Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2003
DR JOHN
DUNFORD OBE, REV
JOHN CAPERON,
MS KERRY
GEORGE AND
MR GARETH
MATTHEWSON
Q240 Chairman: Get away!
Mr Dunford:—flown mysteriously
by the LGA a few minutes ago. We believe that the STRB has been
a good independent body that has produced a lot of good recommendations
over the years. We certainly do not want to go back to the collective
bargaining situation that we had before. To sum it all up, the
paper that we have given you on accountability, which in fact
I think I sent to Members of the Select Committee a few weeks
ago, I think it is that whole area of accountability which is
reflected so much in retention—particularly to the question
you asked about retention into schools in challenging circumstances,
where you particularly want to retain a good cohort of experienced
teachers to bring some stability into the lives of those youngsters.
There are certainly pay measures that you can take to do that.
I think that the accountability framework is particularly important
in that respect.
Q241 Chairman: Thank you for that.
I am going to return to the very patient Meg Munn to open the
questions.
Mr Matthewson: Is it possible
for us, from the National Association of Head Teachers, to say
a few words at the beginning as well.
Q242 Chairman: I am sorry. Please,
do carry on.
Mr Matthewson: I will not say
much because I think John has made an excellent introduction and
we fully support what he has to say. The NAHT obviously represents
primary as well as secondary and special schools, and we have
a lot of information coming through from our colleagues about
the situation as it exists across the country—which is a
very mixed picture as you could probably imagine. Some areas,
for example, when advertising for primary staff, are receiving
anything up to 100 applications and other areas of the country—and
I probably do not have to tell you where those areas are—might
receive no applications at all. The point made by John at the
beginning is absolutely right: it is the schools that are responsible
for recruitment and it is the heads who have the responsibility
each year to make sure that their schools are fully staffed and
that there are teachers in front of children; otherwise, they
are the ones who carry the accountability for that. In many places,
they are covering up the cracks brilliantly. I think that is hiding
a lot of the problems. A colleague to whom I was speaking only
a moment ago, who is sitting behind me, said that recently he
has had to make two phone calls in the middle of the night to
Australia, to carry out interviews over the phone in order to
recruit staff for his school. That is the sort of work that is
being conducted by head teachers in order to make sure they actually
have teachers in their schools in these difficult and challenging
areas. There is also an issue, particularly for London and the
South-East, where you have a body of teachers which is not necessarily
increasing in number but actually moving around from school to
school and driving the pay up in the sort of way in which John
was describing earlier. The issue of turnover is indeed a big
problem. That is one of the issues that is highlighted most often
by head teachers in their complaints and criticisms of the current
situation. Fast turnover is very unsettling and the turbulence
to schools is quite considerable, and it is not helped particularly
by a policy of open enrolment that does tend to create some schools
that are far more popular than others. Clearly schools that are
struggling in certain areas because of the nature of their intake
will find young teachers moving reasonably quickly to a school
in a different area where life can be less challenging, shall
we say. That creates problems for some schools and extreme difficulties
for some head teachers as well. I have just one last comment.
The appalling situation we have experienced this year in some
parts of the country with regard to the funding of education is
actually, perversely, leading to redundancies and job losses.
We have some areas where the number of teachers being employed
is falling whilst of course other parts of the country are still
struggling for teachers.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that
and apologies again.
Q243 Ms Munn: I want to move on to
talk about this whole issue of whether it is reasonable to expect
teachers to remain in the teaching profession throughout their
life. You heard earlier the witnesses saying that having people
feel it is okay to leave and come back is important. Is that your
view? If so, how does that affect what you would want head teachers
to be doing about this whole issue of retention?
Mr Caperon: I think it is very
important to try to keep the maximum amount of continuity and
service. Such is the movement, such is the pace of change in schools,
that I think even a relatively short break is going to be difficult
sometimes for a very professional person even to be able to negotiate.
Therefore, we need to try to ensure, while there are obviously
going to be, if you like, flexible structures for working practices
generally, I think we need to try to ensure in schools the maximum
degree of continuity of work. Obviously, through issues like maternity
pay and maternity leave, the provisions now exist for people to
move to a part-time post at some time and then perhaps back to
a full-time post subsequently. That is the kind of arrangement
which is actually very helpful, but I think schools, as John said
earlier, do need continuity and I do not think we would want to
get into a culture of schools where there was a great deal of
onward movement year by year. Children and school communities
need as much stability as possible.
Ms George: I think part of the
issue also is that the expectation that young people have of the
way that work actually works, if I may put it that way, has changed
massively. Very few young people now expect to go into a job and
stay in the same place for 15, 20, 25 years. They just do not.
