Views & Opinion
5 top tips to help schools with staff retention Comment by Denise Inwood, managing director of BlueSky
According to a recent report from the National Audit Office, the number of teachers leaving the profession is up by 11% over three years, with secondary school teacher training places proving particularly difficult to fill. While staff recruitment is obviously an issue here, it seems to me that the first and cheaper course of action is for a school to work hard to retain its good teachers. To do this it’s important that teachers feel settled, supported and an integral part of the ethos and culture of the school.
I’ve got two watchwords here; clarity and support.
1. By clarity I mean being clear about your expectations from the beginning – whether recruiting new staff or promoting existing staff, that teacher should be in no doubt about the precise requirements of their role. By providing clarity over a job description and role expectation (as well as effective induction), staff settle more easily and this makes for a positive and supportive atmosphere in a school.
2. Next, staff need to be supported constructively to improve their pedagogy. I’ve never known a
teacher who didn’t want to do this – but I’ve seen many who just didn’t know how to do it. To help with this I’d advise constructing a detailed evaluation of each teacher’s teaching. Then encourage ‘learning conversations’ about the different aspects of their teaching, using this forensic evaluation as a baseline.
If you provide clarity about expectations and outcomes regarding pay progression, and the personalised support mentioned earlier, staff are more likely to achieve their objectives.
3. I won’t dodge the elephant in the room - teacher workload! But again I think it’s about providing support and understanding so that teachers know you have their best interests at heart. By demonstrating that as a school or senior leader, you understand the pressures teachers work under, you engender a feeling of being in a team. How can a school provide practical help here? Perhaps first to consider is disaggregation of teachers’ time? Another example is that some schools have a clear distinction between marking and assessing (which is in more depth and naturally will take longer) and what they expect of teachers
4. Wrapped around this is looking after the personal welfare of staff – for example by recognising exceptional circumstances that staff may be in (family illness or bereavement) you take some of the pressure off. We want all staff to work in an environment where they feel valued and are having a positive effect on young people - good teachers won’t feel happy and supported if they are constantly spending time dealing with bad behaviour.
5. As staff get better at their job, giving them additional opportunities to grow as a professional and take on additional responsibilities supports their career and professional growth. Schools also can talent-spot staff who have potential and perhaps give a TLR 3 payment for a specific task. Also schools that have CPL for aspiring middle or senior leadership can support retention, as can facilitating action research so staff can take part in best practice pedagogy. Good head teachers understand that, despite their best efforts, at some point staff will leave – but also take the view that their investment in them will have improved the education system overall.
Please, Miss… teachers needed Comment by Kenneth Slade and Morris Hill, Weightmans LLP
The independent spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, has reported that the government has missed its recruitment targets on new teachers for the last 4 years, despite spending £700 million on recruitment and training annually. Between 2011 and 2014, there was an increase of 11% in the number of teachers leaving the profession with a corresponding increase in the rate of vacancies and temporarily filled positions from 0.5% to 1.2%.
In its response, the Government was at pains to point out that there were in fact more people entering the profession than leaving it, but that this was in a wider context of rising pupil numbers and a generally more competitive jobs market. It also pointed to initiatives such as ‘Teach First’ which aims to “…end inequality in education by building a community of exceptional leaders who create change within classrooms, schools and across society” and the launch in November last year of the National Teaching Service, which aims to attract and retain new teachers and send some of the ‘best’
teachers into underperforming schools in struggling areas. It also sought to pin the blame elsewhere, claiming that the greatest threat to recruitment was the negative picture of the industry painted by the teaching unions and a Conservative spokesperson accused the unions and Labour of ‘scaremongering to create cheap headlines and soundbites’.
The NAO report suggests that secondary schoolteacher training positions are the most difficult to fill: 14 out of 17 subjects at secondary level had unfilled training places available in 2015-16 compared with just 2 subjects with unfilled places in 2010/11. There has also been an increase in the number of secondary level classes being taught by teachers who do not have a relevant post- A level qualification. The report cited physics as an example, the proportion of which classes were being taught by such teachers rising from 21% in 2010 to 28% in 2014.
Last October, the Government launched a TV advertising campaign calling for more people to consider a teaching career, as part of their
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www.education-today.co.uk
annual recruitment campaign ‘Your Future: Their Future’. Only time will tell whether this particular initiative has been a success, but it seems likely that wider public perception of the Government’s recruitment efforts will not have been improved by the recent Press coverage of its flagship ‘Troops to Teachers’ scheme, which hoped to attract ex-service people into teaching. Schools Minister Nick Gibb said that 551 applications for the scheme had been received, which began training people in 2014, leading to 41 people starting the programme, with 28 of the 29 who completed it achieving qualified teacher status. The Government also points out that 2 further cohorts are in training. Notwithstanding the Government’s protestations, the NAO stated that until the DfE met its targets and was able to show how its approach was improving trainee recruitment, quality and retention, it could not conclude that the arrangements for training new teachers were value for money. The report on the Government’s performance on teacher recruitment from the NAO seems clear: must do better.
March 2016
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