Exploring Teacher Recruitment and Retention

Contextual Challenges from International Perspectives

Tanya Ovenden-Hope, Rowena Passy, Tanya Ovenden-Hope, Rowena Passy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367076443
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429556951
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This thought-provoking collection examines the challenge of teacher shortages that is of international concern. It presents multiple perspectives, and explores the commonalities and differences in approaches from around the world to understand possible solutions for the current teacher workforce crisis.

Acknowledging that solutions to attract and retain teachers vary by country, region and in some cases locality, the contributors scrutinise a range of workforce planning interventions at local and government level, including financial incentives and early career support.

The book draws on different perspectives to understand a range of problems that negatively affect teacher recruitment and retention, unpicking key challenges, including links between the disadvantages of location and access to teachers for coastal and rural schools, rising pupil numbers, declining school budgets and the role of professional learning in raising teacher status.

Abundant in critiques, research-informed positions and context-specific discussions about the impact of teacher workforce supply and shortages, this book will be valuable reading for teacher educators, educational leaders, education policy makers and academics in the field.

PART I
Perspectives on teacher recruitment and retention in England

1
SHORTAGES, WHAT SHORTAGES? EXPLORING SCHOOL WORKFORCE SUPPLY IN ENGLAND

John Howson

Shortages, what shortages?

In December 1970, I received a phone call from the headteacher of a local comprehensive school asking me if I wanted a temporary job until the summer teaching at the school: he had two vacancies to fill, one in science and the other in design and technology. I did not find the phone call at all unusual. Throughout the mid-1960s in England, when I was in the Sixth Form, it was quite common for some of those who remained for a third year in the Sixth Form (in order to take the Oxford and Cambridge University entrance examinations at the end of the autumn term) to take up teaching posts after Christmas when these Oxbridge examinations were over, always filling teaching vacancies in local secondary modern schools.

This was my introduction to teaching, and also to the issue of staff shortages. Schools struggled to recruit teachers for the demographic upturn experienced during the early 1970s in the secondary sector. In addition, there was a demand for extra teachers as a result of the government finally extending the school leaving age in 1972 to 16 from 15, where it had been since the late 1940s. This rise in the leaving age, long foreshadowed as an objective from the time of the passing of the 1944 Education Act, followed the delay in implementation forced upon the previous Labour government by the economic crisis of late 1967.

Teacher supply did not feature as an issue after the mid-1970s, when the school population returned to more usual levels, until the mid-1980s, except in one respect. The move to create a largely comprehensive secondary school system meant a move away from class teachers to a subject teacher staffing model in the secondary sector, even in the remaining secondary modern schools. Despite demands for the employment of more subject specialists at secondary education level, the class teacher model remained, as it still does, the dominant means of learning in the primary school sector (the term elementary school disappeared in England following the 1944 Education Act that introduced a break at the age of 11 between primary and secondary schooling).

Throughout the period under discussion, the formal starting age for schooling in England remained the term after a pupil’s fifth birthday. However, in the twenty-first century, with the growing understanding of the importance of the early years in education, many children entered the schooling system at an earlier age, often through nursery provision.

Teacher training and teacher distribution: challenges and potential solutions

There had already been demands in the 1960s, especially by the teacher associations, that all teachers needed to be trained to teach. Hiring anyone, whether a graduate or not, was not for many a satisfactory way of staffing schools funded by the state. As early as 1963, John Newsom’s report, entitled ‘Half our Future’, reflected government thinking of the time:

In the primary and secondary modern schools teaching methods and techniques, with all the specialized knowledge that lies behind them, are as essential as mastery of subject matter. The prospect of these schools staffed to an increasing extent by untrained graduates is, in our view, intolerable.

(Ministry of Education, 1963, p. 105)

The demand to employ more teachers with specific subject knowledge and training created many challenges for governments over the following half-century. By the late 1980s, a teacher supply problem had once again emerged. The then House of Commons Education, Science and Arts Select Committee was moved to undertake an investigation into ‘the supply of teachers for the 1990s’ (House of Commons, 1989). As the then Assistant Master and Mistresses Association put it in their evidence to the Select Committee, ‘We consider that some geographical shortages, especially in inner cities, reflect, in addition to low general availability of teachers, the collective view of the poor reputation of schools in certain areas’ (HC, 1989, Minutes of Evidence p. 126).

Thus, by the late 1980s, the twin themes of the sufficiency of teachers and their distribution in an increasingly market-based education system were already being acknowledged. This was to be a recurring theme addressed by House of Commons Select Committees in various reports over the next 30 years.

One solution, suggested to the House of Commons Select Committee by the Secretary of State, Sir Keith Joseph, was the idea of school-based training (HC, 1989, Q649). This introduced the third of the important themes of the decades, the question of how teachers should be trained. Over the next 30 years, these various themes were rarely out of the spotlight of Select Committees and the educational community.

