The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

Search

  • Home
    • CPRT national conference
    • Blog
    • News
  • About CPRT
    • Overview
    • Mission
    • Aims
    • Priorities
    • Programmes
    • Priorities in Action
    • Organisation
    • People
      • National
    • Professional development
    • Media
  • CPR
    • Overview
    • Remit
    • Themes
    • Themes, Perspectives and Questions in Full
    • Evidence
    • People
    • CPR Publications
    • CPR Media Coverage
    • Dissemination
  • Networks
    • Overview
    • Schools Alliance
  • Research
    • Overview
    • CPRT/UoY Dialogic Teaching Project
    • Assessment
    • Children’s Voice
    • Learning
    • Equity and Disadvantage
    • Teaching
    • Sustainability and Global Understanding
    • Vulnerable children
    • Digital Futures
    • Demographic Change, Migration and Cultural Diversity
    • Systemic Reform in Primary Education
    • Alternative models of accountability and quality assurance
    • Initial Teacher Education
    • SW Research Schools Network
    • CPR Archive Project
  • CPD
  • Publications
  • Contact
    • Contact
    • Enquiries
    • Regional
    • School
    • Media
    • Other Organisations

November 25, 2016 by Warwick Mansell

Education in spite of policy: further reflections on the 2016 CPRT conference

It encapsulated probably the defining contrast I have seen in nearly 20 years covering education: the under-rated commitment and thoughtfulness of much of the teaching profession versus the endless dysfunction, self-centredness and dishonesty of policymakers and the policy process itself.

Here, in the day-long get-together that was the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 10th anniversary conference last Friday in London, was an event to convince any observer of the multi-layered professionalism present at least in potential in England’s schools system.

Yet central to the day’s valedictory keynote by Robin Alexander – he is stepping down at the end of next month after 10 years as this remarkable review’s guiding presence – was the force against which the profession seems so often to be battling. This is the largely shallow, frequently failing and usually self-referential Westminster/Whitehall/think tank policy-spewing machine.

‘Education in spite of policy’ was the strapline to Robin’s speech. This is about as good a five-word summary of the state of play in English schooling in 2016 as it gets.1

‘Ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act started transferring hitherto devolved powers from local authorities and schools to Westminster, policy has become ever more inescapable, intrusive and impervious to criticism,’ he said.

What was needed, then, was not more ‘education reform’ but reform of the policy process itself. Hear, hear.

The Cambridge Primary Review’s Final Report, published in 2009, was unflinchingly critical of the above characteristics in a Labour government which, Robin reminded us, sent documents on the teaching of literacy at the rate of roughly one a week to primary schools in the seven years to 2004. Yet there were some aspects which contributors to the review had welcomed: Labour’s Children’s Plan, Sure Start, Narrowing the Gap and the expansion of early childhood care and education.2

The more relevant question now is whether policymaking has worsened since 2010. While Robin welcomed the concept of the pupil premium, he said the current grammar schools proposal flew in the face of evidence, dating back as far as the 1960s, as to its likely damaging impact on those not selected. ‘To have two initiatives from the same government department pulling in opposite directions, both in the name of narrowing the gap, is bizarre. But hey, that’s policy.’

On four of CPRT’s priorities – aims, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – policy is worse in 2016 than when the report was published in 2009, he suggested. ‘Aims remain a yawning gap between perfunctory rhetoric and impoverished political reality. The new national curriculum is considerably less enlightened than the one it replaced … national assessment … is now even more confused and confusing than it was; and most government forays into pedagogy are naïve, ill-founded and doctrinaire.’

Policymakers can also be a very bad advert for the concept of education in itself, at least when they step away from the soothing rhetoric. Robin reminded us of this with reference to Michael ‘had enough of experts’ Gove and his famous observation that those teachers and academics who disagreed with him were ‘enemies of promise’ and Marxists ‘hell bent on destroying our schools.’

