Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
MONDAY 7 JULY 2003
MRS HEATHER
DU QUESNAY
CBE, DAME PATRICIA
COLLARBONE DBE, MR
RALPH TABBERER
AND MISS
MARY DOHERTY
Q340 Mr Chaytor: Can I pin you down
on this 30,000? It is not 30,000 until 2011 but it is 30,000 for
the current spending round?
Mr Tabberer: Formally, we will
have provisional allocations only for this spending round, but
it would be reasonable to assume that the figures will be in the
region of 30,000 over the next 10 years. There are a number of
fluctuating considerations including government policy. We have
had to recruit more primary teachers because of the expansion
of primary education in the early years. If there are decisions
taken about changing the nature of range of qualifications for
secondary education, that could affect things but there are no
proposals that I know of in that area at the moment.
Q341 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
scale of the problem of recruitment at the moment, we have had
varying messages during our inquiry but how do you judge the scale
of a problem between nirvana and crisis?
Mr Tabberer: It is often observed
that the business of recruitment is one of flood and drought.
If you have slightly too many teachers, there can be media stories
about people who are not finding jobs. If you have slightly too
few, it is a major problem. This is an issue because in many schools
one teacher not being there can mean a whole class is not covered.
The projection at the moment on recruitment is, over the last
few years, we have done much better. Everybody recognises that
the numbers are up considerably. The view that generally there
is now as much a problem to be focused in retention as in recruitment
is a very good position to be in.
Q342 Mr Chaytor: In terms of recruitment
it is really: crisis? What crisis?
Mr Tabberer: No. I would not say
that. We work in a very competitive labour market. These days,
everybody wants graduate labour. There are industries who would
have accepted intermediate qualifications a while ago who now
compete for graduate labour. Frankly, if we let up with any of
our aggressive campaigning or incentives we would be concerned
that we could slip back very easily into what may be a crisis
for individual schools.
Q343 Mr Chaytor: In respect of turnover,
this is the issue that is worrying you more at the moment but
if we accept we are living in an era where most people assume
they will not do the same job for life and if we accept that teaching
is a demanding profession, where we need a constant influx of
new blood anyway, how do you balance the healthy effects of turnover
and injecting new blood at all stages of the teacher's career
and the need to ensure stability and avoid unnecessary wastage?
Mr Tabberer: These are the very
challenges. Structurally and by institution, it seems to us the
only way you can go is to improve across the whole sector and
in individual schools the quality of human resource management,
so these things are managed locally as well as possible. If we
do not plan succession, if we do not recruit actively and positively,
if we do not look after our staff as well as industry is planning
to, we will find things more and more difficult. The conditions
at the moment that seem likely in the labour market, with higher
occupational mobility, the right way to go is to improve leadership
and management, not making movement in and out of the sector more
difficult. That would be taking a risk, not least with recruitment.
These days, if you ask large numbers of young people about coming
into teaching, if you said it was a career for life, you would
find the numbers who perhaps are now willing to commit to that
in the terms that they might have 20 years ago are far fewer.
Lots of people want to teach. They enjoy the idea of making a
difference in young people's lives, but it is far more likely
these days that young people will seek maybe four or five career
changes in their lives and we are very much in favour of an open
market and a sector competing well.
Q344 Mr Chaytor: Your solution to
turnover is to improve the quality of management of each individual
school but are there not patterns between schools? There are patterns
of turnover that vary hugely between schools. What can you tell
us about the variable forms of turnover that we have?
Mr Tabberer: There are structural
issues for the whole sector as well as institution by institution
issues. There is very clear evidence that the more we can do to
reduce burdens on teachers, the more we can do to reduce the workload,
the more we can do to improve work/life balance, the more we can
do to offer extra support and behaviour management, when we survey
new recruits and when we survey people in the profession, these
are the critical issues which keep coming up. Just as if we were
in a company, we should be listening to our employees and taking
their views into account in future policy.
