Recruitment crisis leaves schools system headless
Education chiefs must keep a close eye on recruitment and retention of teachers, warns local authority advisory governor and consultant Robin Hughes
New statistics on the recruitment and retention of teachers in Wales have been revealed by the Education Workforce Council (EWC).
According to officials, the data shows that while there is not a crisis in recruitment and retention in Wales, there are reasons to be concerned.
School governors who struggle to recruit headteachers and can’t find good maths or Welsh second-language or Welsh-medium science teachers may be surprised to hear that there is no crisis.
Just over a year ago, Welsh news programme Newyddion 9 found that more than 100 schools in Wales were without a permanent headteacher.
It had to dig for this fact. No-one at a national level, it seems, was keeping watch. That’s how icebergs sink ships – when nobody’s on watch.
There is no reason to suppose this situation is getting better. In fact, the official stats show that recruiting new headteachers is getting harder.
Applications for headship are at a historic low.
The number achieving the mandatory qualification for headship, NPQH, is declining.
Fewer people are becoming eligible for headship and fewer are showing interest in applying even if they are eligible.
Cabinet Secretary Kirsty Williams AM is in favour of keeping the NPQH mandatory. Reform it but don’t remove it, she says, because it sets the bar for strong school leadership.
Raising the bar works if people know where the bar is being set and aspire to reach it.
A new National Academy of Educational Leadership in Wales will lead on this reform. Hopefully, this will encourage people to step up to headship.
Schools without heads might want this to be a key measure of success for the new Academy.
This is an example of how the system is responding to the challenge of recruiting good headteachers.
School governors should also ask themselves if they are doing all that they can to attract headteachers and teachers too.
Recruiting in the same way as you have always done just doesn’t make sense if the world around you has changed – more vacancies and fewer applicants, generally, means having to try harder to attract the best.
The profile of employed headteachers is changing. There are more women headteachers than 15 years ago, although this is still only 59% when 75% of the teacher workforce are women.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that many women are discouraged from seeking leadership roles in schools and too many governors find it harder to appoint a woman than a man into a headteacher role. This needs to be challenged. Our headteachers are younger than 15 years ago, with the majority now being under 50 rather than over 50.
It should be a concern that more headteachers get to a peak in their career with 15 years of service still remaining. The challenge is to ensure that they are helped to be refreshed and motivated.
Paying people to retire early because of burn-out or boredom is expensive.
Teacher training institutions in Wales had little difficulty in recruiting trainees, historically. In fact, for many years, more were being trained than were needed. There weren’t the jobs for them.
Recruitment targets for these institutions were reduced in recent years.
The EWC finds that universities are missing even these reduced targets, with over 30% of postgraduate secondary places left unfilled in each of the past two years.
There may be two reasons for failing to recruit new entrants into teaching in the number we’d like.
Firstly, critical reviews of traditional teacher training in Wales may be making some potential entrants go elsewhere; and secondly, some may be discouraged by the idea that teaching is demanding.
More could be made of the positives about being a teacher in a school in Wales.
Leading educational research charity NfER is currently working on workforce analysis in England. It tentatively concludes that twice as many teachers leave teaching in England than do in Wales – possibly indicating that teaching in Wales is more satisfying or less stressful than in England.
NfER also says that better data about teaching in Wales is needed.
There isn’t a Schools Workforce census in Wales but there is in England.
We should therefore thank the EWC for making these statistics available, even if parts of the story they tell give cause for concern.
Having someone on watch to spot the iceberg is a necessary first step in averting disaster.