Listening to the speech, and sitting in on a couple of seminars and the day’s final plenary, was to be reminded of another contrast: between the decades of experience many contributors to the conference had to offer and the callowness of those often now shaping policy. I am loth to personalise, but to listen to Robin and to set his isolation from substantial involvement in policy 3 against the likes of Rachel Wolf, now opining on ‘the next round of education reform’ and the revelation that policymakers ‘must focus on what goes on inside the classroom’ a few years into a career almost entirely free of experience outside the policy bubble is to despair.4

So what of the depth elsewhere in the conference? I was fascinated by talks on the merits of philosophy in primary schools; and on the phenomenally popular, Cambridge University-based NRICH maths programme, whose director, Ems Lord, asked the provocative question: ‘is [maths] mastery enough?’ I found presentations on the ideas behind Learning without Limits,5 by academics at the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, as about the most thought-provoking I have heard.

And the final plenary, offering the thoughts of author/journalist Melissa Benn, another distinguished academic in Andrew Pollard and a headteacher in Sarah Rutty, offered much good sense. I was taken by Melissa’s description of a ‘brilliant’ – ie it sounded great – speech in 2013 by Gove, on the subject of primary education, which nevertheless showed a ‘wilful ignorance of the history of education’; welcome to post-truth politics. I was also struck by Andrew’s notion of evidence-informed, rather than evidence-based education, as the former implied the use of value judgement, which was important. However, in relation to policy, in stating that the Department for Education runs ‘consultations which turn out to be pseudo-consultations’, he reminded us how distant any kind of evidence can often feel from the directives.

Finally, Sarah launched into a quickfire, and bleakly humorous, tour de force on what it felt like to be on the end of policy suffused by a ‘lack of trust, lack of empathy, lack of joined-up thinking’, including those endless, and sometimes, she suggested, borderline incomprehensible missives from the Standards and Testing Agency about assessment changes.

‘As a headteacher, I feel a bit bullied if I’m honest. The government are not listening to our voices. They are certainly not listening to the voices of the children,’ she said.

The title of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, of course, was ‘Children, their World, their Education.’ Yet policy, in imposing constant change on schools because this fits both its own internal logic and the political needs of those in charge, staggeringly rarely, in reality, stops to consider the effects on those it is meant to help.

If it did, why would it have introduced major increases in the number of children likely to be deemed failing at 11 as a result of changes in the national assessment and curriculum systems without, as far as I know, having carried out any impact study as to the possible effects on pupils?

If it did, why would it have tried to force major disruptive and expensive structural change on thousands of primary schools without any good evidence that this will help pupils?

If it did, why would it publish a green paper on increasing selection without, seemingly, any consideration of the potential impact on pupils not deemed academic enough to pass a selective test?

Professionalism in spite of policy remains, sadly, the only hope for England’s schools.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007) and the recent CPRT report ‘Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence‘  (May 2016). Read more CPRT blogs by Warwick here.

 

1 – As is also implicit in a blog I wrote in the spring.

2 – CPR was not alone in this view. Another major review, the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales led by Richard Pring, also concluded in 2009. It investigated the notion that ‘there have been too many fragmented and disconnected interventions by government which do not cohere in some overall sense of purpose’.

3 – He has reminded me that as well as the 1991-2 ‘three wise men’ enquiry’ he has served on quangos such as CATE and QCA while his persistence over spoken language, in the face of that notorious ministerial objection that classroom talk is no more than ‘idle chatter’, succeeded in getting it reinstated, albeit reluctantly, in the current national curriculum. But my general point stands: on the one hand we have the rich but largely untapped experience and expertise that this conference brought together in abundance; on the other the supplanting of such experience and expertise by ideologically compliant special advisers and ‘expert groups’.

