Reluctant hosts

Many universities say it’s getting harder to place trainee teachers in schools, but fears their inexperience might have a negative effect on progress scores could be unfounded, say Graham Birrell and Bob Bowie...

Christ Church has a lot of teaching students. A lot. For primary it’s around 1400 on all routes and for secondary it’s about 750. This makes us one of the largest ITE providers in the country.

A nice place to be? Well in some respects, yes. However, along with scale comes complexity and challenge – ask any large provider of ITE and they’ll tell you about one particular difficulty: getting students in schools for placements. It’s fair to say that primary schools in particular get a little fed up with the partnership office ringing to ask if they could ‘just squeeze in one more student’.

There are a number of reasons why it’s getting harder to find schools to say ‘yes’, but two factors are cited above all others – fear that the progress data for a particular class will be damaged by weak teaching from an inexperienced student and, similarly, concerns that a visit from Ofsted is on the horizon and the school’s data is already not good enough.

These are pretty understandable objections, especially when schools are under such incredible pressure to get results and the consequences are so far reaching. However, it poses the question: do students actually help or hinder the results of schools? A gut reaction to this would be that they’re a hindrance as they are obviously the most inexperienced teachers out there, which is perhaps why so many headteachers are reluctant to take them. But what is the actual evidence?

Intriguingly, there is only a very limited research base for this question and although what there is suggests a positive link, it does so from a qualitative perspective – whereas the concerns usually raised by our schools are of a quantitative nature.

Therefore, we’ve had a go at looking at this from a statistical angle and although the methodology is admittedly fairly crude, the results are extremely interesting.

We’ve crunched the data for the 25 primary schools that have taken the most teaching students in the past two years – for ease, henceforth referred to as the ‘Top 25’. We’ve then looked at their progress data using the Ofsted Data Dashboard.

The Dashboard splits schools into five equal quintiles and places the school(s) you’re examining into one of those quintiles.

We grabbed the dashboard data for each of the Top 25 and put them into graphs comparing their progress with schools nationally. Focusing on writing, the results are striking: the graph demonstrates that schools taking lots of students are doing incredibly well, with 80 per cent in the first or second quintiles, and almost none in the bottom 40 per cent. Results for reading and maths are similarly positive, though the majority of the Top 25 fall into the second quintile in these subjects. Even so, its still pretty clear evidence that primary schools taking lots of students not doing badly; in fact, they’re actually performing extremely strongly.

So what explains this?

What we’ve clearly got here is a classic ‘cause or correlation’ dilemma: are some schools in a great position and so have the capacity to take on lots of students, or is there a causal link between hosting student teachers and great schools?

One way to begin answering this question is to look at the Ofsted grades of the Top 25 and compare them to the national average, which is what we did. The results show the grades are almost identical and don’t provide any evidence that only ‘Ofsted confident’ schools are hosting the student placements.

So what could be going on in the Top 25 that allows them to be making great progress and to be taking lots of student teachers, and crucially, is there a link?

Further research in our partner schools is needed before we can answer that question locally. However, there is evidence to suggest that student teachers can have a positive impact on schools. For example, studies suggest that mentors’ professional development is improved through self‐reflection, from learning from their students and their tutors and via collaboration; and because of these and similar factors they and other teachers in the school become better practitioners.

So although we’re definitely not claiming our research proves that hosting student teachers helps schools, the evidence suggests it certainly isn’t going to hurt them. So if you’re a headteacher in need of school-improvement strategies, instead of ruling out student teachers, it may be well worth thinking about ruling them in.

About the authors

Graham Birrell is a senior lecturer in the department for Postgraduate Initial Teacher Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, and Bob Bowie is a principal lecturer at the same institution.