Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260 - 280)

WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2003

DR JOHN DUNFORD OBE, REV JOHN CAPERON, MS KERRY GEORGE AND MR GARETH MATTHEWSON

  Q260  Jonathan Shaw: Could I ask you about job share. It would be an interesting concept for Members of Parliament to be job sharing. I wonder. More realistically, I asked the question of the employers, and they said, "Yes, good" but it is up to you guys, effectively.

  Mr Dunford: It is.

  Mr Matthewson: Yes.

  Q261  Jonathan Shaw: There we are, there is agreement.

  Mr Dunford: It is not easy. It is not easy to organise job share. We support the aspirations of people to come back in, particularly people who have had maternity leave and come back in part-time and so on. The legal framework now is such that we actually have to grant people part-time work and try to organise two part-timers to do a full-time job, even if it is not a formal job-share, under many circumstances. In some subjects in a secondary school, that is perfectly satisfactory. The geography teachers meet their classes once a week, and part of the job share can do one set of classes and another part of the job-share can do another set.

  Q262  Jonathan Shaw: Do you think Reverend Caperon and Mr Matthewson could run a school together?

  Mr Caperon: Indeed, Chairman, just to take that illustration further, as it happens in my own schools this coming September we shall have one absent colleague and two part-time job-sharing colleagues to take over that absence. It may be easier in a primary school situation, where there is more contact with the same group of people throughout the week and to divide between two teachers may not be a huge problem. But if we are talking about, shall we say, an English timetable or a mathematics timetable, you are down to issues of timetabling where it is obviously extremely unsatisfactory for, shall we say, a year 9 maths class to be taught by two or three different maths teachers during the course of a single week or a cycle of the timetable. It does not make for continuity, and, as we said before, continuity is essential.

  Q263  Jonathan Shaw: It does not make for continuity, but, if we are talking about trying to retain very experienced and able teachers . . . As a parent, if I had to choose between one pretty good maths teacher and two exceptional ones, I know what I would choose. You are putting up those points almost like the reasons not to do something. That is how it feels.

  Mr Caperon: I am sorry, Chairman, if that came across as a negative; it was not intended to be.

  Mr Dunford: We had discussed this beforehand—I was a head teacher, as you know, for many years and faced exactly these situations—and we were trying to illustrate simply that it is easier in some areas of the curriculum than others. But, yes, it is one of the weapons open to us to solve recruitment problems. It is increasingly being used in schools, so, if you have to do it, then you have to try to do it well.

  Ms George: Just to prove that we do not always agree on these things—

  Q264  Jonathan Shaw: Yes, I saw you disagreeing when the comment was made that it was easier in primary schools.

  Ms George: I would say it is not necessarily easier in primary schools, but I was about to say—and this is really quite worrying—that I remember what Graham Lane was talking about in negotiating job-share agreements in the ILEA because I was one of the people who did it. I have been involved in job-share working, flexible working for the last 20 years, which is slightly worrying, but, essentially, the issue is actually all tied up with this whole business of saying you have to have a change of culture, you have to think about things differently, you have to come at things from a different perspective. Your perception that you would rather have two good teachers than one indifferent teacher—it would be wonderful to get two excellent and one really good to choose between—seems to me realistic. In those circumstances, a head has to get over the attitudes of other members of staff—which, surprisingly, can be quite negative, and this has always impressed me but it is there—and the attitude of parents. Again, particularly in the primary sector, there is a powerful belief that if children see a different face on a Wednesday morning, somehow or other this will mean that their entire lives will be ruined. Children I think have probably demonstrated they are rather more adaptable than that and they can cope with these things. Certainly there is no evidence to show anywhere that flexible working, job-share working damages children's education. I deal with a primary school which, for the last five years, has only had one full-time member of staff, and that full-time member of staff is the head. By means of flexible working, they have managed to get greater specialism into a primary school, they have delivered all sorts of different things in all kinds of ways. It requires a lot of communication and a lot of planning: once you get into that, it is wonderful. By the way, they have not had a single supply teacher in that school for the last . . . heaven knows how long, because people do not go sick.

  Q265  Jonathan Shaw: What about the issue of early retirement of head teachers? How does that compare now to a few years ago?

