Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 236)
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2003
MR GRAHAM
LANE, MR
RONNIE NORMAN
AND MR
JAMES KEMPTON
Q220 Jonathan Shaw: Schools spend
a lot of money on advertising. The Times Educational Supplement
is enormously thick. Advertising costs huge amounts out of school
budgets. As employers, are you doing anything about this?
Mr Lane: We do not always leave
it to the schools to put an advert in the TES.
Q221 Jonathan Shaw: I was advised
recently that there was a panel for a new head where the LEA said,
"You have to advertise in the TES. If you do not advertise
in the TES, no-one will apply for the post".
Mr Lane: First, when it comes
to newly-qualified teachers, the schools may ask the local authority
to collect into the pool through the teacher training colleges
and therefore reduce their costs and give them much more expertise
in that. Local authorities advertise in the journals as well,
particularly for head teachers, and have successfully tested the
field. If lots of schools have vacancies, as they often do in
April/May, sometimes the local authority will buy a whole page
and that cuts down costs.
Q222 Jonathan Shaw: That smacks of
desperation, does it not?
Mr Lane: No, it is not desperation.
It saves the schools money; it gives them a help with the expertise;
and it solves the issue effectively. Any good company would do
something similar. Also of course, many of us have been recruiting
in South Africa, Canada, the West Indies, et cetera, successfully.
Local authorities will work with the schools to cut the individual
costs to make sure that we get our fully qualified staff for the
academic year.
Q223 Jonathan Shaw: Do you think
there should be a DfES website?
Mr Lane: I would not hand it to
the DfES under any circumstances! It is an interesting idea we
might look at.
Q224 Chairman: Graham, there is something
behind this question. If you are a Member of Parliament and you
want to advertise a job in your office, and these days no-one
advertises in newspapers, which is expensive; you go on to "working
for an MP.com" and get hundreds of replies. I think the
Committee is suggesting that a website might be a better way of
advertising vacancies.
Mr Lane: There are two matters.
First, there is a local government website, which is increasingly
used. There is a problem with headships. We are forced by law—regulation—to
advertise all headships in a newspaper. If that regulation were
lifted, and we suggest it is lifted, it might be rather easier
just to use the website. You might want to take that up.
Q225 Valerie Davey: May I return
to the FETs, and we have them in there, does NEOST monitor the
induction year that schools are then giving them? Does it have
a role in monitoring the quality of that provision?
Mr Lane: The local employer would
do that.
Mr Norman: The LEA does that,
overseen by the General Teaching Council. I happen do be on the
induction panel of the General Teaching Council for any appeals
against an induction year.
Q226 Valerie Davey: I wanted to move
on to the fact that some LEAs certainly are doing a second and
third year, which in terms of retention seems to me a very good
investment. Given your concern for retention, as ours, do you
not have any role or any comment in that either?
Mr Lane: The reason why some authorities
are now doing a second and third year induction is because they
have picked up this information from the surveys that they were
collecting from staff who were leaving their employment or leaving
their school. One of the things that came out very clearly from
many young teachers is that they found the induction year extremely
valuable but then it was all switched off. We would like opportunities
to continue that in the second and third years. That is one of
the reasons that many local authorities have actually done exactly
that. By picking up the information, we have actually addressed
the issue that you raise.
Q227 Valerie Davey: This is then
good practice happening, which is my colleague's point. Who disseminates
that? Has NEOST any role in that or are you simply going to have,
as we would assume from your earlier comment, an awful lot of
statistical information, which possibly does not get translated
into effective action nationally?
Mr Lane: There are the various
networks that local government runs. NEOST, as national employer,
is constantly in dialogue with officers of the authorities and
members, and advice notes endorse all sorts of things in different
parts to spread to good practice. The answer is: yes, we do that,
but we are not a Stalinist organisation that can tell 150 authorities
what to do.
Q228 Valerie Davey: I think celebrating
and good practice is at least to do with that.
Mr Lane: Yes, we do that.
Mr Kempton: The point which probably
has not come across so far in our evidence is that NEOST functions
as a national organisation but local authorities get together
on a local basis. For example, in London, the chief education
officers meet regularly as a group of London Chief Education Officers
and members meet regularly, too. That works throughout the rest
of the country. That is an opportunity where people can share
good practice. These are not regional organisations of NEOST because
it does not function that way. In terms of employers working together,
it works very effectively at that level.
Q229 Jeff Ennis: It is good to see
you again, Graham. My association with Graham Lane goes back to
the late 1980s when we sat togther as representatives on the Association
of Metropolitan Authorities. I have a general question to begin
with before I turn to a more specific retention issue. How big
a problem still is teachers seeking early retirement? I know it
has been reduced over the years since 1997. How big an issue is
it still?
