Call me childish, but for the last couple of years, I have gently teased the DfE by retweeting anything that either it or its ministers puts out about teacher recruitment, adding the phrase: “Crisis? What crisis?”
Back in 2015, when it was already established that the conveyor belt of new teachers wasn’t working as it should, Tes interviewed schools minister Nick Gibb. Despite giving him ample opportunity to agree that the recruitment crisis was, in fact, a crisis, he refused to do so. It was, he said, nothing more than a challenge (see bit.ly/GibbCrisis).
Since then, the DfE’s people have tied themselves in knots attempting to avoid using the C-word when it came to teacher supply. As recently as the beginning of this month, they put out a statement insisting that it was recruiting all the teachers it needs.
This, despite the fact that the evidence is all around them: everywhere, in almost every school, in just about every part of the country. The DfE’s see-no-evil-hear-no-evil has become a standing joke in education policy circles. For schools at the chalkface, cutting options and growing class-sizes, it isn’t exactly funny-haha.
But then, last week, the penny finally - finally! - seemed to drop.
In the days that have followed, we’ve had two sudden and seemingly impromptu changes to government policy on recruiting teachers: the decision to instruct all ITT providers to lower the bar of entry (see bit.ly/ITTstandards) and the decision to allow unlimited resits of the professional skills tests that must be passed before anyone can enter the profession (bit.ly/TeacherResits).
A ‘moment of clarity’
One minute, the DfE was staggering around like an embarrassing drunk at a dinner party, and then it appears to have had what alcoholics refer to as a “moment of clarity”. What was it that triggered this change? Word has it that it was the staggeringly disappointing statistics last week that year-on-year applications for university-based ITT are 29 per cent down (see bit.ly/UcasITT). It’s hard to hide from such numbers. It is also possible that replacing Justine Greening with Damian Hinds allowed for a fresh approach without anyone losing face.
Why it has happened is not the point, however. Much more important is asking whether these policy changes will be enough. Will they stop the Titanic of a school system ploughing into the massive recruitment crisis iceberg? Or - to tease out this hideously clichéd metaphor even further - will these changes prove to be more akin to rearranging the deckchairs?
There are two reasons to think that the latter is the case. To make a significant, and immediate, impact on the growing crisis, you need two things: Money (for bigger starting salaries and to wipe out student debts) and political collateral to change the working conditions of existing staff (workload and accountability). Both are in short supply in the DfE - and what there is is likely to be expended on the farce of HE funding reform.
But even if the money and the goodwill were there, it may well be too late anyway. One Westminster insider took my terrible metaphor and mangled it some more: “I think we might be beyond the Titanic at this stage, and actually at the point where the rescue boat is ploughing through the survivors, determined to hit the iceberg itself.”
However, despite this horrifically depressing outlook, there is one tiny glimmer of hope. In 2008, a projected teacher recruitment crisis was avoided at the last minute by the financial collapse: as is well known, if there are fewer graduate jobs on offer, suddenly, ITT applications rocket.
So, weirdly, could we find ourselves hoping that Brexit goes as catastrophically wrong as some observers have predicted? A massive recession may be our only hope.
@Ed_Dorrell
