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There’s too much content in the curriculum. There are also too many competing demands on a teacher’s time, many of them not directly related to the teaching of the aforementioned copious amounts of content.
Recruitment and retention are getting worse, which makes the challenges of too much content and additional responsibilities trickier to manage, with more being loaded on to the teachers who are left. As a consequence, staff absences are higher and the pool of those having to cope is even smaller.
Amid all this, the accountability system remains unchanged. And so everyone just works harder.
It can’t go on much longer. Teaching is teetering on the edge of falling over.
Teaching workforce reform
With little prospect of action from government to change the conditions in which schools operate, two radical ideas have gained prominence as ways to shift the operations of the system to match its constraints.
The first comes from several heads who have come to the same conclusion independently: we need 50 per cent planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time. If education is to be able to operate long-term on its current footing, we need to cut a teacher’s timetable in half.
This would make proper time for planning, for marking and feedback, for pastoral responsibilities, for CPD, for communications with home, for good old-fashioned thinking space.
The heads estimate that it would require a third more teachers coming into the system (policy people say twice the number). That’s a massive educational investment from the government and it would be a difficult sell to voters. But it would, say these heads, increase quality, standards and job satisfaction - and it would therefore also increase recruitment and retention.
And with population decline reducing pupil numbers, they argue, we can stagger our way towards that 50 per cent goal over time through incremental 5 per cent jumps over several years.
A medical model for teaching
The second idea is one you hear more from system leaders and policy people. There have been admiring glances at the doctor-nurse model in the NHS, and much rumination upon how far we could recreate it in education.
The basic idea that has formed is that we would aim for a smaller core group of teachers, who would be higher-paid and have a higher qualification level, and who would run the teaching operation: plan all the lessons, read all the research and tackle the challenging “cases” (lessons or pupils) only.
Alongside them, you would essentially have an operational role with a lower qualification barrier to entry, rolling out the lessons planned by the teachers and dealing with the vast majority of pupils who do not require specialist care.
We’re already on the way to this model. In many schools, there will be instances when teaching assistants lead a lesson while teachers focus on interventions or planning the next session; we have teaching and learning responsibility payments (TLRs), which are a perhaps more limited version of what is envisaged here; and we also, in several MATs, have centralised planning being done by “elevated” teacher roles.
The model, it is argued, would reduce workload and raise standards and increase recruitment and retention.
Obviously, though, it would require a fundamental shift in how education is structured, it would take years to iteratively get to the point where it was possible, and it risks simply recreating the role of a teacher at a lower salary point.
That there are problems with both proposals is obvious, but we are at a point now when any idea about workforce reform will be taken more seriously than it would have been previously because the situation is so desperate.
That presents teachers with a challenge. Yes, we should continue to call for more money and better long-term planning at a system level, but the profession also needs to help shape more radical ideas for the future, to ensure that if there is a substantial shift to a new model, it’s done with the profession, not to them.
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