Examination of Witnesses (Questions 327
- 339)
MONDAY 7 JULY 2003
MRS HEATHER
DU QUESNAY
CBE, DAME PATRICIA
COLLARBONE DBE, MR
RALPH TABBERER
AND MISS
MARY DOHERTY
Q327 Chairman: Can I welcome today's
witnesses? Most of you are well known to this Committee and some
of you have given evidence before. On social occasions I think
I have teased Ralph that he has not yet had the pleasure to appear
before our Committee and he said he could not wait to appear.
We are coming to the end of our inquiry into teacher recruitment
and retention. I suppose we are at that stage where we are getting
dangerous because we now know something about the subject. On
some of the questions that have been left unanswered we will be
looking to you and the Minister on Wednesday to reveal all. Heather,
in terms of the National College for School Leadership, can you
tell us what impact you think you have made? I remember when I
first met you. I think I was about to be elected Chairman of the
Committee and we were across the road at a school together. Very
shortly after that, you moved on and now you are in this very
important job. What sort of difference are you making to retention
and recruitment of teachers?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It is a good question.
We have been in existence for just over two and a half years so
we are still quite a new organisation. We are not going to claim
that we have everything taped. We have not cracked it all but
where we are making a difference is that we can now offer a fairly
comprehensive range of leadership development programmes. We have
put enormous emphasis on encouraging all teachers to see themselves
as leaders. For those who are taking on a formal leadership role
for the first time at head of department/head of subject level,
subject coordinator level, those people should not just see themselves
as leaders and be acknowledged as leaders but also have some formal
training provision. We piloted quite a sophisticated programme
for those people which will be rolled out from September. Part
of what the college has done is about enhancing the skills, the
knowledge, the understandings, the behaviours of leaders within
schools and the other part is about enhancing their self-belief,
their status if you like, because the whole notion of leadership
is something which is enhancing in terms of people's confidence,
people's sense of having an ability to affect their environment,
to influence others. As I think you have probably found out, one
of the issues that affects teachers' morale and possibly demotivates
them from time to time is that they do not feel that sense of
control and that ability to shape their work. We would want very
much to counter those kinds of impressions. We have just published
the first report that we have compiled about our work. At the
moment it is still fairly partial but we have a good picture of
very positive reactions to the college's work from those who have
engaged with us. We have had well over 10,000 people engaging
in major programmes over the past year coming to our building
in Nottingham, which is a splendid place that offers an environment
that will encourage pride in the teaching profession. We have
many thousands more people engaging in college activities all
around the country through our affiliated centres and through
the other leadership providers who work with us.
Q328 Chairman: How long do people
come for? What sort of courses do they do?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It varies very
much. We do not offer long programmes. People do not come for
three or six months and spend time continually at the college.
All of our work depends on what we call "blended learning"
which means that people have the opportunity to access learning
materials through our website, which is quite extensive and sophisticated.
They also have the ability through the website to engage in discussion
with others through some of the most extensive online discussion
communities we believe exists anywhere in the world. We have 28,000
leaders registered to participate in those discussion communities.
They will also spend some time at the college or in some other
residential provision but that might only be for two or three
days at a time. Then there will be a significant component of
the study that they do which depends upon them doing work in their
own school. They will do a school based improvement project. I
have mentioned already the programme for middle leaders, subject
leaders and others. That is Leading from the Middle. Then there
is the National Professional Qualification for Headship which
becomes mandatory in 2004. There are three routes for that. The
length will depend upon how much prior experience people have
and there is a variety of other programmes of varying length,
but mostly a relatively limited residential component, coupled
with web-based learning and time spent in school on a particular
project.
Q329 Chairman: People outside looking
into the educational sector might say about institutions like
yours that they are a bit special and focused. What is the difference
between someone like yourselves who talks about leadership and
other providers in other sectors who talk about management?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It is a good old
chestnut that we can spend a lot of time thinking about. We would
want to argue at the college that leadership and management are
closely intertwined but that management probably puts more of
a focus on processes, structures, the maintenance of good systems,
day to day operations, all of which are absolutely essential to
make a school work well. If you are going to look for a situation
where you are going to get widespread and radical change—and
I think we are signed up to the notion that that is what the public
education service needs—you have to think of leadership
in a more profound way. You have to think about the way in which
leaders can really exert a powerful influence and give a powerful
message that will motivate people and move people forward to do
things that they might otherwise have thought were unthinkable.
