Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 179)
WEDNESDAY 11 JUNE 2003
PROFESSOR JOHN
HOWSON, PROFESSOR
BOB MOON
AND MRS
ELIZABETH BIRD
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% 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% 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 fête,
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 Manchester 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
more 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—
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