Not money, but a lack of status lies at the heart of the crisis in teaching, reports Wendy Berliner
Tuesday September 4, 2001
It’s the beginning of a drama lesson. Mixed ability. Year 10. So it’s a bunch of 15 year-olds, some of them looking a lot older, some of them far from saints, being noisy in a large hall free from the constraints of a classroom. It could all get out of control so easily.
Their teacher runs down from the raised seating in front of them. He is wearing green combat trousers, a black polo shirt with the school crest on it and trainers. He claps once, raises one hand, and gradually quietness and order begin to take over as one by one each pupil raises their hands too. Within seconds he has their complete attention and everyone drops their hands. He moves around in the middle of them talking softly and inclusively, maintaining eye contact and discussing what the lesson will involve.
It’s impressive, but it’s an everyday occurrence in well-run classes all over the country. It makes you wonder why there is a teacher shortage if it is this easy and heart-warming. Except it isn’t this easy. You need certain talents to pull it off and the man pulling it off today isn’t even a teacher trained by normal methods. He doesn’t have a degree and he didn’t become a teacher until he was 43. Could people like him be one of the answers to this country’s endemic shortage of teachers that will almost inevitably see part-time schooling for some children this new school year?
Because we need some radical solutions to a problem that is fast becoming a crisis. We are critically short of teachers – perhaps as many as 4,000 permanent teachers in secondary schools alone. Ministers say that every child will have the teachers they need this term, but how many of these will be unqualified in the subject they are teaching, or just unqualified altogether; or from abroad; or brought in at great expense from teacher-supply agencies?
Despite excellent campaigns sweetened by training bursaries, free child care and golden handcuffs to first jobs, it is still hard to fill the places on graduate teacher-training programmes in the shortage areas of maths, sciences, modern languages and English. At the other end, disenchanted teachers still wash out of the profession in waves long before retirement.
John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association and himself a former comprehensive school head, says the past school year has been the worst on record for trying to fill vacant posts. Even the chief inspector of schools, Mike Tomlinson, says “comprehensive and innovative” solutions are necessary, as the present teacher shortages are more difficult and more complex than previous cycles. The select committee on education has charged him specifically with examining the impact of teacher shortages in his next annual report. The MPs fear that much of the progress in standards made in recent years could be put at risk if the problems of teacher recruitment and retention are not tackled in a comprehensive and innovative way.
Barry Thompson was an innovation when he joined the drama staff at Mark Rutherford Upper School, a socially and educationally mixed comprehensive in Bedford. An insurance inspector for Sun Alliance by day and an amateur thespian by night, he applied for a teaching job after giving workshops in which he trained fellow insurance workers. The experience drew him to teaching. He had left grammar school with five O-levels and A-level art when he was 17 and got in through the licensed teacher scheme, introduced by the last Conservative government as a way to cope with the teacher shortage then.
The scheme was short-lived. It was despised by teaching unions because it was seen as a backdoor route for the underqualified. The unions had fought for the profession to become all graduate entry; under the licensed teacher scheme you could be employed by a school if your own professional qualifications and experience were deemed suitable. Thompson’s insurance exams got him into Mark Rutherford. He took a two-thirds drop in pay, but never looked back. He loves the job. “Sometimes you get a high adrenaline kick because a lesson goes so well. It is exciting and it just flies – you can’t control it. It just needs the tiniest push to move it along. It’s fabulous. The kids share in the rush and they start to clap.”
He has stayed at the school, rising to be head of drama, a post he relinquished at the end of last term to become an advanced skills teacher – the so-called “super teacher” – and will now travel between schools to spread his skills. The grade is in recognition of his outstanding skills as a teacher.
Head at Mark Rutherford, John Summers, says: “He is an extraordinary and inspirational teacher. He can take youngsters and enthuse and develop them from whatever skills they have. He gives them a tremendous sense of self worth. He makes them believe they can do it and has the technical skills to show them how.”
Despite this, Summers is not sure how many other non-graduates could come into teaching during their 40s and be such a success. “I think we must stick with the graduate profession approach if we are to rebuild and maintain the status of teaching as a profession,” he says.
Mark Rutherford has not escaped the national recruitment problems, even though only a handful of staff left at the end of the summer term. It took until the closing days of term to fill all the vacant jobs. The school was “ferociously lucky”, according to Summers. “It was very tough, edge-of-your-seat stuff.”
