Written evidence from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers
ATL and education policy:
1. ATL, as a leading education union, recognises the link between education policy and our members’ conditions of employment. ATL, with its leadership section AMiE, champions good practice and believes that teachers as professionals must be recognised for their knowledge, expertise and judgement, at the level of the individual pupil and in articulating the role of education in increasing social justice.
Introduction
2. ATL are pleased to respond to this Inquiry addressing teacher training and supply, the latter shortage issue reaching critical proportions in many schools and colleges in which our members lead and teach, affecting them, the curriculum they provide and the children and young people with whom they work.
Executive Summary:
3. The key points are:
- The current Teacher Supply Model lacks cognizance of previous shortages and regional needs which must be addressed.
- The picture of school vacancies is incomplete due to lack of reporting at school level and efforts need to be made to get this information.
- The yearly changes to recruitment approaches makes provider planning difficult and this year’s sudden capping of particular routes have caused huge problems to providers, exacerbating future teacher shortages in some areas.
- The current bursaries are a blunt tool with little evidence of impact on retention. Punitive proposals like Wilshaw’s ‘golden handcuffs’ will only worsen the situation. ATL’s proposal is for an option which repays a percentage of student loans over a number of years. Starting and ongoing teacher salaries have a significant impact on the attractiveness of the profession.
- Short-term fixes like the Troops to Teachers, the National Teaching Service and Researchers in Schools programmes are woefully inadequate to the challenge of meeting teacher supply demands.
- It’s vital that the issue of teacher retention is addressed as part of the teacher supply issue. This means a very real engagement with teacher workload and its drivers, workload being the key reason for low teacher morale and teachers leaving the profession.
- It’s key to motivate the profession, not only through reducing workload but ensuring entitlement to high-quality CPD and meaningful professional autonomy.
The scale of teacher shortage
4. The National Audit Office ‘Training new teachers’[1] report’s findings that the DfE currently underestimates the scale of the teacher shortage issue, with insufficient review of its models and incentives reflects our members’ experience and the evidence of understaffed schools around the country. It’s deeply concerning that the Teacher Supply Model does not acknowledge or aim to address pre-existing teaching shortages, including those caused by four years’ worth of previously missed recruitment targets, particularly in secondary subjects. If this factor is not addressed urgently, the impact of 14 out of 17 secondary subjects having unfilled places will be even more significant, particularly with rising pupil numbers.
5. The NAO report’s recommendation that the DfE and National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) work to establish the extent of the Model’s accuracy by comparing its outputs with data on the actual levels of vacancies in schools is very welcome. While the upward trend of DfE-reported full-time classroom teacher vacancies is worrying, from 630 in 2010 to over 1,730 in November 2014, the vacancy numbers by themselves are unlikely to be reliable, although useful in indicating trend. The culture of intense competition between schools around recruitment is limiting the reporting of vacancies. In some schools, vacancies have been running so long without a post being filled that it is no longer regarded as a vacancy.
6. Not only do the DfE and NCTL need to ensure fuller data on vacancies but we know from members that there needs to be far more understanding within the Teacher Supply Model of the teacher shortage issue at the local and school type level. The lack of recognition within the Model for regional supply needs has left areas like the East of England and the East Midlands struggling. The national focus of the Model fails to recognise that many trainees will go on to teach near where they trained and a shortage in teacher training places can be devastating for schools and areas which already struggle with unfilled teacher vacancies.
7. The LKMCo ‘Why Teach’[2] report (November 2015) found that ‘being able to commute from where I currently live’ was the most important factor in deciding where teachers are prepared to teach, making increased local capacity in teacher training so vital for many areas. The recent closing of primary recruitment, which stopped all primary training providers outside London who have taken on at least 75% of last year’s numbers, from recruiting trainees onto fee-charging School Direct or SCITT (School Centred Initial Teacher Training) schemes means that some areas have not been able to ensure the number of trainees coming through to meet school needs in the future; the executive director of the Essex and Thames Primary SCITT, which covers 128 schools, called it “potentially disastrous” for the region.[3] The speed of capping, once applied, and indeed the lack of stability caused by differing approaches, from year to year by the NCTL, makes long-term planning increasingly difficult for providers within local areas.
Financial incentives
8. The lack of a review of the effectiveness of the Teacher Supply Model in meeting teacher supply needs is echoed in the lack of review of the financial incentives it provides to graduates for particular ITT subject routes. As the NAO report finds, there’s little evidence of the positive impact of bursaries, particularly in the long-term. Indeed, as ATL observed in its evidence[4] to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), ever-increasing bursaries skew the salary that graduate recipients will expect once they have completed their training. Those who have benefitted from tax-free bursaries of £30,000 (the equivalent in take-home pay of around £40,000), are unlikely to find posts which offer the minimum end of the main pay teachers’ pay scale attractive.
