Oral evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 11 June 2003

Members present:

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Paul Holmes
Mr Kerry Pollard
Jonathan Shaw
Mr Andrew Turner

__________

Memoranda submitted by Professor Howson and The Open University

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: PROFESSOR JOHN HOWSON, Director, Education Data Surveys, Visiting Professor, Brookes Oxford University, PROFESSOR BOB MOON, Centre for Research in Teacher Education, MRS ELIZABETH BIRD, Centre for Research in Teacher Education, The Open University, examined.

Q110  Chairman: Can I welcome our witnesses for today and say what a pleasure it is to have you helping us in our major inquiry into secondary education. You will know that we are now well into teacher recruitment and retention; it is something on which we have already started taking evidence, and we had a session with the General Teaching Council last week. We really want to learn as much as we can. We are very grateful for the work that you have submitted, the report from John Howson and the evidence already received from The Open University. Thank you for that, indeed. I thought I would ask Professor Howson if he would like to make some opening remarks.

Professor Howson: Thank you, Chairman, and thank you for inviting me to give evidence to the Committee this morning. Your inquiry is timely, although I suspect, in some ways, perhaps not as you originally anticipated, given what has happened about teaching supply and the teaching workforce over the last couple of months. I would like to apologise if my written submission is a little on the scrappy side; it is only about two weeks since your Clerk asked me to appear and a sensible date for submission would not have left you any time to read anything, so perhaps you will accept its shortcomings in terms of presentation. Clearly one problem with any inquiry into retention is the paucity of available data on the current position as opposed to the historical position. Indeed, your own adviser who has been researching this area for the DfES probably knows more about this topic than almost anybody else in the country.

Q111  Chairman: Professor Howson, we do not like to praise him too much, we may have to increase the fee!

Professor Howson: I just want to note that he is clearly an expert and we look forward to the DfES publishing his evidence so that we will all be able to read it. In putting my own evidence together I have tried to consider what is known about the present situation and what might affect the position during the next few years. I have to say that I confess, in the short term, to being slightly more worried about the possibility of unemployment amongst newly qualified teachers than I am about the problems arising from their early departure. However, I do acknowledge that with the retirement bulge on the horizon we cannot afford either to be complacent or to waste any teaching talent unnecessarily. Before closing these introductory remarks I would like to thank my researcher who did all the work on the graphs and tables in the paper which was invaluable in getting it to you in the time available.

Q112  Chairman: Professor Howson, we know about your distinguished career but could you tell us a little bit more about Education Data Services? Is it part of the university or is it an independent consultancy based in the university? I know we have all sorts of different varieties of these things these days.

Professor Howson: It is an independent consultancy in the private sector that I set up after I left the Teacher Training Agency in 1997. Both the two Oxford Universities have been kind enough to honour me with honorary positions - Brookes with a Visiting Professorship and, more recently, the university department with an honorary Senior Research Fellowship. In some cases, like the study into the turnover in the senior staff labour market, I do it largely by myself; in other cases I work on research projects with university staff to use their expertise rather than spend a lot of time on administration and bureaucracy.

Q113  Chairman: The more I have read in terms of this inquiry, what fascinates me is that every piece of evidence that you read says that the stats of poor; the level of information is not really adequate. That surprises me. Here we have a large Department for Education and Skills, an enormous Ofsted personnel and all sorts of people like yourselves and Professor Smithers' outfit at Liverpool, yet people can consistently say we do not have the data. I would have thought it was easy to obtain the data on who comes into the profession, who trains the profession and who leaves the profession. I would have expected the detail to be there. Why is it not there?

Professor Howson: I recall that the OECD when writing their country report in the mid-70s complained that the statistics on education even then were somewhat difficult to get hold of, so the situation has not changed. I think one of the reasons is the Department's genuine desire that information that goes into the public domain should be as accurate as possible, and that because they do not run schools they are working at arm's length in collecting that data. They have to work, effectively, through local authorities. As the role of local authorities has altered over the last 20 years - in some cases it has diminished - the collection of statistics may not have been a high priority any longer for them because they are no longer seen to be the controlling institutions for the schools, and indeed the delegated budgets to schools are controlling themselves in terms of making their own policy decisions. That, I think, was not taken into account in terms of the effects it would have on the statistics and the need to take strategic decisions at the centre. There are also decisions like the failure to carry out the four-yearly Secondary Curriculum and Staffing Review in 2000 , which I was critical of at the time and which, in fact, only started to take place last year, which meant that the figures which are an input figure into the teacher training model are still being based on data from 1996, in some cases, before the last major change in the early retirement regulations. Whether that is a policy decision or whether it is just an administrative decision from a department that is more concerned with policy than operation, I do not know; others will be better placed to answer that. However, I think that there is a difference between public sector statistics which the Official of National Statistics clearly demand are of the highest possible quality and the management information to understand what is happening day-to-day within the organisation and its operational procedures. Throughout most of my career I have championed the need for the organisation to have good management information. That is, for instance, why I set up the database on senior staff turnover, so I could understand - accurate to the advertisements that appeared last Friday - what is happening in terms of the labour market for senior staff. You can see we have some graphs in my evidence about what is happening with job adverts in terms of The Times Educational Supplement over the last couple of years for a range of posts, in an attempt to understand the labour market as it is operating now. It will not be 100 per cent accurate and nobody would claim it is, but it may give you some idea of when trends start to move in the current labour market rather than knowing what it was like at a different point, for instance, in the economic cycle.

Q114  Chairman: Elizabeth Bird and Bob Moon. Would you both like to say something?

Professor Moon: I think I am going to start and Elizabeth is here to respond to questions as they arise. Thank you for the invitation. I head up the Centre for Research and Development in Teacher Education at the Open University. It has existed for about 11 years now and we are involved in a whole range of projects, not just national projects but also international projects; we co-ordinated a UNESCO survey of teacher education in European countries over the last two years, which has just been published, and so forth. So there is an international perspective in our work. The thing that we are particularly interested in is the OU's contribution to the teaching force in this country, and that is the main focus of our evidence. It is quite interesting to begin by saying that of the people who start an Open University course round about 60 per cent are thinking about becoming teachers. We have had that as an analysis. When you think that we have around 125,000 people doing an Open University degree at the moment, that is a very significant part of our population.

Q115  Chairman: How many do?

Professor Moon: Nowhere near the 75,000 that that figure might represent, but it is an aspiration. In fact, one of the reasons why we introduced our own training programme 8 to 9 years ago was to accommodate the insistent demands we had from potential teachers, 30 a week, who said why was the Open University not running a training programme. Through the 1990s round about 5,000 qualified through the Open University, and I think that gives us quite a good feel for what the mature entrant into the population might be. So there are some statistics which come out of this which I think are important. First of all, if you look at the people who trained in that way, for those who trained as secondary teachers the most popular subjects were science and maths. For those who were training as primary teachers round about half had maths and science in their degrees. You will know that in the primary teaching force at the moment we hardly get people with an A level in maths and science let along a degree level component.. This showed to us, I think that the segment of the population which chooses to become a teacher in their 30s is a different segment from the peer group that 10 years earlier decided to enter into teaching. There are two or three reasons for that: the anti-teaching feeling of university life has dropped away because they have had all sorts of experience with children and so forth, they have also had other vocational experience and come to view what you might call the teaching profession in a different way. We know that because we have, on our current programme, a huge number of applications compared with the number of places we have available - again, with maths and science coming out as the top subject. We have a higher proportion of applicants from those who come from ethnic minority groups. In London, for example, round about 50 per cent of our applicants come from ethnic minority communities. So I think offering an alternative route way into teaching for these people is an important thing. This was noted, incidentally, by the IPPR a couple of years ago in a major report they did, where they felt that the only way we were going to square the circle in terms of teacher supply and retention was by giving much more attention to mature entrants than had previously been the case. I think we are doing that, although a lot more could be done, and I could make some suggestions on that. Two final points for us is that when we look - and this is the work that Elizabeth has been doing - at what happens to mature entrants when they have qualified, we see I think a slightly different pattern from those who go through the conventional route. So, for example, they do not go immediately into teaching necessarily, they may have a year off while they recoup their energies and so forth. If you take it forward, as we have done, four or five years, you then find that 94 per cent have actually taught in that period. The reason I make this point is that the DfES statistics tend to focus on where people are the year after they have done their training, and this does not necessarily accurately represent what is going on in terms of the transition from training into the teaching force. John, we may agree or disagree on this, but I think that is also an issue in terms of conventional entrants into the profession - some of the horror statistics you see about drop-out rates I do not think are as accurate as a longer time scale would believe. The other thing we discover is that those who are going into teaching, within two years they have got promoted positions. So it is quite clear that mature entrants are attractive to teaching. So for all sorts of reasons we think that this is a vein of potential supply of teachers that is being worked at the moment but could be worked more significantly.

Professor Howson: Can I just add one comment to that? While I broadly agree with everything Bob said, the latest workforce figures from the department for entrants who finished training in 2001 and were in the profession by the end of the financial year, March 2002, show that of the 31000 only 16,000 were under 30. So about 14,000 were over 30 when they joined the profession. I think that whilst I accept that mature, second career entrants are very valuable to us, I would want some discussion at some point or other as to what the balance of the profession should look like to ensure as well that we do not get back into a yo-yo situation, where we yo-yo from a very old profession, with most people coming up to retirement, to a very young profession with everybody under 30, and how we can get back to a more balanced profession with a reasonable number in each of the age cohorts.

Q116  Chairman: From what the two of you have said to the Committee so far, are you saying that the situation in terms of teacher recruitment and retention is not as bad as we thought it was comparatively recently? Is that what you are saying to the Committee?

Professor Moon: I am certainly saying that of the mature entrants that we have been studying over the last four or five years the degree of drop-out which tends to get recorded by official statistics is not borne out when you look across the first four or five years of a potential teacher's career as opposed to where they are in the first year.

Q117  Chairman: And you said you are less worried about it?

