High-quality teaching is the most powerful lever we have in schools to improve outcomes. And so increasing the number of disadvantaged children who experience it is fundamental to efforts to close the attainment gap.
Education Endowment Foundation research published this week shows both why this is crucial and also the scale of the task - pointing to the systematic challenges being faced by schools serving disadvantaged communities.
One part of this study, led by Professor Becky Allen, of Teacher Tapp, and focused on recruitment difficulties for schools in deprived areas, explores what makes teaching jobs more attractive to prospective candidates.
It points to useful findings for school leaders on potentially cost-effective strategies - including offering childcare subsidies and specific flexible-working commitments. This complements EEF summaries of the wider evidence base on effective recruitment and retention approaches also published this week.
Recruiting to disadvantaged schools
But the study highlights the key system-level challenge of attracting teachers to work in more disadvantaged schools; and, in turn, the enhanced importance of retaining those that do.
This issue is particularly acute at secondary, with analysis suggesting that teachers could need, on average, a 13 per cent higher salary to consider applying for jobs in secondary schools serving the most disadvantaged communities.
It is a finding that neatly captures the way the current system can act to exacerbate gaps rather than narrow them. Closing the attainment gap would require disadvantaged children to disproportionately experience high-quality teaching; but the prevailing incentives can encourage precisely the opposite.
This poses a fundamental challenge for initiatives - including national policy interventions - intended to enhance opportunity: the system into which these initiatives land is not neutral. The baked in advantage for parts of the system that are already ahead means they are often best placed to benefit further from additional resource and investment.
Where will the new teachers go?
Take, as an example, the government’s commitment to deliver an additional 6,500 teachers.
This week’s findings make it clear that, if treated simply as an overall goal, without explicit consideration of where we want those teachers to be, then it will almost certainly be considerably easier to recruit or retain these teachers in schools serving more affluent communities. And in doing so, it will very likely act to widen rather than narrow the gap.
This is far from a new policy challenge. Under the previous government a target was set to rapidly create a national network of teaching schools to provide school-to-school support.
As such, Ofsted “outstanding” grades - skewed at the time towards schools with more advantaged intakes - were used as a ready, initial designation hurdle. The result? A core element of the school improvement infrastructure was often strongest in the most advantaged areas and weakest in the most disadvantaged.
Rebalancing incentives
The crucial challenge for efforts to enhance opportunity, therefore, is to deliberately rebalance these incentives, aligning them with a system that works more effectively to narrow the attainment gap.
The first task is to remove barriers that can discourage people from working in more disadvantaged schools.
The underpinning evidence reviews carried out by the EEF identified workload as a key issue - one directly connected to perceived accountability pressures, and felt more acutely in more disadvantaged schools
Accountability is vital. But it is also vital that it is fair to schools serving disadvantaged communities, giving full credit to the teachers and leaders who chose to work there for the - often remarkable - things they achieve.
The second task is to create enhanced, proactive incentives. From a national policy perspective, this means thinking relentlessly about how to target each of government’s biggest levers.
How is the overall funding pot - however large - sufficiently weighted to ensure that leaders working in disadvantaged schools have more of the raw materials necessary to meet the level of inherent challenge? How and where is school improvement support directed?
How, crucially, can wider teacher recruitment and retention incentives and high-quality professional development offers be weighted so that the rewards and opportunities to progress are strongest in the schools where the need is greatest?
Targeting towards need
Achieving this is not straightforward. Targeting towards need will have to be baked into the definition of success for each individual initiative and policy - and this will make delivery more difficult.
But doing so is vital, because - as this week’s findings make clear - an enhanced, pro-equity emphasis will not happen naturally. Indeed, the opposite is true: if you aren’t actively targeting towards need, you are, in reality, targeting away from it.
Chris Paterson is co-CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation
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