Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 11 JUNE 2003
PROFESSOR JOHN
HOWSON, PROFESSOR
BOB MOON
AND MRS
ELIZABETH BIRD
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 Humphrys
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% 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 tight limits on the 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 headships. 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 headships—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 headship 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
headship will be mandatory, or working towards it will be mandatory,
for anybody who is appointed to a headship 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 10 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% 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%
of those who trained as doctors left within the first five years,
and that rose to about 25% 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% 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% 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.
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