They expect to move around. If we do not recognise that, that
will be something that we will fail to learn at our peril. The
critical issue, however, my colleague has raised is the business
of saying how, if people are to come in and out of the profession,
you ensure that someone coming back does not then immediately
face things that they simply cannot deal with because they are
out of touch with the changes that there have been, and the non-stop
change that we are becoming hardened to, shall we say. There are
massive issues, it seems to me, around saying, "Yes, we have
to recognise that people will come and go, but, equally, we have
to be very, very clear about how you re-induct people into schools."
Some of the keeping in touch schemes that some authorities did
were fine, but they were very, very, sort of, small beer, in the
sense that they tended to concentrate on the one group which people
think of as coming in and out of the profession: the maternity
leavers. The reality is, as my colleague said, that has changed.
People do not leave now by reason of maternity. They take a reduced
post and they stay around and come back. An awful lot of them,
frankly, cannot afford to leave completely. So that has changed
and it has changed quite markedly. It is something which I do
not think we have yet got to grips with, but which we will lose
completely if we do not recognise that young people do want to
come in and out of different sorts of work.
Mr Matthewson: Flexibility is
key. The opportunity to be able to say yes to a colleague who
has been on maternity leave and wants to come back on three days
a week or four days a week. To be able to accommodate that I think
is very helpful. It keeps that person in the profession and then
they gradually later on go back to being full time. But it requires
a lot of skill, I think, on the part of heads, in particular,
in schools to be able to manage that.
Q244 Ms Munn: We seem to have a bit
of a difference of opinion here, with this end of the table saying,
"This is the expectation we have, that people might want
to do something else," and the other end saying, "Really,
we want to keep them in." Do you not see that perhaps there
is some value, for somebody who has maybe been in teaching for
10 or 15 years, actually going off and doing something else, getting
different experiences, perhaps feeling motivated and refreshed
and then saying, "Actually, I am going to take that experience
back into the classroom."
Mr Matthewson: I do not think
we are disagreeing, actually. I am saying that by being flexible
we are keeping them.
Q245 Ms Munn: No, what John Caperon
said was very different from what Kerry George said.
Mr Matthewson: All right.
Q246 Chairman: I think it is up to
us to decide whether witnesses agree or disagree! We will have
the transcript. John, you wanted to come in.
Mr Dunford: The problem, I think,
is that they do not come back. If people are going to go part-time
or on maternity leave and so on, they come back into teaching.
People who leave teaching and go to another job are very often
leaving because they have had a bad experience, they feel bad
about the job, and they do not come back five or 10 years later.
Perhaps if they have been an MP and lose their seat, then you
never know, but . . .
Q247 Ms Munn: I am worried about
these two! There are two issues. One, sure, if people have had
a bad experience and/or they discovered teaching just is not for
them, that might be the right thing, both for them and the profession
to move on. If they have had a bad experience, that is about what
your group as head teachers and everybody can do to improve their
experience. But there is the other end of that, which is what
should your organisation be doing to say to people who have left
teaching and are doing something else, "Come back."
Mr Dunford: Crucially, we have
to be able to say that you are coming back to a more attractive
profession than you left. We, as associations, have been working
incredibly hard on that over the last two years, particularly
in discussions around workforce remodelling and reducing workload.
We really do pin high hopes on that in terms of making teaching
a more attractive profession and actually the benefits to us,
first of all, will be for retention.
Q248 Ms Munn: That helpfully moves
into my next question really, which was around what is the role
of head teachers in managing and reducing teacher workload? It
is very easy and legitimate to say the Government should do this,
the Government should do that, but what is the head teacher role
in that?
Mr Dunford: We certainly have
what is potentially a difficult situation to manage in September
this year, with the so-called 24 tasks being taken away from teachers,
which head teachers will no longer be able to require those teachers
to do. During the course of the last few months, heads have been
meeting with staff to try to see the distance between where the
school is now and where the school is going to be in September.
But in September they will have to manage the consequence of that
situation and that could actually be quite difficult, particularly
if relationships within the school are not so good. It is also,
I think, not just a matter of these 24 tasks; it is actually about
a culture change in school. At a meeting of head teachers the
other day, I asked a head teacher sitting in the front row, "How
many staff do you have in your school?" He said, "177."
Two years ago, he would have said "65" meaning 65 teachers.
He now says "177" meaning all staff that he has at school.
That head teacher has made the cultural leap that probably a lot
of us do not often make and will have to make very quickly in
the autumn term.