Professor Howson: Yes. I think you have to distinguish between recruitment and retention. Recruitment is relatively easy to track and, indeed, I sent your Clerk a copy of the monthly commentary that we bring out every month when the GTTR (Graduate Teacher Training Registry) issues its monthly figures. It is quite clear that when the government finally announced the training grant of £6,000 in March 2000 that marked a watershed. Until that point applications for teacher training had been declining across the board in secondary and was starting to look at least worrying in primary. From that point onwards virtually every subject has turned round and the only subject that is now below where it was in terms of March 2000 is religious education and the only subject this year which is behind where it was at this point last year is music - both of them relatively small subjects, both of them specialist subject areas where there may be particular reasons for concern. Indeed, as I have said in the conclusion to my paper, I do think that as we are in that point of the economic cycle where for various reasons teaching looks attractive we should be making the most of that to attract as many people as possible and, if necessary, we should be both over-recruiting in terms of the department putting up training targets where it can but, also, providing opportunities to get those people into employment. If that means re-opening some limited form of early retirement scheme to help balance out the large numbers of people who will be retiring anyway in the next ten years that might be advantageous to us if we were to be in a circumstance, say ----

Q118  Chairman: I am sorry, Professor Howson, could you just repeat that last remark?

Professor Howson: Let me unpick that a bit more. We are at a point in the economic cycle, as regards the attraction as a teacher, where more people want to be teachers than did in the boom years of the economy at the end of the last ----

Q119  Chairman: But we are still in a boom, are we not? I think the unemployment figures fell yet again last month.

Professor Howson: But we are being told that the City is shedding labour.

Q120  Chairman: There is very little sign on the national economic indicators. I have to tell you, when I drive to Wakefield Station, which is my indicator of the economic state of this country, I cannot get parked for the executives still piling on to the trains to London!

Professor Howson: I think it may be like the housing market, it may be spreading out from London and the boom may at last be affecting those areas which, over the last 30 years, have been called "intermediate regions", "depressed areas" and all sorts of other things. They may have been benefiting more than some other areas where we are particularly worried about recruiting teachers, which is noticeably London and the South East. What is clearly true is that we are attracting more people into applying to do both secondary and primary PGCE courses, knowing that we have a very large number of teachers who will be reaching retirement age in a few years' time. If we were to get to an economic situation where the economy was even more in balance or overheating in those times and teaching was not attractive as a career, we would struggle at that point to fill those vacancies. All I am suggesting is that the department considers that whilst the goose is laying golden eggs we collect the eggs and make use of them - if I can use a metaphor there. It would be silly, for instance, for us to turn away large numbers of people who want to be ICT teachers who went to university on the back of the telecom boom of the late 1990s, signed up for degree courses in these areas and are graduating this year and next year only to find that that market has disappeared. Many of them will have maths as one of their A levels and we would need them, I suspect, to teach ICT and they would be a valuable source of extra maths and numeracy teachers to us as well.

Q121  Chairman: Professor Howson, very recently people like you - and I am not saying you - were telling us that the one way to solve the so-called crisis - I do not know whether it was a crisis stimulated by John Humphries on Radio 4 but we were told it was a crisis - was to encourage older teachers to stay on for a couple more years, not only to go to the end of their pensionable period but to go on for a couple more years. You are saying that that no longer is what the pundits, and professors like yourselves, are now recommending, but something totally different?

Professor Howson: What I think I am saying is that in a labour market like this it is important to keep it continually under review. If circumstances change and you look at the balance of the workforce and you find that something like 40 per cent is either over 50 or approaching 50, and they will retire almost certainly within the next 10 to 15 years, if you have a circumstance whereby allowing some of those to go earlier allows you to re-balance the workforce and reduce the demand in a few years' time, then that would a sensible thing to consider. The reason that we could not do it and the reason that pundits and people like myself were telling you to hang on to these people was because that was at a point when the number of people applying for teaching was falling rapidly. It was only when the Government took heed of some other pundits who pointed out that transferring the cost of higher education from the state to the individual meant that if people were going to go into the employment market they would seek some return on that investment, and that expecting them to train on a PGCE course and bear the whole cost of that training and the risk of trying to find a job at the end of it might not be attractive, that the training grant appeared miraculously about five days before the end of the financial year 2000 and has made a significant difference.

Professor Moon: I would give a slightly different interpretation, I think, although we share a lot of the same ideas. I think John is over-engineering things a little bit rather in the way, 20 or 30 years ago, we tried to get exactly the right number of people into the classrooms - there were places for teachers - and each year it proved problematic. One of the concerns I have around that is the competition there is within the profession for the higher management posts. So I would say if we have the resources and we have the means, let us have as many people coming into the profession as possible. We certainly need to have more competition for management posts in primary and secondary schools than we have at the moment, particularly in primary head-ships and so on. I think there is a danger, when you talk of early retirement, of trying to balance the numbers evenly. There is also a danger as far as the people who I see as my natural constituency are concerned, and that is mature entrants, in always thinking of those as the people who come along when the economic cycle is at the other point, if there is a problem of supply, suddenly the need for mature students raises its head. I think mature entrants can make, and do make, a really significant different to the profession; they bring important vocational, personal experience, and there ought to be a steady stream of such people into teaching - as I believe there should be in other professions, but teaching we are talking about today.

Q122  Jonathan Shaw: You have raised this issue about head-ships. Can I ask you a bit about that? Is the period in which people are in the classroom before they go on to senior management - deputy or head-ships - coming down?

Professor Howson: I cannot give you a definite answer, I can go away and have a look at it from the evidence that we have got. My feeling is that most people are still trying to appoint heads from the 35-45 age group into first-time head-ship and that where there is significant pressure they will appoint either older or younger people. The interesting test will, of course, come when the market is regulated with the announcement that the national professional qualification for head-ship will be mandatory, or working towards it will be mandatory, for anybody who is appointed to a head-ship for the first time, I think, in April 2004. That should mean that the national college should know what the pool of potential heads is and should be able to identify whether that pool is big enough to fill the jobs available around the country. It does, however, mean that many governors may well find themselves faced with if not Hobson's choice something very close to it, because if you have got two or three applicants turning up who have a national professional qualification and, therefore, have in a sense been certified by the national college, it will be very difficult for the governing body to turn them down; they may find their hands tied. I think where the difficulties particularly lie are schools that have had a chequered past in terms of special measures, failings and schools, particularly those run by the Roman Catholic Church within the maintained sector, who wish to appoint practising Catholics with a Catholic Teaching Certificate, who are frequently the sort of schools we see re-advertising once, twice or sometimes even more in order to fill their head-ship posts. This is where I disagree with Bob slightly about this question of mature entrants and the need to balance, and why I made the comment that about 14,000 people (on the last year available) coming in were already over 30. If you want to appoint somebody as a head you either have to appoint them if they are coming late with relatively little education experience but lots of other experience, and you have to assume that these people coming in actually want to take on managerial responsibility rather than actually wanting to come and be classroom teachers. I think there is perhaps more evidence in the secondary sector that they may be more willing to take on careers leading to managerial and leadership responsibilities. I have some queries about what the data will tell us in terms of the primary sector.

Q123  Jonathan Shaw: So this is an issue for us then. If the profile of the teaching profession is changing in terms of when people are coming in, they will have to form a large part of future management rather than the traditional pattern. I think it is our expectation that someone would have been in the classroom for ten years or so before they became a headteacher. That is, perhaps, not going to be possible if someone is coming in in their forties, etc. It has implications for training and all sorts.

Professor Howson: One in eight primary school teachers will end up as probably a head or a deputy. We do not ask people who come into training whether they have a field marshal's baton in their knapsacks or whether their aspirations are in there; we are just interested in whether they can be good class room teachers.

Professor Moon: But a lot of those who come as mature entrants do aspire to have that in their knapsacks. You have got the evidence on mature entrants.

Q124  Chairman: Elizabeth wanted to come in.

Mrs Bird: We have evidence for secondary not for primary of aspirations for careers of these people coming in as mature entrants, and it certainly was that around 60 per cent of our samples aspired to at least head of department, with a significant number looking for deputy or headship roles in the future.

Q125  Jonathan Shaw: I have gone a little away from the script. I was a bit shell-shocked that you were not able to park up there! I cannot quite get over that you have not got your own space. Have there been any other comparisons between other professions in terms of recruitment and retention?

Professor Howson: I had a quick scout around within the limits that I could find and in a previous incarnation of this Committee when it looked into teacher recruitment there was some discussion about the medical profession by one of the witnesses, and the evidence then tendered was that 20 per cent of those who trained as doctors left within the first five years, and that rose to about 25 per cent after ten years. The Association of Graduate Recruiters did some surveys some years ago which looked at turnover in the private sector and suggested that something like 50 per cent of new graduates were not with the same company five years on - of course, they may be doing the same job but may have moved from Marks & Spencer to Debenhams in the retail trade or from the Hilton to de Vere or somebody else in the hotel trade. It is very difficult to calculate that sort of thing. Some parts of the public sector make a virtue out of a vice in the sense that the armed forces have always had short-service commissions, deliberately targeted to people who only serve a short amount of time but with the hope that some of those people who do a short-service commission will convert to regular commissions because once they get in they discover they like it, so they are using it as a recruitment tool.

Q126  Jonathan Shaw: So a National Service for Teachers, do you think?

Professor Howson: In a sense, Teach First, having brought the idea over from America, is trading on that short-service idea - that you do two years and then go off and join your large corporate company. I expect that at the back of that there is the hope that some of those people who get into these challenging inner-city schools in London will find the experience so rewarding and enjoy working that they will actually want to convert to be long-term stayers in the profession.

Professor Moon: That is an indication, I think, that if we had a mature version of Teach First in a more significant way - teacher scholarships from commerce and industry and so on for two years - that would again give status to the notion of somebody mid-career entering teaching, whereas at the moment the policy system still sees that as second-best and forgets about it. The rhetoric is there but the reality of policy development needs strengthening.

Q127  Jonathan Shaw: So the future is bright, Professor Moon, or is the future grey?

Professor Moon: I am much more upbeat about where teaching is going than some of the rhetoric there is around teacher disenchantment and teacher morale. I have two daughters who are teachers who give me front-line experience, which reinforces it. When I talk to the hundreds of people who are aspiring to be teachers coming from the medical profession, the legal profession or bringing up children through the Open University route way it is difficult not to be a little bit inspired by that.

Mrs Bird: The future may not entirely be grey but I do think it is important to keep track of the recognition that many people no longer see a career as being for life and that while we are attracting young people in, who may be leaving after 10 or 20 years, perhaps to other educational jobs but actually leaving the chalkface, equally we need to have the people who are doing other jobs coming in to balance that out.

