Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 399)
MONDAY 7 JULY 2003
MRS HEATHER
DU QUESNAY
CBE, DAME PATRICIA
COLLARBONE DBE, MR
RALPH TABBERER
AND MISS
MARY DOHERTY
Q380 Paul Holmes: Starting at one
end of the teaching profession with newly qualified teachers,
and so on, we have already had a number of discussions about where
we have a recruitment and retention problem, one suggestion was
that sometimes we have a flood tide and sometimes a drought. I
know Professor Alan Smithers published some research for the Department
for Education and Skills at the end of last month which showed
that the number quitting teaching was two thirds higher in 2002
than it was in 1996. I do not know if that indicates a flood tide
or an ebb tide, but it seems to be a worryingly high figure?
Miss Doherty: I have looked at
the recent Smithers research and the conclusions were that people
are not leaving the education sector but they are going to other
jobs within education, either in teaching into the independent
sector or to work in LEAs or other sectors. I think the opportunity
comes back to a similar discussion we were having earlier about
the opportunity for employment, and I think that is something
that we need so start to think about because in our recruitment
work we like to encourage people to see being a teacher as being
part of the education sector and we are very dependent in the
education sector on people with previous experience of being teachers.
Many of us here are in our positions because of our previous experience
as teachers. The research did not say that people are leaving
the profession in droves, we are losing fewer to other employers
but it is to other jobs in the education sector, also to things
like travelling. Alan Smithers very helpfully set out the best
bets for getting people back, there are important lessons for
us there and there are also important lessons for policy. It is
not leaving the education sector but it is adding to that churn
within the teaching profession.
Q381 Paul Holmes: There is a much
higher churn at one end of the teaching profession than there
was six years ago but you are saying that is not really a cause
for concern. Going to the school leadership, deputy heads and
head teachers, the National College for School Leadership's first
Annual Report says on page five says, "10% of primary and
secondary schools advertised head teacher posts in 2002, which
was higher than a decade previously, indicating that head teachers
on average are spending fewer years in the job". It also
said that re-advertisements for primary school heads were about
34%, which was the highest recorded level and that premature retirement
is one of the largest causes of vacancies for head teachers. Is
that something that we do not really have cause for concern about
or does it show a worrying recruitment and retention problem for
heads?
Mrs Du Quesnay: Yes, I think there
is some cause for concern there. We have to bear in mind that
people who are headteachers well into their 50s have a substantial
career in teaching behind them. One of the things that the College
has been really working hard at is to try find ways we can enable
those people to feel refreshed and find a new lease of life, if
you like. Particularly if you are leading a school in challenging
circumstances, if you do that job for 5 years, certainly 10 years,
it is jolly hard, it is real tough work and it takes a great deal
out of people, both intellectually and emotionally and physically.
One of the things we have done at the college is to look at how
we can create opportunities that will give people the opportunity
of refreshment: we offer them part-time research associate-ships,
we offer a limited number the opportunity to go and look at education
systems abroad, we try to give them things to do that will open
some new doors. We have also developed within our Leadership Development
Framework the concept of the consultant leader, it is the fifth
of our stages of leadership, and we offer people systematic training
(it is a programme that Pat Collarbone developed) which would
enable them to acquire the skills and understandings and behaviours
to work with other schools and to work with other leaders. Many
of them have said that has been some of the best training they
have ever done and it does give them a sense of, we can make a
new start, we have fresh energy. It is important to do that for
people because otherwise it is a gruelling job.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: One
of the things we have found is really helpful for people is when
they receive a coach or a mentor, probably from outside education,
maybe from the business world. We have had a scheme going with
Partners in Leadership and that has worked quite well in terms
of offering some support for head teachers in fairly complex and
challenging circumstances. We are looking at ways in which we
can develop mentoring, coaching, peer support, support with the
business world and support internationally for people to get refreshment.