In the early 1990s, the government created the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) as an arm’s-length organisation with a remit to oversee teacher training, as well as recruitment into the profession. Operating as it did in a market-based system, the TTA had little or no involvement in where new recruits would work, and thus a system was created that rewarded high-quality training programmes, even if they were not in areas where teachers were needed. The issue of matching teachers to the vacancies was seen as a problem for the market and not for the state. This produced a potentially wasteful misuse of resources, with teachers unable to find work in some areas but schools unable to recruit teachers elsewhere.

By the time of the economic recession in the United Kingdom between the end of the 1980s and the mid-1990s, and despite the concerns of MPs in their 1989 report (HC, 1989), recruitment into teaching had improved, and vacancy rates recorded by schools reduced accordingly. There were three years in the early 1990s when the training target for mathematics teachers set by government’s internal Teacher Supply Model (TSM) that determined the number of teacher training places required each year was not only met, but exceeded. Table 1.1 shows vacancy rates in secondary schools over a ten-year period from 1986 to 1996 as a percentage of the teaching workforce in England.

TABLE 1.1 Vacancy rates in secondary schools 1986/96 as a percentage of the teaching force in work

Year	Vacancy
	Percentage
1986	1.1
1987	1.2
1988	1.0
1989	1.3
1990	1.5
1991	1.1
1992	0.5
1993	0.3
1994	0.4
1995	0.3
1996	0.3

Source: Department for Education and Science, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991; Department of Education, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995; Department for Education and Employment [DfEE], 1996.

In the period after the changes contained in the Education Reform Act of 1988 came into force, which included the introduction of local management of schools, and with budgets transferred from local authority control to headteachers and governing bodies, teacher vacancy rates in the secondary sector declined. The growth in the early 1990s of public sector higher education, following the conversion of the polytechnics and later the colleges of higher education into degree-awarding universities in their own right, may have helped provide a supply of new graduates for whom teaching looked like an attractive career option. This appears particularly true for the increasing number of the new female graduates at that time (Graduate Teacher Training Registry [GTTR], 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996).

The Labour government won the general election in May 1997, just as the tide was turning away from a positive flow in the supply of teachers. In the summer of 1996, I provided evidence to another House of Commons Select Committee inquiry into teacher recruitment, and as a mark of concern I advised the Select Committee that:

The history of teacher training in England and Wales during the past thirty years has been one of alternating periods of ‘feast’ and ‘famine’. Periods of shortage have been followed by times of teacher unemployment. The current position is one where a period of relative over-supply may be being replaced by a period of significant shortage towards the end of the century unless prompt action is taken by those responsible for the overall control of the teaching profession.

(HC, 1996, p. 8)

And so teacher supply was to continue lurching from periods of surplus numbers to shortages during the next two decades as the remainder of this chapter helps to demonstrate.

Falling postgraduate numbers and supply shortages

Although teaching remained the career of choice for many graduates, as it always had been and remains so to this day, applications to postgraduate teacher training fell in key subjects between the 1996/97 entry round and those applying to start courses in 1998/99, illustrated in Table 1.2.

TABLE 1.2 Applications to secondary postgraduate teacher training courses in England 1996/97 to 1998/99 (selected subjects)

Subject	1996/97	1997/98	1998/99
Mathematics	1,873	1,579	1,288
English & Drama	3,197	3,104	3,141
Sciences (all)	3,698	3,625	2,878
Languages (all)	2,680	2,561	2,442
Technology (all)	1,549	1,605	1,595
All Secondary applications	20,654	20,074	18,904

Source: GTTR, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 (England only).

The number of teacher training places at this time was controlled by the government department at Westminster responsible for schools (Department for Education and Employment, Department of Education, Department for Children, Schools and Families, or Department for Education, depending upon the title in use at the time), and distributed through the Teacher Training Agency to most course providers. The overall level of allocations provided the benchmark by which the success or otherwise of recruitment onto teacher preparation courses could be measured. This measurement of success is still used in England to the present day.

Four subjects were responsible for the majority of the unfilled places in both years shown in Table 1.3. Across the two years, these subjects accounted for 7,930 of the 8,770 unfilled places, or some 90 per cent of unfilled places.

TABLE 1.3 Unfilled places on ITT higher education courses 1997/98 to 1998/99 (selected subjects)

Subject	1997/98	1998/99	Total unfilled places
Mathematics	830	1,080	1,910
Sciences (all)	520	820	1,340
Languages (all)	920	720	1,640
Technology (all)	1,200	1,840	3,040
Total from above four subjects	3,470	4,460	7,930
All Secondary applications	3,740	5,030	8,770

Source: GTTR, 1997, 1998, 1999 (England only).

In the 1980s, it had been the custom in some years for governments to add back in to the following years’ targets any shortfall in recruitment to training courses from a previous year, presumably in the hope that recruitment might have improved. This practice was abandoned in the late 1990s, possibly because it was creating some unachievable targets. There is, after all, no point in recruiting too many trainees on to teacher preparation courses, since each year every school has to be fully staffed, even if, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, the mix of staff is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the editors
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Perspectives on teacher recruitment and retention in England
• Part II Perspectives on teacher recruitment and retention internationally
• Afterword
• Index