Examination of Witnesses (Questions 192
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2003
MR GRAHAM
LANE, MR
RONNIE NORMAN
AND MR
JAMES KEMPTON
Q192 Chairman: May I welcome our
witnesses this morning and say that it is a pleasure to see here
an old friend of mine, Graham Lane—that does not mean that
I have known him so long that he will get any quarter from the
Chair, as he knows—and also Ronnie Norman and James Kempton,
the first team to bat. I have told my team that we want to get
into this hour as much as we can. We want to get a lot of questions
and answers into this hour. We know that you are very knowledgeable
in this field. This is an inquiry into recruitment and retention
of teachers; it is a very interesting issue and one about which
we are particularly keen to learn. I start by asking Graham Lane
if he wants to say anything briefly about the situation. Do we
have a crisis? Do we have enough teachers? Are teachers coming
into the profession in enough numbers? Are we retaining them properly?
What is the situation from the employers' point of view?
Mr Lane: The employers' point
of view is much better, I think, than sometimes the media leads
people to believe. First, may I say that we do represent all teachers
in the state sector; that includes the church schools and foundation
schools and not just local government schools. One-third of our
schools are voluntary aided. The situation is better than it has
been. It is also better than I think some people feared. Two or
three years ago, I remember saying on radio that we were not going
to have a three or four day week because of the shortage of teachers.
It is very interesting that this story keeps re-emerging and over
the funding issue as well. The biggest problem for some time has
been the retention and turnover of teachers. That has declined
considerably in certain parts of the country. Even secondary schools
in London are now showing more retention than they did a couple
of years ago. There are reasons for that and one is what we actually
did as employers. We persuaded the Teachers' Pay Review Body to
shorten the pay scale for younger teachers and those leaving the
profession. Turnover does not mean necessarily those leaving the
profession. You can move within an authority or to another authority.
The highest number of teachers leaving the profession, apart from
actual retirement, was among 25 to 30 year olds. Younger teachers
for three or four years were considering leaving teaching for
various reasons. We persuaded the Teachers' Pay Review Body to
shorten pay scales so that people reached the threshold in five
years instead of nine. The DfES officials were not very pleased
about this, and did not fund it properly as a result, which may
have caused some of the problems we now have. We think that was
a significant thing that we did as employers. You will notice
from our evidence that we think it is difficult to start talking
of a shortage of subject teachers in secondary schools. Maths
is not the subject with the highest shortage; the shortage of
English teachers is higher. To suggest that certain subjects receive
a premium payment over others would fly in the face of the evidence
we produce. There is a much more even shortage of subjects at
secondary level. We also think there is good news on the horizon.
With most of the other unions, bar one, we played a great part
in getting the agreement on workload signed. As that goes through,
there will be the 24 tasks next year, then the year after there
will be a limit on the amount of cover for absent staff, and then
in the third year, which is the most important move in our view,
and we are the ones who pushed for this, the minimum of 10% non-contact
time for all teachers, including primary teachers. We think that
will have a significant effect on recruitment and retention of
primary teachers. Again, as employers, we pushed for that. We
had to fight the DfES officials on that to get it through. The
unions were in favour of it and we got it through as part of the
workload agreements. We think that is going to be very significant.
Finally, there are two things I would like to mention where we
still need to do more work. We need to see older people, perhaps
some who have been made redundant from British Airways or Marconi,
with degrees coming into teaching at a later age. Very often,
head teachers and governors are reluctant even to interview such
people. I think we ought to make it easier for people who have
had another career to come into teaching in their late 30s or
40s, or even in their 50s. That is a source of recruitment we
should consider. We should look much more towards people being
flexible about moving in and out of teaching. Young teachers tell
me they are only going to work in teaching for five or six years.
There is nothing wrong with that but can we attract them back
for another five or six years, sometimes in their 30s or 40s?