Q128  Paul Holmes: Just a very quick one to Professor Moon. You have just said you are very optimistic and inspired by talking to Open University students, many of whom are saying that they want to go into teaching, but you have said quite early on in the evidence that although 60 per cent said they would like to get into teaching, in fact a far smaller number actually did. How far do the statistics bear out the optimism that you get anecdotally?

Professor Moon: We have nearly 800 people applying for 100 science places, we have 700 people applying for 100 maths places. That is a quite good strike rate in terms of a barometer of interest. We have not got the data on it but we do train classroom assistants as well as teachers, and a lot of those people who are in the process of gaining an Open University degree also train with us to be classroom assistants, and that has come in in the last three or four years, and I think that will be another route into the profession that will be an important one to exploit.

Mrs Bird: On that line, looking at the research we have just done, it is interesting to note that of the people coming in as mature trainees, a very large percentage of them have already had some experience of working in schools, not necessarily in teaching in schools but technician and support roles. So they were aware of the reality of schools and still found it an attractive proposition and wanted a route along which that they could train flexibly alongside, perhaps, the work they were already doing.

Professor Moon: School governors is another group.

Q129  Mr Chaytor: One of the issues that has come out in discussion so far is the lack of reliability or the variability of the data that we collect. What would you suggest needs to be done to get a more reliable and consistent set of data on all issues of teacher recruitment and retention?

Professor Howson: I think, ideally, it is to get to a bit of joined-up thinking between the various players in the system. If I could have a sort of magic wand and wave it around, the schools need to collect human resource data about the people they employ and how they deploy them in the system. If that could be collected electronically, as more and more schools are doing, in such a way that the data is available to policy-makers both locally, regionally and nationally then we may be able to get management information which is useful to understanding the trends in the labour market so that those people who are working on the levers associated with recruitment are able to recognise what is happening as it is happening and not after it has happened. It worries me, as I said in the introduction, that much of the data we have got inevitably looks backwards for quite a long period of time; for instance, the data that I put in the report on 1996 completers on the first five years through to 2001 is the latest that the department could give me earlier this year. That period is a particularly difficult period of history of teacher supply, for all sorts of reasons. What we want to know is has it improved since then? What has happened to the 2002 completers who have been working in schools in the last year? How many of those are intending to stay? Can we distinguish between what I call in my paper organisational factors and institutional factors - the extent to which the work that the London Institute has done on what they call rogue leaders (those heads who do not follow the rules on induction, do not give inductees full timetable relief and do not send them off to training courses) produces people less likely to stay, and those people who have trained in what one might describe as cathedral cities but find themselves teaching in urban and inner-city settings and whether or not they are more likely to leave because there is less of a relationship between the training and the employment? So we need, I think, better data both on the system, therefore, and also at the institutional level. If we can use the opportunities which ICT give us to be able to work as a profession at all levels to be able to use that sort of data which is useful both for managers and leaders of institutions staffing their own institutions, but also those who are operating on a wider canvas, that would be helpful.

Q130  Mr Chaytor: Given the enormous amount of data the department collects on pupil achievement, for example, why is the department, do you think, reluctant to have a simple system of data collection for each individual school in respect of all aspects of recruitment? What is the blockage there? Looking at it from the outside, it seems such an obvious thing to do.

Professor Howson: I think you would have to ask the department, but if you are asking me to speculate I think it is probably to do with the way that the education system in England is conceptualised and the roles of the various parties involved in it, and the way they have been evolving, essentially, over the last 20 years from the days when I first came into education administration when it was described as either a national system locally administered or a partnership. If we have new roles we have new responsibilities and we need new structures. I think that the information part of those new structures (the system we have got) may have been one of the things that not as much attention may have been given to as might have been.

Professor Moon: One of the things we have to be clear on in relation to this is that the GTC - who you were talking to last week - is setting up their own database, and certainly for registered teachers that ought to be a pretty accurate plotter of where people are going. How that then relates to DfES collection of statistics - and the TTA is doing its own thing as well - is an area where there are problems.

Q131  Mr Chaytor: Can I come back to the question of the evidence over time about teacher recruitment and retention and ask has there been any analysis of the relationship between the labour market within teaching and the wider labour market at particular points in time? I suppose the purpose of my question is, is not the easiest way for any government to improve recruitment and retention in teaching simply to jack up unemployment to 3 or 4 million?

Professor Howson: I think, when I first gave evidence to an inquiry in early 1996 on this, that was one of the issues that came out - as to whether teaching and the public sector were counter-cyclical to the economic cycle. Since the economic cycle, as the Chairman has already alluded to, appears to have disappeared in terms of the labour market since then, and labour market growth has held up very strongly (I think we probably still have record numbers of people in employment) we may not be in that situation in the future, particularly since we are trawling in that portion of the labour market which is probably the most rapidly growing, which is the demand for graduates. If we have an education system which either releases people on to the labour market at 16 with virtually no qualifications or at 21 or 22 as graduates, then more and more employers are trawling in the graduate market, which has traditionally been important to us as the largest consumer of graduates in that market. We are finding ourselves in a more and more competitive market.

Q132  Mr Pollard: I was interested when you said that about 75,000 aspired to be teachers and then you are turning out 5,000 at the end.

Professor Moon: I did not say "aspiring teachers" I said they had teaching as a possible career. I think if you decide to do a degree when you are 34, which is the average age of somebody entering an OU degree, then it might well be that that sort of profession is something that you have in mind.

Q133  Mr Pollard: Why do not more of them go in? It would seem it would solve all our problems if we could get more of those in, particularly if you have got a steady stream of mature folk. I am an OU person, I dabbled in that some years ago. Can I also say that I was looking at my own career and after training I went two years, four years, two years, four years and the longest job is the one I have got now which is six-and-a-half years. Jonathan Shaw: And for years to come as well.

Q134  Mr Pollard: It is not looked upon as a virtue in industry and commerce: if you stay longer than three or four years, you are stuck and you are not worth employing. This is the standard. In the teaching profession it does not appear to be the standard.

Professor Moon: I think it is the way the policy system faces on to recruitment. If you look at the adverts that are on the television at the moment to attract teachers, there is nobody with a waistline of more than 30 inches, for example, and they are all actors - I think they may be models, even, judging by the people you see. That is the sort of image which may attract a certain group but I think there is another group in society that would be very motivated to go into teaching. I think we ought to be encouraging schools to take mature entrants into teaching because one of the great difficulties we have is that nationally - because we place teachers right the way across the country and therefore we are having to place teachers in parts of the country which have not had a tradition of teacher training - we encounter some worries about doing this. Some financial incentive to schools to play a role in that I think would be important. I have talked about the idea of teacher scholarships, as well, coming out of industry.

Mrs Bird: If I may clarify, Bob is talking about placing teachers in training within schools.

Q135  Chairman: Before we finish this session, the big question we start with, the answer to which we want to discover in the course of this discussion: Is there a problem in teacher recruitment and retention at the moment or not?

Professor Moon: In terms of the statistics over recruitment, at the moment I think things are looking quite buoyant. Underneath that there are some issues. We have talked about the primary headship issue. Another issue is teachers who are teaching outside their area. One of the difficulties that we have had over the last few years is head teachers -----

Q136  Mr Pollard: Do you mean geographical area or subject area?

Professor Moon: Subject area - and that applies in the primary school as well as the secondary school in terms of specialism. Head teachers are having to flex their curriculum and their timetable to do that. This is one of the reasons why I think over-engineering in terms of entry would be a negative thing, because those people who are teaching maths who really do not want to be teaching maths are better not teaching it. It would be better getting more maths teachers into the classroom. Those are the sorts of areas that I think are more subtle issues of concern than the big questions: Are teachers leaving the profession? Are we getting enough people wanting to be teachers?

Q137  Chairman: But you would like a more diverse stream of entry.

Professor Moon: Absolutely. Yes.

Mrs Bird: My background is in physics teaching. To back up what Bob was saying, there are several heads of departments in local schools who every time I meet them say, "You don't want a job, do you? I can't get physics teachers."

Chairman: They rarely say that to Kerry and I - and I am an economist.

Q138  Jonathan Shaw: On the image thing, Chairman, do you think the Department are projecting the wrong people?

Professor Moon: No, not the wrong people.

Q139  Jonathan Shaw: Thirty-inch waists, you say. Should Charles Clarke be on there saying, "Do you look like me? Come into teaching."

Professor Moon: Some of us looked like that 30 years ago. I think there are homely figures in teaching to which people respond, I think there is the mature person who has the knowledge in a particular area as a result of vocational experience. All those could be demonstrated.

Q140  Jonathan Shaw: It is a serious point.

Professor Howson: The teaching awards demonstrates that by having a cross-section of teachers, real teachers, who get into the media. I think, Chairman, there are two separate issues here. One is recruitment and the other is retention. On recruitment, the short-term news is good and we should make use of that wherever possible. But we cannot be complacent because with the very large numbers of teachers who will retire from about 2005 onwards, the recruitment levels are going to have to be at or above the sort of numbers that we are talking about at present, which is 32,000/35,000 into training each year.

Q141  Chairman: That is the irony of your point, that you would actually stimulate early retirement now and get new blood in, so the balance was better for when we hit a more difficult time.

Professor Howson: Yes.

Q142  Chairman: Interesting.

Professor Howson: On retention, because the quality of the data is so poor, the jury is still out. We do not really know, for instance whether the introduction of the proper induction year from 1999 onwards has made a significant change to that. One of the things that clearly the research evidence from the London Institute and elsewhere is showing is that where the induction year works properly, then it is more likely that people will stay in the profession at the end of that year. Where they have a very difficult induction year - either because the circumstances are different from where they trained or because frankly they are not being given what they should be in terms of assistance during that year - they are more likely to quit. The Scottish Executive, who are very concerned about the relationship between training and employment, have a system whereby you can nominate in which authorities you want to work at the end of your training. The press release which came out yesterday suggested that 96 per cent of new primary teachers and 94 per cent of new secondary teachers gained a job this year in either their first, second or third choice authorities. That is 2,000 new Scottish teachers who will be teaching where they want to teach. In a structured way, moving between training and employment will assist their induction year and ensure that that goes smoothly and they complete their training. One of the problems that we have is that we have a free market where the risk is all borne by the student. But, whatever system, whether it is the GTP in schools or a traditional higher-education based training course, at the end of that you are on your own in terms of finding a job. If the market works efficiently, the best quality students will get the jobs that are there first, and then the market will sort itself by taking the less well qualified students, and the least well qualified may have to wait before they enter the market, during which time their skills may go backwards because they are not practising them.