Mr Lane: It has dropped considerably.
Q230 Jeff Ennis: I can see that statistically.
Mr Lane: That is because of the
new funding regime that came in. We persuaded the DfES to allow
what the civil servants have got, actually reduced early retirements.
We could not get it at 50; we could only get it at 55. We were
told that could cause people to leave who would not have done.
We did not think it would but it has actually; the numbers increased
when the Government reduced the arrangements at 55. We do not
think we would persuade the Government to reduce the age to 50.
I have seen an indication of some consideration in the new pension
arrangements that it may be difficult for new entrant teachers
to retire at 60 from the profession. The number of people seeking
early retirement is not significant now since they cut off the
early retirement arrangements.
Mr Norman: Anecdotally, I think
the issue is more with head teachers. I think a lot of head teachers
start being a head in their mid-40s and, by the time they get
to their mid-50s, they feel they are almost on burn-out, and I
can quite understand that. There is a problem with getting them
added years and that is becoming tougher and tougher. It is apt
to be the unsuccessful person who is encouraged to retire and
who receives the financial package. This is the wrong way round
but it is very hard to know what to do about it.
Q231 Jeff Ennis: My individual perception
of the situation is as someone who did 20 years in the classroom.
I am sure everybody in this room agrees that teaching is a very
difficult profession. I have nothing but admiration for all teachers
in this country. I have quite a few close friends who are still
teaching in their early 50s. You have used the word "burn-out".
I think some of my friends fall into that particular category.
They see having to work until they are 60 or 65 as a big problem.
Many MPs carry on after the age of 65 in this country but very
few teachers do so. You can draw the obvious conclusion from that.
Are we using enough mechanisms, for example, to try to get teachers
in their 50s to go part-time, et cetera? What sorts of
measures are we taking to try to keep the enthusiasm amongst this
older group of teachers and to retain them in the profession,
so they are satisfied with the job they are doing?
Mr Lane: Teachers retire at 60,
not 65. We have "step-down" regulations agreed. We put
that forward and persuaded the Government to bring in step-down
regulations, which some senior staff have used. That means you
do not take the last three years' salary but you preserve what
that high salary was. There are examples of people choosing to
move into other parts of the educational service. There is a problem
in doing that with very senior staff because of the salary structure.
It is always difficult to recruit inspectors and advisers, even
for primary head teachers but certainly for secondary head teachers,
because of the differences in salary. The only way to do it is
possibly by a secondment arrangement, but that can be quite expensive
short-term. There has been some movement, particularly with head
teachers. If someone is in an inner city comprehensive schools
for 10 or 15 years, he or she may start to think of doing other
things. Other opportunities are beginning to emerge. Appointing
advisory head teachers is one way in which local authorities have
been using experienced head teachers who have successfully run
a pretty difficult school for a number of years. As employers,
this is an area we need to work on continually.
Mr Norman: Another thing we have
not really talked about is the use of support staff to help out
teachers. I suspect that people going through their 50s may easily
want to spend their time coming into a school and lifting the
burdens. They may not be qualified teachers, but they may become
qualified teachers. That is a very important development that
must be carefully handled.
Mr Kempton: Your question was
addressed to what may be a short-term issue. I think it is right
that you should raise that. One of the things we referred to earlier
is getting more flexibility within the workforce so that there
are opportunities for career breaks and for people to come in
at an older age. Your experience of clocking up 20 years before
going on to something else may actually be a positive one. Somebody
clocking up 20 years' experience elsewhere before entering teaching
would also show a positive element in addressing this subject.
Things need to be done to change the culture of teaching and to
make the whole issue of flexibility better. I think the statistics
show that there is quite a large number of people now coming into
teaching over the age of 30. I think that is very positive but
the culture of the teaching profession needs to change in that
area. As employers, obviously we are working towards that. Hopefully,
you will be talking to the head teachers and other representatives
about that issue.
Q232 Chairman: What you have been
describing this morning is a very complex management task of a
dynamic profession and a great deal of change. As we listen to
the evidence, particularly on this topic, not just the evidence
you have given today but the evidence we have taken from other
experts, where is the competence of employers, of local education
authorities, indeed the Department itself, actually to manage
the process? It seems to me that you all have great and good intentions
but are you able to manage this, to make sure, for example, that
we represent our constituents who are taxpayers? If you were in
the private sector—and you do not have to talk about a Stalinist
system—many of your constituents would say that it is an
enormous waste of taxpayers' money to lose so many teachers. The
process seems to be managed ineffectively because no-one seems
to be able to manage. The LEA is not in control any more. The
Government does not seem to be able to do that job and nor do
you as employers. How will you resolve this problem? If you were
a private sector company, spending this amount of money recruiting,
training and then losing that percentage of entrants into the
profession, you would be in serious trouble and it would show
in your bottom line. What can you do about it?
