Is The Teacher Recruitment Crisis Actually Part Of A Bigger Plan?
The government seems committed to the idea of bringing market forces to bear on how our schools work, argues Jon Berry – so why are they doing such a bad job of following the lessons of the market when it comes to recruiting teachers? I love football, and spend many Saturday afternoons enduring the efforts […]
- by Jon Berry
The government seems committed to the idea of bringing market forces to bear on how our schools work, argues Jon Berry – so why are they doing such a bad job of following the lessons of the market when it comes to recruiting teachers?
I love football, and spend many Saturday afternoons enduring the efforts of my unfashionable and unsuccessful team.
When fans get frustrated, they have a repertoire of insulting chants. Officials are regularly told that, ‘You’re not fit to referee,’ or that, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’. Managers – usually of the opposition – are taunted by a ditty informing them that they’re ‘Getting sacked in the morning’. Exhortations to ‘Sack the board’ are frequent.
I sometimes feel like standing outside the offices of the DfE and running through this playlist. Yes, I know I’d look like a simpleton and that the impact would be non-existent – but, my goodness, Nicky Morgan, her ministers and their predecessors deserve it as much as any hapless match official or befuddled head coach.
Market forces
Their latest display of incompetence has been exposed with the publication of last week’s National Audit Office report on teacher shortages. In this catalogue of errors, it’s hard to place their miscalculations in order of importance, so grave is each one. What connects all of them, however, is the fact that they were avoidable, had they only listened to those who knew what they were talking about – members of the teaching profession itself.
Let’s start with the notion of supply and demand. Now, if there’s one thing that a government dedicated to the ideology of market forces should understand, it’s that. So how come, in its latest model for the required recruitment of new teachers, the DfE presents a range of 25,000 to 38,000? That looks like a pretty sloppy forecast. If only I could find a qualified maths teacher to work out the percentages for me…
When it comes to training new teachers, the report reveals that the variety of routes into the profession is confusing for applicants and schools. It calls for training providers (universities and school-based federations) to be given a clear and stable basis on which to plan. The report also criticises the lack of attention given to local patterns of supply and demand, as more NQTs drop out of the system with inadequate numbers coming along to replace them.
A commodity to be marketised
We shouldn’t be surprised by this rampant inefficiency – but nor should we put it down to plain old incompetence or indifference on the part of the government. At the heart of its education policy – and increasingly in all areas of public life – is an unwavering commitment to the primacy of market forces and the shrinking of the state. Underpinning these notions is a drive towards a low-wage economy, insecurity of employment in the form of short-term contracts and the need to demonstrate value for money.
I would like to bet that if I had described teaching in those terms even 10 years ago, most teachers would not have recognised them as features of their working lives. But in a world of performance-related pay, data-driven outcomes and unrelenting scrutiny, this view of education as a commodity to be marketised is fast becoming inescapable. This constant pressure to ‘produce’ – and then ‘prove’ that something has indeed been produced – is one of the principal reasons why teachers are leaving the profession, which just compounds this dreadful state of affairs.
Meanwhile, these same market forces have ensured that the head of the Harris Federation, Sir Daniel Moynihan, now receives an annual salary of just short of £400,000 – an increase of some 83% since 2009.
In 2013-14, 422 of 1,116 teachers left Harris academies – now where is that maths teacher to tell me the percentages?
The privatisation of education
There is a harsh lesson here for all of us. The privatization of education – because that is what the government’s commitment to the growth of academies amounts to – positively encourages practices where deregulated entry into professions and rapid turnover of (often inexperienced) staff becomes the norm. Accompanying this is the production of ‘outcomes’ at all costs, and the handing over of public assets to private speculators. If those speculators then reward themselves with huge salaries, that’s just part of the deal.
All of this makes me want to lead a hearty chorus, directed to Nicky and her chums, of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’
Unfortunately, they do.
Jon Berry’s book, Teachers Undefeated: How Education Reform Has Failed to Crush the Spirit of Educators, will be published by Trentham/IOE Press in March