Ms George: If you are going to
have this kind of culture—and, I agree with John absolutely,
it is a cultural change—it is also, as far as I am concerned,
a refocusing of what teachers should be doing, rather than a whole
pile of stuff they have picked up over years because schools have
been underfunded and they have not brought in support staff and
they have collected jobs. Anyone who is addicted to photocopying,
for a start, is going to find life very tricky from September
onwards. They really are.
Mr Matthewson: They will still
do it!
Ms George: Yes. But, realistically,
it is about changing the culture completely and that has to start
with the leader of the organisation. It is head teachers who actually
work more excessive hours than any other group of people in the
entire system. Price Waterhouse Cooper's report demonstrated that.
They themselves have to think differently and operate differently.
The governing bodies are going to have to think differently. We
cannot seriously have situations where meetings start at 7 o'clock
in the evening and go on until midnight on a regular basis. That
is no way to run schools. There is a massive culture shift that
needs to take place. I think what John originally said is right,
the way you get people back into the profession when they have
left, assuming that they have not left with broken legs, is that
they will come back to something that they see as more attractive
and much more of a profession than a job where they are picking
up all sorts of things they should not be doing.
Q249 Chairman: Going back to the
point I tried to raise with the witnesses at the end of the previous
session: who manages that process? If you are going to give new
experience, it is going to be better, but who manages it? At the
moment, with the relatively independent role of schools and the
weakened role of LEAs, it does not look to us, or certainly to
me, that there is anyone out there who actually can make sure
that process is managed.
Mr Dunford: As two associations,
we are supporting our head teachers in managing that process.
We want the Government—and in this case it is not just the
Government, it is us all working with the Government by agreement—to
create the framework in which the head teachers manage the situation.
We are saying that, that framework will be radically changed,
culturally changed, this September and through the next couple
of years, in ways that would be helpful to head teachers to manage
that situation. Managing any kind of change is not easy, particularly
where, as Kerry points out, there are working practices that teachers
are not always going to want to give up these things.
Q250 Chairman: It is a very complex
management task, running a large school, and even a small school.
Are you satisfied that the quality of training in management is
there? This symptom that Kerry George mentioned of someone having
meetings that start at seven and run until midnight, is that not
the sign of poor management?
Mr Dunford: I have two good heads
on either side of me.
Mr Matthewson: We do have to meet
until midnight sometimes—but that is more because governing
bodies want to talk a lot, and for various other reasons. With
regard to the implementation of an agreement on workload, that
we are going to be moving on to in September, there is a slight
difference perhaps for larger schools which are used to employing
a fair number of non-teaching staff, and probably in many large
schools the 24-tasks are not being carried out by many teachers
anyway. For the big schools—and I am head of a pretty big
school—it is going to make a tremendous difference. I think
where the problem is going to come this year, and hopefully we
will get over it in future years, is in smaller schools where
the budgetary restraints are not necessarily going to allow them
to employ additional non-teaching staff in order to take on these
tasks, and they could find themselves in a very tricky management
situation where you have possibly a union rep saying, "We
are not doing these any more," and you have the head teacher
saying, "Who is going to do them?" Of course, who will
end up doing them? The head teacher and the senior staff. That
could be a problem. I am hoping that will not create the sort
of difficulties at the beginning of this new agreement that will
sour it for the rest of the years to come, when I think there
are big gains to be made by all of us.
Q251 Chairman: That is very interesting,
but you have sort of side-stepped the question. You manage a big
school, you have just said.
Mr Matthewson: It happens to be,
yes.
Q252 Chairman: Where did you get
your management experience?
Mr Matthewson: I picked it up
along the way, I suppose!
Q253 Chairman: In any other business,
Mr Matthewson, running a big, complex organisation, to say that
would have people laughing in the aisles.
Mr Matthewson: Perhaps it was
a flippant remark.
Q254 Chairman: John Caperon, where
did you get your management experience?
Mr Caperon: Chairman, thank you.
I got my management experience in the relatively early days of
my career in what was then a pioneering school, Banbury School,
in Oxfordshire. That was, I think, one of the first major comprehensive
schools to become a seriously professional organisation. I think
throughout my work in that school and subsequently, added to with
reflection and higher degree study time (as it happens, in my
case, the University of Oxford), I was able to move through a
range of management posts, gaining experience, gaining perspective
and gaining, if you like, as a consequence of the way the ladder
works, increasing responsibility. Head teachers nowadays obviously
have a far greater support than was the case when I was coming
through, through NPQH and through all the other support mechanisms
for head teachers, both before headship and, indeed, subsequent
to their appointment. I think it would be very misleading, Chairman,
for you to assume that a lighthearted remark from a colleague
here—
Mr Matthewson: It was not quite
meant in that way.
