There’s nothing that signals the start of the autumn term better than the return of The Great British Bake Off. As we start to think about heading back to the classroom, there’s a comfort in knowing that our hearts will be warmed by the tales of amateur bakers going all out to impress Prue and Paul.
As always, the bakers have some big questions to answer. What do they need to do to this week to become Star Baker? What is the secret to a great crème pâtissière? How long should that pie be in the oven to avoid a soggy bottom?
But it’s not just the bakers who have big questions to answer this year if their technical challenge is going to go to plan. As we head into our own new season, both the profession and the Department for Education (DfE) have some big questions to answer and a technical challenge of our own.
These questions - I count five of them - aren’t the ones that our teachers and school leaders are grappling with day to day. But they do underpin many of the persistent problems that they are trying to tackle - how do I help all my educators to keep getting better? How do I make sure that development is high quality and coherent? How do I pay for it?
And while the answers may not provide quite the same viewing excitement as Bake Off, they will, if we get them right, move us closer to becoming the best place in the world to be a teacher.
1. How do we make sure our professional standards are both demanding and collectively coherent?
The group of professional standards and frameworks that set out what teachers, middle leaders, heads and trust CEOs need to know and be able to do and in what order aren’t all informed by the best available evidence and they aren’t all joined up.
Because these standards and frameworks underpin the end-to-end curriculum for educators if they aren’t joined up, the curriculum for these educators won’t be either. We know, through our experience of designing programmes across all levels, that if we say different things to teachers and middle leaders and heads, then contradictions and overlaps creep in and things start to break down.
With the Early Career Framework finalised, the department has begun reviews of the initial teacher training framework, has started the process to create specialist national professional qualifications and is also, I hope, about to start the process to review the leadership national professional qualifications too alongside. The DfE is also looking at how national leaders of education and specialist leaders of education fit into this puzzle.
This gives us a rare window to look at all of these standards and frameworks together. We have the opportunity to make sure the content of one framework flows into the next, that important content is revisited and built upon, and to use language that makes the experience for educators clearer. The great news is that the DfE, supported by those sitting on the various advisory groups looking at different frameworks, have clocked the need to join things up. We’ve now got to make it happen.
2. What is the best way to roll out the Early Career Framework?
Too many teachers are leaving the profession in the first few years of their career.
The successful rollout of the Early Career Framework is a big opportunity to improve proficiency and keep teachers in the profession for longer. But we mustn’t underestimate how hard this going to be. Improving the training for roughly 50,000 newly qualified teachers and their mentors is among the most significant implementation challenges the system has faced in a generation.
The good news is that the DfE has a well-thought-through plan with lots of time for learning built in. The plan is the result of one of the most successful sector-DfE collaborations I’ve seen. Ambition Institute, the graduate school for educators where I am chief education officer, is now working with the Education Endowment Foundation and Chartered College of Teaching to pilot some different approaches ahead of the early rollout in 2020-21. We’ll then learn more lessons before a national rollout in 2021-22.
I’m particularly interested in how we develop subject-specific content, how we reach the most isolated schools and where the training emphasis should be placed between the early career teachers themselves or their mentors.
3. What is school leadership expertise?
It’s always tough to question the prevailing wisdom but over the past year, that’s exactly what I’ve been pushing my team to do. Having spent this year reading everything we can about school leadership and talking to school leaders up and down the country, we don’t think the evidence for “transformational leadership” - the leadership theory that dominates in education - stacks up.
Is what school leaders need most their vision and a clutch of personality traits (sometimes measured on a dubious test) or is it more important for them to have extensive knowledge of curriculum, instruction, assessment and managing behaviour that they can use in the service of solving the common problems that they and their teams face each day? If it’s both, what’s the balance and which parts can we and can’t we explicitly develop?
I’ve written before about my belief that England is having the best conversation about teaching in the world. This year, we have to widen that conversation to include school leadership. We need more people to join in. As John Stuart Mill would say, our arguments will be all the “clearer and livelier” from their collision with other evidence and opinions from across the profession.
4. What is system leadership expertise (and how can we share it)?
While we’re talking about school leadership expertise, we should also throw in conversations about system leadership expertise. These roles are relatively new and, as more schools join trusts and the “school-led system” beds in, they are increasingly important.
Yet we’re not clear what constitutes expertise in system leadership and the incentives push against those who do know their stuff from being generous beyond their own schools and trusts.
On the expertise point, we combine leading teaching in one school on one site to leading teaching across multiple schools and multiple sites at our peril. The knowledge and skills required, while connected, are different.
As well as developing system leaders’ expertise, we must also think about how to create the right incentives for these system leaders to be even more generous with their time. Some of our best system leaders work in the school trusts that take on the most challenging schools - a job that keeps them pretty busy. We’ve got to find ways to lower the incentives that lead to a focus on making “your trust” great and increase the recognition for those folks who help others.
5. Can we unlock the apprenticeship levy?
Finally, and by no means least, we have to find a way to fund this important work. The idealist in me would love for every school to have its own CPD money tree. However, until we figure out how to do that, we have to be even more creative!
That has led us to look at the apprenticeship levy. Schools have around £150 million tied up in their levy and are finding it hard to spend it. The obvious place to look would be a teaching apprenticeship but the unusual rules around apprenticeships mean that route doesn’t stack up against schools direct or a traditional PGCE (for example, it takes four terms to qualify rather than three). But a teaching apprenticeship isn’t the only option. Other sectors have been using their levy to develop staff through more advanced apprenticeship routes and the education system needs to catch up.
A large group of schools, universities, professional associations, other education organisations and the DfE (who committed to unlocking the levy in the recruitment and retention strategy) have been working together to find a way through this. We’re close to a solution that would allow schools to use their levy to fund national professional qualifications for their staff. If we can pull this off, we could bring a much-needed cash boost into the system.
Showstopper
If we can end the year with a coherent, evidence-informed set of professional standards; an ever more robust plan to roll out the Early Career Framework; a thriving conversation about school leadership expertise; better incentives to encourage system leadership generosity; and a boost to the coffers we need to pay for it all, I’d call that a showstopper.
The holiday is over. On your marks, get set, bake!
Matt Hood is chief education officer at the Ambition Institute