  Mr Dunford: There is now an increasing number of things that head teachers can do if they wish to retire early. Heads who have been in post for a long time are now looking, in their mid-fifties, very often to cease to be full-time heads and to become consultants, threshold assessors, advisors and so on, on a part-time basis, and to build up a portfolio and a career in their late fifties. If we tie that in with the National College's development of consultant leaders, which is the top end of their professional development scale, that is actually quite a good development, if those people are then spreading good practice back into the system, either by staying in post and doing that consultancy work part-time or by actually retiring early and doing these jobs.

  Q266  Jonathan Shaw: We heard from the Open University last week. They said that in terms of mature entrants into the teaching profession, 60% were seeking to achieve head of department or senior management positions within two years of qualification. That changes the picture, does it not, from what Mr Matthewson told us about, your management development? You have had a traditional route, you have been in teaching all your life and acquired management skills over a period of time. If we have mature people coming in from various different backgrounds—which is a good thing, as I think everyone agrees—what do we need to do to ensure that those people who are ambitious are going to have the necessary depth and skills to manage our schools in the future?

  Mr Dunford: We have the flexibility within schools at the moment, when really good people come in like that, to fast-track them. The way we fast-track them is not by joining any government scheme, but by giving them posts of responsibility and actually giving them really good jobs to get their teeth into at a very, very early stage. Yes, it is perfectly possible, particularly in certain parts of the country, where heads of department posts can be very difficult to fill, for these people to become heads of department very quickly indeed if they have the talent to do it.

  Q267  Jonathan Shaw: The Times Educational Supplement, your schools, the 24,000 schools, spend enormous sums of money. Can we do it any differently? Or was the advice from my LEA, that you have to advertise if we are going to have any head teachers respond to this advertisement in the TES.

  Mr Caperon: The situation, Chairman, is that there are a number of different advertising possibilities at the moment. I think the vast majority of schools are still using the Times Ed, which is of course available as a web site as well as a newspaper, so it is simply a bit of old technology and it does I think at the moment still provide for the vast majority of schools the place where they would probably, on balance, want to advertise most, if not all, of their full-time permanent posts—although obviously the local press tends to be used for short-term and part-time advertisements—at a cost, however. One of my colleagues in Hampshire tells me that over the last year he has spent way in excess of £25,000 on advertising in order to try to attract from a very, very sparse field.

  Mr Matthewson: There are other ways of advertising for staff, using the E-Teach, for example, which operates a system via the website. You can advertise through them very, very cheaply. But, although many schools are using them because they are so cheap, they are worried about whether to not it will actually go to all the people that they think it should, so the Times Educational Supplement continues to be used, I think, by the overwhelming majority of head teachers when they are advertising for staff, because you want to get the best feel and you do not want to lose out because you failed to advertise in the right place. In my part of the world, I have to say, if you are advertising for a Welsh teacher you advertise in the Western Mail. I am sure John would know that. May I make one other point which is quite important. I do not want us to lose sight of the fact, John is right, that people are leaving for further development and professional enhancement in other ways, but we are still losing many heads because of burn-out, the stress of the job and so on. I really do feel that that should not be lost, because it is a factor in retaining good staff, good head teachers. In terms of the costs, going back to the Times Ed, a colleague sitting behind me says it costs him the equivalent of two teachers a year because he has to advertise for so many teachers.

  Ms George: The new regulations, the staffing regulations which will be applied in schools shortly, still require that the head teacher has to go into a printed publication, so the Times Ed will still keep its place, I think, for some time. The second point about early retirement which we skipped over rather quickly, is that we have always said that the prospect of early retirement actually enhances people's capacity to stay on. There is something encouraging about being able to see the finishing tape, as my colleague behind me just said. Ironically it can work that way. We would also like to see considerably greater creativity, as, for example, there has been in Scotland, where they now have a much better winding down scheme than anything we have in England and Wales. They do actually have something that means in the last few years you can reduce your teaching, you can work differently, but you do not lose out in pay terms. Graham Lane described the stepping down scheme. Stepping down is fine, but, depending on when you do it, you lose out in pension terms ultimately. We would like to see a bit more creativity there.

  Q268  Jeff Ennis: I wonder if our two sets of witnesses could very quickly outline and rank in priority order the main issues that they feel are impeding successful retention in schools today.

  Mr Dunford: Workload; accountability—excessive accountability . . . What is my next one?

  Mr Matthewson: Perhaps I could come in!

  Mr Dunford: Sorry, behaviour.

  Mr Matthewson: That is exactly what I was going to say.

  Mr Dunford: Behaviour; and pay. In that order.

