The Guardian view on teacher shortages: the trouble with data
The government’s teacher recruitment and retention strategy for England contains much that is sensible and desperately needed. Key recruitment targets have been missed for six years in a row. In some subjects, and some parts of the country, shortages are acute. In physics, for example, the number of trainees last year was just 47% of the number sought. Bursaries trialled on maths graduates appear not to have solved the problem. A third of new teachers give it up within five years, while nine in 10 heads struggle to fill posts in the core subjects that make up the GCSE Ebacc. Last year, 10% of all secondary teachers left teaching. Meanwhile, the population bulge that followed the spike in the birthrate in the 2000s means the secondary-school-age population is expected to rise until 2025. The situation is accurately described as a crisis.
The education secretary, Damian Hinds, has come up with a package of measures that he hopes will ease it. Efforts to reduce workload dovetail with the priorities set out in the new Ofsted inspection framework. Ministers and inspectors now acknowledge the “unintended consequences” of a system that has accountability as its overriding objective. One idea is that requirements for data collection should be relaxed, giving teachers more time to think about the substance of what they are teaching. Specific support for new teachers, which the government has promised to fund, includes mentoring and time outside the classroom. Inspectors, in future, will take a broader-brush approach, less focused on the minutiae of individual pupils’ measurable achievements and more on the big picture.
Whether plans to boost retention bear fruit will depend on whether ministers are right that there is an unmet demand for part-time jobs in teaching. The proposed new matchmaking service for would-be jobsharers is a nice idea, at any rate. Efforts to simplify routes into teaching are also reasonable, as is the focus on career development for classroom teachers who do not want to be managers. Just as valuable as the pragmatic substance of the proposals is the tone in which they are delivered, which is notably more collegiate than that adopted by past education secretaries, both Conservative and Labour. Mr Hinds regards the teaching unions not as a “blob”, in the famous phrase of former education secretary Michael Gove, but as a partner.
That said, there are many problems that this strategy does not begin to address, with funding the most urgent. English schools have faced cuts of 8% in real terms since 2010, and the £400m offered by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, last year for “little extras” was regarded as derisory. Years of publicsector wage freezes have meant salaries have fallen compared with teachers in other countries, as well as other graduate jobs. Last year’s removal of caps on training courses may help heads to fill vacancies. It may also lead to issues with quality control. Also not addressed is the unsatisfactory state of the many academies that perform worse than the local authority schools they replaced. Unless the government finds a way to tackle such weaknesses in the system, and until it increases funding, standards will suffer – even if this is masked by practices such as “off-rolling”, whereby difficult pupils are encouraged to quit without being formally excluded.
It is also questionable to what extent the reforms will return to teachers the professional autonomy that they lack. But the government is at least listening; and taking responsibility for planning for a future in which the number of secondary school pupils is set to increase sharply.