Mr Lane: This situation is complex,
it is true. I think it is right that we move towards a situation
where a lot of the employment decisions are made at school level
and made obviously by the heads and sometimes the governors—but
that is right, I would not want to have a system when that was
not the case—and therefore the employment role has changed
for local government and changed in a much more strategic way.
I do share the view—and it is the view shared by the National
Employers—that you have really to question whether you need
a Teachers Pay Review Body. They do not deal with conditions of
service, for instance. We have found very successful discussions
on the workload talks, where they have involved the Department
and ministers, ourselves as employers and all the unions, including
the support staff unions. Increasingly, I think the schools are
no longer going to be seen as where you just have students and
teachers but you also have a whole group of other staff, who often
are on worse conditions of service, certainly lower salaries,
but you have to see the school staff as a whole, much more interchangeable
too in some of the work that is done. It is quite absurd to expect
head teachers to be expert in accounts and finance, when in fact
there are many more people who could be working with schools to
reduce some of that burden, so they can concentrate on the curriculum
and the educational leadership. Those changes will obviously make
the situation easier to manage. But I think it was always going
to be a complex situation and I think also we must not assume
that teaching is going to be a job that people go into at the
age of 20-odd and come out at the age of 50-odd, having worked
in three or four schools. They may do many other things in their
lives as well. We need to set a school system up which reflects
that in the current structure.
Q233 Chairman: We understand that.
Are you being critical, then, of the inability of, say, local
education authorities to manage the staff across a local education
area? We see from the evidence that here we have a young person,
who comes through as a trained teacher, goes into the first school,
the mentoring may be poor, the whole process of career development
may be poor because of the particular circumstances—you
even mentioned bullying of members of staff, which is quite an
astonishing fact, is it not?—but there seems to be no process
where that new entrant into the system is looked after by a competent
management system.
Mr Lane: We have a conflict in
this country between what is known as school autonomy and schools
working together. We are much keener on getting the latter, but
we do need to look at some extra flexibility that we can have.
I was talking to a senior manager in Marks & Spencer. If they
have the problem in a Marks & Spencer store of weak management,
they move somebody to strengthen that management. That is much
more difficult under local management of schools in this country
and it is in fact a downside of local management that it is not
as easy to do it. We started to use those measures to find ways
round them, but we would like to have more flexibility, so that,
where there is a failing school, we can move a senior member of
staff—he could be a good deputy somewhere—to get experience
of working at headship level in a failing school, of helping to
turn it round, advancing that person's career at the same time
as solving some problems.
Q234 Chairman: Would that mean a
stronger role for the LEA?
Mr Lane: It would mean a stronger
strategic role for the LEA.
Q235 Chairman: Ronnie Norman, what
do you think?
Mr Norman: You started off by
saying from statistics you were not quite sure whether the teaching
profession was any different from other professions and I am not
sure we do know that, but I know if you try to shackle anybody
to stay in anything you are not going to succeed. You must allow
freedom of movement. I think there are a lot of steps in place
at the moment (like professional development for teachers in their
first five years, like the whole of the teachers' workload reform)
which are going to help but I would want to make sure that people
can come back in and go out and there is flexibility of movement.
One cannot be a dictatorial employer or you would be an unsuccessful
employer. I think teaching, which is becoming hopefully more professional
and being seen as a profession—and it is so important that
educators are seen to be a professional in the same way doctors
and lawyers and accountants are—will help people move in
and they will go and be successful elsewhere and come back in.
It is managing all of that which is not the role of a strong LEA.
They must contribute by helping new teachers in schools to make
sure they are developed, offer courses, talk to their head teachers,
et cetera. I am quite buoyant about the future role of teachers,
and there seem to be enough around at the moment, although there
is some disagreement in that, and it seems to be a profession
that people are likely to want to go into.
Q236 Chairman: Could I thank you
very much for the evidence. We have run out of time. We could
have gone on much longer. Thank you very much for the very high
quality of evidence and comment. Also, your colleague who was
trying to undermine the whole Hansard system. If there is anything
you want to add that you think should have been added, it can
be amended—remember when your colleague started speaking.
Mr Lane: Thank you very much for
enabling us to give evidence. You have put some questions which
we will go away and think carefully about.
Chairman: Thank you.
| 
