Most teachers are passionate about bettering the lives of those less fortunate, particularly children. It’s a mission statement that’s driven so many into the profession.

Yet astonishingly, it’s the same one that’s driven so many out. Through a mixture of factors, largely out of their control, teachers are leaving where the children need them the most.

In a 2016 report, Becky Allen, director of the education datalab, found that “the odds of a teacher leaving a high Free School Meals (FSM) school are 1.7 times higher than for a nearby low-FSM school”. Due to high staff turnover at many of these schools, Allen found that “higher FSM schools have more teachers without a formal teaching qualification or who are newly qualified, fewer experienced teachers, more teachers without a degree in the subject they are teaching (particularly in maths and science) and higher teacher turnover.” She concludes that these factors prevent students in these schools from making good progress.

Research in 2013 by the Department for Education found that teachers at secondary schools in the worst-off areas were 70 per cent more likely to leave than those in the top 20 per cent of best-off schools.

We could point at a range of factors to explain this, including pay (which, in the same report, Allen states is in fact lower for newly qualified teachers (NQTs) in some high FSM schools than others) and the challenging behaviour of students.

But it’s my contention that the deep-rooted problems in recruitment and retention in deprived areas also come down to the work of an organisation whose core purpose is supposed to be to “narrow the educational gap” across the country: Ofsted. 

Standing up to the challenges

Let’s take a school in city where more than a twentieth of its land mass falls within the 1 per cent most deprived in Britain. A school that sits in an area where gangland shootings happen and where  income deprivation is ranked better than in 0 per cent of others areas of the UK.

Not to make excuses, but I think any observer can recognise that any school situated slap bang in the middle of this area is going to have its fair share of challenges to deal with: challenges that will inhibit its ability to “make” children make the kind of progress Ofsted would want or expect.

Say that school had more than double the national average of disadvantaged students and a significant number of EAL students.

I know a school like that. It is rated as “requires improvement”.

That “rating” will be primarily based on outcomes: the attainment and progress of their students. These are factors that will surely be incomprehensively impacted by their context. Nevertheless, to quote Sean Harford, Ofsted’s national director, “the answer isn’t to artificially judge outcomes higher; that won’t make headteachers or, more importantly, the kids feel any better.”

The Ofsted report for this particular school certainly won’t have made anyone within it “feel any better”. After a report like they received, certain “cycles” can happen.

Progress actually stalls

Headteachers leave to sunnier climbs and NQTs burn out from trying to implement the subsequent “action plan”, implemented ferociously by senior leaders intent on getting a “good” next time. More experienced staff - the few that still remain - ponder early retirement because of the danger of paranoid micro-management. And because of all of this, standards actually drop. Progress actually stalls. The school actually remains requiring improvement. And so it starts again.

Meanwhile, schools just down the road in the leafy suburbs are graced with “outstanding ratings” time and again.

Here, students benefit extensively from good parenting, their cultural capital, their propensity to actually spend time with them and, in some cases, pay for extra activities and tutors to ensure they do well academically. For these reasons, from the age of 11-16, the students in these schools make more rapid progress than their peers from their starting points, and therefore have a much better chance of getting a better Ofsted grade.

Supportive parents and societal norms in locality make all the difference, but Ofsted seems reticent to address this with meaningful policy change or any tinkering of their inspection regime. They say they “consider the context of schools” but, ultimately, they won’t budge on judging “outcomes” and the “outcomes” make up the final grades.

So, ultimately, if you’re a good school in a poor area, it’s much harder.

Different league

This isn’t justice. I think we need justice for every school, leadership team or staff body that has to walk around with “requires improvement” tag around their necks because of an inspection system unwilling to accommodate those operating in the meanest, toughest circumstances.

For me, we need to level the playing field - higher salaries for all staff in these schools, higher budgets for core development and, more importantly than all that, a new criterion for judging schools with higher than average FSM cohorts, especially those with lower than average key stage 2 starting points.

Ibrahimović would score a hat trick every week playing in League Two. Why do we expect our teachers to perform at the same level as their counterparts who are simply playing in a different league, financially and otherwise?

Thomas Rogers is a teacher who runs rogershistory.com and tweets @RogersHistory

For more columns by Tom, view his back catalogue

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