Q382 Paul Holmes: In a previous evidence
session Mr Ronnie Norman, who is the Vice-Chair of the National
Employers Organisation, said that he felt that the teaching profession
was starting to become recognised as a profession in the way that
lawyers were—as somebody who was a teacher for 20 years
I thought I had been working in a profession for a long time anyway.
Part of improving the professional status is something like the
National College for School Leadership, so far how many deputy
head teachers and head teachers have got the National Professional
Qualification for headship?
Dame Patricia Collarbone: We have
9,000 people who have already got the National Professional Qualification.
As we sit here there are 7,000 people in addition to that who
are on the programme. The NPQH is staged in three routes, you
can do it fast-track in a very short space of time for those who
are nearly ready for headship or you can do it over one year or
two years.
Q383 Chairman: What is that as a
percentage of overall heads?
Dame Patricia Collarbone: About
two-thirds. You have 24,000 heads in the country, give or take
a few, that is a fairly high proportion. We believe we have over
time now been able to develop a pool of people with a professional
qualification to prepare them for headship. Again anecdotally
you can get lots of evaluation reports from those who have done
NPQH of late where candidates and people will say when they go
into their job it is the best preparation they have had. I think
if we are talking about the recruitment and the retention of senior
post people that are more prepared, people that have support,
people that have on-going support after they have finished NPQH
when they take up their headship they can then go on to the Head
Teacher Induction Programme (it used to be called Headlamp) where
they can have for up to three years a sum of money they can spend
on various modules and visits and coaching or mentoring dependent
on them and their circumstance. It is all very well to train people
for a job through NPQH but when they get into the school they
need a different kind of support, there is support for three years
and then four years in there is another programme called the Leadership
Programme for Serving Heads, which is a programme about how well
you are doing in the job and it gives them that feedback we referred
to earlier. There is a lot of support we have now put in place
for people to support them throughout their leadership career.
We believe it is not a one quick-fix, do this then and that is
it, they need support of different kinds as they go through their
leadership career, and that way we hope we will retain more people
in the job.
Mrs Du Quesnay: Can I just come
in, I may have been misleading there and I did not mean to be,
about 16,000 people are either engaged in or have already acquired
the National Professional Qualification. I do not think we know
the proportion of serving head teachers who have already got the
NPQH but by definition certainly the 7,000 have not yet moved
into headship because they are still doing the NPQH. That is the
sort of data we do need to be much smarter at collecting.
Q384 Chairman: How many staff do
you have?
Mrs Du Quesnay: We have about
160 people currently.
Q385 Chairman: The budget?
Mrs Du Quesnay: In the current
year the budget is about 80 million and well over half of that,
about 50 million, supports the major training programmes. The
National Professional Qualification has a budget of about 25 million
or 26 million a year, and most of that is supporting the training
of the people going through rather than paying administrative
costs.
Q386 Paul Holmes: You think at the
end of school management it is important to have on-going professional
training and qualifications, back at the other end, how important
is it that teachers are professionally qualified and have QTS
status?
Mrs Du Quesnay: For teachers who
are full class teachers it is absolutely essential. The College
would very much welcome the emphasis that has been brought to
bear through the recent policy moves on diversifying the work
force in schools. It has been a ludicrous situation. I was a teacher
for a long time but it is a while since I was in school and for
all those years you see teachers doing jobs which other people
could probably do better, particularly now as the environment
in schools is changing, there is more pressure for community involvement,
there are different kinds of resources and with the information
and communication technologies we can see far more ways in which
adults other than qualified teachers can support children's learning,
but you always have to have that core of fully qualified teachers
who can manage and supervise that situation and provide an overview,
which is about the quality of education and children's learning.
Q387 Paul Holmes: You think it should
be a core of teachers who are qualified teachers as opposed to
all full-time classroom teachers being qualified?
Mrs Du Quesnay: I think full-time
classroom teachers should be qualified but it is important they
should be supported by a rich diversity of other adults. We can
see more sophisticated ways of doing that now than would have
been the case 10 years ago or when I was teaching.