9. ATL believes that these funds should instead be used to repay the student loans of teachers; by repaying a percentage of their loans over a number of years, teachers would be incentivised to stay within teaching, helping to address the issue of retention. We welcome the comment made by John Howson in his Observer article which contrasts the £9,000 fee that teachers have to pay for the ‘privilege to train as a teacher’, with the payment of salary by the Ministry of Defence to officer cadets for the army, navy and air force during their training.[5]
10. The positive approach of repaying student fees, is in stark contrast to the ‘golden handcuffs’ trap which Michael Wilshaw propounded to the TES to combat the ‘brain drain’ of trained teachers to schools overseas.[6] We agree with Laura McInerney that telling graduates to ‘waive their right to travel’ will not only fail to increase recruitment but is highly likely to narrow it further.[7] The context around the current teacher shortage crisis, while including a financial element, is far wider and more complex than Wilshaw’s proposal could hope to meet.
Fig 1. Growing pay gap, ATL evidence to the STRB. Full-time gross annual median earnings, 2011-2015.[8]
11. While teachers’ motivations are largely intrinsic with most joining the profession to ‘make a difference’, particularly to the lives of children and young people, longer-term financial considerations are important with teachers’ starting salaries impacting on the standing of the profession and on the ability of teacher graduates to stay in education. The graph above, provided in our evidence to the STRB, suggests that teachers are falling behind other parts of the economy.
12. With teacher recruits burdened with higher levels of student debt and facing increased housing costs because of a housing crisis that disproportionately affects this demographic, many are being forced to make a more pragmatic decision around their current and future careers. With a buoyant graduate labour market and increasing graduate starting salaries in other professions, education will progressively lose out. The impact of low starting salaries, restricted advancement through performance pay progression (PRP), and high costs is very real for teachers: in 2014, 51,536 teachers needed to apply for a pay day loan, compared to fewer than 5,000 doing so in 2011.[9]
Impact of route diversity
13. We hear from our ATL Future, student and newly qualified teacher members, that navigating the plethora of initial teacher education routes is increasingly complicated and off-putting. With graduates facing an array of routes, offering QTS and/or PGCE, via SCITTs, schools offering School Direct, salaried or unsalaried, HEI-led provision, Teach First, Researchers in Schools, or Troops to Teachers, they’re compelled to make many applications, where before it was possible to make only one.
14. While a diversity of routes can encourage a range of graduates, with a rich variety of experience, education and needs into the profession, it’s vital that the infrastructure is sufficiently robust to support it so that graduates can find easy-to-access information, and that application processes are streamlined from the graduate user perspective and also balance the needs of providers. This balance is vital so that neither schools nor HEIs are weakened by the move towards increased school-led ITT. ITE provision is becoming an increasingly unstable option for HEI providers, the impact already evident with the loss of the outstanding Open University, Bath and Anglia Ruskin as ITE providers. HEIs are vital to both school-led and HEI-led ITE provision and their weakening would result in a lesser ITE offer for potential trainees.
15. There is a growing tendency by the DfE to open new routes, in response to particular needs, driven by political short-term needs, rather than by evidence of what actually works. For example, rather than looking at evidence around the training needs, recruitment benefits, and motivations of a greater variety of career-changers to the profession, short-term under-resourced programmes like Troops to Teachers are born, failing to meet shortage needs and letting down those few who took or applied for this training route. The National Teaching Service risks being another such expensive programme, which fails to address the long-term issues of getting teachers into schools and areas which are perceived to be more challenging. The workload impact of Researchers in Schools where the ‘fifth research day’ is enabled by five days’ worth of work and training being compressed into four, will hardly make it a highly attractive option.
Impact on teaching
16. Increasing teaching shortages lead to heavier demands places on those working in schools. As the NAO report finds, in many schools, teachers are increasingly being expected to teach subjects for which they have no post-A-Level qualification; working incredibly hard to stay just a step ahead of the classes they teach, but with inevitable concerns not only on their workload but also around the quality of subject teaching they can provide, with this lack of professional training and support.
17. These shortages are also likely to not only impact on classroom teaching but also the levels of pastoral support and leadership within schools. We hear from our members of staff being stretched every further, having less time to collaborate and to provide additional support for pupils and parents. The Guardian Teacher Network reported teachers’ observations that when teachers are promoted, they are expected to do their old jobs too; one reported juggling being a head of department, an assistant head and teaching a 90% timetable[10].
Retention
18. ATL welcomes the NAO’s question to the DfE around focusing attention on the issue of teacher retention. It is the vital other side of the teacher supply coin and the slowness of the DfE in addressing this has severely reduced the effectiveness of its recruitment practices in making a lasting difference to teacher supply needs. In 2014, the OECD found that UK teachers rank second from the bottom, just above Singapore, in terms of their longevity in the classroom.[11] This reflects the impact of our excessive accountability system which has added huge bureaucratic pressures on our teachers with workload cited as the number one reason for teachers leaving.
