Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


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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