A new investigation is getting under way to assess whether teacher turnover can be used as a performance measure of how effective a multi-academy trust is.
This year’s Schools White Paper set an ambition for schools to join “strong multi-academy trusts”, but with no set definition of what constitutes this, the Education Policy Institute (EPI) think tank is running a long-term study into the possible features of successful school groups.
As part of this, the institute has begun new research to understand whether characteristics of a school’s staff can determine how effective its trust is.
Researchers have identified a five-year cumulative staff turnover - the percentage of teachers that have exited a school group five years after a baseline measurement is taken - as its preferred way of measuring turnover.
They also considered the annual turnover: the percentage of teachers exiting a school group each year and presenting a three-year rolling average.
The EPI said that it has decided that the five-year measures can capture more holistically the disruption caused by high staff turnover.
It is now seeking views from the education sector on how to improve the measurements, in order to make the research as robust as possible.
The key questions being asked as part of the consultation are:
- What characteristics of a group’s workforce (for example, the age and experience of its teachers, the regions it operates in and the curriculum subjects it offers) should be used as control variables to contextualise the results and what characteristics should be considered to arise from the deliberate decisions of school groups?
- Whether school groups should be compared only on teacher turnover or turnover across the whole school workforce?
- What, beyond just turnover, should be included in a basket of measures to assess strong workforce management in school groups?
This research is the the third part of EPI’s work to identify the features of effective school trusts, having already looked at financial efficiency and inclusion metrics.
Alongside this consultation, the researchers set out a report highlighting how recruitment and retention ”is a serious challenge for the English education system”.
They outline that different groups of schools have a “large variation in turnover figures” and say this means they are not yet able to “confidently identify school groups where deliberate workforce management policies lead to higher or lower turnover, as opposed to other contextual factors”.
Lorna Stevenson, researcher at EPI, said that alongside the growing push for schools to join “strong multi-academy trusts”, there is also “growing demand for policymakers to better understand the characteristics and practices contributing to ‘strong’ school groups”.
She encouraged the education sector to respond to the consultation, which is open until 6 January.