Q388 Paul Holmes: This might be an
unfair question but I will ask it anyway, if the Prime Minister
says that since 1997 they have recruited 25,000 more teachers
but it then turns out that only half of those are qualified do
you think that matters?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It depends where
they come from. Some of those teachers have come from abroad and
they may have a teaching qualification, they may have good experience
but it is not formally recognised in this country. I think we
need to understand what the position is so that we do have sufficient—I
am not going to try and quantify what is sufficient—fully
qualified teachers to provide security about the quality and continuity
of education for children and the relationship with their parents.
For the most part in the country as a whole we have that. We know
there are some schools, particularly in pressured areas like London,
where that is a vulnerability. We all recognise that. I worked
in Lambeth for four and a half years, some schools are very, very
challenged about having a sufficient body of teachers who can
really provide that quality and continuity.
Q389 Paul Holmes: Those challenged
schools tend to be the ones that have the highest numbers of teachers
without qualified teaching status, the highest number of overseas
trained, the highest number of trainee teachers.
Mrs Du Quesnay: You get this awful
syndrome developing where schools may have vacancies, they may
draw in the most challenged and challenging children, they find
it hard to recruit because some of the behaviour issues and the
fracture issues in society make it harder and put more pressure
on the teachers. You do get a spiral which is why I think that
most of us who know London really welcome the fact we have the
London Challenge and there is a recognition of those issues and
that we are not trying to sweep it under the carpet any more and
pretend we can do the same as we are doing in the rest of the
country. I suspect one could argue there is some very similar
pressures on schools in other urban areas but it is more intense
in London.
Q390 Chairman: Are you saying the
worse behaved pupils in Britain are in London?
Mrs Du Quesnay: No, but I am saying—I
do not think I said that—you get a situation in London where
admissions are quite competitive and where schools that find themselves
with a large number of surplus places (I can think of a couple
when I was in Lambeth) where they are under pressure to take in
children who may have been excluded from other schools, children
who may only have come into this country as asylum seekers and
have gone through terribly traumatic experiences. It can be extremely
difficult for the local education authorities and the governing
bodies and the head teachers to maintain a reasonably balanced
situation for those schools because you do end up, we know it
happens, with a situation where some schools are subject to enormous
challenges, much more so than maybe a neighbouring school not
very far away.
Mr Tabberer: If I can add to this,
I think it is a concern that schools have had a higher proportion
or higher number of unqualified teachers involved, especially
in these areas. When we look at the figures we have to recognise
that a lot of those unqualified are on training courses to become
teachers, they are on our GTP Programme, they are on our Overseas
Trained Teacher Programme and for some of those it is an assessment-only
period while we can properly validate their qualifications. It
is important to say that. It is important to add, as Heather Du
Quesnay said, for me these are the compelling reasons why we have
to look at both increasing the number of teachers we have and
what is called remodel the profession. In the period since 1997
we have increased the number of teaching assistants and support
workers in schools by 80,000. I think the more we do to make our
work force more diverse the more we do to introduce flexibilities
in schools so that heads cannot only just deploy teachers as a
solution for every problem but also deploy other staff and indeed
ICT.
Q391 Chairman: I do not think Paul
Holmes' question was unfair at all, the only unfairness is if
we gave you a direct quote that Doug McAvoy gave to this Committee
about unpeeling the so-called 20,000-25,000 extra teachers, and
he took them sliver by sliver and said they come down to almost
nothing, if we send you that quote could you try and unpick it
for us because we would like to know whether that was an exaggeration?
He did not go unchallenged on this.
Mr Tabberer: Obviously that is
a question you ought to put to us with the DfES because a lot
of the data on these numbers will be DfES's
Chairman: If we get your take on it and
the Minister's on Wednesday we will be belt and braces.