A psychology post has been filled by an unqualified teacher; the school hopes to get her trained under the graduate teacher programme, which enables graduates to be trained on the job. They lost one French teacher, who was also not a qualified teacher, once she realised she had to take a maths test under the terms of the programme. “She was convinced she would fail even though we offered to get someone from the maths department to train her up,” Summers says.
It might have been hard, but at least Mark Rutherford has been able to fill its vacancies with home-grown people. Many schools are not so lucky. Bedfordshire, for example, has seen headteachers on recruitment trips to South Africa during the summer term.
One of their recruits will end up in one of the county’s primary schools, and this in many ways exemplifies the extreme nature of the current teacher shortage. The school the South African teacher has been appointed to is a church school in a sought-after village that until very recently had a stable staff and no problems filling any vacancy. It has a staff of four and two of them quit during the summer term, leaving just the head and the deputy. Both the teachers who resigned were mature entrants to teaching and in their thirties. They had only been teaching for a few years and both were leaving the profession because they were fed up with it.
It’s not the money that has put them off. The deputy head, who prefers not to be named, explains: “I don’t think money would make any difference. Most reasonable teachers are satisfied with the money they get; it is more to do with their status.
“I’ve been here for 26 years and things have changed. We don’t get the same respect from the children we once did or from the parents or the media. There is a lack of appreciation of the job we do and the workload we carry. Many parents don’t instil discipline into their children and when we do it some of those children find it hard.”
Earlier this year the school had to exclude a child for the first time. The nine-year-old boy was very aggressive and one day brought a knife into school. The deputy head says: “We can get aggressive behaviour from children coming from all kinds of families, including professional ones. We have had six- and seven-year-olds hitting teachers.
“The home lives of children can be very difficult because their parents are arguing or stressed through work and they don’t have time for their children. Often parents find it difficult to accept that their children are disruptive and they shout and scream at us.”
Dunford says: “Teaching remains a marvellous job, but undoubtedly it’s very difficult in some schools. There is a huge vacancy crisis. In the short term we are in for a bumpy ride.”
He believes the initial pay for a new teacher is good at around £17,000, but the gap of several thousand pounds that begins to emerge with other comparable jobs after about four or five years is a problem. The disparity comes when young teachers are still paying off their student loan but might be thinking of settling down and getting a mortgage. This, coupled with huge assessment demands on individual teachers and the bad behaviour of pupils, makes it hard to retain the good young teacher.
He also feels that the national curriculum has squeezed out too much creativity and too many reforms to the system are introduced with little notice. All of these issues need to be tackled, he believes, to get a sufficient flow of good-quality teachers into the profession – and to keep them.
Professor Alan Smithers, of Liverpool University, is co-author with Pamela Robinson of Attracting Teachers: Past Patterns, Present Policies, Future Prospects, published last December. He says: “It is a serious and continuing problem. It’s hard to get teachers and it’s proving hard to hang on to them.” He doesn’t believe pay is the central issue. The high wastage of teachers who quit the profession has, historically, only dipped slightly after big pay rises.
“The principle reason is bad behaviour by children. There are changing attitudes in society and teachers are at the sharp end of it. They find that it is a continuous struggle to get children to listen and learn. Children are constantly challenging them and it is a battle to get them to do anything,” he says.
Another authority badly hit by teacher vacancies is Surrey. It has few discipline problems in its schools, but had 600 vacancies to be filled for this term. It illustrates the complexity of the teacher shortage, which is caused by both national trends and local issues. In Surrey’s case, high house prices there – the average house costs £209,000 – make it difficult to recruit young teachers. The director of education, Paul Gray, wrote to parents during the summer term warn ing them that some schools might have to send children home if they could not find enough staff. In areas like this government housing subsidies promised for key workers in the south-east are needed.
Steve Clarke, deputy director of education for Surrey, believes the schools will be able to have someone in every vacancy for the start of term, although heads are more comfortable with some appointments than others. “We have hunted round the world, we have used teacher-supply agencies and we have advertised for teachers who aren’t teaching to come back. Anyone who is suitable we have signed up within the hour. If they all turn up we will have avoided part-time education for the beginning of term.
“But it is precarious. We have had to pull in supply teachers for one-term appointments so we are still on the edge of a cliff. Who knows what’s going to happen in January. At least it’s given us a breathing space.
“A down-turn in the economy is usually good for teaching because there are fewer jobs and more come forward for teaching. But I think it would be unwise to think that there will be so many people unemployed next year that they will be queuing up to be teachers. We are still planning for a difficult year.”