Q143  Chairman: That is a very good point. I want to move into teacher training, but, before we do, one of our specialist advisors has passed me a note: Are there gender differences in terms of how you view both recruitment and retention?

Professor Howson: On the Department's evidence, there is little difference, if you look at the 2002 workforce statistics volume, on leavers by gender in terms of roughly their percentages. There will be undoubtedly be more women who are leaving for a caring role in the community - because they will inevitably want to be taking maternity leave - than there may be men in the same circumstances. I have to say, the thing that worries me in strategic terms more than anything else would be a change in society's attitude to women and lifelong careers, because one of the things that we as a profession in education have benefited from is the change in female participation rates during what might be described as the second half of their working life. If you go back 30 years to the big changes around and about the equal opportunities legislation and the employment rights legislation in the 1970s, before that it was quite common for women to leave the labour market at some point when they started their families, and, if they came back, only to come back part time, and for many of them never to become economically active again. We have benefited as a profession by the first generation of women who have been in large scale economically active for the whole of their working lives. Indeed, we are seeing the first of that generation of female teachers coming towards the end of their careers. As a profession it has become increasingly feminised. If societal attitudes to that were to change in any way, it would have a profound effect on professions like teaching. I see no evidence other than the occasional books that come out recalling the blissful days of housework in the 1950s or whatever, that living at home and bringing up your family is a good idea. Attitudes are changing. I merely raise this as something which has an implication for professions like teaching as it does for nursing.

Chairman: A good long-term point. We are moving on to teacher training and I am going to ask David to lead us on this.

Q144  Mr Chaytor: The evidence on recruitment as a result of the new incentives is fairly clear. You have said that there has been a substantial increase. Could I ask about the quality of the new recruits; that is to say, have the new financial incentives improved the quality? - however you define quality, whether it is over the point scores or class of degree or whatever. Is there anything we know about that?

Professor Howson: I have to say I do not know. The TTA would be able to tell you this more accurately, I suspect, than anybody else. The only measure I can think of is that admissions tutors are clearly looking over their shoulder at OFSTED inspections of initial teacher training, and the quality of applicants is one of the things that is inspected. Therefore it is not in the interests of an institution to take people who OFSTED would query if they wish to keep up their grades. There is information that is not in the public domain which the Graduate Teacher Training Registry have and which they share with the Teacher Training Agency on a weekly basis.

Q145  Mr Chaytor: On a weekly basis.

Professor Howson: On a weekly basis - and I get it on a weekly basis, but it is confidential. It relates not only to the number of people who apply but the rate at which those applications are translated into acceptances by institutions. What is interesting me on the confidential evidence I have seen so far this year is that that translation appears to be slightly slower than in previous years, even in some subjects where the rate of increase in applications has been significant. All I can say in research terms is that some years ago an American researcher at Harvard who did a lot of work on teacher supply discovered that when applications were low you got a very high proportion of people who might be regarded as vocationally interested in teaching (in other words, teaching was something they had always wanted to do) and they were more likely to stay there six years after. When applications went up significantly, institutions had no more money to make decisions about who they took into the profession but, because they were having to make those decisions on a larger number of people, they were more likely to get it wrong and more of those people were likely to quit within the first six years. It would be interesting to know whether or not the fast-track scheme, on which the Government spends an enormous amount of money, in terms of assessment centres for selecting people compared with what the average institution like Professor Moon's or any other teacher-training institution has in terms of selecting, is any better able to spot people who will stay in the profession than the very small amount of time that universities are able to spend on it.

Q146  Mr Chaytor: It is too soon, presumably, to assess whether those who have come in as a result of the new incentives are more likely to stay. We just do not have the data yet.

Professor Howson: How much of it will be the new incentive and how much of it will be the improved induction schemes and how much of it will be the possibility of other employment elsewhere. It is a combination of different factors. How do you winnow out without a significant research project on this? I am not privy to the extent the department that is conducting research is asking those specific questions. I do not have any research data because nobody has funded me in the private sector to do it.

Q147  Mr Chaytor: Given that we now have a great variety of ways into teaching, has someone done some analysis of the impact of these different ways in on teacher retention. We have some figures on mature entrants, but do we know if people are more likely to stay if they come in as mature entrants or if they come in through the old BEd route or through the PGCE or through the graduate Training Programme? Are there any emerging patterns here?

Professor Moon: I think the answer to that is no, although the Department is launching a major research project as we speak in that area to plot that. How that research project handles the data issue, which we keep talking about, is going to be a crucial issue.

Professor Howson: I think it is something people should know. It seems to me rather bizarre that if the Teacher Training Agency spends several million pounds on television advertising it does not know at which segment of the market it should be aiming. This sort of market research data - and this is where it is management information rather than statistics that is up to date, it may not be 100 per cent accurate but it at least tells us broad trends - ought to be feeding back through the loop to policy makers who are making decisions. I assume that the Government increased the number of places on the Graduate Training Programme for employment-based training on the basis of evidence that that programme produced a better retention rate than university-based courses, but I have actually never seen a piece of research - I do not know whether Professor Moon has - that comes to that conclusion in the public domain. Otherwise, why are we spending money asking schools to do that programme? Similarly, with school-based training, like the SCIP courses, interestingly, if you look at primary teacher training courses, where at the beginning of this month every single university course was full (apart from those that were looking for specialist language teachers or, outside of England, the Welsh and Gaelic courses), the other courses that were still looking for people were school-based training courses. Is this because they are looking for a better quality of applicant than the other courses or is it because people do not want to go on to those courses or is it because they just do not know about them?

Professor Moon: I think it is important to look at what happens to people as they come out of the individual institutions. For example, there are some institutions for historical and geographical reasons that attract people into doing a PGCE. Competition to get into those institutions is greater. Whether three or four years down the line the people that that institution trained are still in the teaching force is something which I think is important. They can be very successful there with very good students ... This is from a head teacher in Oxford, for example. I know that the Oxford Department gained absolutely splendid students, but in some subject areas I had the feeling, anecdotally, that a few years down the line there would not be that many left in the profession as they moved off into other things.

Q148  Mr Chaytor: Is it not almost inevitable that the most high-flying recruits are going to move on? It is just the nature of life and the labour market: those who have the highest level of talent and therefore the greatest opportunities open to them are less likely to stay in the job they start off with at the age of 22 or 23.

Professor Moon: It depends how quickly they go. That is one of the things we are concerned about.

Professor Howson: This is one of the policy decisions that was anguished over in the mid-1990s when the Advanced Skills Teacher grade was created. This was a centralised policy decision deliberately determined, I think, to attempt to keep more teachers in the classroom by offering that career route. Judging by the numbers of Advanced Skills Teachers we have and the targets which the Government has set over time, it has not been for some reason or another the most successful policy initiative that has ever been promulgated.

Q149  Mr Chaytor: Could you expand on that? You said, "judging by the numbers of Advanced Skills Teachers we have," how many do we have?

Professor Howson: I believe we still have less than 2,000. I believe that when Mr Blunkett was Secretary of State we had a target of 2,000 by September 1999 or 2000, and I believe the current Minister of State last year said that he wanted 5,000 by a certain date - which looks as if it will be difficult to achieve. It is interesting to compare that with the relative success of the Assistant Headship grade, which is not a top-down initiative but is actually a bottom-up initiative which allows schools the freedom to add extra posts into their leadership, which has probably produced more posts than the AST grade in a shorter period of time. Government initiatives as well take people out of the classroom. The whole o f the literacy strategy and numeracy strategy produced a significant number of coordinator posts that have taken people out of the classroom. One only has to look around about, whether it is Sport England or Healthy Eating or something else, there is a whole raft of trained teachers being stripped out of the classroom and the schools to operate those posts. Clearly there is a necessity for that. There are others posts, allied to teaching, for which we need people to have been through the teaching workforce to be successful at. For instance, for educational publications, it is helpful if their editors have been teachers. We would not be able to staff OFSTED without people who have been through the teaching career. So there will always be 400,000 people in teaching and almost as many people not in teaching but many of them doing jobs allied to teaching.

Q150  Chairman: The fact is that at the moment we train twice as many teachers as we need in order to get the number we want. That takes in a lot of taxpayers money to be spent on people who are not going to use those teaching skills. The Scottish experience to which you were alluding seems of great interest because it has always seemed to me - and I think other members of this Committee share this view - that having someone come through a university course and then into a teacher training year and then being dropped almost indiscriminately, that any major company with a recruitment policy would not do that. They would actually take a graduate entry programme over three years, where you would develop the talents, put someone not in the most difficult school in the world to start honing their skills, and then you would move them around until they are a rounded teacher. We have the Teacher Training Agency and all these other different agencies, we have Government initiatives, but no one seems to have grasped the nettle that dropping people into the teaching experience is not a way that most others who professionally train people would do it.

Professor Moon: If you look at other countries, the status of teachers can impact on that process. Where you have teachers as civil servants, as you would have in France or Germany, for example, you would have exactly what you have just described in terms of control.

Q151  Chairman: I do not think we want to go as far as the French.

Professor Moon: No, but I use that to illustrate the point: that implies a degree of managerialism from the centre or from somewhere that is not part of the English tradition in terms of the way education is currently organised.

Q152  Chairman: Do you think it is something we should attend to, Professor Moon?

Professor Moon: I personally think that we should have a much more regional sense of what is happening to teachers. I think looking at other parts of Europe is instructive in that sense. If you are training to be a teacher in France or in Germany, you very much do associate with your academy or your lander: the inspectors of that area are thinking about you, the teacher trainers are thinking about you, the head teachers are thinking about you, the teachers unions are thinking about you. Whether we can do that in England - I think we can in Wales and we do it in Northern Ireland - is something which I think would need more structures than we currently have. There are some universities where not a single graduate from that university is doing a PGCE in that university; they have come from all over the country. If you went in mid-September to stand at Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham, you would see potential PGCE students streaming past each other up and down the motorways. Some head north and some head south, so they do not have an association with the locality in which they do their training necessarily. Once they have done that training, who do they go to? There is nobody looking after them at all. They are on their own. I think we could put some structures in there to support people.