  Q269  Jeff Ennis: Teacher behaviour or pupil behaviour?

  Mr Dunford: Pupil behaviour; and pay.

  Q270  Chairman: Gareth Matthewson?

  Mr Matthewson: The same. I think the issues are pay; workload; behaviour, definitely; accountability—which is a big issue and getting worse, particularly for head teachers. When you asked the question, I could not quite work out whether it was heads and senior staff you were talking about or teachers generally.

  Q271  Jeff Ennis: Teachers in general.

  Mr Matthewson: In which case, then, all of those, and the whole business about house prices in certain parts of the country. I really do feel that we have to keep that in mind. It is interesting that you go to some schools, particularly, say, in Inner London, and you will find that they survive largely obviously with lots of Australians and so on but also large numbers of youngsters, who, in many cases, are happy in their early years of teaching to continue to live like students. Because of that, living in shared accommodation and so on, they can manage to continue to live reasonably cheaply and they are happy to stay in London. But, of course, there is a time when they eventually wish to leave London and our view tends to be that once somebody has left London they do not come back.

  Ms George: Perhaps I could just add very quickly that yesterday I had a call from a school in London where they were asking whether it was okay to give a newly qualified teacher a management allowance because they had no one else to carry out management responsibilities. We had a long discussion about it and I suspect that if they do that, that is going to be one of the NQTs who will go, but they are desperate. It is that sort of situation that we cope with because particularly in London we have young staff who do not stay.

  Mr Caperon: Could I just make one further response to the issue about concerns and could I add the issue of public esteem. It does seem to me that we need, as a society, to continue the efforts to recreate public esteem for the role of the teacher and I am encouraged to say that recently in attempting to recruit for the graduate teacher programme in our school, we had an excellent response to a single advertisement and several of those whom we interviewed said that it was that advertisement which said, "Those who can, teach", which got me thinking. Perhaps we are moving in the right direction, but until there is a real understanding that teachers are doing a most valuable social role, then I think there will be difficulties in retention.

  Q272  Jeff Ennis: To change the subject slightly, one of the initiatives the Government have really brought in, which I think has been quite successful, has been the real expansion in the number of non-teaching assistants and curriculum support assistants. Has that had any effect on the ability of schools to retain staff?

  Mr Dunford: I think it is early days to say. It is something that both secondary and primary schools have been doing of their own accord in recent years and clearly it will be accelerated considerably by the new agreement. Anything frankly that makes a teacher's job easier and makes it easier for the teacher to concentrate more on the teaching and the learning and to get away from the administrative tasks is helpful.

  Ms George: I think the evidence is that teachers absolutely value the classroom assistants and the support that they get. The mere presence of other adults in the classroom assists with a whole mass of things, including pupil behaviour which causes enormous difficulty. There was reference earlier to the NUT's position on the Workload Agreement and I think it is sad that the NUT manages to produce evidence that suggests that some of our teachers see this as creating workload for them to have additional people to work with in the classroom because certainly everywhere I have been to, talking to headteachers in the country and talking to deputies and teachers, they have not said that at all. They value these people hugely and they wish there were an awful lot more of them. I think it is starting to make a difference and to see how it works over the long term will be interesting.

  Mr Matthewson: There has of course been a big move, particularly in large schools, of administrative tasks to non-teaching staff. For example, I have a non-teaching member of staff doing all the exam work in the school, doing all the daily cover work and all those sorts of task which were previously done usually by a senior member of the teaching staff and they are done just as efficiently by somebody who is specialised in that area.

  Q273  Jeff Ennis: In Barnsley and Doncaster, the two local education authorities I represent, we have a number of schools in challenging circumstances and the sort of variation in retention rates between the schools in challenging circumstances is enormous. What would you think are the main factors in terms of a school in challenging circumstances being able to keep its retention rates high as opposed to some others where the rates are low?

  Mr Dunford: I think it is partly a funding issue and I think the Government's Excellence in Cities programme has put a lot of money into schools in inner cities, schools which are in challenging circumstances and has helped them to employ a much wider range of support staff. I think that has been hugely helpful as well, but I think the thing that works most against retaining people in schools in challenging circumstances is the accountability regime which I put pretty near the top of my list because over-accountability, as we said in our paper, is even worse in schools in challenging circumstances than it is in other schools.

