Last month, I read a brilliant article in The Economist about race relations in the USA. The article was a multifaceted examination of how and why black Americans were still falling behind their white counterparts. 

Inevitably, education was identified as a key factor. Although I was not looking for comparisons between our two nations, one passage in particular resonated with my experience as a teacher working in an inner-city school in the UK: “Schools in poor neighbourhoods need particularly good teachers. But the schools that require the greatest talent often receive the most inexperienced instructors, in part because there is little financial encouragement for the best to work in them.”

The notion that such schools require particularly good teachers appears to be almost ludicrously self-evident. And yet, from my five years of teaching experience, there seems to be a worrying trend towards over-relying on inexperienced trainee teachers in inner-city schools, including my own. 

Honing their craft

In the final virtual staff briefing of the year, the senior leadership team at my school, an inner-city academy in West London, announced that next year the school would be taking on 15 trainee teachers.

Fifteen. This for a school that serves just over 500 students. Although this would be the largest cohort of trainees yet, this is not an unusual number for schools such as mine. 

High staff turnover, problems with recruiting experienced teachers because of the cost of housing in the local area, and the lack of a sixth form all play a hand in these schools’ reliance on trainee teachers, as does a tight budget because of low student roll. 

In fact, my own career trajectory has followed a similar pattern. I started as a trainee teacher five years ago when I lived in rented accommodation. My wife and I then bought a place together (a canal boat) and we have slowly inched further and further away from the city. After three years of commuting for more than three hours each day, I am finally leaving my school to join a local Catholic school. 

Behaviour at my school is exemplary, which undoubtedly makes it a fantastic environment for a trainee teacher to hone their craft. The school leadership takes a zero-tolerance approach to low-level disruption, and are always visible on learning walks or patrolling the corridors.

Indeed, when taking parents round the school, the principal would often make the point that parents could not tell the difference between the classroom of a trainee teacher and an experienced teacher. This is obviously a good thing: trainees feel supported by a clear behavioural policy and the visibility of the SLT. 

In the hands of an experienced teacher

I have witnessed first-hand how such a policy provides trainees with the environment they need to be able to make much faster progress.

However, my role as a teaching and learning coach, part of a small team responsible for raising standards in teaching and learning, has given me the opportunity to spend more time in the classroom of trainee teachers. And you can absolutely tell if you are in the classroom of a trainee teacher or an experienced teacher. 

Experienced teachers are invariably far more confident in their delivery of material, more flexible in their teaching - able to readily adapt in the moment if they notice that students have misunderstood something. 

They have a much wider range of behaviour-management techniques, which allow them to address poor behaviour without having to resort to sanctioning a student or removing them from lessons. Indeed, the school’s isolation unit was usually full of students, the overwhelming majority of whom had been sent out of lessons by trainee teachers. 

Most importantly, the more experienced teachers were more likely to be subject experts, who exuded authority to their students because of their mastery of their subject area. 

Becoming a good teacher

Becoming a good teacher takes time and practice. Many trainees become truly good teachers by the end of their third year of teaching, by which time there seem to be two options: gain a rapid promotion that you could never dream of getting in a “normal” school, or leave for pastures news. This recruitment model needs to be redrawn. 

There is a lot to be positive about for our profession at the moment: teachers have received a pay rise, there has been a huge increase in applications for teacher training, and the government may finally hit their recruitment target. 

However, the government must not view the boost in applications for teacher training as a panacea to remedy the ills of the education system, particularly now that the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened during the lockdown. 

Instead, if they are serious about “levelling up” the country, they must address the recruitment and retention issues faced by inner-city schools. Our most disadvantaged students deserve to be taught by the best teachers. 

This will require bold policy proposals: better remuneration for experienced teachers; more affordable housing, which goes beyond the shared-ownership scheme for key workers; lower train fares for commuters. 

The model of hiring a large batch of trainees or inexperienced teachers and then watching them leave, fatigued or disillusioned, a few years later, is unsustainable. And, more importantly, it is unfair on those students most in need of the best teachers. 

Shivan Davis trained with Teach First and is now a Teach First Ambassador, teaching English in an inner-city academy