Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 11 JUNE 2003
PROFESSOR JOHN
HOWSON, PROFESSOR
BOB MOON
AND MRS
ELIZABETH BIRD
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% of new primary teachers and 94% 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. By 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 advisers 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 numbers 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% 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 SCITT
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 of 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
länder: 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% being published sometime this last year.
Professor Howson: Your adviser
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% 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%,
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% feeling they have a
good deal to something like 90%. 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% 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% 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.
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