Examination of Witnesses (Questions 237
- 239)
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2003
DR JOHN
DUNFORD OBE, REV
JOHN CAPERON,
MS KERRY
GEORGE AND
MR GARETH
MATTHEWSON
Q237 Chairman: May I welcome you
to the Committee. John, you are an old friend of the Committee.
We have seen you in front of the Committee many times. We always
get very good value out of you, I do not know if you do out of
us—
Mr Dunford: Of course.
Q238 Chairman:—but we hope
you do. I have met Kerry George before but John and Gareth I may
not have met before. Welcome to the proceedings.
Mr Dunford: Thank you very much,
Chairman. John Caperon, my colleague from SHA is Head of Bennett
Memorial Diocesan School, an 11-18 school in Tunbridge Wells.
Jonathan Shaw: I did know that. One of
his pupils is coming on work experience in my office.
Q239 Chairman: In the private session,
Jonathan asked would I get away with asking questions about access,
in terms of admissions, but I said we would have to control that
strictly today. John, you and the team have been listening to
the previous evidence and you will know that we are keen to learn
some lessons about how we recruit and retain teachers. We are
learning a lot from that process. Would you like to say how you
see it. There was quite a rosy feel about the last group of witnesses.
They thought the situation was pretty much all right.
Mr Dunford: It does not reflect
the picture as we see it. I have to say that I think the essential
player in recruitment and particularly retention now are the schools
rather than the local education authorities. I think that balance
has changed very much in the last 10 years. I presume we want
to focus on retention into the profession as opposed to retention
into a single school because there is a balance between retaining
teachers, which you want to do in your school, but equally helping
them to gain promotion and go elsewhere and get different kinds
of experience. A really good staff in a school is a balance of
people who have been there for a good time and new blood that
is coming in. We want to focus on retention in the profession
as a whole. I guess one of the worries which was highlighted on
the front page of our evidence to you, Chairman, was the age profile
of the profession. That is something that clearly worries you
as much as it worries us over the next 10 years or so. In that
context, I think we have come to realise in the last two years
that actually retention is now a bigger problem than recruitment.
A lot of the measures are in place for recruitment but the measures
that would really do something to improve retention, such as the
Workload Agreement, have not yet started to come in place, and
at the school level I think we feel that retention is more difficult
than recruitment. Workload is a problem but it is not just a problem
in terms of the amount of work the teachers have, it is a problem
in terms of the type of work teachers have and the ownership that
they feel of that work. It is altogether different if you feel
you are a delivery service for a government curriculum, which
is never going to retain the brightest and the best people in
teaching, as opposed to a more creative role that you might have.
But where the workload bites we feel particularly in secondary
schools is on middle managers, on the heads of departments particularly,
who have borne a huge load, particularly in those schools where
recruitment has been very difficult, where there are a lot of
young teachers, a lot of new teachers, a lot of teachers from
abroad and the head of department may in fact be the only fully
qualified graduate teacher in a department of 6, 8, 10 or a dozen
people. So that is difficult. One of the things that has made
that worse in recent years is the number of government initiatives
which have set up opportunities for local authorities to create
secondments. If you look at, for example, the Key Stage Three
literacy and numeracy initiatives and the behaviour management
initiative in secondary schools, the Times Educational Supplement
is full of advertisements in the back section. I started counting
them at one time and I remember one week there were 33 of these
secondments, just for secondary pupils, apart from the number
in primary schools. The people who are being sucked out of schools
for these secondments are the really good heads of departments,
people at that level. I have been advocating for some time, both
in the Department and to local authorities that these secondments
should be part-time, that people should still be rooted in the
schools as heads of departments, as deputy heads, as experienced
teachers, continuing to have that experience, and for perhaps
two days a week working for the local authority, spreading the
good practice around, and so on. You could have groups of people
doing that. I think that would be much more effective and it would
not have the adverse effect on recruitment and retention, because
very often under present circumstances these people do not come
back into the classroom regrettably. I would just make a comment,
because it was in the evidence of the local authority witnesses
earlier, on recruitment and retention allowances. A very low percentage
of teachers was quoted. The reason for this is actually outlined
in our evidence, that secondary school heads do not like using
recruitment and retention allowances because of the inequities
that they create in the staffroom. These inequities can be hidden
in other ways, by paying newly qualified teachers for July and
August when starting in September, and by starting them higher
up the salary scale than legally the head is really allowed to
do. That is widespread in London and the South-East, people starting
not at point 1 but at even point 4 or even as high as point 5.
That is silly because they get to the threshold within one year
or two years of starting, which is not right. There should be
a better way of organising management allowances. Again, management
allowances are used as kinds of recruitment and retention allowances
to give somebody a higher management allowance. These things should,
in our view, be brought into a simpler pay structure, a simpler
classroom spine—and we could show you the details which
we have worked up. A final two points: no, we would not abolish
the STRB—
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