Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Professor Michael Day: Director, School of Education, University of Roehampton
Introduction
1. This submission is intended to supplement those from TEAG and UCET, drawing on the experience of the School Direct (SD) partnerships led by University of Roehampton. It offers observation from our perspective on a number of the policy objectives of SD.
Schools Commissioning ITT from HEIs
2. A clear intention of the SD policy was that schools would have major involvement in designing and delivering ITT for their trainees. Our teaching school alliances have been keen to engage in this process, and some of the subsequent discussions and negotiations have challenged the thinking of both parties. It is clear that working so closely with schools has allowed us to draw more heavily on their expertise and capacity, and will strengthen our “core” PGCE programme. The feedback from schools is that they now have a much greater understanding of, and respect for, what Roehampton can offer in ITT. To achieve this aim has taken a large investment of time and effort by the University and schools—drawing heavily on good will and substantial, unfunded, commitment of resources by both partners. The result is an SD programme with three models of partnership:
Professional—Roehampton provides the full PGCE training programme;
Integrated—schools play a major role in programme design and delivery in partnership with Roehampton. Training delivered both at schools and Roehampton;
Alliance—the teaching school alliance designs the programme with help, QA and validation from Roehampton. Most of the training is delivered by schools, with some Roehampton input.
3. Clearly, schools joining the Roehampton SD partnership in subsequent years will reap the benefit of all the investment required to reach this point, and a range of issues around intellectual property rights remain to be resolved.
4. A major feature of the joint working has been the understanding by schools that their staff delivering ITT to adults require additional support and training to work at this level. They are keen that Roehampton works with them to provide staff with bespoke masters accredited training which can count towards a professional masters degree (we would expect staff to undertake this training successfully if they are to teach the masters credits elements of the PGCE). Working with our schools, we have jointly designed the qualification and have proposed to the NCTL that they use funding from the National Scholarship Fund (which supports teachers in masters level study) for this purpose.
5. The issue of who is the “customer” remains unresolved in SD. It is the trainee who provides the funding for the SD training programme route, but the school that spends the money on the trainee’s behalf but without reference to the trainee. There is some anecdotal evidence that schools are becoming aware of the need to offer a PGCE with masters credits, not only for its intrinsic value as a training route, but also to attract strong candidates. More NCTL advice to trainees on how to “shop-around” for the best training, and ensure that their money is being spent on training that is generic enough to fit them for a range of schools, would be helpful.
6. The decision by Ministers to balance the removal of the supernumerary requirement for salaried SD with a cut to funding has proved difficult for our primary schools. Our partner schools are keen to provide a PGCE with masters credits to their salaried SD trainees, but because of the financial pressures have considered the option of QTS-only training provided by some of our competitors, even though they acknowledge that this is a lower quality route.
Schools Recruiting Trainees
7. The aim of schools acting as “gatekeepers” to the profession has been largely realised. We have previously made extensive use of school colleagues to support recruitment to our programmes, but recruiting an SD trainee as a potential teacher for the school has sharpened the decision substantially. We have been very impressed by the rigour of the selection processes used by our partner schools—often using similar processes to those used to recruit teachers. But this has imposed major burdens on schools. They have relied on the goodwill of Roehampton to undertake the preliminary screening of unsuitable candidates—about half—but the work of multiple assessment days, candidates “shopping around” and holding more than one offer, plus the need to keep the recruitment process open until late in the school year, has proved very demanding. Some schools also expected trainees to be almost “classroom ready” rather than understanding how to spot potential. It is clear from feedback from our schools that they are finding the burden of recruitment to be heavy and this may develop into a factor affecting their “appetite” for SD places.
8. Although cheaper for the DfE, requiring candidates to have applied for a place before they can take the QTS skills tests has placed an additional burden on schools. Once the more rigorous tests are introduced in September 2013, it would be helpful to schools to require applicants to have passed the tests before making applications.
9. The lack of understanding by schools of subject enhancement courses (SKE)—without which a large proportion of maths and physics places would not be filled—and many SKE courses being filled early in the year, so not available for later applicant SD candidates, added to the difficulties of filling shortage subject places. Roehampton would have been willing to expand its SKE provision to meet this need if NCTL funding had been made available. The decision to guarantee (and advertise) only those SKE places delivered by Outstanding providers will add considerably to the risk of not filling shortage subject SD and “core” places.
10. Although logistically the NCTL decision to concentrate SD places in teaching schools is sensible, it does have the perverse effect of giving the best schools the “first pick” of the best recruits. Previous administrations have made a priority of encouraging the strongest recruits to work in the most challenging schools. Ministers have made it a selling point of SD that it gives Outstanding/Teaching Schools (many not in challenging circumstances) first pick of the strongest recruits. The original policy work around SD developed from an approach (“ticket-to-teach”) to the problem that some schools, particularly in areas where teacher recruitment was difficult, found it hard to join EBITTS, with their scarce and valuable GTP places. The notion was to give them a fairer access to high quality recruits. Even within teaching school alliances, sharing the limited number of high quality shortage subject trainees between schools is already proving a severe test and has the potential to de-stabilise teaching school alliances.
11. A major issue going forward will be the sanctions on schools for under-recruiting to SD. Some of our schools have closed their books despite having empty SD places. This has implications for our resourcing—we can’t risk recruiting staff if schools are content to leave places unfilled—and for national teacher recruitment if places used for SD are not filled. These are early days, but clearer guidance on sanctions for under-recruitment (and for not offering employment) would be helpful.
HEIs as “Full Service” Partners for Schools
12. Our schools are keen to work in close partnership with us across ITT, CPD and school improvement activities. For ITT, they are keen for us to support them across the whole range of secondary subjects. We are unable to do so, because the NCTL does not award us core places in some subjects, such as music, PE and Art. The NCTL offered us five places for geography to support our five SD places (a financially viable cohort is around 20) but only for one year with no guarantee beyond that. We advertised for a member of staff to lead this area, but decided that the risk was too high and did not appoint. This year, we were inspected under the new Ofsted framework and dropped from Outstanding to Good on our secondary provision. All our secondary places are now at risk—major cuts in places would leave our courses unviable and make it more difficult to retain the capacity to support SD places. To make SD university/school partnerships viable and sustainable, with expert capacity on both sides, NCTL needs a longer-term strategy of investing to create “full-service” providers of those, like Roehampton, that have committed heavily to SD and have strong support from partner schools.
July 2013