Some like to ease into a Monday morning, taking the time to slowly catch up on emails and drink copious amounts of tea. Others like to begin the week with a bang. The Department for Education fell firmly into the latter camp this week, as it revealed its brand spanking new teacher recruitment and retention strategy.
Education secretary Damian Hinds and co consulted with teachers, school leaders, trade unions and other education experts to come up a much-needed plan of action to tackle the teacher supply crisis plaguing schools. So, what do you need to know about their new strategy?
The Early Career Framework
Tipped to be the buzzword of education in 2019, at the heart of the overall strategy is the “ECF”. Its aim? To provide new teachers with world-class training and support to tackle the problem of staff leaving the profession within just a few years of becoming qualified. The NQT period will now last for two years, and there will be a new framework for new teachers to work through with their mentors. They will then be assessed at the end against the Teachers’ Standards. Teachers will also be guaranteed 5 per cent off-timetable time during their second year for support and training. The DfE has pledged to invest at least an extra £130 million per year to make this work.
Primary teacher and curriculum lead Jon Hutchinson and assistant head Caroline Spalding, writing jointly for Tes, said: “New teachers will receive what other professions have enjoyed for a long time: a structured, consistent and coherent induction period, in which they are taught the accumulated knowledge and skills necessary to not only survive but also thrive in their chosen profession. The exposure to research on the varied areas of education (from special educational needs to assessment theory) will mean that each teacher can embark on a career-long path of increasing expertise in their chosen field.”
Match.com for flexible working
The DfE is planning to play Cupid when it comes to finding teachers their dream job share. How this will work exactly is not 100 per cent clear yet; we’re hoping for a Tinder-style app in which you can swipe yes or no depending on a teacher’s profile. Location, obviously, would be a consideration, but also how you pair pedagogically and GSOH would help, too.
Headteacher Michael Tidd said: “An online matching service might do well to match up teachers who want to teach opposite halves of the week, who both have expertise in the same age range, who can both travel to a mutually accessible location and who have a good range of subject expertise. But just like real dating sites, the easy algorithm stuff is not enough.
“In both primary and secondary schools, if you’re expecting teachers to jointly share a class, then you need to know that they’ll be sufficiently compatible. Just as a shared love of skydiving won’t make for a perfect couple if one party can’t bear the other’s love of jazz music, so it is that one teacher’s well-managed classroom would be a colleague’s idea of regimented hell.”
‘Hello, workload hotline ... What’s your emergency?’
Ofsted is set to launch a new hotline to allow headteachers to report inspectors who add unnecessarily to their school’s workload. This puts schools in the driver’s seat, and will hopefully ensure that the watchdog honours its commitment to avoid contributing towards workload.
Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector, said: “We wholeheartedly support the government’s recruitment and retention strategy, and want to play our part by ensuring that teaching is a career people want to join and stay in. Our new inspection framework supports this aim, and we believe it will reduce teacher workload. Ultimately, this will mean teachers can focus their energy on giving pupils a good curriculum that is well taught.”
Rewarding the remainers
Bursary payments for teachers are going to be reformed so that they reward people who stay in the profession. The DfE says it’s planning to overhaul the bursary payments so that 40 per cent of the money is given to those who stay in the classroom, and larger pots of money will be given to those working in the most challenging schools. Kerrrr-ching!
John Blake, director of policy and strategy at Now Teach, said: “Of course, there are always a few devils in the implementation details, but there are refreshing signs here that this, too, has been given proper consideration. The result is that there will probably be fewer fireworks over this initiative than those of some of [Damian Hinds’] predecessors, but that should not disguise the boldness of this strategy, nor the system-defining effects it is likely to have.”
Building homes for teachers
It may become easier for schools to build housing for teachers on their surplus land. The strategy says that the government recognises that housing is an issue for teachers in some areas. The move follows calls for action to provide affordable housing for teachers in high-cost areas, such as London. This is a move that’s likely to be well received; Sir Dan Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation of academies, previously told Tes that “if someone doesn’t do something, there will be no public sector workers left in London”.
Strategy ‘could be a game-changer’
Speaking about the recruitment and retention strategy, Samantha Twiselton, director of the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, said: “If this is really going to work, we can’t just sit back and let the DfE get on with it. People in the profession at every level and in every role need to get behind it and take it seriously as the potential game-changer it really could be.”