  Mr Caperon: There is also the whole issue of league tables and I think it is exceptionally difficult for schools in difficult circumstances who are seen both by themselves and by external observers to be less successful, going down the tube, at the bottom of the pile. Wherever we have a hierarchy of schools, that is going to be very, very destructive to professional morale for those working at the lower end and it is enormously important that we do all that we can to ensure that those schools which are perceived as, in some sense, at the bottom of the pile are given those additional resources to enable extra staff to go in, and it is not of course the case that Excellence in Cities universally applies to all such schools.

  Q274  Chairman: I certainly appreciate those comments with the particular difficulties of my own constituency. Can I just push you on one point though, Gareth and John. In terms of your hierarchy, in behaviour, what is interesting about behaviour is that you go to two schools that look broadly similar on most of the criteria, special educational needs, free school meals, whatever the criteria, similar sorts of parts of cities or towns. One has excellent behaviour, excellent behaviour, and the school in exactly similar circumstances has appalling behaviour. Now, what is it? Is it something about the quality of management, leadership from the head or what is it that you notice as soon as you go into a school where you immediately see that the staff are in the corridors, in the playground and the head is everywhere? You say it is behaviour, but very often the behaviour is a factor very related to the management of the school, is it not, the quality of management?

  Mr Matthewson: What you quote is something that you can see clearly because you will go to some schools in similar areas and yes, the behaviour in some schools is good and the behaviour in others is not so good, but I think we need to look a little bit below the surface and see why is it that perhaps this school is different from that. Very often, once one school has gained itself a sort of reputation of perhaps being the better school, it attracts per se the better children and there is no doubt that the whole business of open enrolment and the fact that there are in some areas schools where perhaps there is a surplus of places, you are going to find that some schools are going to benefit by recruiting the better kids, the ones from families where they take more notice about education possibly, and other schools are left with the more difficult children to deal with. Those present particular challenges, particularly in terms of retaining teachers because if teachers can go to the school up the road and earn exactly the same salary and have less challenge and more professional fulfilment, then clearly that is a choice that they might well be inclined to make rather than stay in the school which is extremely challenging. I think there are issues about looking at the way in which we allow pupils to go to schools because even those that have been quite well publicised, those schools that have had so-called `superheads' installed which have managed, if you like, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even they have had great difficulty in maintaining a very high standard over a very long period of time because the problem persists.

  Q275  Chairman: So you are saying that whatever the quality of the head, the quality of the management, the behaviour will remain the same?

  Mr Matthewson: No, I was not saying that. What I was saying is that the system of open enrolment can create difficulties.

  Q276  Chairman: No, you have just said that.

  Mr Matthewson: I said that the system of open enrolment can create particular problems for certain schools because once schools in one part of the town perhaps are perceived as having a better reputation, they are likely to attract the better pupils which creates particular problems for other schools. The school which has got the more challenging circumstances could have an excellent headteacher and excellent staff working there, but if they have got more challenging children, I am afraid you may well see, particularly in the locality around the school, more evidence of misbehaviour far more than you would see in another school. I do not think it is as simplistic as you described originally of saying that if you go to two schools in similar areas, the behaviour is good in one, bad in another and it must be something to do with the head and the staff.

  Mr Caperon: I want to put a complementary view to that. It is not an opposite view, it is a complementary view. I would say that most children in my experience, most children, will behave properly, positively if effectively led and managed, most children, but effectively led and managed does not just mean having a head who is on the corridors all the time or is inspirational or whatever, but it is about a whole staff commitment to shared expectations and values and without that, then clearly the culture is not going to work. It is essentially about culture and underpinning that culture has not only got to be a set of shared assumptions about what we do in school and what we do not do in school, but there has got obviously to be the parental support. Unless there is a clear understanding and agreement between parents, teachers and students about what students are in school for and how they need to behave in order to benefit from it, then obviously we get the difficulties of which you have spoken, but there is a significant minority of youngsters for whom what perhaps most people in this room this morning would regard as normal and acceptable canons of behaviour do not exist and it is with that very small minority of youngsters that there is, I think, a very particular problem and the need for very well resourced, very adequately staffed with good ratios specific attention given to, if you like, the process of re-education and socialising so that the educational enterprise can actually continue effectively, but that is a small minority, I believe.

  Mr Matthewson: I think the difficulty about the small minority is that it is concentrated all in one school and I think that is where you have the real problem.

