Teachers need to be protected “from any unnecessary pendulum swings” in workforce policy, the chief executive of the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) has warned.
Melanie Renowden, chief executive of the NIoT, also said that it was important to ensure that “we’re not reinventing the wheel” with the future government’s education policy plans.
Ms Renowden was speaking at a fringe event at the Labour Party conference on Sunday, at which panellists discussed whether the party’s schools policies could eliminate barriers to opportunity.
Labour set out its missions for education earlier this year, including policy announcements such as a pledge to recruit over 6,500 new teachers, to revise the delivery of the Early Career Framework (ECF) and to deliver a ‘Teacher Training Entitlement’.
At the Labour conference on Sunday, the NIoT chief said that she wanted to see a new government making the most of workforce policies “that help to overcome those barriers to opportunity”, pointing to the potential for growth in apprenticeship routes to open the career up to those who “currently are priced out of teacher training.”
“We have been working on these issues carefully...for a long time. We need to make sure that we’re not reinventing the wheel to protect teachers from any unnecessary pendulum swings, given the pressures that we know teachers and schools are under,” Ms Renowden said.
Teachers and schools ‘under pressure’
”And we should draw on an area that we’ve made real progress actually, in the last decade or longer...research that helps us direct our time, attention and resources to the places where they can deliver the most return”, she added.
The NIoT chief also wants to see “careful attention” paid to regional variances in teacher recruitment shortages.
Tom Rees, chief executive officer of Ormiston Academies Trust, who also spoke at the event on Sunday, said that he did not think there was “anywhere near enough ambition at the moment” inside or outside government around changing special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision in schools.
Mr Rees said that even if it was possible to process education, health and care plans (EHCPs) more quickly, it would not be possible to get the level of expert support to deliver on that EHCP.
Earlier this year government data revealed that the number of EHCPs had risen above half a million for the first time.
And Mr Rees also claimed that “the way that we conceive of SEND in school is a problem in and of itself”.
The Ormiston chief also said that almost 40 per cent of children who will go through the school system in England will at one point or another will be classified as having SEND, a figure he branded as “too many”.
“We can’t address 40 per cent of children in the system through specialist intervention,” Mr Rees said.
He added that the only way that this proportion of pupils can be supported is through increasing the level of complexity that schools can deal with.
Mr Rees also said it was important that the sector was able to develop the workforce and school practices “that are able to deal with a greater level of complexity in the classroom”.
MATs inspected ‘all the time’
Regarding the possibility of introducing inspections of multi-academy trusts, Mr Rees said that MATs get inspected “all the time”, claiming that this was the case every time a school within a trust received an Ofsted inspection.
But he said that one thing to look at would be whether Ofsted should look more at local areas to explore local issues, which he said might “hold trusts to account”.