Professor Howson: I think I said a few minutes ago that the risk is with the student in teacher training. We have a free marketeers dream in the labour market for education, in that all posts are advertised and anybody may apply for any of them, and there is no or virtually no intervention in that market to ensure that it works. I think that the relationship between what one might now call stage 1 training, which is the formal training course, and stage 2 training, which is the induction year, is totally haphazard. As Professor Moon has said, you finish your training course, you go to your training year in school or a course in a university, and you apply for posts. If you are lucky, and you are in the primary sector and you apply to an authority that still has a pool application system, you are vetted by the pool and then offered to schools to pick from that pool, as to which school wants to take you. For the secondary sector, where pools have largely not existed for the last quarter of a century, you just apply for a job that you see in the Times Educational Supplement and keep applying until somebody appoints you. If you are lucky, you end up in a school which has a good induction programme and is used to dealing with newly qualified teachers and all goes well. But, particularly in the primary sector, where more schools do not have newly qualified teachers each year and may struggle to keep up to date with what the latest training is, where your mentor may also be your appraiser because the school is so small that the head is doing both roles, the possibility of people getting a bad experience during that year may be causing us to lose people in whom we have invested quite a lot of money during their training, who have invested their own intention to want to come into teaching and be teachers and are then put off by the failure of the system at the institutional level at that stage. Whether there is somebody in the locality that can intervene, in terms of local authorities or some other body, or whether we can improve that system, it would certainly cut down what you are alluding to and produce the sort of practice that in the private sector they would regard as the norm in their large graduate career development programme.

Chairman: I am conscious that we have to move into a rapid question and answer session to get all the questions in. I am going to call Paul on this subject, then David, then Andrew, and then we are on to the next topic.

Q153  Paul Holmes: A few years ago there was a lot of discussion about teacher training courses and people in the Government and the media saying we need a lot more in-school training and a lot less sitting back in the university doing BEds or PGCEs in a theoretical way. Starting with that viewpoint, what statistics do we have on how many people start teacher training of any kind and never complete it? I recall a figure of about 40 per cent being published sometime this last year.

Professor Howson: Your advisor will probably be able to give you more up-to-date statistics than anybody else on this. My feeling is that you have to distinguish between the undergraduate training course for primary - because virtually all the secondary training is either in school or on the one-year PGCE - where a significant number of people who are taken in may lose their vocation at some point during that course for all sorts of different reasons, and a drop-out rate of 40 per cent might not be unexpected. For the one-year PGCE course, now that the £6,000 training grant is there and there is help for people in other subjects through other means as well, I would expect the drop-out rate during training to return to its long-term norm, which is probably somewhere round about 10 per cent, and that would be made up of those people who clearly, once they get into the course, discover that they do not have one or other of the attributes that are necessary, and those people who unfortunately fall sick or for some other reason are unable to continue during the year. I would regard that sort of in-course wastage level, which is historically what it has been on PGCE courses, to be probably about tolerable and unlikely to get it down very much more. I think people coming on a one-year course like that are making a commitment, know what they are coming to, know the PGCE course is not (as it might have been described in the past) a relatively easy year. It is an extremely difficult, hardworking year of preparation for teaching and people will not do it unless they actually want to do it.

Q154  Paul Holmes: Is there any noticeable difference, therefore, between courses which spend more time in school and the graduate teacher training programme which is all employment based? Are some more successful than others within that overall figure?

Professor Moon: Certainly people think much more highly of their PGCE courses than they used to. Evidence from the University of Cardiff is quite significant in this respect. Good, robust studies. The percentage satisfaction rate amongst students - and I do not have the figures to hand at the moment - has leapt up from 50 per cent feeling they have a good deal to something like 90 per cent. The more practically based, school-based courses have been a big success with the students themselves and I think with schools.

Professor Howson: It is almost one of those problems, as well, that it is the way you ask people. If you ask people immediately after training, they want to be able to be successful practitioners in the classroom at that point. If you ask them five years later, they may well say, "That was terribly useful but I did not get anything about the philosophy of education which underpinned my values and I now recognise the importance of that sort of thing." That of course feeds through to the importance of a significant continuing development programme which I think the Government has recognised over the last two years.

Q155  Paul Holmes: I would imagine that the answer to this is that it is too soon really to tell statistically, but, in terms of the financial incentives, the hellos and so forth, they are time restricted: if you leave too quickly from teaching you have to pay the money back or you lose the money. Is there any evidence that people are taking advantage of those financial incentives because they have student debts, student loans, etcetera, but as soon as the time limit is up they are off, out of teaching, and it is just a way to minimise their graduate debt?

Professor Howson: I do not have any evidence of that. I would think that the PGCE course is so intensive now that if you have done any research and understand what the training course is like you would be unwilling to do it, as people use to, for instance, as an insurance policy or because they wanted to stay in the same university because their current partner was finishing off. That has long gone. The course is so demanding that you do not put yourself through it unless you actually want to come into teaching. The evidence suggests that the conversion rate at the end of the course of people looking for jobs is high.

Q156  Mr Turner: How can you describe something as a free market where there is a control of supply, the price is totally controlled and there is a significant lack of information about the institution in which you are going to work.

Professor Howson: I think the market is quite free because all jobs are advertised in effectively the Times Educational Supplement. The price is not controlled, in the sense that you can go and barter as to what the school is prepared to employ you at, whether they would give you recruitment and retention points, what else they would do in terms of a relocation allowance, when they will start paying you if you are a new teacher, what responsibility points they will give you if you are a teacher already in the profession. I would have said it is a fairly classic open market, in that sense. Yes, there are imperfections in it, but it is not regulated in the way that many, for instance, in American school boards, regulate their labour market, where you can be rung up out at 11 o'clock in the morning and told, "We are taking you out of this high school and putting you into another high school." We have a much freer market. It is one of the things which attracted me into teaching as a young graduate, that I could be in control of my career. I was not going to be, as in many other organisations, at the risk of somebody writing an appraisal report on me with whom I did not get on, and that potentially blighting the rest of my career. I could apply for whatever job at a point where I felt like it and track my own career through it.

Professor Moon: Although if you joined the profession now you would certainly get an appraisal report each year.

Professor Howson: Yes, you would get an appraisal. But it is, in my view, a very open labour market compared to many others. You can move anywhere in the country with your qualification. There is probably more we can do to make it even more open.

Q157  Mr Turner: We have institutional arrangements coming out of our ears in education and you suggest more institutional arrangements. Would it not be better to pay teachers more where and when there was a shortage and pay them less where and when there is not a shortage?

Professor Howson: I think we do that anyway. Certainly if you look at the labour market for heads, which is the least regulated part of the market and the nearest to a free market, the first primary school to hit the £70,000 pay barrier was in the London Borough of Waltham Forest just before Christmas. There are no primary schools of the same size anywhere else in the country that are anywhere near approaching that in salary.

Q158  Mr Turner: That may be true recently for some headships - and I think the London Oratory was the first that was quoted in that sort of context - but at the recruitment end of the market are there those freedoms and what would the effect of the Chancellor's proposed regional pay negotiation information have on this?

Professor Howson: If I may, there are two answers to this. When I joined the profession in 1971, working in a school in Tottenham which, were it still to exist, would clearly be a failing school - fortunately, it was failing so much, even then, that it was closed - if you were a maths newly qualified teacher or a design and technology teacher, at the end of your first year you went to the head and said, "I've seen a job down the road, paying (then) scale 2" and the head said, "I'll match it." If you were an English teacher and you went to the head and said, "I've seen a job down the road, scale 2," the head would say, "I'll write you a reference." He knew there would be another newly qualified teacher around who could fill the English post but he was very doubtful whether he would get a maths teacher or a design and technology teacher. To that extent, within the framework that was allowed, there has always been the ability to tweak the system. I suspect much of it has been done covertly and much of it is probably done with the benign connivance of the professional associations. Unfortunately, when local management of schools came in, the market was thrown into some degree of confusion. Previous to that, you could regulate how many promoted posts there were in each school depending upon its size and where it was. By giving the schools the budget, you then turned it into even more of a free market because they could choose (a) how much of their budget they decided to spend on staff and (b) whether they wanted to go for large classes and well paid staff or small classes and less well paid staff - the dilemma which always faces the Government on a national level when it is setting teachers' pay: does it go for more teachers less well paid or a smaller number of teachers but better paid, depending on how much money it can get out of the Treasury. We have always had regional pay, in the sense that we have always had a supplement for London, and that has been recognised this year within the School Teachers Review Body report, where there has been the extra pay for people working in Inner London, which is clearly a significant difference between people working there and working beyond the outer London fringe area. It is a macro-economic decision as to whether or not you deal with the differences within the economy between different parts of the country through paying people to work in the labour market in different areas or you work on the other side of the economy to bring down the prices that are inflating the costs in that area - and that is not a debate, as a teacher supply person, which I particularly want to enter into.

Q159  Mr Turner: You clearly think that the market is reasonably free and effective, but that suggests then that there must be some other hidden reason which is causing the difficulties of some schools to recruit some staff. The one which is most frequently cited - and, indeed, is cited by the DfES - is workload, discipline, stress. Would you share that view?

Professor Howson: I think we have all been round this agenda many times. I made a note of what, I think, was the second inquiry which this Committee under Margaret Hodge did in 1997, which was Recruitment and Retention, and the list of issues which came up there. It started off with the image of the teaching profession, then workload, then pay, then the cost of training to the individuals (since the report was before 2000), then competition from other employers. I think, if you put all those things together, you get a situation as to how competitive teaching is. In the north-east, where the number of graduate jobs may be a smaller fraction of the total labour market, it is interesting - and the chart is in your table - that over 90 per cent of those people who trained in mathematics in 1995, despite all the problems of the period between then and 2001, had been in a state-maintained school teaching at some point or other and over 60 per cent of them were still there by 2001. In London and the south-east, where the competition for graduates and the opportunities are much greater, the percentages who were still there and the percentages who have been in are very much lower. If we do not remain competitive across the whole range of different factors, some of which are national, like workload, some of which are specific to individual schools, like whether it is an "easy" place in which to work or a "difficult" place in which to work, we will not solve the problem across the board.