  Q277  Mr Chaytor: Just pursuing Gareth's point, surely what you are arguing is a circular argument, accepting that the immediate neighbourhoods of schools vary significantly. If we are comparing like with like, the school that is getting a better reputation and, therefore, attracting a greater number of applications is doing that precisely because of the quality of the headteacher and senior management?

  Mr Matthewson: It may well have started off there and that is absolutely possible, but do you want to accentuate that and have a situation where you create, one does not like to use the term "sick schools", but you have schools that have difficulty in breaking out from the situation that they are in because all the circumstances are contriving against them? There have been many examples, have there not, of superheads going into schools, being paid large sums of money, but not actually being able to do a great deal because we have found that it is not just the head, but it is the whole team that really needs to be looked at and the additional resources need to address those issues as well. There is another two-pronged attack, I suppose, on the issue of pupil behaviour and that is actually putting into place policies which will support and help youngsters in controlling their behaviour and seeing the benefits of a proper social existence with their peers in school and the normal respect that we would expect to be shown from youngsters. Generally speaking, LEAs I do not think have the resources necessary in order to be able to provide the back-up that we need. Just getting an educational psychologist to come and see a child can be a major undertaking in some local authorities because the resources are not there and that creates further problems. It leads on to all sorts of difficulties about exclusions and so on, particularly in the upper part of the secondary school, which I think have been created largely because of a lack of resources earlier on.

  Q278  Mr Chaytor: Yes, but at the end of the day I am just anxious that you are trying to abdicate the heads of responsibility.

  Mr Matthewson: No, I am not doing that.

  Q279  Mr Chaytor: At the end of the day these things must remain the head's responsibility within the overall financial context and within the nature of the immediate catchment area. What I am trying to say is do you not accept that at the end, it is the head who determines the culture and policies of the school and determines the overall ethos and, therefore, sets the standards of behaviour?

  Mr Matthewson: No problem. I fully support what you say.

  Mr Caperon: I think that is absolutely true, but to establish that culture and ethos positively in some schools is far more difficult than it is in others.

  Chairman: Well, we go to a lot of schools as well as you, John, and the fact is that the most depressing school to go to is where the head and the staff say to you sometimes straight and sometimes in code, "What do you expect us to do with these kids coming from this sort of background?" That is the most depressing thing that anyone who visits a school might face.

  Q280  Paul Holmes: Just returning to a point which was raised earlier about trying to get some respect back for the profession and that that was a key factor in recruitment retention, when the Committee visited Dublin and Belfast recently to look at schools, one of the big things which struck us over there was where they were saying, "Teachers are respected. The brightest young graduates apply for teacher training", and they were comparing that to here. Ronnie Norman, at the end of the first session, was saying that he thinks that we are just getting teachers to the point where they can be professionalised, but would you agree that people have not been professionals for the last 20 odd years and whose fault is it that it is seen that way?

  Mr Caperon: I think there has been a growing culture of professionalism over the last 30 years in the education profession. I think the issue is, if you like, an issue of perception rather than an issue of actuality and I have to say that the press or certain sections of the press have not always been as positive in their presentation of the education system and those who work hard within it as they might have been and I think a lot of very regrettable assumptions have gone around on that basis.

  Ms George: I also do a lot of work particularly in Northern Ireland and the difference I see there is that education itself is highly respected. There is a massive difference in terms of the culture in which people are working and that is something again which I think we have damaged in this part of the world very much at our peril because it is actually important. The Workload Agreement, just to come back to that very briefly, again is actually about refocusing the teaching profession on teaching and not being distracted by other tasks which actually seem to me, and I think a lot of teachers have said this and a lot of heads have said it, to have taken us down roads which have been deprofessionalising rather than anything else.

  Mr Matthewson: A recent survey of the quality of managers and so on put headteachers in a very high position as being trusted, honest, efficient and whatever, so I think that did quite a bit of good for heads generally. I sometimes think that the profession think less of themselves than others do. Generally speaking, parents will always, or almost always, be highly complimentary about the school that their children go to and certainly are not critical of the teachers in the overwhelming majority of cases, although they may make general comments about teachers having long holidays and things of this sort, but, generally speaking, they do show respect to the teachers in the school where their own children attend.

  Chairman: If I can draw this to a close, perhaps I can say as Chairman of this Committee that I think the teachers in this country are fantastic and do a wonderful job, but sometimes around about Easter perhaps they give the press an opportunity. Thank you very much. It has been a very good session.





 
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