Miss Doherty: There are also hot
spots. London and the south-east are clearly areas of great turnover
and we are heartened by the introduction of the London Challenge
and the opportunities that is going to present. Turnover there,
where you already have considerable turmoil in pupils' lives,
can be a useful thing but it can also be detrimental to the well-being
of the learning experience of the pupil; so making sure that the
focus is on retaining the good staff and having a core of sound
good staff, but also welcoming others back. We have a programme
for people returning to the profession, encouraging people who
have had experience to come back. The number of returners has
increased over the last few years, and they have opportunities
through returners' course provision.
Q345 Mr Chaytor: In London and the
south-east, is the issue the nature of the school systems and
the individual schools or is it the competitive pressures of an
economy that has a very, very high level of unemployment?
Miss Doherty: I think it is a
range of factors. When the housing prices in London are, on average,
£100,000 more than elsewhere, that is going to be a major
factor. There are also other things in terms of the amount of
investment in London in education compared to, say, the police
or other services. There are major challenges for London schools
also. The London Challenge is going to be very welcome in that
area.
Mr Chaytor: We have a confused picture
of the availability of data on teacher recruitment and retention
and I would like to ask the TTA and the National College what
your views are on this and if you think the current arrangements
are satisfactory. If not, how can we improve our data collection
systems for teacher recruitment?
Q346 Chairman: Is the data good enough?
Some people will tell you, "We have all the data we like."
Others tell us it is insufficient and they do not really know
what is going on. Who is right?
Mrs Du Quesnay: They are probably
both right. I do not think our data is good enough. We have been
in existence for just over two years. We are refining it all the
time. We will have a much more sophisticated means of collecting
data about the people who engage with us next year but in terms
of overall predictions about the shape and structure of the teaching
profession we depend very much on the Department for Education
and Skills. There is lots of data. The problem is it is not always
processed in a way that makes it very usable and accessible for
the particular needs of particular agencies. I am pleased to say
we have just managed to get into much closer discussion with the
Department about that and we are hoping to do some work with analytical
services in the Department, which we hope will satisfy our needs
better in the future. There may be more work to do.
Mr Tabberer: We are in a different
position in the initial recruitment and the early years of the
profession. The TTA has been around for nine years. We have been
building data sets quite elaborately for quite a while. The data
we need to take decisions in our area is pretty good. Recently
there was a study of data availability across Europe and I think
only four countries had data sets of any strength. Ours compared
well with those other three. We feel that broadly we have data
to take the decisions we need. There are always areas where you
collect it where you would like more because you are drilling
into issues more deeply. A bit more comparative data might help
us so that we could cope better with questions about the relative
performance in teaching and other professions but whenever we
have gone looking for that we get very clear advice from people
about being very cautious about the comparative basis. The other
area where we could do with more data is simply long trends over
time. We have now built up some pretty healthy data sets tracking
inquiries about teaching into acceptances on courses, into applications,
into acceptances and into registrations and then through. In the
next few years, we will be able to use that data to look back
and understand a bit better than we do at the moment which routes
and which types of people to drill into further but broadly we
have the data we need.
Q347 Mr Chaytor: Your data systems
are largely about recruitment and not so much about turnover.
In terms of the monitoring of what happens post-recruitment, who
is collecting and analysing that information and is that satisfactory?
Mr Tabberer: The responsibility
for that lies largely with the Department. It works with pensions
data and with GTCE because it is now collecting data. We all link
up and try to make sure, within the compliance of the Data Protection
Act, we can use and share data and drill into it. There is certainly
more to be done in tracking on from the early data and following
it over time so that we can really get at trends. There are quite
extensive data sets within the profession, age profiles etc.,
but that is probably something that you ought to ask the minister.
Q348 Mr Pollard: I am delighted to
see Heather Du Quesnay in her new role. When she was director
of education in Hertfordshire, she was inspirational and showed
great leadership. I have followed her career with great interest.
Ralph suggested earlier that there would be more churning in the
system in the future and there will be pressure on class sizes
coming down. Is that likely to require more than the 30,000 you
were talking about? Mary mentioned the overall pupil numbers dropping.
That may well be so in certain parts of the country but in the
South-East where the new build is likely to take place the population
is likely to go up, so there will be regional differences. That
would need to be taken into account as well.