The structures do not make that easy. One area where we are keen
to work, though we need to get the DfES officials more in agreement
with us on this, but there are people interested in doing it,
is in the formation of a proper professional development career
programme for teachers. The London Challenge under Tim Birdhouse
is looking at this as a method of recruitment and retention in
London. We think professional development for teachers is still
left very much to individual schools or individuals. We think
a proper national programme with the employers working with the
teacher unions could do a lot to make teaching a very attractive
career in which people will remain. That is the sort of area we
would like to move on to but the situation is always one in which
we must be careful. We will never have enough teachers but in
fact there are more people teaching now than there have been for
many years. We need to make sure we retain our teachers and make
teaching an attractive profession. Some of the measures in the
last few years have been very welcome indeed. As employers, we
have played a key part in that.
Q193 Chairman: You are quite strange
employers in one sense, are you not? I am not going to take a
side swipe at the fact that you all seem to come from London and
the South-East this morning, or very close. In terms of employers,
normally one associates employers with having a much more proactive
role in the management of the people being employed. Is there
not a sense in which you are more spectator than employer? On
that last point you mention, that of career development, the Committee
has already had evidence that a large number of teachers are lost
very early on in their careers. Any other big organisation would
look after the staff they employ very carefully in those first
three to five years, when they know that they are going to lose
a very large number of them. That management of their experience
as young teachers, the quality of mentoring and support, would
be very carefully looked at. Are you able to do anything about
that?
Mr Lane: There are 150 employers,
if you analyse local government. You are right that we do not
actually decide teachers' pay; it is decided by a Government-appointed
body called the Teachers' Pay Review Body. That creates problems
in itself because governments have a habit of not actually funding
the awards that they then recommend to be implemented. A lot of
the work is done at school level. Head teachers and school governors
appoint and dismiss staff. That does not mean, as national employers,
that we do not exert a much more strategic influence. For instance,
we persuaded the Government to bring back the induction year for
newly-qualified teachers; there was no induction year. A lot of
authorities now ask for exit strategies from teachers as they
leave the school. We find it surprising how many teachers leave
because of bullying or the behaviour of senior management. That
alerts us to do something about it. We have now started in many
areas to introduce much more support, and not just for first-year
teachers. We managed to introduce time out of the timetable but
also support by in-service training for second and third year
teachers. Because of a competitive market, there has been a shortage
of recruits. It is important to retain teachers. Local authorities
and employers have done much more work with their schools in order
to help recruitment and retention of staff. Very often, a school
needs more support, particularly with the recruitment of newly
qualified teachers. Where there were big shortages, some authorities
have done a lot of work with their schools to solve some of the
problems. Without the strategic work that local employers have
done, you would have seen a more difficult situation in certain
areas.
Mr Norman: There are a couple
of things in the pipeline. Graham Lane has referred to many of
them. One of those is professional development. I am on the General
Teaching Council and, as it so happens, we are advising Government
on the professional development of younger teachers in their first
five years. In Kent, for instance, as an employer, a local education
authority, we are moving into key worker housing. That involves
not only teachers. We are building cheap housing and have a housing
association joining this so that there can be equity sharing in
the housing and cheap rents. We are also building blocks of flats
on school grounds, if we can surmount the planning hurdles. As
far as the teacher workload reform is concerned, there is the
work-life balance responsibility coming in this September so that
head teachers look after teachers and governing bodies look after
head teachers. Personally, I feel this is terribly important in
keeping people happy. I believe that we ought to allow, as Graham
has said, people to leave the profession with a smile on their
faces. People in other professions move around. Accountants and
lawyers go off and work in big businesses and come back. I feel
that one should not hang on too tightly but should make a return
back into teaching more easy, as happens with other professions.
I think that is extremely important.
Mr Kempton: It is important to
try and set the context correctly. We have provided you with some
information from our survey, which I think shows some of the views
around in a different light. Particularly with younger teachers,
whilst we would want to see that there was some turnover, because
you would not find many people staying in their first job for
an enormous length of time in any other walk of life, we need
to focus on the amount of wastage. There are teachers who are
leaving the profession. That is a key statistic, taken alongside
turnover. It is misleading to look at a person leaving a job in
a school; we ought to focus on his or her destination. As employers,
we are concerned about the people who are leaving the profession
early. As you have heard, we are doing things to support that
inquiry. There is a disadvantage in terms of people changing jobs
and the disruption within a school but we need to recognise that
there is a lot of movement within the career patterns and we should
not see teaching somehow as different to the sort of career patterns
that young graduates have in other professions.
