“What’s our biggest blind spot in education?”

I recently wrote this blog about one of the biggest blind spots in education.

My response to today’s consultation document on QTS reform brings many of these thoughts back to mind, and I feel so much more optimistic now. It’s brilliant to see that the importance of the early career phase is recognised. However, it is vital that this is framed in a way that is about support and development - not compliance and hoop-jumping. The way the consultation is presented is very promising in this respect. This matters as it’s only this way that we can get anywhere near to solving the teacher recruitment and retention crisis that is (in my view) the number one priority right now. In saying this, I put the emphasis as much, if not more, on retention as recruitment. This is potentially where support and development in the early career phase could make a real difference.

Apart from the obvious reasons why teacher retention matters, there are other crucial factors that may not be quite so familiar:

Teacher recruitment problems and high teacher turnover impact by far the most on schools with the poorest intakes. Schools with affluent intakes have double the percentage of teachers with more than 10 years of experience, compared with the poorest. Pupils in schools serving areas of higher deprivation are much more likely to have teachers without an academic degree in a relevant subject. The schools serving more disadvantaged communities experience higher levels of teacher turnover and much more dependence on supply teachers, unqualified teachers, fixed-term contracts and NQTs. I could go on. The problem is not experienced evenly across the sector. Those who are impacted most by teacher recruitment and retention problems are the schools with the most deprived intakes.

High numbers of different teachers will always result in highly disrupted learning and relationships. High-turnover schools need to keep recruiting novice, inexperienced teachers. Teachers get better in the first 10 years of their career - these schools are not benefiting from these incremental improvements. Most turnover is also wastage out of the profession - teacher-training costs a lot more than it should as more and more teachers need to be trained to replace those that leave.

This problem is harming schools and government budgets, but, importantly, it is doing the most harm to the most deprived pupils who need the best support.

Just why is this problem so acute? Obviously there are multiple reasons, and I could write at length about workload, accountability, esteem, pay and conditions, lack of agency, but instead I’m going to talk about one of the biggest problems that sits behind a lot of this. It’s something everyone knows about but no one in power is really prepared to admit it in such a way that something serious is done about it.

ITE is not long enough, and this means too much is expected of NQTs, which is what makes so many of them leave so early in their careers. This is the most significant but most underreported finding in the Carter Review. Arguably we were as bad as everyone else. It was underemphasised in the report because we knew nothing would be done about it. The truth is, the initial preparation isn’t anything like long enough and, therefore, it’s not good enough to meet the very high expectations of heads who employ NQTs. If we collated all the things that all the experts and headteachers, etc, we spoke to said that someone needs to know and be able to do when they start their teaching career, it would probably add up to about five years to cover even in a fairly superficial way. There wouldn’t be a single thing you’d take out and, arguably, there wouldn’t be a single thing that some NQT somewhere hasn’t experienced as a high priority need in that first year.

‘We set them up to feel like failures’

Thinktank LKMco’s Why Teach? report showed that two of the top three reasons why teachers stay in teaching are “being good at it” and “being well qualified to do it”. This was cited by over 90 per cent of respondents and over half said that these three factors were “very important”. Yet we put so little time into equipping teachers to feel this way at the beginning of their careers. Instead, we set them up to feel like failures. The report also stated that the availability of CPD would influence three-quarters of 25-34-year-old teachers’ decisions about where to work. ITE is not long enough and not enough happens with teachers in the early years of their career to address this problem. This is why early career teachers are crying out for good CPD. Across Europe, the minimum total duration of ITE is usually between four and six years. In Finland,it takes five, in Shanghai between two and four years. The ITE consecutive model lasts seven years in Luxembourg.

The reform of QTS offers an opportunity to do something really significant: guaranteed, visible, sustained and very high-quality support, development and requirements for teachers to go on developing in the first three years after the initial preparation phase. This is the period when support is most needed but, just as importantly, it’s the period when it can made most meaningful and when the most significant development can happen.

My organisation, the Sheffield Institute of Education, is trying to do something about this in the Sheffield city region with a new programme called Partnerships for Attainment. This project is about promoting, securing and developing a high-quality teacher workforce. Its success will ultimately be measured by improved student outcomes resulting from consistently high-quality teaching. We’ve been really encouraged by the enthusiasm and commitment shown by our partners to make this initiative work.

If you’d like to find out more, email Samantha at S.twiselton@shu.ac.uk

Professor Samantha Twiselton is director of the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. She was a member of the advisory panel for the Department for Education’s Carter Review of initial teacher training in England. She tweets @samtwiselton

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