Miss Doherty: I think you are
right about regional differences. It is very important to take
account of them. When I was talking about the pupil numbers, I
was talking about nationally. We know in London and the eastern
region that pupil numbers are going to increase there. That is
where things like the pay and awards and the progression are important
in attracting people, because we can attract people to London
for several years in the beginning stages but as they reach different
stages in their life cycle they are tending to want to move out.
We have to make it attractive for people to stay in the profession
at those stages and we have to respond to the regional variations
and differences. Much of our work with recruitment managers is
funded from the TTA through a grant from the DfES where 97 recruitment
managers work in 107 LEAs. They are working very much at making
sure that they have a staffing population which is appropriate
to their school needs. They are doing some forward thinking in
terms of the demographics you are talking about within regions.
Q349 Mr Pollard: When we talked to
Doug McAvoy a short while ago he said his ambition was to have
every teacher staying in the profession and having to be dragged
away, kicking and screaming from it because it was so good to
be a teacher. It gets back to the churning. I have had seven different
careers in my time and no doubt I will have a couple more before
I have done. I am not sure that Doug McAvoy's hypothesis was entirely
right. What would your view be about that?
Mrs Du Quesnay: We need a mix.
I do not think it is realistic to think that anybody is going
to sign up to a job for 40 years. I have had three or four different
jobs myself but when I went into teaching there was a sense of
probably embarking on something that might be a career for life
and the world is not like that anymore. It is absolutely true
that you have to have a sufficient, stable core of people who
children get to know, who parents get to know, who create the
community and the ethos of the school. You cannot afford to have
such a churn that you never achieve that. That is one of the issues
in London and it is particularly an issue if people leave after
three or four years and they never really move on to middle leadership
roles. You have that hole in the middle. You might be able to
get a headteacher. You get the youngsters or the Australians or
New Zealanders coming in, but you get that hole in the middle
which is where so much of the quality of the school is driven.
That becomes a real problem.
Q350 Chairman: Is not one of the
problems that so much of your management and leadership is education
specific? Many teachers seem when you talk to them to be worried
they are going to be trapped in teaching only for the rest of
their lives. If you gave them a more transferrable skill, perhaps
they would feel more confident. If the trend is that people move
in and out of careers, if you gave them less specific training
and more general management training but with education as a main
focus, they would have more self-confidence in their ability to
move in and to move back. Is there not something in that?
Mrs Du Quesnay: The leading of
teaching and learning is only a part of what we do at the College.
A lot of what we do would be very much shared with other kinds
of leadership organisations. We look at strategic planning, managing
the organisation, interpersonal skills, self-awareness so that
you know the sort of impact you have on others. All of that kind
of activity and understanding would be shared with all sorts of
leadership development providers. We are also looking very hard
at how we can get higher education accreditation for some of the
leadership qualifications and programmes that we offer again in
order to give them greater currency and status so that people
would feel confident that they could move into other spheres,
other professional areas.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: What
we are trying to do with the programmes more and more as we develop
is work very much with management consultants and others, putting
together programmes which do bridge that gap so it is not purely
educational. You can take the best of the best from Ashridge or
Cranfield or wherever to make the programmes a good balance. That
is very important indeed. One thing I would agree with Doug McAvoy
on is that we do want teachers to say that it is really good to
be a teacher. That is very much to do with providing things which
are motivational, with the right kind of support and career progression.
Indeed, there are many more teachers these days who will talk
about transferrable skills because they realise the skills that
they have gained as a teacher are very marketable and transferrable,
particularly those which are to do with interpersonal skills,
emotional intelligence. There I go back to data because the one
thing we need to remember is that schools are very data rich.
More and more these days there is a lot of data and information
that schools can use, both about the individual as well as about
the class and the school. That means that we can know a lot more
about what we want to do. That is specifically important in the
programmes where we do a lot more work on emotional intelligence
and thinking about what does this 360 degree feedback mean to
me. We are trying to get heads to look at that so that when they
take 360 degree feedback from their staff and staff give them
messages they can say, "Hang on. What do I need to do to
make this school much more motivational for my staff? Oh God,
I did not realise this behaviour was producing this kind of effect
for my staff." There is a lot of work we are doing, borrowing
from the work of Daniel Goleman from Harvard and those places
around those interpersonal skills. There is more to do and of
course there always will be but we are certainly beginning to
bring those things into programmes.
