Recruitment and retention: a symptom of a wider issue
We are repeatedly told that there is a recruitment and retention crisis and I think that's true. It is more true if you work in a challenging context. I had never really thought about leaving education - I liked teaching and I like my work in leadership and honestly there is nothing else I could do. But just lately I have been wishing there was another option. Not because I am unhappy or stressed or have an awful work-life balance or dislike my job but because I suspect that at some point the job I am asked to do will become at odds with what I think is right.
Education is losing its moral purpose and reaching a crisis point. I didn’t used to think it was. I used to think that people were exaggerating the problems but now I believe it. Education should be the means by which we empower the children in our society but instead it has become an example of survival of the fittest. I am not going to use this post to bash the government (and that doesn’t make me a Tory sympathiser). The government make decisions about education and some of those decisions are the wrong ones. But I don’t believe that there is a government conspiracy to destroy education, rather there is a lack of understanding of what it feels like to be in education. There is some odd stuff in the white paper and there is also some pretty good stuff but too many people are ignoring the positives. This is a problem in education, we are alienating ourselves. Since the dawn of time educators have had to work within difficult political frameworks and our job is to make the best of the bits that can work and present a united front on the elements that won’t so that we are truly listened to. We don’t do that at the moment.
Education has become too competitive. Schools are not collaborating or even coexisting. They are competing: to be the best, to get the most bums on seats, to poach the best staff, etc. It isn’t helpful for schools to be in this situation. If you are a struggling school deemed requiring improvement you need support from local schools and staff but you don’t get it unless you sacrifice your autonomy to be gobbled up into a MAT led by an ‘outstanding’ school who, despite knowing nothing about your context, are hailed as the answer to everything. How can you grow cooperation in an environment like that? I have worked in a good school, an RI school and an outstanding school and each of those schools had pockets of excellence. The outstanding school had lessons to learn from the RI school, the RI school from the good. But it doesn’t work like that. And that's a real shame. And I accept that it is largely due to political and accountability frameworks but we as school leaders could do something about it.
Recruitment and retention are talked about in the same breath but they are very different. The recruitment issue is an easy one to unpick. It used to be easy to apply to do teacher training – clear routes, clearly signposted, accessible application process and a fairly quick decision. Ten years ago, no fees and indeed a bursary and for the privileged few, golden handshakes and the suchlike. Now it costs you to train unless you are in a shortage subject. There are multiple routes, schools are competing to secure you in school based routes and the whole thing is confusing. It shouldn't be that hard just to train. There is uncertainty in the relationship between schools and HEIs who need to collaborate and compete all at the same time. There is PGCE, School Direct, School Direct distance, School Direct Salaried, Teach First, Troops to Teachers, and so on. We don’t make it easy.
Then there is the retention issue. More teachers are leaving in the first five years than ever before. Is the training flawed? Maybe. Teach First is hard and perceived by some as a two year commitment to give back to society before moving on to better things. But this isn’t true of all. Do we prepare new teachers for the realities of teaching? Maybe not. Then there are those who make it through the training but become career changers due to intolerable workloads, filling in spreadsheet after spreadsheet to prove to management that they are doing their job (it doesn‘t happen in all schools but it does in some) or because they are battling poor behaviour that leadership pretend not to see. Again I am not trying to bash leadership – leaders do the best they can in the accountability systems that drive their reality. Then there are the good teachers, great teachers in some cases, being made redundant as schools try to balance the books (something that will hit the creative subjects fairly hard I suspect if the Ebacc is prioritised). Then there is another group of people, people who want to be teachers but are deemed inadequate and ‘moved on’ through various processes so whilst they are willing to teach they are no longer able to. I remember being inspired by Dylan Wiliam’s idea that we should love the one we are with – we have a duty to help teachers to become better but sometimes this is an ideal rather than a reality. And possibly understandably – bad teachers get bad results, bad results mean standards fall which triggers Ofsted which nobody wants – so can we blame them? Once you then factor in PRP and other devices becoming part of teaching, it is a fragile and unstable job to be in.
So it all feels a little bit broken. We have lost sight of who and what matters as we step on each other to get to the top of the table. And those at the top get rewarded (sometimes financially) which strengthens their position and those at the bottom get stepped on as everyone tries to promote their organisation all the while forgetting that why we came into this. We are supposed to prepare students for the world. To educate them. To support them. To care about them. To challenge them. To teach them about the world. Maybe even to role model how we treat people. If ever we lose sight of that, or fail to attract and retain the people needed to do that then the education system truly will be broken and I will have to find something else to do.