Q194 Mr Chaytor: You mentioned the
changes to the induction year, the shortening of the thresholds
and the importance of the 10% non-contact time as part of the
new Workforce Agreement. Is that it? What else has your organisation
done or achieved in terms of influencing teacher supply, recruitment
and retention? It does not seem very much.
Mr Lane: There is a number of
things that all local authorities are doing. One of those is making
sure we employ enough teachers each year. Obviously there is always
a turnover; that is now down to about 10% over the country. That
is probably not unhealthy. It is only once it goes below that
you start to have some worries. As employers, we actually went
to David Blunkett at the time and said we had to reconstruct and
teachers' pay arrangements. We advocated and supported the threshold
arrangements. They did that in bits and pieces, which was not
what we wanted. If we had been in charge of these negotiations,
we would have had a proper trade-off of pay and conditions at
the time, and we would have had a much more thought out approach
to what happens post-threshold, which at the moment is still unclear.
We are still trying to persuade Ministers that there should be
two basic career structures post-threshold: one for advanced skills
teachers, which is constantly turned on and off, and one for management.
Obviously there is a link between them and a way of moving to
and fro. The advanced skills teacher was a wonderful way—and
Estelle Morris was keen on it—of paying teachers high sums
of money in order to remain in the classroom, instead of them
having to leave the classroom to get the sort of salaries to which
some of them aspire. There was an opportunity to use that scheme
with teacher training to get them to work with the TTA. We had
all sorts of ideas but that has not really caught on as much as
it could have done. I understand there will be a proposal over
the next few months to phase out the specific grant-funding through
the Standards Fund for that, which I think will be very regrettable.
The reason we went back to the Government and argued for a change
in the structure was because we could see real problems in recruitment
and retention on the horizon with the teaching pay scales locked
into something which did not reflect the 21st century. We were
the big movers behind the Workload Agreement. The employers got
the NAS and NUT to suspend their action in April 2001. We put
to David Blunkett then that you have seriously to look at changing
the contract and at getting everybody around the table to look
at the conditions of service for teachers. We argued that you
should bring into that debate UNISON, T&G and GMB around the
same table. At local level, that is exactly what should be being
mirrored as we now begin the changes in the contracts which start
in September. Our view always is that you have to be doing various
different things both to recruit and retain teachers, but also
to look very much at the way teaching can be seen as a very attractive
career for our very best graduates.
Q195 Mr Chaytor: The issues for which
you have lobbied are based on the information in the annual surveys
that you have done over a number of years. The way you collect
data is different from the way the DfES collects it. Is that right?
Can you remind us of the difference?
Mr Lane: We ask a series of quite
detailed questions. We surveyed something like 10,000 schools,
which is a very large survey, and we had a 70% response, and again
that is high. If you look at the last two pages where you have
an analysis of what we have found each year, that goes back to
all the people we surveyed who replied. That is one of the reasons
we have a good return; they get some feedback as to what is happening.
This is seen as much more thorough and giving a fuller picture
than some of the more simplistic surveys that are done. We also
share this information with the DfES and the Teachers' Pay Review
Body and have close discussions about what we find.
Q196 Mr Chaytor: But the DfES collects
information as well?
Mr Lane: It does do that.
Q197 Mr Chaytor: How is that different
from yours and why do we not just give the job to one of you?
Why do we have these multiple surveys?
Mr Lane: The difference is a series
of wastage statistics with those data historically showing a higher
level of gross wastage than is shown by our surveys. They certainly
do collect data in a different way but we talk to them about the
different figures we get.
Q198 Mr Chaytor: Would it not be
simpler just to have one collection system? I do not see the value
of having two or three different sources of data?
Mr Lane: That is not the only
thing that happens. All sorts of people keep asking schools the
same questions and schools have always said to us, "Why can't
one person ask us one set of questions with which we would co-operate
fully?"
Q199 Mr Chaytor: Could we deal with
the criticisms of head teachers about excessive bureaucracy when
they only have one survey to complete?
Mr Norman: That is a perfectly
fair point but it comes from a great mass of different areas.
The General Teaching Council is doing it, the DfES does it, and
we do it. Personally, I think it would be a great contribution
to get this into shape.
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