Q351 Mr Simmonds: I want to follow
up one or two points that David raised with regard to recruitment.
I was very intrigued by one of the exchanges that took place when
there seemed to be a general acceptance that recruitment was fairly
acceptable at the moment, except at the margins. I want to give
you the experience in my constituency. Governors, head teachers
and teachers say to me that 20 years ago for every job there were
50 applicants. Ten years ago there were 20. Now, if you are lucky,
you have a choice. Often there is one. More often than not, there
is nobody at all. Is that not an abject failure on your part?
Mr Tabberer: What we were saying
on the issue of recruitment is that recruitment into the profession
is now in a stronger position than it has been but I would completely
accept that there are real challenges in London, the South-East
and you can follow it up through Oxfordshire and other areas.
It is true these days that in many schools they will get smaller
groups to recruit from. If people are after priority subjects,
maths or science, in perhaps disadvantaged areas of London in
a school that is not doing well, it can be extremely difficult
to find people. We would absolutely accept that there are real
problems and we are working with local authorities and schools
in those positions. What we have to recognise is several things
have caused this to come about. Some of it was lower recruitment
into the profession during the 1990s. Part of it is also the expanding
appetite for teachers in schools. The school sector has been expanding
over the last five or six years. The amount of expenditure, at
least up to this year, has been growing. People have been looking
for extra teachers and the demand within the system has increased.
If you look at teacher numbers compared now with what they were
six years ago, they are considerably larger across the whole profession.
I am not saying that the situation you have described does not
exist. We try and do everything we can to help those schools.
We are starting to help to bring in more teachers now which will
contribute towards making this position better over time.
Q352 Mr Simmonds: Is there anything
that can be done in addition to the dedicated resources that are
going to the recruitment process at the moment? Student loans
were mentioned earlier and the golden hellos. Certainly in my
constituency, which is part of rural Lincolnshire, it is not part
of the London problem but there are terrible recruitment issues.
Nothing seems to be specifically being done for the particular
area that I represent where maybe all the focus tends to be on
providing London weighting or whatever where perhaps the more
visible problem in the South-East is. Is there more that can be
done?
Miss Doherty: There are recruitment
managers in Lincoln so they are working in Lincolnshire in order
to attract people, but there are particular areas which may find
it very difficult to attract people. Schools have at their disposal
recruitment and retention allowances which they can use to encourage
staff to apply for posts but there is some reluctance on the part
of head teachers to use those recruitment and retention allowances.
That is the first thing, using all the opportunities and incentives
that head teachers have at their disposal. Secondly, in terms
of Lincolnshire, it may be worth tapping into the returners. If
schools can respond and have more job shares and flexibility in
terms of working hours, there are probably more people to tap
into.
Q353 Mr Simmonds: Obviously I am
talking about the whole of the country. Are there other areas
that you think could assist recruiting teachers into the profession—ie,
an allocation of a specific funding stream that does not exist
at the moment? If the Secretary of State for Education said to
you, "We have this spare pot of money. We would like you
to use it in a way that it is not being used at the moment",
how would you use that money to recruit people and in what area?
Mr Tabberer: We have found that
the way we have to approach recruitment—I think the same
applies to retention—is very much thinking about different
groups of people and different people's expectations of work.
It is a marketing job. It is trying to make the proposition of
teaching attractive to them in the short or long term. What we
have done with previous injections of funding is to look for new
schemes which are viable at bringing in able and committed people
we have not had access to before. This is how we started, for
example, the graduate teacher programme which is on the job training
so that a school which is facing difficulty has an additional
option of going to a career changer and saying, "You do not
have to go back to college to train. Maybe that is not an attractive
option for you. You can come into school and we will organise
a training package for you". We have been able to expand
that scheme over the last three years from just a few hundred
people to now round about 4,000. We are just about to take that
up to about 6,000. We constantly look for these new routes in
which attract different kinds of people. Last Tuesday I was in
Canterbury with a new group on Teach First. This is a new experiment
with a different kind of candidate. It is trying to recruit some
of the most able people from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford,
Imperial and the like and offer them a proposition, which is that
they will train for two years as teachers and work within our
most challenging schools. In that period, they will also get a
business education so that at the end of that they can make a
choice about which route they want to go down. That is an experiment
that is well worth trying. It currently has 186 people on it and
if it proves itself as quality training and gives us some retention
we would look to come to Government and argue for an expansion
of it, with a proven scheme. There is quite a marketing process
about trying out new ideas, watching how they catch. Where they
are worth pursuing because they give us able and committed people,
we try and take them to scale.