Q330 Chairman: Why do we have a special
college like yours for education? We have the National Health
Service University coming in to see us on Wednesday. Why would
not a provider like Ashridge or Cranfield or even a private sector
supplier be just as good at providing management and leadership
rather than setting up a special college in this exclusive zone
of education?
Mrs Du Quesnay: There are an awful
lot of things that we have in common with other providers. We
just saw Bob Fryer, the chief executive of the National Health
Service University, before we came here. We have tried to learn
from what is going on in the private sector. We have a number
of private sector members of our governing council, including
our chair, Richard Greenhalgh, who is chairman of Unilever UK.
The whole notion of a coordinated, coherent framework for developing
leaders we borrowed from the private sector and from what they
do in companies like Unilever. We do spend quite a bit of time
trying to find out what is going on among other leadership providers
both in this country and internationally. We try to learn from
the best. We also hope we have some practice to share with them.
The big difference is that if you are leading a school you are
leading pupils as well as staff and you are leading learning.
Most leaders would say you have to be committed to learning if
you are going to be an effective leader these days. There is something
special about the role of the school in terms of its role to educate
and instruct pupils and that does require some special skills,
knowledge and understanding.
Q331 Chairman: There seems to be
a problem emerging that we are not getting enough female heads
coming into secondary education. Are you addressing that in terms
of the kind of work you are doing?
Mrs Du Quesnay: Yes. It is an
issue that does concern us. We do have data. I am afraid I do
not have all the data about the gender split just at my fingertips
but you are right. We have a lot of head teachers of primary schools
who are women but there is still an issue about the number of
women coming forward to headship roles in secondary schools. We
are researching and have already done some pilot work in terms
of developing a programme that would encourage women to come forward
into secondary, formal leadership roles and particularly headship,
just as we are for people from ethnic minority groups as well.
Q332 Chairman: Ralph, in terms of
the particular niche that you have in the education empire that
we jointly have this interest in, what is your special contribution?
What is your unique selling point?
Mr Tabberer: The Teacher Training
Agency is an executive agency charged to deliver at the gateway
to the profession on targets for recruitment to the profession.
We have to bring in about 35,000 people to initial teacher training
a year. Our other primary charge is to ensure that the quality
of the initial teacher training is the best we can make it. That
is most of our remit. We have additional areas where we contribute
towards overall teacher retention policy, for example, by supporting
LEA and school local initiatives to hold onto and recruit staff
and also by overseeing the induction year. We are very much a
gateway organisation.
Q333 Chairman: How do you benchmark
your success? When I was an undergraduate and coming towards the
end of my undergraduate studies, there were a lot of people round
me who did not quite know what to do with the rest of their lives
and they signed up to initial teacher training because it staved
off the fearful day when they had to decide to go out to work.
I say that only in a slightly humourous way in the sense that
still, despite your best efforts, we have an enormous amount of
wastage out of the profession in the first three years. First
of all, people come in; they take the initial teacher training
and they never teach. Others do not stay the course and drop out
during the first three years. If you were a commercial organisation
and you had that track record of getting bright, young graduates
in; they stay with you such a short time, you would be asking
some pretty hard questions of your management team about why that
was happening. It still seems to be the same sort of problem with
large numbers of people going out of the profession very quickly.
Mr Tabberer: You started with
a question about how we judge our success. You have gone into
the particular of what we do about people in the first three years.
We judge our success and our performance against the government
targets and how well we have done over a period of 10 years. We
judge against the quality of the intake, how many people have
had 2:1s and better, for example, and also we judge against the
quality of people in their first year of teaching. We use several
yardsticks for judging how well we are doing. Coming to your specific
question about people leaving in the first few years, when I talk
to industrialists about what happens in teacher recruitment and
in early years retention, the sort of dropout that we have is
not unfamiliar to them. It is true that early in a career people
are still finding their choice of career. If there is going to
be turnover anywhere, it is early while people are beginning to
understand their choices.
Q334 Chairman: Unilever, Shell, Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers lose 50% of the graduates they take in?
Mr Tabberer: It is very difficult
in practice to compare figures. There was the Audit Commission
report 2002 on several public sector recruiters and we have discussed
recruitment with a number of private sector recruiters as well.
I know we should be doing everything we can to hold on to everybody
we can. That is exactly what the best companies are doing but
this comes up every year with industry colleagues from STRB. My
experience from industry is they find our problem unremarkable.
