Justine Greening has a long to-do list. At the top should be “teacher supply and retention” and “school budgets”.
The two are inextricably connected. Even if schools can recruit, they can’t afford to pay to retain. All the improvements in pupil outcomes are going to be lost if, as is now happening, a primary school can have a whole teaching staff turnover in a year while many secondaries can’t find science teachers.
Correcting the various problems of teacher supply means addressing the piecemeal mess created by Ms Greening’s predecessors who, in public, denied that there was a problem, while in private they abandoned planning and favoured “market forces” as a fix-all panacea. So salaried and non-salaried School Direct courses are based on where Teaching Schools happen to be, and university providers compete with each other, causing some, including the Open University, to discontinue PGCE courses.
Bursaries to attract graduates into teaching have provided perverse incentives
Meanwhile, bursaries to attract graduates into teaching have provided perverse incentives - for example, a mouthwatering tax-free £30,000 for a 2:1 physics graduate, tempting for a debt-laden undergraduate even if you don’t then teach.
Correcting this requires proper planning on the part of the government, aided by advice from those who know what’s happening - perhaps the revival of a National Advisory Council on Training and Supply of Teachers consisting of all the interested parties and charged with giving annual advice to the secretary of state.
Teacher supply is only half the problem
Just like the NHS with doctors and nurses, so the schooling system depends on a supply of committed, well-qualified professionals. In both hospitals and schools we are in a crisis. But supply is only half of the problem. Retaining teachers is even more important.
The new College of Teaching is a move in the right direction, but it mustn’t stay on the margins. Its main task is in the retention of teachers, and that requires two measures: one involves money and the other an inducement to schools to prioritise CPD.
Ms Greening must persuade Theresa May to endow the College of Teaching with a one-off £300 million “founding grant”, with the interest on the invested cash to be spent on CPD for state school teachers.
It shows what can be done when bodies are not scrabbling for cash on an annual basis
There are two precedents - Labour in 1997 bestowed £150 million to found the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and the Coalition sank £125 million into the Education Endowment Foundation. Both have had an enormous impact, which just shows what can be done when bodies are not scrabbling for cash on an annual basis. So now the Conservatives must give a one-off grant to the College of Teaching, specifying that the benefits go to CPD for teachers in state schools.
The second change the college should lead on is a kitemark covering internal CPD practices. At the first sign of budgetary pressure, too many schools sacrifice good CPD.
It is far better to have fewer motivated and intellectually curious staff than to have more who, through no fault of their own, become demotivated and can’t wait to leave.
Justine Greening should act now: “Greening CPD bursaries” could enter the vocabulary, and her legacy might be better than most of her predecessors’.
Sir Tim Brighouse is a former schools commissioner for London