Miss Doherty: The school curriculum
is based on a range of fairly defined subjects, whereas in higher
education people are tending to go in for amalgams of degrees
and disciplines. Although we have a good, healthy graduate population,
when we are looking to recruit people to particular subjects we
are looking for people who perhaps do not have the subject knowledge
in physics and we give them an opportunity through physics enhancement
courses which we are going to start piloting in January. We are
already under way with maths for those people who are just below
the subject knowledge required for initial teacher training, to
have a six months, in depth opportunity to enhance their subject
knowledge. That is going to be maths, physics and chemistry. For
modern languages, we are looking for linguists with two languages;
whereas people are tending to go for a language with economics
or with business studies. From next Easter, we will be piloting
an opportunity for people to get up to speed in a second language
for Key Stage 3 by an intensive three month immersion course;
looking at all the different pools that we can draw upon and responding
to those different pools with different provision, recognising
that there is no one answer, but constantly examining the data
and the statistics and what is going on and then deciding: is
the provision of a one year PGC appropriate to all? Do we need
to find other ways to support and enhance subject knowledge so
that that graduate population that is there can be matched to
the challenges of the school curriculum.
Q354 Mr Simmonds: You mentioned earlier
that the recruitment process in the graduate market was highly
competitive and you also mentioned some of the issues that you
have to try to resolve to make teaching a more attractive profession.
You did not mention pay. Is that a significant factor?
Mr Tabberer: Yes, pay is important.
It is a factor but it is not, in our experience, the most important
factor. It plays slightly more strongly in our testing with men
than with women as a factor. It has been an advantage to us in
our recruitment and campaigning over the last few years that there
have been improving pay and conditions in the sector. We promote
the starting salary. People ask us about the salary several years
in. There is now a threshold payment which helps us to talk about
progression after several years in. We talk about higher levels
that teachers can aspire to, staying in the classroom, and indeed
the higher headship scales. We also recognise that there are lots
of pressures on the public purse. What we are particularly keen
to see is a mixture of a national pay which is compelling and
also pay flexibility so that individual head teachers can make
decisions about what additional bonuses or wider human resource
packages they should be supplying locally in order to tailor to
the particular needs of Lincoln or Birmingham, Cumbria or whatever.
Q355 Chairman: Are teachers well
paid now or generously paid? What is your view?
Mr Tabberer: When we are in campaigning
mode, there has never been a better time to be in teaching. In
London particularly there is a compelling salary and if you are
considering a future career in teaching I can assure you it is
well paid. We always take our advice to the STRB that if there
are any additional allowances possible then we are interested.
It helps us to recruit.
Q356 Jonathan Shaw: We heard from
the Open University a few weeks ago and the solution, according
to them, was more mature teachers. One of the criticisms that
we had of the Teacher Teaching Agency's adverts was that they
did not speak to the people who were potential recruits. The gentleman
said it was aimed at people with 30 inch waists and it was not
necessarily the image that people would relate to who might be
prospective candidates to go into teaching in terms of a career
change. What do you say to that? Is it prospective, mature teachers
who offer the solution? Are we going to have more places?
Mr Tabberer: Our campaigning in
the last three years has been strongly focused on increasing the
number of career changers coming into the profession and it has
been highly successful at attracting more mature recruits. We
now attract over a third of our recruits at over 30 and we have
something like 12,000 career changers a year, choosing teaching
as a second career. There are many mature entrants. You could
argue that part of the increase in the last few years has been
because we have been particularly successful at going after and
succeeding in getting this group. Our advertising takes many forms.
It is not just the television and commercial advertising. It is
press, media, ambient. We even advertise on beer mats, for example,
and they have all helped us to attract the very audience that
you are talking about.
Q357 Jonathan Shaw: So, "Beer
Bellies Are Us".