Q392 Paul Holmes: Round 3,700 of
the supposed 25,000 extra teachers are trainees. If you can count
somebody on the Graduate Trainee Programme as a teacher for the
purpose of Government statistics why not count all of the ones
that are on PGC courses as teachers because they are all graduates?
Surely we should count all those and then we would have far more
than 25,000 extra, we would have 30,000-40,000 extra.
Mr Tabberer: There is a difference
between the on-the-job training programme, which puts people in
schools for full-time or near full-time courses and those who
are in schools for part of the time. I think the important thing
that we do is take a look through the slivers of the onion and
show you what these people are doing and then you can make a rounded
judgment about the increase in the profession and, indeed, the
increase in teaching assistants and support workers at the same
time.
Miss Doherty: There is also another
factor in terms of 14-19 curriculum, when I worked at the QCA
we encouraged schools to diversify the range of people so they
were using instructors and people who have experience in ceramics
and motor vehicle maintenance or other aspects of the work-related
curriculum so schools were employing instructors for periods of
time in order to give that enrichment to the curriculum. Your
question is a very good one. Your follow up of asking people to
unpack that is also very important.
Q393 Mr Chaytor: I have two points
following Paul Holmes' line of questioning, you have said of the
24,000 serving head teachers you have 9,000 individuals who already
have the head teachers qualification, a further 7,000 are in the
course of being trained, you do not know how many are heads and
how many are aspiring heads, but in terms of the debate earlier
about data collection it is not a terribly difficult thing to
do when the application forms come in to put them in two piles
and count this lot which are heads and this lot which are aspiring
heads, is it? This is a basic data collection task which is really
quite important?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It is very important.
People apply to do the National Professional Qualification and
have been doing that over the last five or six years. We will
know and we do know whether they have acquired the qualification,
what we do not know is whether and when they go on to become head
teachers because of course those appointments are made by individual
governing bodies. At best it would be the Local Education Authorities
who would have that data. That is the area that we have to get
much smarter at. It does not sound that complicated but getting
consolidated data of that kind from LEAs can be quite complicated.
We have to crack that.
Q394 Mr Chaytor: At the point of
which they are on the programme within the college do you not
know who are then heads?
Mrs Du Quesnay: Yes.
Q395 Mr Chaytor: Fine. It is the
follow-up later.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: Yes.
We are putting a process in that tracks people from whenever they
start to do a programme in the college throughout their career
so we will have a complete data management set which we have not
had to this point.
Q396 Mr Chaytor: Of the 16,000 people
who have been through programmes and completed it or in the course
of doing so at the moment what is the proportion at the point
of entry of heads and aspiring heads?
Mrs Du Quesnay: They would mostly
be aspiring heads.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: When
they take the professional qualification they are all aspiring
heads, they will not have a headship.
Q397 Mr Chaytor: At the point of
entry they will all be aspiring heads.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: Sometimes
during the two years they may get a headship during that time.
Q398 Mr Chaytor: In terms of current
heads, current heads are excluded from the programme completely?
Dame Patricia Collarbone: From
NPQH, yes they are, it is for aspiring heads only. Once they have
a headship they go on to the HIP, the Headship Induction Programme.
Q399 Mr Chaytor: The second point,
this does follow on that, in terms of the monitoring of their
subsequent performance we were presented with some research which
showed a strong correlation between the length of time a head
served in a school and the PANDA rating of that school, my question
is therefore in terms of tracking the subsequent performance of
people who have been through your programme are you yet or do
you envisage being in the position of being able to make the correlation
between the PANDA performance of the school and the acquisition
of the headship qualification?
Dame Patricia Collarbone: We are
looking at all kinds of ways now in which our programmes impact
and what the outcome is. As we are putting this programme in we
are thinking of those kind of questions and moving into that domain
very, very seriously to see what effect those are having, that
is a crucial question.
Chairman: We are moving to career patterns
now. Valerie Davey, who has been extremely patient.
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