Education is losing its moral purpose and reaching a crisis point. I didn’t used to think it was. I used to think that people were exaggerating the problems but now I believe it. Education should be the means by which we empower the children in our society but instead it has become an example of survival of the fittest. I am not going to use this post to bash the government (and that doesn’t make me a Tory sympathiser). The government make decisions about education and some of those decisions are the wrong ones. But I don’t believe that there is a government conspiracy to destroy education, rather there is a lack of understanding of what it feels like to be in education. There is some odd stuff in the white paper and there is also some pretty good stuff but too many people are ignoring the positives. This is a problem in education, we are alienating ourselves. Since the dawn of time educators have had to work within difficult political frameworks and our job is to make the best of the bits that can work and present a united front on the elements that won’t so that we are truly listened to. We don’t do that at the moment.
Education has become too competitive. Schools are not collaborating or even coexisting. They are competing: to be the best, to get the most bums on seats, to poach the best staff, etc. It isn’t helpful for schools to be in this situation. If you are a struggling school deemed requiring improvement you need support from local schools and staff but you don’t get it unless you sacrifice your autonomy to be gobbled up into a MAT led by an ‘outstanding’ school who, despite knowing nothing about your context, are hailed as the answer to everything. How can you grow cooperation in an environment like that? I have worked in a good school, an RI school and an outstanding school and each of those schools had pockets of excellence. The outstanding school had lessons to learn from the RI school, the RI school from the good. But it doesn’t work like that. And that's a real shame. And I accept that it is largely due to political and accountability frameworks but we as school leaders could do something about it.
Recruitment and retention are talked about in the same breath but they are very different. The recruitment issue is an easy one to unpick. It used to be easy to apply to do teacher training – clear routes, clearly signposted, accessible application process and a fairly quick decision. Ten years ago, no fees and indeed a bursary and for the privileged few, golden handshakes and the suchlike. Now it costs you to train unless you are in a shortage subject. There are multiple routes, schools are competing to secure you in school based routes and the whole thing is confusing. It shouldn't be that hard just to train. There is uncertainty in the relationship between schools and HEIs who need to collaborate and compete all at the same time. There is PGCE, School Direct, School Direct distance, School Direct Salaried, Teach First, Troops to Teachers, and so on. We don’t make it easy.
Then there is the retention issue. More teachers are leaving in the first five years than ever before. Is the training flawed? Maybe. Teach First is hard and perceived by some as a two year commitment to give back to society before moving on to better things. But this isn’t true of all. Do we prepare new teachers for the realities of teaching? Maybe not. Then there are those who make it through the training but become career changers due to intolerable workloads, filling in spreadsheet after spreadsheet to prove to management that they are doing their job (it doesn‘t happen in all schools but it does in some) or because they are battling poor behaviour that leadership pretend not to see. Again I am not trying to bash leadership – leaders do the best they can in the accountability systems that drive their reality. Then there are the good teachers, great teachers in some cases, being made redundant as schools try to balance the books (something that will hit the creative subjects fairly hard I suspect if the Ebacc is prioritised). Then there is another group of people, people who want to be teachers but are deemed inadequate and ‘moved on’ through various processes so whilst they are willing to teach they are no longer able to. I remember being inspired by Dylan Wiliam’s idea that we should love the one we are with – we have a duty to help teachers to become better but sometimes this is an ideal rather than a reality. And possibly understandably – bad teachers get bad results, bad results mean standards fall which triggers Ofsted which nobody wants – so can we blame them? Once you then factor in PRP and other devices becoming part of teaching, it is a fragile and unstable job to be in.
So it all feels a little bit broken. We have lost sight of who and what matters as we step on each other to get to the top of the table. And those at the top get rewarded (sometimes financially) which strengthens their position and those at the bottom get stepped on as everyone tries to promote their organisation all the while forgetting that why we came into this. We are supposed to prepare students for the world. To educate them. To support them. To care about them. To challenge them. To teach them about the world. Maybe even to role model how we treat people. If ever we lose sight of that, or fail to attract and retain the people needed to do that then the education system truly will be broken and I will have to find something else to do.
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