Professor Moon: There are factors that inspire in that respect, are there not? I was in Hillingdon just a week ago talking to the Deputy Director of Education about schools there. Hillingdon is not in the Inner London area, so the salary incentive is not as great there, and it is also quite a diversified borough, so some schools are able to offer higher up the spine starts for initial entrants, which means that in the pecking order, in terms of where certain schools were, they were heavily disadvantaged. I did not feel that those schools were recruiting actually in a very free market, but that is taking another perspective on it than I think is the notion of market that is being talked about there. Those schools did not really have anybody who was applying for them. They did not have a market to go out to. They could not get a head of maths and they could not get any maths teachers. Nobody was there in the maths stall.

Q160  Mr Turner: Is not the conclusion from that - and I know this is easy to say - that those schools did not have enough money to attract people to the difficult conditions in which they were operating, whether because they were badly run or because they were at the wrong end of the barrel?

Professor Moon: Whether the schools did not have enough money or whether the schools did not have maths teachers, it is the same thing really, is it not? Whether you give the money to the school to pay for the maths teachers, to attract that head of maths, or whether some other interventionist policy was pursued that put a head of maths into that school which badly needed an experienced head of maths would be a policy and, perhaps, a political issue. But that school needed a head of maths, whichever way we did it.

Q161  Mr Turner: Surely we are trying to look at is what is the best way of doing it.

Professor Moon: I am attracted to giving a lot more money to the school, but that is .....

Professor Howson: Let us go back to the economics of this. Clearly economics tells us that if you want to get supply and demand into balance you have to use a mechanism which is frequently price. The best evidence that we have in terms of that, in terms of teacher recruitment, is what happened when we improved the price to people who wanted to train by giving them £6,000. Across the board, the price produced an increase in supply of people coming on to training courses. As soon as you put in even more differential pricing, like the golden hellos ... I never quite understood why the Department introduced English as a golden hello subject in January 2002, I think it was. It seems to me that is a subject that has never failed to recruit to its target. Somebody panicked, because it was having a slow start that year, put it on the list for golden hellos and applications have gone through the roof. We are about 30 per cent up on what we were this time last year for English. It may well be that by doing that we improve the quality: of course price is affected by quality because, the more you pay, the rational theory of economics would suggest you get a better quality. The problem about heads of department is a slightly different problem. That is a hangover problem from previous decisions in the labour market. If you get the labour market wrong in a closed profession where people start at the bottom and progress through, the hangover of getting that wrong will be with you for generations to come. We had a problem at the end of the 1980s. We had cut back on the number of teacher training numbers because the birth rate had been falling and the school population was declining and we were not filling even those small revised targets. We had, in a sense, a double long-term whammy, in that we had lower numbers of people than the historical trend in training, and those training targets were not being filled. That is now filtering its way through to people who have been in the profession 10/12 years who are the core of the people you would be expecting to take middle management and be moving into senior management positions - that is one of the reasons why we have this serious problem in terms of senior middle management in secondary schools and deputy heads and heads of primary schools - and that is a much more difficult problem to eradicate in the short term.

Chairman: It is interesting that you use Chris Patten's term "double whammy" about a period I think when he might have been Education Minister.

Q162  Mr Pollard: Could I ask about mature students, mature entrants. Professor Moon, on page 6 of your report it says, "Many mature entrants have also experienced the demands of other occupations and are attracted, despite lower material rewards, to the lifestyle." Does that imply that when they come in the grass is not quite so green for one side than the other?

Professor Moon: One of the myths about mature entrants is that they find difficulty in obtaining jobs. That has not been the case with the cohort of 5,000 at which we have been looking: they do find jobs but they accept a position on the pay spine which is lower than would reflect the sort of vocational experience they have had. It is an indication of their level of commitment to becoming teachers that they are prepared to do that.

Mrs Bird: I think we have people coming in as mature entrants from a very wide variety of backgrounds. We do have people coming in from domestic responsibilities at home with children, a lot of whom have become involved in education through their own children's education and have seen the appeal through that. We have people coming in from other jobs who may have been disillusioned with the other jobs, may have wanted a change of career, but quite a lot of them are saying, "Actually, I had always thought about teaching and now seems a good time to make the change."

Q163  Mr Pollard: One of the things teachers complain about is workload. If people are coming in from commerce or industry, their workload has been high. Industry and commerce demand a lot from people nowadays. Are the two not equitable, so that when people - not those who are home-carers but in industry generally - leave and move into teaching they say, "The workload is not much different than it was previously. It is about the same." I think I am asking whether teachers are overblowing this workload compared with industry generally.

Mrs Bird: My answer can only be anecdotal. We have certainly had some students who have said that the workload is much higher than they had anticipated. It is more concentrated over the term time and they had not anticipated the level of stress and workload that teaching did demand. But that is not all of them.

Q164  Chairman: Should we make it easier for people to transform from being a full-time teacher to a part-time teacher if they find at a certain stage it is becoming too stressful for them?

Mrs Bird: I think that is probably quite an important question in terms of mature entry to the profession. Certainly the data I have suggested that something like 42 per cent of our trainees actually went into the profession on a part-time basis. There have been suggestions, going back many years now, from people in the field that more flexible working patterns might be instrumental in attracting a lot more women with school-age children into working in the profession. Recently, that has also been added to by looking at people at the end of their teaching career who may wish to downsize and to teach more flexibly. There is an indication that there are a lot of people who are moving into supply teaching after leaving full-time employment in their fifties. I think it is important that we look at ways that flexible and part-time working could be used within the profession to keep people in and to attract in people.

Q165  Mr Chaytor: On this very point, because I think this was an issue that we raised with the witnesses from the General Teaching Council just a few weeks ago: what is the main problem in preventing a more flexible set of contractual arrangements for teachers in their fifties as they move to retirement? When I put this question to the GTC, the answer was, if you give up your full-time contract you are worse off. We all know that. My question is: Is there something in the teacher's pension that makes it financially disadvantageous for teachers to go to a half-time contract in the last three years of their employment, for example?

Professor Howson: I think the answer to that is probably inertia. There were significant changes to the pension rules some years ago to allow segmentation of the pension, so you did not fall into the trap of your salary being based on your best pay in the last three years. You could effectively ring-fence your pension up to a certain point, step down to another job and restart. When that was announced, some people did it. I see quite a lot of evidence in primary schools of head teachers and deputy head teachers stepping down to classroom teacher level again, in the questionnaires that we get back from schools. I suspect from the notes that we get that it is more to do with decisions about workload and lifestyle than it is a positive decision in terms of career choice. I think, again, in terms of the micro-management of the workforce, given the age profile of the workforce, if we do not have policy decisions about how we want to manage the movement into full-scale retirement of a very large number of teachers over the next few years, we may be in some difficulties, and that is something which I hope the Department is modelling in terms of what will happen. It will clearly be affected by this generation being the generation that will have paid off their mortgages - in many cases because they were starting to buy their houses much younger than their parents' generations - by the time they are in their fifties. If they have made a substantial capital gain on that, if you are doing the figures it may well be worth, from 55 onwards, putting that capital gain into an interest bearing account and going part-time or going to live in a villa in the south of Spain where the cost of living is lower. But not all teachers, indeed, not all of us are rational beings in terms of working out the finances versus the other sections of lifestyle. If you are happy with what you are doing and you enjoy the job still, you are more likely to stay. If you find that there are opportunity costs to do with something else which you feel are greater, you will do something else. Clearly the closure of the funded early retirement route in 1996 had a big effect on the number of people staying/going officially. We do not know - and again this comes back to the statistics' question - the leakage of people over 50 out into just doing supply work, leaving the profession without bothering to collect their pension but effectively banking it, and what more we could do in terms of utilising their skills up until retirement age, whatever that is in the future, to the most effective way for the profession as a whole.

Q166  Mr Chaytor: To clarify this point, there is therefore no financial barrier to prevent a teacher in a hardship subject in a secondary school, who really feels that in their fifties a full-time teaching commitment is just too heavy a workload, switching to a half-term contract, thereby maintaining the stability and continuity in that school, rather than throwing themselves on the supply market, working Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, zipping off on Thursday evening Ryanair to their cottage somewhere in Andalucia, coming back on Monday evening and starting again Tuesday morning. There is absolutely no problem for someone to do that other than inertia. There is nothing in the teachers' pension scheme that would make them financially worse off, other than the fact that their gross earnings are obviously slightly lower.

Professor Howson: As you know, the teachers' pension scheme is a weird and wonderfully complicated document, and I would not claim to be a total expert in it, but my understanding is that the mechanisms exist, since the changes that were made at the end of the 1990s, to make that sort of flexible working at the end of the career a possibility in a number of different ways, including the one you have suggested, and including the stepping down where you want to give up responsibility and go back to, for instance, classroom teaching without the extra burden of leadership associated with it, but stay full time.

Q167  Mr Chaytor: This is a very positive way of managing the issue.

Professor Howson: Yes.

Professor Moon: If I may just come in on that point. I think that is right but I think there need to be cultural changes in the management traditions in schools to allow that to happen. The culture of the English teacher is the all-singing, dancing, doing everything person: the fete, dealing with the dinner queue, teaching the subject, and so on. I think one of the, as you call it, stepping down things is that individual tasks will become more differentiated and that is going to require, I think, a different organisation of schools. For example, we have a growing number of people who are taking up classroom assistant type roles in schools. That is a part of policy at the moment. How that group of people can be incorporated into the workforce in ways that allow some teachers to work in the way we have just described I think is going to be critical.

Professor Howson: It may be a straw in the wind, but the number of full-time teachers in primary schools dropped by about 1,000 between January 2002 and January 2003. There was not a similar sort of significant drop in the number of part-time teachers. It may be that as falling rolls start to impact, what is happening is that, because it is impacting on budgets at the margin in primary schools, they are less likely to take up full-time teachers and more likely to offer fractional posts or part-time posts to people because that fits in with the budget, because of the way that the budgets are constructed. One would need to see some more research evidence on that.

Q168  Chairman: You have not given much in evidence on the demographics. Are we going to need less teachers because there is going to be a substantial fall in the population over the next number of years?