4 – Among several remarkable claims in Rachel Wolf’s blog is that ‘too many schools still resist testing as an “evil”’.   Really? No, they’d no doubt like to resist some of the more damaging impacts of high-stakes testing, but policymaking hangs all on test results, so…

5 – The papers on Learning without Limits will be on the programme’s website from next week.

Filed under: Aims, assessment, Cambridge Primary Review Trust, conference 2016, DfE, evidence, pedagogy, policy, primary teaching, Robin Alexander, Warwick Mansell

November 23, 2016 by Stephanie Northen

Education in spite of policy: reflections on the 2016 CPRT conference

‘It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.’ So observed American science fiction writer Philip K Dick, way back in 1981. Dick, whose work inspired the cult movie Blade Runner, was not talking about education. Thirty-five years ago, such a comment would not have been relevant to schools. It is now.

The current ‘reality’ of primary education is convincing many teachers that insanity might be an inevitable and actually a preferable outcome to continuing in this crazy world where what is educationally wrong is held up as right by those who must be obeyed.

For those of us who daily engage in this topsy-turvy turmoil, the 10th anniversary conference of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust on November 18th was deeply reassuring. It was also by turns depressing, alarming and inspiring, but most of all, for an ordinary classroom teacher such as myself, it was reassuring.

We don’t get out enough. Maybe once a term we escape to talk and share the Catch 22 dilemmas of our working lives. (Don’t teach to the test, but don’t you dare do anything else…) The rest of the time we inhabit classrooms with glass ceilings through which we are scrutinised by Lord Data, he who really must be obeyed, and his many acolytes. Some of these come in paper form, some have only a virtual existence, some, sadly, are only too human. They gaze through the ceiling, tut-tutting and often disagreeing with each other, but we can’t answer back.

Thus it was so heartening to read: ‘What works and what matters: education in spite of policy’ – the title of the conference keynote. Not only was it a relief to be able to applaud the sentiment, but it was also inspiring to realise it was being said in big letters to a hall full of people who all agreed! There was, for example, the new headteacher who took on the job with no training and little experience but who had the guts to get rid of all those time-wasting tracker tick-boxes. There was another head, insistent that she ‘doesn’t want to play their games’, but uncertain how long she can hold out in the face of indifferent Year 6 Sats results. There was the full-time teacher now embarked on a full-time PhD in order to bring philosophic questioning to the primary classroom.

And, of course, there were so many eager to celebrate the moral, ethical, social and cultural aspects of primary education. They daily risk their mental health subverting the accountability systems imposed by politicians, inspectors and academy chain executives to do the right – and sane – thing. As one teacher said: ‘I had my worst time ever as a teacher in May 2016. Those Year 6 Sats ran counter to everything I went into education for.‘ How has this happened? Well, it’s down to a surreal combination of what mad Lord Data says can be measured and what 18th century politicians say 21st century children need to know.

The insanity that is reality was summed up best by Robin Alexander, chair of the Trust, in his keynote speech. Policy is now ‘dangerously counterproductive’. It has become ‘ ever more inescapable, intrusive and impervious to criticism’. Classroom priorities are dictated by politicians increasingly susceptible to personal whim. One only has to remember Michael Gove, responsible for exhuming fronted adverbials, burying calculators and the re-examination of long-dead questions. As Alexander said of an edict from one of Gove’s colleagues: ‘Is it really essential … that every Year 6 pupil should know who shot England’s King William II, especially when this is a question that no historian can answer?’

Such madness is everywhere. Teachers battle with a national curriculum that is, to quote Alexander, neither national nor a curriculum. In the scary era of post-truth politics, the problem is also ‘the sheer dishonesty of the government’s approach’ to what is taught, claiming breadth and balance whilst setting high-stakes tests that enshrine ‘minimalism, narrow instrumentalism and a disdain for culture’. Such machinations are never welcome given that they do a profound disservice to the country’s young children. In times of Brexit and Trump, they are horribly reckless.

