t been working in a school, you don’t really understand the complexity of stuff that school staff have been juggling.It actually feels like the government hates schools and hates school staff. There’s so little trust.”

This expectation that we are, literally, at the government’s beck and call every single minute of every single day just keeps hanging over us, keeps being there. And in the early days, when we thought it was going to be, like, a month or something, nobody minded, we all jumped up and did it, we wanted to keep our community safe, we love our communities, we love our kids. But to still, nearly two years on now, be expected to work at this pace, I think it’s literally killing people, I really do.

Recommendations

Acknowledgements

This research was originally funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, and current policy-focused dissemination activities are funded by the University of Sussex Knowledge Exchange Policy Fellowship. This response has been prepared by researchers at the University of Sussex, including:

 

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[i] Andersson, K., & Liljenberg, M. (2020). ‘Tell us what, but not how’–understanding intra-organisational trust among principals and LEA officials in a decentralised school system. School Leadership & Management, 40(5), 465-482.

[ii] Browning, P. (2014). Why trust the head? Key practices for transformational school leaders to build a purposeful relationship of trust. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 17(4), 388-409.

[iii] Thomson, P., Greany, T., & Martindale, N. (2021). The trust deficit in England: emerging research evidence about school leaders and the pandemic. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 53(3-4), 296-300.

[iv] Andersson, K., & Liljenberg, M. (2020). ‘Tell us what, but not how’–understanding intra-organisational trust among principals and LEA officials in a decentralised school system. School Leadership & Management, 40(5), 465-482.

[v] Browning, P. (2014). Why trust the head? Key practices for transformational school leaders to build a purposeful relationship of trust. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 17(4), 388-409.

 

April 2023