Mr Tabberer: Thank you for a new
slogan.
Q358 Jonathan Shaw: Can I ask just
following on comments from my colleague Mr Simmonds, in terms
of the money that is available, the golden hellos, the golden
come backs, et cetera, I have asked a number of witnesses, "are
we using the money to the best effect?" Some witnesses say
that it creates resentment within particular schools, but putting
that aside for a moment, if we have a school in a leafy suburb
where they have no difficulty recruiting and someone might get
£4,000 for coming back is that really the best use of public
money when that money might be better used doubling up in an inner
city school, for example? Do you think there is enough flexibility
within the current regime?
Miss Doherty: I think you probably
need both. Golden hellos have brought about an increase in recruitment
to priority subjects, which is very important and very valuable
and we would not like to see any diminution of that. Equally to
attract people to inner city schools where they face many challenges
we do need to make sure that there is a positive drift in that
direction. That is where the opportunity for recruitment and retention
allowances was first of all put in place so that head teachers
could respond to local challenges, although head teachers are
reluctant to use them. STRB is looking at these longer term issues
and looking to see do head teachers need within a national framework
greater flexibility for exactly the things you are talking about.
The evidence is, yes, golden hellos have encouraged more people
to go directly because they get paid the golden hello at the end
of their first year, at the completion of their first year more
are going directly into teaching. Repayment of the student loan
is clearly intended to be a retention measure over time. I would
not like to see us easing up on one to give greater money to another,
but clearly both would be important.
Q359 Jonathan Shaw: You would not.
Heather Du Quesnay, perhaps you might have a comment on this,
it does seem to me there is a limit to the amount of money that
we have. If it is a teacher in a subject where we have shortages
they can still get that extra cash and go to a school where there
are not any shortages, is that the best use of public money, whereas
for a school in Lambeth or Tower Hamlets we might be able to double
up that money to make sure we get the very, very best in the most
difficult schools, something that you were talking about in terms
of Christchurch? People are reluctant to answer this question,
I do not know whether I am barking up the wrong tree but it does
seem to me there is an argument for it.
Mrs Du Quesnay: It is difficult.
I do see where you are coming from, the notion that with limited
resource the more sharply you can target it at the areas of the
greatest need the more you are going to get out of it. On the
other hand, the more complex you make the whole system of teacher
reward and payment the less flexibility you are creating locally
for head teachers and governing bodies to determine their own
priorities because they are dependent on these extra special things
that are particular to a particular school. One of the things
that should be looked at is a much more systematic approach to
the continuing professional development of teachers, which would
lead into leadership development, which is where we are coming
from, than what we have at the moment. At the moment so much of
it depends upon the particular priority that an individual school
gives to supporting a particular teacher. When funds are tight,
as they are this year, it is a much more threatened area than
might otherwise be the case. We could do more to build through
from initial training through the early years of a teacher's life
in school and then on to leadership development.
Mr Tabberer: If I can add to that,
I think the challenge is a good one. In a way I want to answer
by saying that the system already allows for the situation you
describe. Essentially there are two recruitment issues here, one
is the recruitment of the profession and one is the recruitment
of a school. We need a set of incentives that we can promote in
the recruitment market, this competitive market, which are a guaranteed
package for coming in. It helps us for that to be set at a level
people can understand. In fact there is already a range of different
incentives and we have a job explaining those. We need a set there.
The golden hellos, the repayment of loans for priority subjects,
these things help us to compete and get people into initial teacher
training so that we have a chance of holding on to them. You are
then right in saying, "do some schools not need to do more
on top?" At the moment we have recruitment and retention
allowances which they can deploy and indeed they can go beyond
the terms of recruitment and retention allowances in order to
hold on to people. Those sort of local pay flexibilities are important
and in practice schools do use them. Across the system the more
there are flexibilities available to disadvantaged schools or
schools in London the more it helps us to get the balance of supply
at school level right across the system. It is only really in
the last few years that those flexibilities have started to enter.
I would not like to see us becoming uncompetitive at the point
of introducing people into the profession, I do not think we want
to reduce our funding there because the set of propositions we
have at the moment are working particularly well. If you are going
to look at spending additional money one of the issues could be
more help to disadvantaged schools.
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