And what stands between the children and the reckless politicians? Obviously CPRT with its enlightened curriculum based on ‘reliable evidence and clear and valid vision’. Some campaigners on the side of the sane – for example Melissa Benn seeing hope in a middle-class rebellion and protests such as More than a Score.

And then there’s us – the classroom teachers.  As Robin Alexander said:

It’s the teachers who have heeded this message that the Cambridge Primary Review Trust celebrates. Their insistence on professional autonomy underpinned by reflection, evidence and vision underlines the force of another often-repeated quote from the final report: ‘Children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers merely do as they are told.’

Teachers do continue to heed the message of the final report of the CPR. All those at the 10th anniversary conference know it is the right way to go and that it is based on evidence not increasingly dodgy ‘data’. They continue to not merely do as they are told. But, make no mistake, this is a heavy responsibility for the overworked and not-terribly-well-paid teacher to shoulder. How much better if we could make sure, as Shakespeare urged, that: ‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.’

Stephanie Northen is a primary teacher and journalist and one of our regular bloggers. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

Filed under: Cambridge Primary Review Trust, conference 2016, curriculum, policy, primary teaching, Robin Alexander, Stephanie Northen, teachers

July 22, 2016 by Olwen McNamara, Jean Murray and Rebecca Phillips

Teacher training, supply and retention: trends, policies and challenges

There has been no shortage of worthy advice of late, from the great and the good to the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) and Department for Education (DfE), on the subject of teacher supply, recruitment, training and retention. This year alone the National Audit Office (February) and the Public Accounts Committee (June) have issued reports on training new teachers and the Education Select Committee inquiry into teacher supply rumbles along attempting to unearth whether there is a crisis, a challenge, or just a chronic shortage in some subjects; and if so why, and what is to be done?

Professor John Howson, an expert on teacher supply, going to the nub of the semantic debate in his written evidence to the Select Committee, said that ‘there are no current descriptors for how to measure either a challenge or a crisis in recruitment’, and that in any case it was more helpful to consider the matter at a more granular level, citing overall numbers, geographic location and quality of teacher supply. In any event,  the debate about where the responsibility for this lies is likely to get much more heated: Schools Week reported that in making judgements about schools under the new Ofsted framework ‘one of the key questions inspectors might ask headteachers is about teacher supply’.

Meanwhile, according to the State of Education Survey 2016 from The Key, over the past year 35 percent of primary schools have faced a shortage of teachers and nearly 60 percent of primary heads reported finding teacher recruitment and retention challenging. In the secondary sector the respective figures are 49 percent and 76 percent. All in all, this makes grim reading.

Within these figures there are, of course, marked regional differences, both in the supply of teachers and distribution of training places. Worryingly, the National Audit Office found that DfE had ‘a weak understanding of the extent of local teacher supply shortages and whether they were being resolved locally’. Attempting to reassure, DfE officials explained that they sharpened their understanding of recruitment ‘by talking to the schools involved in School Direct’,  the new(ish) school-led teacher training route which ‘allows school leaders to react much more effectively to local circumstances’.

The Public Accounts Committee was not slow to see the flaw in this strategy, given that the 57 percent of schools not involved in School Direct were ‘disproportionately primary schools in rural areas and secondary schools in disadvantaged areas’, which were the very schools ‘that struggled to recruit good teachers’. Add to the mix the well-aired difficulties experienced in London and the southeast, where The Key reported that 56 percent and 50 percent of all schools, respectively, were facing staffing difficulties. Particularly worrying in this survey was that primary heads reported that, of the top three reasons for teachers resigning, equal first by a good margin with ‘job offer elsewhere’ was ‘unable to cope with the workload’.

The National Audit Office report also concluded that ‘retention may be becoming an increasing problem’ based on numbers leaving the profession between 2011 and 2014, which rose by 11 percent overall (to around 42,000 annually) and was matched exactly by the increase in the proportion leaving for ‘reasons other than retirement’.

