Ministers must make teaching more “intellectually attractive” to stop long classroom hours driving people away from the profession, according to the official behind the world’s most influential education rankings.
Andreas Schleicher, who runs the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), made his comments after new figures revealed that teachers in England and Scotland spend a significantly larger proportion of their working time in front of pupils than most other developed countries.
“Teaching load is really high in England - this is a big chunk of teachers work and it means they have less time for other things than teaching, such as professional development and lesson planning,” Mr Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said.
He stressed that while pay was important for teacher recruitment and retention, tackling the balance between teaching and other activities was also key.
Asked by TES whether the type of workload experienced by teachers in England could be contributing to staff shortages, Mr Schleicher said: “I think countries need to worry more about making teaching intellectually attractive rather than just financially attractive.
“Finland is a good example. Teaching is the second most prestigious occupation. That is not because they get great salaries - the salaries are comparable to the salaries in England - but they have a lot more opportunities to grow in their profession, more career opportunities, more career differentiation.
“Those things are not less important than money in making teaching more attractive.”
Crunching the numbers
The new figures from the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2016 report reveal that teachers in England spend 59 per cent of their working time teaching classes.
The average teaching time across the 22 countries surveyed was 45 per cent. In Japan, ranked seventh in maths in Pisa 2012, teachers take classes for just 32 per cent of their time.
Countries need to worry more about making teaching intellectually attractive rather than just financially attractive
Mr Schleicher said that a low teaching load was common in East Asian countries that scored highly in the Pisa rankings. Teachers in Shanghai, China, which topped the table for maths in 2012, take between 11 and 16 lessons a week, he said.
“When you look at high-performing education systems, there is a general tendency to invest more in non-teaching time,” he said. “So teachers spend more time with parents, more time with individual students, more time on professional development and they spend more time on lesson preparation.”
But Mr Schleicher said that the way these countries were able to afford to give teachers more non-teaching working time was to have more students per class.
MPs have called on the government to do more to tackle teacher shortages in England, with the Commons Public Accounts Committee saying that the Department for Education’s approach to recruiting teachers is “reactive and lacks coherence”.
On retention, the latest DfE figures show that 10 per cent of qualified teachers left the profession in 2015 - up from 8.9 per cent in 2011.
Malcolm Trobe, interim general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has warned that teacher shortages could “jeopardise standards”.
The government’s inquiry into workload in 2014 found that teachers’ top priorities were around eliminating the excessive time they spent on non-teaching tasks, such as analysing data and marking, rather than reducing the time they spent in front of pupils.
But Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers teaching union, said: “It would undoubtedly be better if you had a lighter timetable and more time to reflect, so you don’t get exhausted, spend the holidays being ill, then recover just in time to go back to school.
She added: “What Mr Schleicher is doing is taking a much longer-term view. For teachers to have lighter timetables when pupil numbers are rising would require a real rethink about teaching and learning, and would require investment in our schools. Teachers would definitely welcome that.”
A DfE spokesperson said: “Teaching continues to be a popular career that appeals to the brightest and best graduates. We know that unnecessary workload is one of the biggest frustrations for teachers and we are working with the profession to address this.”
