The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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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.

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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.

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Reflections from an NQT: surviving or thriving?

Last June, Sadie posted about training for primary teaching and looked forward to becoming an NQT. Here’s the sequel.

Rewind to Sunday 31st August and you would have found me sitting on my sofa staring down the barrel of my first year as a teacher, wondering what the new academic term would bring. My classroom was beautifully decorated, I had planned my first few weeks of teaching and I was armed with plenty of ‘back to school’ activities to get to know my new class. Adrenaline had kicked in and I was looking forward to making a difference to the children of the inner-city academy I had chosen for my first teaching role. I felt well-rested, eager and raring to go.

Flash forward to present day: I’ve survived my first term as an NQT and the metaphorical onion has revealed its layers, the reality of teaching has become apparent and during the past four months I have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions. It has been exhilarating, exhausting and at times overwhelming.

Initially, I felt as though I was treading water, simply keeping afloat. For the first time in a long time I felt insecure and out of my depth, I continually questioned everything I was doing. It quickly became clear that teacher training does not fully prepare you for the challenges encountered during your first post as a fully-fledged teacher. It is an immense learning curve. I learnt more in those first few weeks than I had in my entire training year. Move over PGCE, welcome to the world of full-time teaching.

The deprived school in East London was a stark contrast to the primaries in Cornwall and Devon where I had completed my training. I was dealing with a high proportion of children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) and over half of my class were considered to have Special Educational Needs (SEN). The high volume of SEN and EAL pupils forced me to adapt my teaching and think outside the box. Thankfully, this is where pedagogy came into play and all those research papers I scrutinised during my PGCE began to form the basis of my teaching across this diverse range of pupils.

To make matters worse, I was also tackling extreme behaviour issues and became aware early on that embedding consistent behaviour strategies in the day-to-day routine was key to ensuring Sarah wouldn’t run out of the classroom when she was feeling frustrated or that Fred wouldn’t lash out at other children when he couldn’t keep his temper under control.

Combine all this with the announcement that two executive heads were parachuting in due to the secondary’s ‘catastrophic GCSE results’, the ensuing resignation of the primary head teacher, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a pretty tough start to an NQT year, but I’ve not let it put me off… yet.

My first term was a blur of planning, marking, getting to grips with behaviour management strategies, learning about my pupils, getting to know colleagues and spending more time than expected within the four walls of the classroom. My partner forgot what I looked like and when I did surface at home late into the evening I spent a lot of time drinking coffee, marking, planning, completing paperwork and preparing resources, not to mention compiling evidence towards to the teaching standards for my NQT file and striving to meet weekly targets set by my NQT mentor.

As a full time primary teacher, I expected to teach 80 percent of my 30-hour timetabled week, with only 10 percent of time allocated to completing NQT tasks, observations, reflections and training, and a further 10 percent allocated to the two remaining, yet fundamental, aspects of the role: marking and planning. An incredible burden is placed on this 10 percent and, no matter how hard I tried, I found it impossible to keep up – leaving all outstanding tasks to be completed in my own time.

Those who know me well would describe me as incredibly organised and highly efficient, qualities I pride myself on. Yet I found myself struggling to get everything done – there simply wasn’t enough time in the day. I led a miserable existence for those first seven weeks. I was working 14-16 hour days on a regular basis, which was completely unsustainable of course. Inevitably, I became ill and despite the fear of falling even further behind I took a sick day. Physically and mentally exhausted, I began to question whether I had made the right decision by pursuing a career in teaching. I hate to admit it, but for the first time I had serious doubts about my future within this new profession.

Thankfully after half term something clicked. I realised that I was trying to be a perfectionist – working too hard, ticking every box, exceeding expectations and trying to make every lesson amazing. I took some time to reflect on my teaching and acknowledged that, in education, resilience is a daily necessity. I wanted to be the perfect teacher, but teaching is a lifetime’s craft. I will never perfect it, nor will I ever complete my ‘to do’ list. Once I accepted this, I began to master the art of resilience. Although I still work on Sundays and am yet to fully establish the elusive work-life balance, I’m working on it. I’ve begun to know when to stop, when to let go and when to switch off, I’ve started to look after myself and feel less guilty about meeting friends, pursuing hobbies or having an evening off.

My teaching philosophies and principles are steeped in the work of the Cambridge Primary Review and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and I have always endeavored to demonstrate these in my day-to-day practice, but when you’re bogged down by bureaucracy it’s easy to forget about the great intentions and aspirations you had at the start of the year.

My first term of teaching has provided so many challenges that I’ve inadvertently discovered so much more about myself. I have become less self-critical, more forgiving of my own mistakes. Whereas I was once left feeling battered and bruised by observation pressures, scrutiny and the persistent need to develop subject knowledge across the curriculum, I now focus on the positives; recognising my own successes, reflecting on mistakes, identifying areas for improvement and developing a reassuring support network. My colleagues and fellow NQTs have been an invaluable source of support through the highs and lows, both in school and online.

Recently, when re-reading the CPR final report, I had my own light-bulb moment (the kind that I love seeing in the children so much). I remembered precisely why I became a teacher in the first place: to make a difference. The key aims and priorities outlined by CPR and CPRT reminded me that being a teacher isn’t simply about teaching the curriculum; it really is about so much more.

I strive for this kind of principled approach not only to the curriculum, but also the whole experience that I offer children in my care. At times I have been a therapist, a mediator, a comedian, a disciplinarian, a motivator, a guardian and a source of comfort. I use the CPRT aims as aspirational tools to remind me what’s important – over and above government priorities. The CPR final report  provides the evidence to remind us that we can (and must!) trust ourselves as professionals to provide for pupils’ development and learning. Great teaching doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s about getting the simple things right.

Despite all its trials and tribulations, teaching truly is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling careers there are and at the beginning of the year I promised myself I would remember this. It’s not always easy to cultivate a positive outlook, especially in the depths of a dark and gloomy January, but it really does make a difference and I feel so much better for it. It reflects in my teaching too. If I’m tired the kids won’t get the best from me. I need to look after myself. We all do. So, once I’ve finished this blog you’ll find me on my sofa relaxing and enjoying the last few moments of the Christmas break, before the New Year – and the new term – begins.

Having completed her PGCE, Sadie Phillips is teaching at a primary school in London. Read her previous CPRT blog and follow her at @SadiePhillips.

Contact

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