So, given that over 50 percent of the around 45,000 teachers currently entering or re-entering the profession every year are newly qualified, how is the government’s teacher supply model bearing up? Not well, it would seem. A number of factors, including sustained economic growth bringing with it a competitive labour market, mean that DfE has missed its 2015/16 targets in 14 out of 17 secondary subjects, and the cumulative effect of having missed overall targets for every one if the last four years has begun to bite. This is far from reassuring, since according to the DfE school workforce data released in June 2016 primary pupil numbers have been rising steadily since 2010, and between 2015 and 2024 primary/nursery pupil numbers are projected to increase by eight percent and secondary pupil numbers by 20 percent.

Meanwhile, during the past four years NCTL has presided over the most radical reform of routes into teaching and made annual changes in the allocation strategy and the applications process. From the point of view of marketing and recruitment, the overall effect, claims the Public Accounts Committee, has left potential applicants to the five main training routes bewildered and ill-informed about the availability, quality and cost of training locally. This conclusion is supported by the recent NCTL report The customer journey to initial teacher training .

So how is the teacher education sector dealing with the crises and challenges it faces?

The first challenge is the recruitment and ongoing retention of high quality entrants to the profession. In 2015-16, school-led routes together accounted for 50 percent of all (primary and secondary) training allocations and 55 percent of primary (post graduate) places (30 percent of primary trainees still follow the undergraduate route).

Yet evidence presented to the National Audit Office indicated that the increasing proportion of places allocated to school-led routes might be accentuating the teacher supply problem. In 2015/16, for example, university-led routes filled 85 percent of their overall training allocations while school-led routes filled less than 60 percent. Following on from this, NCTL’s recent report Linking ITT and workforce data has attempted to unpick the variations across routes in drop-out during training, before entering the profession and after three years of teaching. When the datasets are more established and robust this line of analysis will make interesting reading, but currently the clearest message is of regional variation in percentages entering the profession (lowest in northwest, northeast and southwest), which links back to the point made above about the regional variations in training places.

The second challenge is managing the repercussions of the inexorable, and recently exponential, move to school-led training. As our forthcoming CPRT research report on initial teacher education will show, the political drivers for establishing ITE partnerships, and through that for increasing schools’ involvement in the management of training, can be traced back well over 25 years. What is new is the sheer scale and speed of the transition. School-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) was introduced in 1993. By 2011-12, nearly 20 years later, there were just 56 SCITT consortia. By 2015 there were 155. The school direct route, in which (groups of) schools recruit trainee teachers directly and pay a university to train them, was established in 2012/13 and now 43 percent of all state schools in England are involved.

Shifting the power dynamic in roles and responsibilities in order to strengthen the ITE partnership model, already considered effective by Ofsted, can only be for the good, and the best managed school-led partnerships are undoubtedly excellent. However, the pace of expansion has jeopardised quality assurance of the sector overall, and left university education departments with little time to adapt. It has also raised some serious questions:

