Jobs for Life?

Tinkering with one-year initial training programmes is not enough, says William Stow. It’s time for a bigger conversation about recruitment and how to help teachers stay in the profession...

I recently had the pleasure of hosting a visit by Sir Andrew Carter and members of his advisory panel as part of the Independent Review of ITT, commissioned by the late-lamented Mr Gove. In total, nearly 40 students, mentors, headteachers and tutors enjoyed four hours of probing questions and lively discussion, covering a range of important topics, such as subject knowledge and pedagogy, behaviour, SEND, assessment, and the role of mentoring.

If the panel can make sense of the thousands of submissions and dozens of similarly busy meetings they’ve been holding across the country and turn these into valuable recommendations to improve the quality of initial teacher education, then they will have achieved something very important. But for all its detailed consideration, I am left with a nagging feeling about the review – is it asking the right questions and missing some fundamental points?

The review comes at a critical moment for the ITE sector. Since 2011, there has been a rapid level of growth in school-based and school-led ITE. This has resulted in some welcome and remarkable innovation and brought about a level of challenge to existing practice. But there are already worrying signs of over-expansion: under-recruitment in almost all secondary subjects; local supply problems; and Teaching Schools losing their designation after drops in Ofsted gradings.

Further instability could lead to significant loss of capacity, especially as Teaching School start-up funding runs out. Schools may no longer have the additional resources to devote to weeks of recruitment and so end up with a shortage of trainees; university vice-chancellors may lose patience with the declining income and political buffeting associated with teacher education and withdraw courses; and those interested in starting SCITTs might think twice after seeing recruitment decline last year.

It is therefore worrying, and fundamentally misguided, that the review’s remit – which focuses on quality and effectiveness – does not include recruitment and retention. For two years in a row now there has been a strong suspicion (despite DfE obfuscation over statistics) that recruitment has not been up to target. Of particular concern is that this now includes primary, where SCITTs and HEIs have previously had to turn applicants away at the door.

This has come at a time when we have rising rolls in primary schools and a demographic in teaching that is creating a leadership crisis. We are burdened also with an unmovable, almost clichéd, statistic – that half of all teachers leave within five years of initial training

One of the positive aspects for ITE of the cataclysm that was Michael Gove’s time in office, is the way in which Teaching Schools have begun to transform our national conversations about teacher development. Those conversations extend to university education departments, because in many quarters, the focus is now not on ITE and CPD in isolation, but on how we can create compelling and supportive frameworks to help teachers navigate their way through those first five years.

But one of the most unhelpful aspects of the cataclysm has been the intentional exaggeration of false polarities between schools and universities, through both policy making and rhetoric. Whilst the political effectiveness of this cannot be denied, given the pace and scale of change, we should be entering a new phase now, one focused on collaboration and true partnership.

These partnerships can develop to provide access for teachers to the best that schools and universities can offer together – outstanding classroom practice, based on critical appreciation of the latest research and embedding an active research culture in each school; plus a range of options for accredited and non-accredited professional development, taking a longer term view of teacher development and giving teachers the tools to reflect on their own and others’ practice and look beyond the confines of their classrooms and schools.

Having injected cash, moral energy and exhortation into the Teaching School sector, the government now needs to incentivise partnerships that make the best of the expertise, capacity and knowledge in both schools and in universities.

It is surely time to move on from tinkering with one-year initial training programmes. Let’s start a serious conversation about retention and teacher development, to stop the wholesale wastage of expertise in both schools and universities to which the current situation is leading and to show that we are serious about sustainable, long-term investment in the thing that matters – the quality of teaching in schools.

About the author

William Stow has worked in education since 1988, first as a primary teacher, and then as tutor, researcher and now head of the school of teacher education at CCCU.