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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