As with Jeremy Hunt and the NHS, education ministers should remember that reform is impossible if workforce morale has tanked

You can approach reform with as much zeal as you like, but it matters not one jot if teachers are so fed up they just want to get out, writes TES deputy editor

25th October 2015, 11:14am

Ed Dorrell

The EBac, character education, funding reform and tackling coasting schools are fine and dandy in theory, but the teacher recruitment crisis could render them all pointless.

I was at talking to a headteacher last week who oversees a school in Blackpool. No amount of intervention, she explained, is going to sort out her school if she can’t get the staff.

As any decent head will tell you, the biggest part of leadership is getting the right teachers teaching the right lessons.

One of the reasons so many coastal schools appear to be underperforming is down to their location. As research this week showed, teachers generally like to live within 10 miles of where they work, and a seaside location reduces the area from which you can recruit by around 50 per cent.

Operational problems aren’t restricted only to coastal regions, however, when teacher supply is in a mess. One head in a deprived Yorkshire town explained to me not long ago that his school improvement plan couldn’t include a radical overhaul of his teaching personnel because “if they leave there’s no-one to replace them”.

Put simply, very few teachers wanted to live near his school.

It’s very hard to concentrate your resources on the latest intervention from the Department for Education, such as the compulsory EBac, if your physics department is understaffed by 50 per cent.

To make matters worse, it is quite possible that the government’s long-awaited overhaul of the national funding formula could exacerbate these problems.

What could be interesting would be to map the schools that will be hit hardest by cuts against the areas suffering worst from teacher shortages. My bet is that the sweet spot will be slap bang in the middle of the recent educational success story of central London. Maintaining the momentum of the upward trajectory of these schools’ results will be very, very difficult when it’s impossible to find a maths teacher - and then even when you do, you can’t meet their salary expectations.

At this point it is worth reminding ourselves that the growing recruitment crisis is not just down to the drought in graduates entering teacher training; it’s also about the fact that experienced staff are leaving in their droves, with even more thinking of following in their footsteps.

The Workload Challenge was a good starting point, but education ministers need to go further and put teacher morale firmly at the centre of everything they do. All other announcements should be of secondary concern.

Because, as Jeremy Hunt is discovering in health, it’s all well and good having big ideas about reform, but if you lose the goodwill of the people on the ground, you may as well be tilting at windmills.