Mr Caperon:—was meant in
any way to be an accurate description of a whole complex of very
serious management training arrangements which are in place for
the profession. Increasingly, the work of NCSL (the National College
for School Leadership), and you will know, Chairman, of the shift
that has now very significantly taken place from an emphasis upon
management to an emphasis on leadership. I do not think that means
that the management of schools is any less important than it ever
was. Clearly, we have huge issues to manage.
Mr Matthewson: Could I add something.
Q255 Chairman: Could I just say before
you do—
Mr Matthewson: I made what appeared
to be a flippant remark and I would like to expand on it.
Q256 Chairman: Gareth, would you
be quiet for just a moment. I want to make clear that this Committee
and certainly the Chairman does not say anything, in terms of
the management, in terms of a negative. You have absolutely the
greatest of support. I believe that heads should get all the help
they can in a complex management task. Gareth, someone who learns
management on the job, I would not decry at all. I hope we get
that straight.
Mr Matthewson: Yes. What I said
actually was true: you do pick it up along the way, because that
is the way head teachers of my generation did learn. It has been
described in a more expansive way, but it is very much a case
of learning on the job. I can remember, when I first became a
head in Newham, one of the other head teachers, who had recently
had a secondment for a term, had written a very good thesis on
becoming a head. She could not think of a proper title for it
but her husband came up with one: Bang, Bang, You're Head.
I think it summed it up. At that time, you were a deputy one day
and you became a head the next. A lot of it was brand new to you.
Although you had been a deputy and you had picked up a lot of
management experience, all of a sudden this was a totally new
job that you were taking on. It is changing today because of the
national professional qualification for headship and the sort
of work that is being done in order to prepare people for the
situation.
Q257 Chairman: Here we have a tremendous
waste of our nation's money, in terms of losing people from the
profession and, as John said, who never come back. We are trying
to dig under the surface, to find out in terms of the quality
of management experience. Should it not be very very high, for
a head as a manager, to ensure that a young member of staff coming
into the school does have a very positive experience. If he or
she is in the wrong niche, if the experience is not going well
in the first year . . . . We have examples of a recent survey,
about to be published, by one of our specialist advisors that
gives cases studies of people getting to the profession. Their
mentoring is nominal, minimal, if it exists at all, and there
they are, cast away, from the case studies we have in front of
us, and they get no support. Then after three years, they leave
the profession and never come back.
Mr Caperon: Chairman, if that
is the case, it is a matter of extraordinary regret. I would say
to you, certainly from the perspective of the Secondary Heads
Association and, I have no doubt, from NAHT's perspective as well,
one of the key priorities for all school managers is to ensure
that there is effective, adequate support, both for newly qualified
teachers in their induction year and, indeed, subsequently. Most
schools, I am quite sure, are keen to develop or have already
developed a structure in which there are very specific responsibilities,
as, for example, professional tutor, staff tutor, subject mentors
and so on, very specific professional structures within which
the early years of teachers can be supported and made more effective.
Clearly—and I think you are absolutely right to challenge
on this—unless there is in all schools an effective, positive
culture of ongoing professional development, then people are going
to be saying, "This profession is not actually helping me
to move on as a professional, it is not helping me improve the
quality of my work, and the quality of my rewards, therefore"—which
must be seen in human terms rather than monetary terms—"is
not adequate." Professional support is absolutely essential.
I am sure all the associations would agree on that.
Mr Matthewson: That is absolutely
right. I will not add at great length because I think that has
summed it up pretty well, but what you are finding these days
is more and more schools are actually going for the Investors
in People Award, which I think is a very clear indication of how
seriously they take the business of the professional development
of their colleagues. If you are going to go for an award of that
sort, then clearly the professional development and the support
you are giving to new colleagues coming into the profession is
absolutely crucial. Certainly it is in all our issues to pursue
policies of that sort, because we want these youngsters to stay
in the profession. We do not want them to leave, we do not want
them to be attracted to go elsewhere, and we need to make sure
that if, for example, they might be having some particular difficulties,
perhaps with behaviour problems with youngsters and so on, they
get the full support in the early years while they develop and
mature and become competent teachers.
Q258 Paul Holmes: You talked in the
evidence you have given about the importance of the new workload
initiative in helping to retain teachers with better conditions
of service and so forth. The employers group also said the same
thing. But Graham Lane said that, for example, the shortening
of the pay spine from 9 to 5, which is one initiative, had been
underfunded and that is part of the crisis this year. Of course
the largest teachers union has not signed up yet to the workload
initiative, because one of the things they say is that it is not
going to be funded: it is not going to work because the money
is not there. Are you confident that the money actually will be
there in September and the year after and the year after to make
it work and therefore to retain teachers in the profession?
