Creating Value In Schools
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John Viner was a primary headteacher for over 20 years, has served as an inspector, teacher trainer, RE specialist and writer. He’s now a chair of governors (among other things!). We’re told by the government that there are green shoots of recovery, but I think I'll believe that when I see it! The current parliamentary briefing paper on this says the retention of early year early career teachers has fallen since last year, but remains higher than the record low. A decade after qualification, 59% of teachers are remaining in the profession. 10 years ago, that was 65%. The government has not hit their recruitment target for more than a decade, but they have plans to recruit 6,500 teachers by 2029. I’ll believe it when I see it! A former teacher colleague of mine said: ‘My daughter thought she'd like to be a teacher, but thank goodness she's changed her mind’, and that sums it up We have to flag funding. Even the new flagship breakfast clubs have been hit with people saying, sorry, we've signed up, but we can't do it because we haven't got the staff. So there is a big funding issue. I think there is a behavior issue, and I am sure that part of this is because we're failing to meet the increasing complexity and frequency of kids with additional needs. This has an impact on their behavior. It has an impact on their attendance. I'm a chair of governors and we have Ofsted in now as I speak, and Ofsted is a massive putter offer. I happen to be of the view that Ofsted has had its day now. I inspected for Ofsted for 17 years, so I’ve done a lot of different kinds of inspections: primary, secondary, early years, special. We need to take the pressure off We used to be told that the purpose of inspection was to raise standards. But the whole thing has changed its focus. Ruth Perry was the third head teacher to take her own life as a direct result of Ofsted. A former teacher colleague of mine said this: ‘My daughter thought she'd like to be a teacher, but thank goodness she's changed her mind’, and that sums it up. We need to take the pressure off, whatever that means. We need to be kinder. Now I know, it sounds trivial. We need to be kinder to our team. In the school where I'm chair, we are kind to our teachers. The teachers say, ‘this is so much better than where I used to be, because people believe in me’, and we've got to generate that kind of feeling. So we need to be kind and understanding, and we need to be more encouraging of part-time working. Both of my sons who are teachers don't work on a Friday, because they want time for family things and other things, and fortunately they're in a position to be able to do that. We need to protect people's PPA time, their time talking to colleagues, working with their colleagues in school for planning, preparation, and assessment. People need to want to do it, enjoy doing it, feel valued, feel adequately recompensed financially, and want to make a difference. Nobody is in teaching who doesn’t want to make a difference. We have got good ways into teaching, including now the introduction of the non-graduate teaching apprenticeship. The problem at the moment is telling people about it and getting schools to believe in it, and getting schools to accept non-graduates because there's something in us as professional teachers that goes, you’ve got to be a graduate. Then there is this wonderful thing called the assessment only route Something I’ve used a couple of times is the unqualified teacher route. I had a fantastic unqualified teacher, when I was running a training school. One of our most reliable people, initially in the SEN department, was a teaching assistant. We put her onto the unqualified teacher scale. It made a lot of difference, and I've encountered people that join on the unqualified scale, and they spend their time doing a degree. Then there is this wonderful thing called the assessment only route, which is greatly ignored by schools. I looked it up the other day: it's a perfectly valid route into teaching. As a teacher trainer I’ve done loads of assessment only visits, and quite frankly, it’s quite low key. You turn up, look at the teacher, chat to them, look at the evidence they've got and say, yeah, okay, you need to do A, B, and C. They do A, B, and C. You go back, you look at them, look at the evidence they've got and go, yeah, okay, you are a teacher. Well I happen to think that the governing body which I currently lead is pretty snappy. And one of the reasons we're good is we built up a model that doesn't have, as John Cleese would've said, ‘meetings, bloody meetings’. We have what's called governance without committee; the circle model, so there's not constant committees for this or committees for that. We take great interest in what happens in the school. We are all over it. There's not much we don't know about the school. And for the first time since I've been chair – and I've been chair for nine or 10 years – we're fully complimented. So we're obviously doing something right. We can recruit diverse, talented people; we just need to be active around it Where do we get them? We put something on the local community Facebook page, and we've actually picked up a couple of people through that. I keep pointing out, you don't need to know anything about education; there's one or two of us here that do know about education, so we want you to know about other stuff. I've just acquired a local authority governor who does clever things in engineering. I asked her, what is it you do mostly? And she said, data and finance. Oh, welcome data and finance. When can you start?! So it's a bit like recruiting teachers. We want to be kind to them. We want them to feel valued. We want them to feel they're making a difference. But we can recruit diverse, talented people; we just need to be active around it. We have to keep those networks going and keep exploring them. Ok: three useful books. Dave Coles and Bob Twells wrote a book called EduCaveman® which is a good read. The wonderful Ross Morrison McGill, who you may know as TeacherToolkit, wrote Mark. Plan. Teach. 2.0 which contains simple, sensible advice, particularly if we want to make things easy for people coming into the profession. And, if you really want to be depressed about stuff, read Beyond Belief: Why school accountability is broken and how to fix it by Andrew Morrish of Headrest. More links and resources Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.Top takeaways
Teacher shortages
Multiple pressure points
Be kind
Get creative with recruitment routes
Governor recruitment
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