Professor Howson: If you can answer some other policy questions, I would be able to give you an answer on that. What level of pupil:teacher ratios, for instance, are the Government trying to achieve? What balance between, as Professor Moon says, classroom assistant, other support staff versus IT assistants and qualified teachers as we traditionally know them, will the mix of the labour market need? You have to put all those together to answer that question. We do know, as I think we said at the beginning, that the age profile of the profession - which is well known, which I certainly did not bother to rehearse it in my evidence - means that from somewhere round about 2005 onwards, depending on how many people go through to 60 and how many people opt out from 55 onwards, we will have a significant number of people leaving the profession for about an eight to 10 year period and they will need to be replaced. My best guess on the current mix is that that will mean that we will need to train somewhere round about 30,000 to 35,000 teachers every year into training.

Q169  Chairman: What about the number of children coming through during the same period?

Professor Howson: The good news from the educational point of view was that the birth rate went up marginally in 2002 after several years of decline. The Department's statisticians estimate that the primary school population peaked in, I think, January 1998 but it might have been 1999. The secondary school population will probably have peaked this January, partly depending on how many people stay on in school, sixth forms, and how many people go into the FE sector post-16, and, I have to say, partly affected by the number of children of asylum seekers and other people who are coming into the country which slightly skews the figures. It has particular implications for certain regions of the country. Generally speaking, the secondary population overall, having peaked, will continue to decline slowly at least until 2011, which is the furthest period forward that the DfES or ONS statisticians are prepared to give evidence in their evidence to the Pay Review Body every year. I can give you the figures. I cannot quote them and I would not want to off the top of my head, but it is quite clear that there will be a loss of a number of children to the system and that will impact on the number of teachers you need if you keep everything else level. If you want to improve pupil:teacher ratios, then you will want to keep the number of teachers the same. If you want effectively to keep your pupil:teacher ratios as they are now, you will need fewer teachers.

Q170   Mr Turner: Is the achievement of an age balance or for that matter a gender balance in an individual school something that governors should regard as important?

Professor Howson: I think this is a philosophical question which relates to the whole of the system. One could take an extreme example: if no governors anywhere in the country bore the slightest interest to this and said - a hypothetical example - "We are really interested in people who have done lots of other things beforehand, mature entrants. We will take people over 35" the question would be: Where is your next cadre of leaders going to come from? If you are planning an individual school, it probably does not matter. If you are planning a system as a whole that is employing potentially nearly 500,000 people, I think that some sort of modelling of the effects of not taking any account of that needs to be understood. This is where the free market that we talked about collides with the planned market because the significant planned portion of the market is the fact that the teacher training targets are decided by the Department as, if you like, the manufacturer; they are given to the wholesaler, which is the Teacher Training Agency, who then passes it on to the retailers; the retailers differ from everything like a superstore, like the Metropolitan University or the London Institute of Education, with large numbers of training places down, to your corner shop, as you might describe it, the school-based training programme with 20 places. That is clearly very tightly planned and in some cases you could argue mor tightly planned than is necessary but I do think that if nobody takes any account of age profile, you will have a problem about where the next generation of leaders are going to come from.

Q171   Mr Turner: Professor Moon, would you agree with that?

Professor Moon: I think I would agree with that, yes. We have not come to a conclusion, I should say, though.

Chairman: The last topic we need to cover is school standards, if we can just switch to that.

Q172  Jonathan Shaw: One of the issues about disadvantaged schools is that we know they have more difficulty in recruiting and more difficult in retaining and there is also research you have carried out, Professor Howson, on the PANDA ratings and the length of service for a head teacher. Obviously, we want to understand what you think about improvements to retaining in challenging schools, and my colleague was referring to this marking system earlier on. The Government is spending lots of money with golden hellos, golden comebacks, golden this and golden that, do you think that they are being sufficiently imaginative with the sort of money that is available? For example, if there is a golden welcome back, presumably a school in a leafy suburb can go out and get a teacher who can go to this school and get this £4,000, whereas they would not have much difficulty in recruiting someone else, would they? Is that the best way to use this public money, because you were talking about quality and pay and that was the position?

Professor Howson: I think you have to distinguish between those things which are important for the system as a whole, like the £6,000 training grant, which clearly had a system-wide impact, and those things which you target as individual institutions for whatever particular reason you do. Specialist school grants are one example of that, where you allow individual schools to get extra money if they meet certain criteria. If one of your criteria is that schools facing difficulties have traditionally the most difficulty in getting the most staff and are the first ones who are most likely to suffer in any teaching shortage, you have to ask, do you want to intervene in that market to actually do something about that if there is an overall shortage, or if there is not an overall shortage but there is a differential quality, to either to make sure that those schools are first in the staffing queue, or get the best quality teachers. Then there are various mechanisms you can adopt. One is clearly a price mechanism. We did that in the 1970s when we had the schools with exceptional difficulties payment, which was paid for teachers working in certain schools, where for the first three years they got £201, and once they had been there more than three years they got £279.

Q173  Jonathan Shaw: What would that be like in today's prices?

Professor Howson: I have no idea, but I would be guessing.

Q174  Jonathan Shaw: Yes. If you said £200,000 to anyone, I think ---

Professor Howson: Certainly I know - since I was working in one of those schools at the time - it was a significant addition to my salary, and was the sort of thing that might well have persuaded me to stay there rather than go into a leafy suburb. I think what also attracts me is the sort of work that is being done at UCLA with what they call Project X, which is to recognise the social justice element of people who are going to be successful, what we might call the vocational element.

Q175  Chairman: Is that the one which relates to a former governor who runs Project X, as I understand it?

Professor Howson: Its genesis and history, I cannot tell you.

Q176  Chairman: Sorry, the Committee may want to know more about that. Anything called Project X is of interest to us.

Professor Howson: My understanding is that it is based on the concept that if you have got people who are attracted to working in those sort of urban high schools, then you need to be able to give them the tools to do the job, and it is no good training them in schools where those conditions do not exist. You need to stand on its head the concepts that some of these schools are so bad you must not put trainees into them, and so you put trainees into them who have expressed an interest to work in those sort of schools. It is no good putting people in there who have no interest in working with those sort of children.

Q177  Jonathan Shaw: Do we have any evidence that newly qualified teachers, trainees, et cetera, when they go into schools like that are more likely to leave the profession in the way that Paul Holmes was asking you about? Someone qualifies, they go into a very difficult school and it is horrendous, and they feel all of the pressures that we know about all the more than your average school, are they more likely to leave the teaching profession?

Professor Howson: I think it stands to reason if they have been properly trained for those sort of schools and are aware of what they are getting into, they are more likely, if the institutional factors are then right during their induction year, to stay. If you have trained in a cathedral city, in leafy suburban schools, this is the only sort of job you can get because you may not be the strongest person on your course, and you are not philosophically inclined to want to work with those sort of children, then you may well find that as something where you leave very quickly. It was very interesting that in The Sunday Times last week there was an article by a teacher who had come back from teaching in Botswana, and had gone to teach in some London schools, and had quit after two years. She was complaining about how difficult these schools were to teach in, and how everything was stacked against working in them. I felt underlying that was a philosophical point of view that actually she did not want to be in that sort of school, working with those sort of children.

Professor Moon: There is definitely a greater churn of teachers in those schools, in those urban areas. My own view is that what we have to address here is a cultural thing, not just a statistical thing. We have had periods when working on the front line in urban schools was seen as one of the high spots, that you were in the forefront of your profession if you were prepared to take that on, and I thought like that myself in the mid-1960s in London. Now, for various reasons, that has disappeared, particularly in the secondary area, and I think we just have to regenerate that sort of feeling. There are some policies that are moving us in that direction.

Q178  Jonathan Shaw: What I was going to ask you is, from what you have described, Professor Howson, whether the structures and pay as they are at the moment perhaps lead to the most least able teachers teaching in the hardest schools in our country?

Professor Howson: I think because of the way in which the nexus between training and employment works, there is that risk. That was what attracted me to what the Scottish Executive is doing, and anything that will look at the most disadvantaged schools which clearly need people with additional skills to be able to succeed in them, to be able to provide them with the tools rather than leave them to get what they can on the open market. If you are going to leave them to the open market, then what works in the open market is normally price, which is a slightly curious thing. I think price, by itself, is only part of the thing; it is not the whole package. We have seen it with head teachers, and we have seen it with high profile head teachers, who come in from being successful head teachers in leafy suburban areas, have gone into inner city schools and have found the challenge extremely difficult because they have not been prepared for it.

Professor Moon: John, you talk about a risk, but that is a reality in a lot of urban comprehensive schools, particularly in Inner London. My daughter's year eight tutor group only has one permanent member of staff who teaches them.

Q179  Jonathan Shaw: If you had the pot of money that we spend on the golden hellos, the golden goodbyes and welcome backs, et cetera, and there was no more money, what would you do differently with it in order to try and address some of the issues that we are talking about?

Professor Howson: I think my key concern is that the most disadvantaged children in the most disadvantaged schools do not necessarily get provided with teachers who have been trained to meet their specific needs. We talk about x amount of the course being in school and the rest of it being in college or university. If you are going end up in those sort of schools, either by choice or that is the only place where you will get a job, my feeling is that the whole of that course - that is what happens on the college-based part of the course, and what happens on the school-based part of the course - actually needs to be focused on helping you to be able to work successfully with those sort of children, many of whom are very damaged in all sorts of different ways. Many of them will be damaged in ways that you, as a successful graduate, will not have experienced in your own lifestyle. Although we have comprehensive secondary schools, there is still a wide gap, I think ---

Q180  Jonathan Shaw: They have never been onto a council estate in their lives.

Professor Howson: Between the social experience of being a successful student in a comprehensive school and being in one of our council estate schools in one of our northern cities, or parts of London or, indeed, in some of our less successful social schools in terms of rural areas as well, because it is not entirely an urban problem.

Q181  Jonathan Shaw: What would you do with the money? Would you do anything differently with the money?

Professor Moon: Yes. I think the Government's inquiry into 14-19 education at the moment is actually crucial to the issue and we are coming to this late in the day. In one sense the model of teacher supply is posited on the model of curriculum, but we are going to see change and I think there will be cross-party support for this change. It is clear that we have to have more practical applied relevant vocational work in schools than has been the case, but we have not got the teachers there necessarily to deal with that.

Q182  Jonathan Shaw: I agree with that, but neither of you have answered my question. If you were in charge of the money, and in terms of what we have spoken about in terms of quality and how much you pay, are we distributing the money correctly? When I gave you the example that you can come back into the profession, into a leafy school and get £4,000, that does not seem to me the best use of the public money when we are talking about your daughter's school?

