Quality teaching involves subject expertise, and knowledge of child development

A most helpful Report has just been published by the Think Tank Politeia about teacher recruitment, employment and retention.  The Report is edited by Sheila Lawlor the Director of Politeia, with additional comments from Professors Burghes of Plymouth and Howson of the Education Data Surveys, by Dr Marenbon of Trinity, Cambridge, John O’Leary, former Editor of The Times Higher Educational Supplement, and Chris Woodhead formerly Chief Inspector of Ofsted.

The aim of this Report is to improve the country’s recruitment and retention of teachers and to provide the most academically able and professionally competent new recruits to the profession.  The Report compares the arrangements in the United Kingdom (specifically England) with certain European countries, with the United States and New Zealand but, maybe significantly, not with Finland which for years had headed up the OECD tables for standards in numeracy and literacy and operates an all-through school from the age of seven to 16 with the most minimal of state direction of its curriculum.

The Politeia Report is a well written, authoritative document, illustrated with many tables of comparative educational statistics on school structures, administrative arrangements, staff-pupil ratios, pupil numbers/enrolment and – of particular interest – the relationship of paraprofessional teacher assistants to fully trained teachers.  It is here where one of the findings of the Report is most stark: in recent years there has been a massive increase in teacher assistants who now account for 43% of all the adults in English classrooms (301,000 teaching assistants to 403,000 teachers).

The Report is much concerned with what it sees as the progressive lowering of standards forced on schools by the rapid turnover in staff.  This leaves policy makers with the dilemma of either leaving teaching posts unfilled, or appointing staff with less appropriate qualifications.  The situation has been getting progressively worse; some 20% of those who train as teachers do not even enter the profession upon qualifying, while between 20% and 30% of those who start to teach resign within three or four years.  Government is now training (at great cost) some 38,000 teachers a year, just under 10% of the total teaching force.  This suggests a ‘professional life’ of little more than ten years on average, or only 25% of the average person’s working life.  No other country, especially the European countries, comes close to this level of attrition.

The Report investigates the varying terms and conditions of service in different countries; the starting and finishing salaries of teachers, and how they relate to pensions; and the differing levels of rewards and incentives.  It goes on to spend much time looking at how success should be measured.  The Report, however, fails to ask the basic, and very personal, question: why do so many young people enter the profession with enthusiasm, but after a few short years leave it disillusioned?  It then raises a supplementary question – why do half of secondary headteachers take early retirement?

The individual Commissioners attempt to answer parts of these questions from their own, often subject-based, perspectives.  While David Burghes approaches this specifically from a mathematics perspective, he is quick to pick up the damage done to the professional teachers’ autonomy by the minutiae of prescription issued by governments complicit in a policy which makes it possible to recruit emergency and trained teachers who then depend on such spoon feeding.  Both Burghes and Marenbon hint at what is called an “undereducated profession”, and they are most right to do so.

Tight control, regulation and prescription, do not attract men and women whose training has equipped them to make better decisions on the ground than could ever be made by a bureaucrat defining in advance something to be applied nationally.  Consequently, many of those who leave the profession early reflect bitterly that if they are not to be allowed to think for themselves, then there is little wonder that they don’t encourage pupils to do so.

The Report, perhaps taking its cue from the generally backward-looking views of Chris Woodhead, is limited by its attempt to fit its reforms within the present structure of schools, rather than seeing that the assumptions which underpin that system are now the basic cause for so much of its dysfunction.  Early on the Report notes that Pupil-Teacher Ratios in the United Kingdom are lowest at upper secondary level and highest at primary level, with a more extensive differential between the two than almost any other country.  This requires the reversal of an upside-down and inside-out system of education, and the recognition that it is ultimately the responsibility of teachers to wean children of their dependence of the system.  “It is a bad teacher whose pupils remain dependent upon him,” (Nietzsche)

Although never expressed in these terms in the Report, this surely reflects the later 19th century belief that, as inheritance was largely believed to be inherited, it was appropriate for primary schools to keep children in sufficient good order for the natural cream to float to the surface so that once in secondary schools, those more able could be fast-tracked through to the higher levels of tertiary education.

Such a set of assumptions about the nature of intelligence so disturbs today’s teachers that they are often in revolt about the way in which heavy levels of prescription simply keep today’s ‘bandaged-up’ structure going for just a little longer.  “I don’t want to waste my life applying further sticking plaster,” they say, “though I fear what may happen to my own children in the future.”

“Teachers Matter” is a most useful analysis of part of the present problem – but it is only part of the story that an incoming government will have to tell when it takes up office in Westminster.  Such Members as will have been elected to serve the country then will have to be wise enough to act on Einstein’s belief that you will never solve a problem by using the same techniques that created the problem in the first place.  Those who read the Politeia Report should also read the Initiative’s Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians if they are to know what to do to give England the education system its children need.  It should also be vice versa.  We all need both perspectives.  We all have to think smarter, not just harder.

Everyone really must realise that there is  much more to education than the efficient teaching of subjects at both primary and secondary level – critically important as they are in their own right.  This will require every teacher to have higher qualifications in English, mathematics and science, together with a far better perception of learning theory, of child/adolescent development, and of the proper relationship of formal learning with informal experience.  Members, as with teachers, parents, administrators and the general public need to reconsider the claim made in 1959 by the Crowther Report “until education is conceived as a whole process in which mind, body and soul are jointly guided towards maturity, a child’s personality will not necessarily be developed.”

See Actions 1, 5 and 6 of Briefing Paper which sets the nature of teaching within the context of English society at large

This article is tagged: Education, politics, Schools, teachers.