Mr Matthewson: We are not confident
it is going to be there in September but we are working on or
hoping that the guarantees that we have been given that it will
come through in future years will actually materialise. We can
only go by what government ministers are saying to us.
Mr Dunford: For both NAHT and
SHA this has been of huge concern, and right from the beginning
of the negotiations we have been saying, "Yes, this is fine
provided we have the resources to deliver." That is a major
worry.
Ms George: The essence of our
concern, and we have said it right from the start—neither
of the associations ever had the slightest difficulty with the
agreement itself and the principles contained within it: they
are absolutely sound and we have got to deliver them—is
that it is members ultimately, whatever the LEA said earlier—and
I was impressed by some of the things they said—who will
have to further that. It is the heads in schools who will need
to deliver that and make sure those changes occur. The risk for
our members has always been that they would end up piggy-in-the-middle,
that they would not have the sufficient resource to deliver the
things that are needed, that they would have members of staff
on their hands who, quite rightly, have had their expectations
raised and want to see changes. They want to see changes with
effect from 2 September. That has all been of huge concern for
us. The Government, I think, in fairness, has recognised that
there is a major problem this year—we all recognise it is
an extremely difficult year. We also know that we will have schools
that will be going into deficit budgets this year because they
are determined to make sure that they will deliver the changes.
We are really pinning our faith at the moment—and I have
to say it is our faith—on the idea this will not be replicated
and we will get the money sorted out properly for years two and
three of the agreement. The problems that will ensue if we do
not, do not bear thinking about. The agreement, frankly, will
fail unless it is funded.
Mr Matthewson: We are concerned
about recruitment and retention but recruitment and retention
of senior staff as well, head teachers and so on. If this agreement
turns out to reduce the workload of teachers but at the expense
of increased workload of the senior staff, then clearly that is
going to have an effect on the recruitment and retention of heads.
There is a concern that unless it is properly funded there are
dangers that senior staff in schools could end up picking up some
of the pieces, ending up with a greater workload themselves. If
I could just quote an example, we will have a situation in a few
years time where teachers will not be required to invigilate in
examinations, but if you do not have sufficient funding to be
able to recruit enough good quality invigilators you could end
up with heads and senior staff having to fill in lots of gaps
in situations like that, which clearly would be an increase in
their workload in which they are not currently engaged. My worry
may be unfounded but it is those sorts of concerns that are nagging
away at us at the moment, and that is why we want to be certain
that the agreement will go forward—that it will go forward
and reduce workload across the board, not just in one sector of
the service.
Q259 Paul Holmes: The employers'
statistics showed that turnover in teaching has shot back up to
14%, which is the high level it was last at round about 1990.
Graham Lane said the thing that is going to solve this is things
like the workload initiative. But you are saying there is a grave
danger that, even from this September, if you do not know the
money is there—and we are already in that financial year—there
is a grave danger that, far from solving the problem, the turmoil
that could come from it being underfunded will make the problem
worse.
Mr Matthewson: It could be very
difficult during the first year.
Ms George: And as much in the
primary sector as anywhere else because of the differences in
terms of the extent to which support staff are employed. The smaller
the school, the less likely it is that you have a massive support
staff handy. You simply will not. That aspect of it is going to
be difficult, that these funding problems came at a time when
an initiative of this importance is just starting to hit the schools.
Absolutely desperately unfortunate.
Mr Caperon: Could I add a further
comment on that with your permission. I think it is enormously
important that all of us recognise that this is a three-year programme
of reform which does need, as colleagues have said, to be very
adequately funded, but it is not something which relies simply
on head teachers. It is, I believe, essential that head teachers
and governing bodies are working very effectively together to
ensure that the culture of schools has changed and that the employment
practices and assumptions of schools are brought into line with
the new expectations. But, if I may, let me just return to the
issue of the retention of younger members of staff and the workload
implications of this. I am actually this year, in the school I
lead, losing only one younger member of staff. This is somebody
who is an extremely able and talented teacher, who has had no
broken legs or other difficulties during the course of her two
years with us. She happens to be married to a junior hospital
doctor. When explaining to me that she felt it was time for her
to move on from the profession and return to academic study, she
made it very clear that one of the key reasons was that, by comparison
with her junior hospital doctor husband, she was working excessive
hours, and she had no opportunity except during holiday times
to have a life of her own. Unless that situation is changed for
young and, indeed, more experienced teachers, the drift from the
profession will continue.
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