Professor Howson: In theory, the LMS formula, topped-up with the special needs' elements, should provide for those schools to have more money than the leafy suburb schools in the same authority, because they will be getting x amount ---

Q183  Jonathan Shaw: Sixth forms, do you mean?

Professor Howson: Which should, in theory, mean that they are able to offer more responsibility. Clearly, it does not work like that for all sorts of reasons, such as whether the school has got a sixth form, or other factors, in which case if you want them to be successful you have got to find some other way of intervening. I am probably arguing that you need to pay people more to work in the most challenging circumstances, and you need to find a way of doing that which is acceptable to everybody. Even, more importantly, you need to identify, right from the word go, people who are actually socially responsible and wish to take on the challenge of working in those sort of schools, and give them the training and the support to enable them to be successful with those sort of children. I suspect a greater number of people can succeed teaching leafy suburb children, who are there because they want to learn, are relatively biddable and are not facing all these other problems. That is exactly the sort of school that I spent seven years in at the start of my career. Professor Moon spent time in London with his career. We went there, we enjoyed doing it and we were - we hope - successful, but we need to make sure that the generation who are doing it now gets as much help as possible to be successful for the education of these children.

Q184  Chairman: Something that is not coming through from this very interesting set of questions from Jonathan in terms of the answers, is it is all very well to juxtapose the leafy suburb school to the inner city school, but what is the difference, in your experience and in your knowledge, of what high quality management of that school brings to the new teacher coming into that environment? What I think this Committee needs to know is if you take two leafy suburb schools, or two inner city schools, which are very similar, what difference does it make? Some of the evidence that we have had from you and others suggests that if there is a good head, a good management structure, who cares about the induction and all the rest, it makes a tremendous difference between whether that teacher stays or not. Is that wrong or is it right?

Professor Howson: I would say, yes. I would say very clearly that the leadership role is critical. We are in the people business in education. We work with people and most of what we do is an interaction between people, and if those interactions in a learning sense can be successful, then everybody will feel better about it and the outcome, however you measure it, will be better. Now, as Professor Moons says, it may be that for some of the age group we are actually doing the wrong thing. So it is going to be very difficult to make it succeed because we are not doing the right sort of thing. I would say you have to have successful leaders, again who are trained to understand the circumstances in which they find themselves in, are supported at the local level - whether it is a buddy system, or whether it is through some sort of local support network - which allows them when the going gets tough, as it inevitably does, to recognise that they are not going to be named and shamed, and that they are not going to be held to account for every mistake that they make. Inevitably, in challenging circumstances, you may make mistakes and, if you take risks, of course, you are more likely to make mistakes. Again, this is a question for the National College in terms of the National Professional Qualification for Headship. To what extent is that a bland national qualification, which assumes that in all schools are the same and should it, or can it, be tailored to recognise that challenging schools need their leaders to be able to be equipped to take on those challenges during the preparation stage, just as I think we are arguing that those people who go in as newly qualified teachers need the extra support and training that going to those schools demands.

Q185  Paul Holmes: Two areas on schools then. The first one is picking up on what you have just been saying. I was really pleased to hear Professor Moon say that not that many years ago some teachers went into inner city schools. As they say in the survey, it was a challenge, they were at the cutting edge, they were making a real difference, but you said that various structural changes, or changes in policy, will work against that for various reasons now. We have just heard that a really good head, as a leader, can make a big difference. Just to take an example. The Phoenix School in Hammersmith was one of Labour's first Fresh Start schools in 1997, and William Atkinson, the head there, is seen as one of these really great leaders. His school over the last five or six years has got around 11 per cent A-Cs - 11 per cent of the children got five A-Cs - although in this last year it has gone up to 25 per cent, which is a very good improvement but still way behind what the Government want. 60 per cent of the kids are on free school meals, 60 per cent have got special educational needs and 40 per cent have got difficulty with spoken and written English. The last Ofsted Report said: "The school's problems were largely beyond its immediate control, staff recruitment and retention in particular". How far do you think things like naming and shaming, league tables, professional staff performance pay - which means you are held responsible for your kids making certain progress, otherwise you do not get your pay rise - encourage teachers to go into schools like these, and how far do they discourage teachers?

Professor Moon: It is in one sense a very important question, but I have to give the balanced answer. I think the pressure on schools to improve standards across the board has been a positive thing. In the schools in the most challenging circumstances what you often require is the most amount of innovation, and the context in which the schools now operate actually can constrain innovation rather than open it, so people go for safe options, they go for trying to nudge forward, to keep it tight and so on, and I think that is one of the difficulties that we face with the system at the moment.

Professor Howson: Yes. I was talking about risk taking a few minutes ago. I think risk taking is clearly important there. One of the interesting questions that one would want to ask the Phoenix School is: "Has your staffing settled down over the last year after a period of very great difficulty, and was that one of the reasons why your GCSE results have started to improve?" It is very difficult for secondary schools, in those sort of circumstances, where its primary schools are facing an enormous amount of turbulence and, therefore, are unable to meet the standards that one would expect of primary schools normally across the country, for those secondary schools then to pick it up. This is why it takes so long - it is a bit like a super tanker - to turn it round. If your primary schools have stable, good, high quality staff, able to produce the basics, then those children transfer into secondary schools with the sort of skills that secondary schools can build on. If the primary schools have got no secondary staff, are operating on a procession of overseas- trained teachers from the Commonwealth countries, or itinerant supply teachers who have no commitment to that school, it is not surprising that the children in those schools (a) do not see education as a very worthwhile experience, and (b) may not succeed. If the secondary schools are then trying to adopt a normal secondary school process, they are trying to impose success on failure. One of the things that we did in response to the Bullock Report in the 1970s - Learning for Life - was to recognise that 50 per cent of our intake, in the school I taught in in Toton, had a reading age which was two and a half years behind their chronological age, so we abandoned subject teaching. We went back to classroom teaching to give the children the settled environment where they could actually continue to develop their basic skills. If the staffing in the primary schools settles down - and it has been particularly settled in parts of London - then that will have a knock-on effect for secondary schools, but it will take time. I think to expect the secondary schools, in those circumstances, to work miracles, and then to name and shame them when they do not, is hugely counterproductive.

Q186  Paul Holmes: Yes. You have talked about the importance of stability of staffing, like these preferred examples. We hear a lot these days about teaching should not be seen as a profession for life, which perhaps it used to be. We have got the Fast Track Teacher Scheme, for example, which the Government introduced, that emphasises very much, "We will take these whizz kid new recruits and we will put them in one school for two years, then we will move them to another school for two years, then we will move them to another school for two years, and then they will be fit to be a super head and so forth". With some of the old "stick in the mud" teachers, like I was, - who stayed in one school for ten or 12 years at a stretch - we were always a bit sceptical about this, about wanting a fast churn of teachers all the time, who come in and leave before the problems materialise from what they have done. Some of the research that Professor Howson has done on schools getting A* grades on their PANDAS, on their performance assessment, shows they tend to be the schools where the head has been in post for over six years rather than be somebody who is here today, gone tomorrow, onto another fast track job. Is there more of a case to be made for stability and service of teachers and heads, and heads of department, rather than this sort of commercial sector pressure that we have heard about from Kerry Pollard, for example, where, as an engineer, he would spend two years with one firm, four years with another and two years with another? Are we undervaluing the idea of length of service and stability with teachers within a school?

Professor Moon: I taught in the same school for ten years when I started, so I would empathise with what you are saying there. Is it not a mix of the two? I think this issue about heads in posts is a really significant one, but I would also apply that in secondary schools to those who are in the middle management area. It is quite clear that the same thing applies, particularly in the major departments in a secondary school, the core curriculum areas. Those people who come in to fill those posts may well have benefited from the sort of moving around that you have talked about, and we do not manage that very well.

Professor Howson: No, I think it is the balance. Some people may want to spend a long time, some people may find it, for all sorts of different reasons, worthwhile moving around to get the degree of experience. If everybody moves around at one end of the spectrum, then you get so much turbulence that there is no continuity for the children and I suspect they start to fail to understand the advantage of having a settled thing where they can relate to the people who are delivering their education. If everybody stays put, the risk is that you get no new ideas and no fresh blood. If somebody comes in, they are treated like hero innovators and the dragon eats them as if they are St George, because their ideas do not fit in with the conceptual norms of the institution and, therefore, they leave. The worst possible diversion, I think, is an institution where too many people are there for too long that they become resistant to new ideas and become antagonistic to anybody who wants to change the status quo. So it is finding that right sort of balance for the institution that is most critical.

Q187  Jonathan Shaw: Were you a history teacher?

Professor Howson: I was a geography teacher.

Q188  Jonathan Shaw: I thought that, because I thought St George slew the dragon.

Professor Howson: Not the hero in the battle.

Q189  Chairman: Just this last one. We have found this a very valuable evidence session, that it why it has gone on for much longer than we predicted, and we have learned a lot. Are there one or two aspects of this you would be very discontent if, when we wrote this up, we did not include? Is there anything you think you have missed informing the Committee and you would like to see it in the report? Professor Moon?

Professor Moon: I mentioned in my introduction the issue of ethnic minority communities representation in the teaching force, and the fact that I think through mature entrants you will get a greater participation. I really think that is a terribly important point.

Q190  Chairman: Elizabeth?

Mrs Bird: Nothing more to add, no.

Q191  Chairman: Professor Howson?

Professor Howson: I think I would want to put two in. One is the whole issue of data and information, and how it is managed throughout this large and complex situation that we call the education organisation in England. Secondly, this nexus between training and employment and the potential risk that getting that wrong for retention involves, and the wastage that that involves in terms of public money that has been spent on producing high quality training for people. I think as a caveat to that, I would want to say that the training should be funded on the basis that it is a training course and not a higher education course which is subject to the sort of pressures that higher education funding has been subject to over the last few years, because that has consequences. It would be interesting to compare the cost of training a teacher with the cost of training a police constable at Hendon, with the cost of training an army officer at Sandhurst and, indeed, the cost of somebody going through the Marks & Spencer's-type training programme, to see whether or not the Treasury is still regarding teacher training as effectively higher education at low cost, to get more out of it through economies of scale and efficiency costs, and whether that is damaging the recognition of being able to improve the needs of the individuals who go through the process and who are on their way to becoming more valuable members of the teaching profession.

Chairman: Thank you very much for that, Professor Howson. Thank you.