Q335 Chairman: The evidence we have
taken so far suggests that here we have people training to be
teachers. They are bright, young undergraduates. Many are committed
to teaching. They come into teaching and they are very quickly
dropped into schools. Many of them have very little experience
of teaching in a range of schools, perhaps socially deprived schools
right through to more affluent schools and so on. It does seem
to many of us on this Committee that the evidence we are getting
is that the management of their first three years is pretty hit
and miss. Is that not something that your agency should be looking
at?
Mr Tabberer: I do not want to
say there is not a concern. We believe that as a profession structurally
and by institution we should set out to provide the industry best
practice, human resource management. We ought to work at everything
we can in order to hold on to the precious graduates that we get.
It would certainly make our job of recruitment easier. Indeed,
we look at what we can do to hold on to people better in those
early years. All those things are true. We have to look at the
issues that have been raised by other people giving evidence to
your Committee and by the GTC survey. We have to look at issues
of workload, behaviour management, but we also have to recognise
that there are limits to what we can do, particularly because
these days when we talk to young people and career changers about
their outlook on career there is a very different attitude these
days from the one that would have existed, say, 20 years ago.
There is much more expectation of high occupational mobility.
If we go back to industry colleagues, many of them would be assuming,
if anything, higher churn in the future rather than lower. We
must do things but also we must not pretend that there is a magic
bullet or that we have unique problems which somehow, if we just
did this or that differently, would be solved.
Q336 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask about
your projections for the future? You have said that at the moment
we are recruiting 30,000 teachers into training for each year
but what is the pattern likely to be in the next decade in terms
of the demographic patterns in schools? Will that 30,000 a year
figure remain constant? What will happen to the numbers of pupils
and how are you planning for that?
Miss Doherty: The first thing
we have to take into account is pupil numbers. They are a major
driver. In terms of primary pupil numbers, we already know they
have started to decline and secondary pupil numbers will decline
from 2005. They are not the only things which make demand for
teachers. The other factor you have to take into account is the
age profile of the teaching profession. We are recruiting at the
moment because we are aware of the demographics of the age profile.
It is characterised at the moment in a sphinx shape where we have
a large number of people at my sort of age in their career, moving
forward, who will be retiring over the next 15 years. The supply
model we work to from which the targets are set is derived from
taking into account the number of people who will be leaving,
the pupil population numbers, the demands for teachers. That comes
into the work that the Government is developing now on remodelling
the profession, looking at the demands being made on teachers
and looking at the work that teachers are doing and the concerns
teachers have about workload. All of those factors are taken into
account in the numbers. That comes back to us being allocated
numbers by the department to recruit to. That is the next challenge.
Recruiting to secondary priority subjects has been very challenging.
We have made headway in those areas. We need to continue to look
at the introduction of the training salary and golden hellos.
The repayment of the student loan has helped, as has a starting
salary which appears competitive and a shortening of the pay scale.
We cannot let up. We have to be unrelenting in working to fill
all those allocated places in a very competitive job market.
Q337 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
annual figures, are you saying therefore that the 30,000 a year
will remain constant because that takes into account the compensatory
effects of declining school numbers and the large numbers of teachers
declining in the next 15 years?
Miss Doherty: The aim will be
to have a flatter age profile rather than the sphinx shape we
have now. The numbers we recruit each year are reflecting that.
Q338 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
interrelationship of the different factors, what assumptions are
being made about the role of non-teaching assistants?
Miss Doherty: The major issue
for teachers and retention is workload. You want teachers to be
doing the jobs that only teachers can do. We have seen in other
walks of life—I am grateful to my colleagues in the TTA—a
whole range of jobs which enable me to do my job and that is equally
true in teaching. The remodelling agenda, bringing in the high
level teaching assistants, is going to enable the teachers to
do that job.
Q339 Mr Chaytor: Within the model
are there assumptions made? We know about the importance of relieving
teachers of jobs that non-teaching assistants should be doing
but are there assumptions made about non-teaching assistants taking
on a teaching role?
Mr Tabberer: At the moment, we
have our provisional allocations only within this spending round,
so it is for the next two years, both for secondary and primary.
In both cases, we have been asked to bring in additional teachers.
The general climate at the moment is very much one of recruiting
more teachers and more non-teaching assistants and teaching assistants.
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