  • Are individual trainees fully aware of the differences between routes? Do they know, for example, that QTS (Qualified Teacher Status), although it certificates them to teach in England, is not accepted internationally, or even in Scotland? The split between academic (PGCE) and professional (QTS) qualifications was introduced nearly 20 years ago but the stand-alone QTS qualification is becoming increasingly popular as a cheaper, less demanding option, particularly for school-led routes, than the (generally) master’s level PGCE with QTS. We believe that a QTS-only model of training, based on a ‘what works here’ craft apprenticeship approach, privileges performativity and local practical knowledge over critical reflection and theoretical, pedagogical and subject knowledge. This is currently a moot point, for over half of England’s schools – the academies and free schools – are not required to employ trained teachers.
  • Does time spent in school (in excess of the two-thirds of training already school–based) inevitably and unproblematically lead to better and more relevant professional learning? The main focus of many schools is about acquiring ‘local’ curriculum knowledge and pedagogical skills and in some cases may lead to a ‘branded professionalism’ which we believe is less effective in preparing teachers for a lifelong career in which they are adaptable to future changes and other contexts. Additionally, staffing levels and restricted non-contact time limit many individual primary schools’ capability to support extended learning within a critical community in which, at times isolated, trainees can reflect on practice.
  • Will the changes prove mission-critical to the university-led training sector? The effects of training numbers and funding being reduced and unpredictable from year to year have already included loss of strategic capacity, increased casualisation of staffing, and the vulnerability of programmes and, ultimately, of university education departments. This, together with the attendant impact on the education infrastructure, including the loss of research, specialist expertise and published evidence, may be extremely damaging for education as a whole in the long term. Training allocations in 2016-17 may be critical in deciding the future of some university providers. Current plans, yet to be fully revealed, to establish a number of university ‘centres of excellence’ with greater security of training numbers, may be little compensation for the loss of local, long established training partnerships, knowledge and expertise built up over decades. The National Teaching Service, when launched, is also unlikely to be able to compensate for the shortfall of teachers, and the fall-back position of a workforce largely QTS-only qualified, or unqualified, is yet another way in which England is out of step with the rest of Europe.

Olwen McNamara and Rebecca Phillips are at the University of Manchester; Jean Murray is at the University of East London. With Rosemary Webb and Mark Brundrett, Olwen produced a research report on primary teacher education, training and development for the Cambridge Primary Review, which was published in 2008 and revised for The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys in 2010.  The present authors’ CPRT follow-up report will be published in autumn 2016.

Filed under: Cambridge Primary Review Trust, DfE, initial teacher education and training, Jean Murray, Olwen McNamara, primary teaching, Rebecca Phillips, school-centred/school-led/school-based teacher training, teacher recruitment, teacher retention, teacher supply, universities

July 1, 2016 by Sadie Phillips

Teaching: am I in or out?

In two previous blogs Sadie charted her progress through her PGCE year and into her first teaching post. Here she is again, one year on.

What a year! I’m sure there are other people out there who’ve had a terrible NQT year, but this one has got to be up there with one of the worst.

It started to go downhill from the beginning. September was a blur. There were no lesson plans, no medium term plans, no effective behaviour management system and very low expectations from staff and children alike. Within three days my parallel teacher had literally fled the country, deciding to return to her home country, and I was left to face the music alone.

I worked every waking hour to prepare lessons and resources from scratch, briefing supply teachers daily. I had somehow slipped under management’s radar. Unaware that I was an NQT, support and observations were virtually non-existent. I could have been teaching science and literacy or snakes and ladders for all anyone knew. There were no subject leaders or Key Stage heads that I could recognise. I was a rabbit caught in the headlights, with nowhere to turn.

Thankfully, one of the supply teachers agreed to stay on. This was my saving grace. We became each other’s support network, encouraging each other to keep going, taking it one day at a time. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry, and so we did both. Eventually, the latter began to happen far too often.

In October, quite unexpectedly, the head resigned and had left by Christmas. A week later, the school’s deputy head had followed suit. I felt utterly at sea, crushed and hopeless, watching idly as staff abandoned the sinking ship in droves – a combination of redundancies, retirements and escapees fleeing to greener pastures.

So desperate was our situation that two ‘super heads’ were deployed and a seismic shift in stress levels began. The academy regime had arrived.

Perhaps naively, I was momentarily motivated by the fresh faces, corporate blue trouser suits and no-nonsense attitudes. They signalled hope, an era of change. Sadly, this was the biggest let-down of all. During one of the new regime’s very first speeches, the word ‘HELL’ was actually emblazoned on a fiery 5m x 3m projection wall in the school hall. An unsustainable work-life balance was regarded as normal and accepted as part of the job. We were run ragged, whilst the running commentary from senior leadership left us feeling worthless and undervalued. Morale in the school had hit an all-time low and I was desperately unhappy. I was constantly stressed, tired and emotionally drained. It was as if we’d made a pact with the devil. Yes, we’ll work from home. Yes, we’ll do so until the job’s done – even if that means working into the early hours. Yes, we’ll work on weekends. Yes, we’ll read your emails and respond to them on Sundays. When I did eventually climb into bed my head was fuzzy, fraught with frantic deadlines and data, scrutinies and stress.