19. Whilst we welcomed the government’s Workload Challenge in terms of engaging and hearing the profession, and our participation on the ‘Data management’, ‘Marking’ and ‘Planning and resources’ working groups, little has been achieved to date in terms of reducing workload. Indeed, the context of massive changes to curriculum, assessment and qualifications, the delays around accreditation processes of qualification specifications[12], the long shadow of Ofsted in terms of headteacher perceptions of needed practices and the perceived demands of performance management are meaning that workload is worsening rather than getting less.
20. The impact on morale on those newest to the profession is clear; in January 2015, an ATL survey found that almost three-quarters (73%) of trainee and student and newly qualified teachers (NQTs) say they have already considered leaving the teaching profession. Over half (54%) said they did not think they would still be teaching in ten years' time and almost a quarter (24%) said they did not think they would be teaching in five years' time. 76% of the NQT respondents say they have considered leaving teaching because their workload is too high.[13]
21. Whether graduate or career-changer NQTs, our members’ responses graphically showed the impact of workload on motivation and morale: “Planning takes all weekend and I spend hours marking. Although there are wonderful ‘light bulb’ moments, there are not usually enough of these to wipe out the downsides. At the start of my second term as a NQ, I am exhausted and very demoralised.” (NQT Secondary); and “I saw this as a vocation, a lifelong dream following a successful non-teaching career elsewhere. I now have no time to spend with family or even speak to them. Can’t sleep, no social life but still love ‘teaching’; it’s just the rest of it that’s unbearable.” (NQT, Primary)
22. Workload is driving up teacher departure across the profession. ATL’s recent Workload survey[14] found that 81% of respondents had considered leaving the profession because of their workload. Working long hours, including in some meetings and on types of marking that add little value to pupil/student learning, have left the profession worn out and increasingly demoralised. One member stated that their school has “a marking policy that involves three different coloured pens and ten symbols of different forms. You have to write a positive comment and set a target after each piece of work with every piece of work is required to be marked. A set of books takes 90 minutes to mark times by two. That's 3 hours marking each night.”
23. Excessive workload and the busy work that takes up so much time are impeding the kind of teaching that our members wish to do, reducing motivation to stay within the profession. The shadow cast by a punitive accountability system is still looming over leadership who remain unsure that Ofsted’s myths around marking, classroom observations and heaps of written evidence have really been bust.
24. Workload also impacts on the support that new and struggling teachers receive. Our newly qualified members observe inconsistent levels of support, which is echoed on the Guardian Teacher Network where one teacher recalled having to wait more than six months to get feedback from a lesson observation by an assistant headteacher[15], making it of little use by the time it was received.
25. Quality of teaching is affected by teachers’ having little or no time to access CPD which meets individual needs, to reflect on their practice, to innovate, to access research evidence. This lack of time is also affected by a culture in some schools which perceives teacher expression of need/desire for CPD as an admission of professional weakness, exacerbated by an implementation of performance related pay which, inconsistently applied, leads to demotivation and division. With teachers’ motivation including ‘feeling good at their job’, ‘love of subject’[16] and being able to teach in a way that makes a difference, this hugely impacts teacher morale and lowers retention rates.
Recommendations
26. The Teacher Supply Model should take account of previous years’ recruitment shortfalls and build review mechanisms with schools to assess its accuracy in determining teacher supply needs.
27. Due to competition between schools for parents and teacher trainees, many school leaders underplay the number of vacancies they have, making it difficult to accurately measure the full extent of the teacher supply crisis in schools. Schools need to be incentivised or reassured to share that and other relevant data more easily.
28. The TSM and recruitment strategies need to include a regional dimension, recognising the higher supply needs in particular areas and for schools in challenging circumstances. This should also include a review of the regional impact of imposing caps on recruitment at particular arbitrary points.
29. The DfE and the NCTL need to review the effectiveness of bursaries, not only on attracting graduates in particular subject areas onto training courses, but also on their longer-term retention within the profession and consider other financial incentives.
30. Workload must be tackled as a matter of urgency. The working groups are due to publish shortly but their recommendations will have mixed chances of success if the drivers of excessive accountability, external changes, performance management, uncompetitive remuneration, are not addressed. This should include an urgent review of Ofsted as it remains a key driver for an unhealthy and alienating work climate (see ATL’s A new vision for inspection in schools). Proposals for education change should be reviewed in terms of impact on workload.
31. In addition to addressing factors which negatively impact on teacher morale, the government also needs to respond to the evidence of what motivates people to enter and to remain in the profession, including an entitlement to high-quality personalised professional development, as part of a continuum of development from initial teacher education through to career-long CPD, related to subject-, leadership- and SEN-development.