If the new Chartered College of Teaching is to succeed, it needs to be “massive”, according to chief executive Dame Alison Peacock. She wants the college to be selfsufficient by 2021 and no longer reliant on government funding.
“We have to be in a position where we can stand on our two feet by then,” she told TES. “In a decade’s time, I would want, as soon as a teacher becomes qualified, that one of the first things they do alongside joining their union is say ‘and I must become a member of the Chartered College’.”
With initially modest ambitions - Dame Alison had been targeting “hundreds” of members to begin with “because I don’t want [the college] to be an organisation that is driven by sales” - her growth plan is already ahead of target.
By Monday, more than 1,000 teachers had joined the college, only three school days after its official opening last week. However, Dame Alison said that to have a real impact on the teaching profession, the college had to become a “massive organisation”.
It aims to be voluntary, teacher-led and to support professional development, promote and share evidence-informed practice, and recognise excellence.
DfE funding promise
The college had a troubled birth, having raised less than 10 per cent of its target during a crowdfunding campaign last year. It was only able to get off the ground with a promise from the Department for Education of £5 million over its first four years.
Dame Alison said that the college would have to be able to pay for itself at the end of that period through a combination of membership fees and funding secured from industry and philanthropic organisations.
I want us to become independent as soon as we possibly can
“I want us to become independent as soon as we possibly can,” she said.
“We don’t want to be in a position where there’s a change of government or there’s a change of thinking, and they say ‘oh yeah, that College of Teaching, that was a good idea but that’s by the wayside now’.
“This needs to be something that is permanent for the profession.”
Proof of ‘relevance’ needed
There is still work to do in winning some teaching union leaders over, though. NUT general secretary Kevin Courtney said that the college “remained something of an unknown quantity”.
“Teachers will want to be convinced that it will add value to their work,” he warned.
His counterpart at the NASUWT teaching union, Chris Keates, argued that “the onus is now on the college to answer the legitimate questions that teachers have about its relevance to their working lives, and the contribution it will make to the profession and to the quality of teaching in our schools”.
“If the aspiration of the college to become financially self-sufficient within four years is to be met, the college will need to rapidly demonstrate its political independence from government,” she added.
The college will need to rapidly demonstrate its political independence
Dame Alison stressed that the DfE had not tried to meddle in the work of the college.
“They have been very hands-off in terms of requiring us to behave in a certain way - we really haven’t had any interference,” she said.
One of the key early priorities of the college is to develop a “chartered teaching” programme, which Dame Alison said would provide teachers with “high-quality professional development beyond your initial teacher training years”.
She said it would provide evidence-based best practice on what achieves results in the classroom, but would not be “prescriptive” or try to set a “blueprint” for how all pupils should be taught.
Improved professional development could also cut workload by giving teachers the “courage to say no to things”, she added.
“The greater professional knowledge and confidence that is built across the system, the more we’re able to say, ‘you know what, actually that isn’t important’.”
Dame Alison believes that the college has the potential to improve retention by lifting morale. “Greater, enhanced professionalism means that we will have more teachers who will want to stay in the profession,” she said.
“When morale is low, typically that’s because you feel out of control, you feel as though there are too many things you can’t achieve or do anything about, and the way of flipping that is to begin to act.”