By Christmas, I’d decided that enough was enough. I had been working 14-16 hour days and felt under unbelievable pressure to reach unachievable results. In my PGCE year I was graded ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted. I have an incredible passion for teaching and working with children. I am creative, positive and excited to be part of an invaluable education system. But when I looked in the mirror at the end of autumn term, I saw a panic-stricken shadow of my former NQT self. I applied for a job in the holidays and gave my notice in the new year.

But the pupils aren’t responsible for those two traumatic terms. They (along with my team) were the only reason I stayed as long as I did. It broke my heart to leave them. They made me smile, filled me with pride and, on occasion, flashes of brilliance filled the classroom. They achieved against all odds. They were a pleasure to teach, in spite of the surrounding nonsense. In such a short space of time they had come so far, but they were fragile. A fraying rope that I couldn’t let go, for fear it would unravel completely. All the good work with their behaviour and attitudes, undone in a single moment. Another teacher is leaving us. I couldn’t hold back the tears when I bid my farewells, but I’m glad to say I’ve not shed a single tear since.

By Summer term, Ofsted had put the school into special measures, but I didn’t need that result to know I’d made the right choice. Once I moved to another school, my life improved ten-fold. I’m no longer taking work home in the evenings and I’ve gained my precious weekends back. The biggest highlight has to be the positive working environment, the inspirational leadership and constant support from colleagues. There has been plenty of encouraging feedback throughout the term – from peers, pupils and parents alike – always unexpected, but it’s made me realise that I might actually be good at my job after all. My confidence is slowly returning.

I’ve finally struck a balance that I feared I’d never see again. I used to wonder how teachers managed to get all of their work done by 5pm and spend every weekend and holiday blissfully divorced from school life. I couldn’t quite comprehend how they managed it, assuming it involved some form of time travelling Tardis!

Every now and then, I still feel a pang of guilt about the class I left behind. I will always wonder how my class (the brightest, the keenest and the most apathetic) is getting on. I will always look back fondly on the enthusiasm of that first class and I will always be proud of my most creative lessons but I can’t pretend that those magical moments weren’t outweighed by everything else that we were contending with. The environment had become toxic and we shouldn’t feel like that about a job that is so vitally important for the future of our society. I don’t think I realised the full impact on my mental health at the time, but I can understand now why so many NQTs decide to leave the profession. If only they’d found the right school, I wonder.

As I mentioned in my previous post, sometimes it’s easy to forget what’s important and to become railroaded by politics. Thankfully, the CPRT aims are there to remind us what’s really important – over and above government priorities. My NQT year has been a baptism of fire, but somehow I survived. I’ve learnt more over the past year than I have in any other. I’m certainly not the same teacher I was at the start of the year and I hope I can continue to grow and say the same again next year.

I’ve gained so much from this experience and despite such a challenging and chaotic NQT year, I’m sticking with it.

I’m in.

Is Sadie’s experience of becoming a primary teacher in these difficult times unusual, or is it more common than it should be? What of the extremes of chaos and ruthless corporatism, and of stress and damaged self-esteem, that she suffered before at last encountering the positive and supportive working environment that as an NQT she needed and deserved? We would like to hear from other recently qualified primary teachers, and from school leaders who can reassure those following Sadie into the classroom that she was just exceptionally unlucky in where she landed.

Filed under: Cambridge Primary Review Trust, leadership, NQT, primary teaching, Sadie Phillips, support, teacher retention

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk

Copyright © 2025