Oral evidence: Supply of teachers, HC 538Wednesday 9 December 2015

Oral evidence, 9 December 2015.

Witnesses

Russell Hobby, General Secretary, National Association of Head Teachers, Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary, National Union of Teachers, Darren Northcott, National Official for Education, National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, and Emma Knights, Chief Executive, National Governors’ Association, gave evidence.

Chair

Okay, welcome. Can you all say what you are representing?

Darren Northcott

My name is Darren Northcott. I am from the NASUWT.

Kevin Courtney

Kevin Courtney from the National Union of Teachers.

Russell Hobby

I represent the National Association of Head Teachers.

Emma Knights

I represent the National Governors’ Association.

Chair

Thank you. The theme in this second panel is to assess the situation as it currently stands. Lucy is going to be asking just how bad the situation is.

Lucy Allan

Good morning. I would like to ask whether this is a problem of lack of candidates and/or lack of quality candidates, but also follow that up with a question of subject and whether it varies by subject or school to school. Emma, maybe you would like to start first with that.

Emma Knights

Obviously, governing boards have the experience primarily of recruiting senior leaders and certainly we have been saying for a number of years that generally there is an issue of too few applicants but also about the quality of applications, but it is definitely getting worse. Clearly, you only need one great applicant to appoint your head teacher, but when we come to look at teaching supply that is an issue that governing boards are discussing more and more. Clearly, if you do not have enough teachers it becomes a strategic issue. As was being said on the earlier panel, obviously we have had problems with recruiting maths and physics teachers forever really and lots and lots of initiatives over the years, but we are seeing more and more problems in other subjects. In particular, the ones that we identified in our survey of governors and trustees this year were English and modern foreign languages. It is secondaries that are under slightly more stress, but primaries are increasingly under pressure as well. For quite a long time we have had issues in special schools, which I do not think we have mentioned yet. Do you want me to talk about those areas or are you coming back to that?

Chair

I think we will try to keep our answers short and pithy.

Russell Hobby

With that hint, issues of quality and quantity shade into each other, as Emma has said. If you cannot get enough applicants you then start considering applicants you might not otherwise have considered. At the heart of it, that is why you see such a big gap between what the profession is saying is happening in schools and what the Government statistics are saying. When you sample it in November, schools have already taken measures to fill the vacancies that they have, but that may mean appointing a non-specialist teacher to a subject, appointing an unqualified teacher or appointing a long-term supply teacher as well. You cannot have an empty classroom. You have to make it work. Whether that is the person you would have wanted in front of those children is another matter.

Lucy Allan

Kevin, I wonder if I could widen that out a little bit. We keep getting told by surveys that there are this many teachers leaving the profession and I am wondering how many teachers really do follow through on some of these thoughts of leaving that we see documented.

Kevin Courtney

I am sure less than say in a survey that they are contemplating it, but the fact that so many say in surveys that they are contemplating it tells you that there is a big problem with morale that needs to be addressed. In one sense, there is no problem with the supply of qualified teachers. There are more than enough qualified teachers to fill the jobs, they just do not want to do it. A lot of them do not want to do it. That is the problem we have. I want to agree with what Russell said. The November census data on vacancies really understate the problem. Even though that is showing an increase, it still understates it because by the time you have reached November, the head teacher has to have filled the vacancies—in some cases they collapse nine teaching groups into eight, increasing class sizes in a way they do not want to because they do not have a teacher, or they fill the job with a non-specialist or with someone where they are not satisfied with the quality. Those head teachers have filled the vacancies by the time you get there, so that understates the problem rather.

Lucy Allan

Is there also a similar shortage at the senior leadership level?

Kevin Courtney

Certainly, the NGA—and we see this evidence from our members—has a great deal of difficulty with appointing to some headship positions. We talked with some heads in Leeds across the weekend and we are getting comments back from them saying in seven years of headship the situation has moved from difficult to critical; for the first time ever it is a problem. Head teachers commented that a few years ago they were getting 100 applicants per position but they were now finding it very difficult to recruit staff. Another spoke of only four applicants for maternity cover advertised for January, none of whom were suitable. It is anecdotal evidence, but people are reporting real difficulties.

Lucy Allan

Darren, do you have anything to add to that?

Darren Northcott

I would echo many of those comments. The point Kevin made is very important. There are a lot of qualified teachers out there sitting in what is known as the PIT, the pool of inactive teachers. It is a question of how attractive teaching is. I think that is fundamental to the problems we are discussing this morning.

Chair

Lucy, you are going to talk about recruitment.

Lucy Frazer

Yes, I am going to talk about the impact the teacher supply situation is having on schools. Do you think, given that there are issues with recruitment, that schools are being a little bit more creative about how they recruit? In one of the schools I went to this week the head teacher said she was advertising in universities for PhD students, not to be a teacher but for support in the school. Are other heads doing that sort of thing and, if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Emma Knights

In fact, we know that some multi-academy trusts are going abroad to try to find teachers. You have to say well done for a bit of innovation to those folk that are doing it, but we have real worries that across the system it is going to entrench some of the differences that we have, that those that are doing well and have the capacity and the money—which is really important—to do those sorts of things will do that and the schools that we desperately want to attract good teachers and good leaders will not have the same wherewithal. We have real worries that the fact we do not have enough of a supply both at classroom teacher level but also at senior leadership level will pull the schools apart even further than is currently the case.

Lucy Frazer

Emma, that is a good point, but why does it cost money to recruit, to put an advert in a PhD students’ forum or to look overseas? Why is that a question of—

Emma Knights

That might not cost particularly, but certainly looking overseas does. There are chief executives of multi-academy trusts who are flying out to Australia now, so that is a massive investment in recruitment.

Russell Hobby

I think we should expect schools to be creative and that is a good thing. If you have to act in the interests of children, you will do whatever you can to make sure there is someone who can teach those children. I think Emma’s point is creativity requires capacity and it is not just a money issue. If every second of your day is spent focused on making sure that the teachers that you have are being coached and developed in some of the most challenging areas, leadership can be a very fragile and all-consuming activity. Your ability then to take a couple of days out to fly out to a Commonwealth country to recruit is going to be limited. I think school leaders have a right to expect some of the basics to be supplied to them by the system, enough money to do it and enough teachers to recruit.

Kevin Courtney

We have to be grateful that there are teachers from overseas who want to come to help. There are lots of Irish teachers. There are lots of Spanish teachers who have arrived recently. The NUT set up a network for Irish teachers in London, there are so many of them. But we have to be a little nervous. During the last teacher shortage there was substantial recruitment from Commonwealth countries and it led to problems in some of those Commonwealth countries with losing their teachers. A Commonwealth education protocol had to be established to try to regulate that. We have to have a concern about that and try to grow our own and look at the problems here. We are seeing problems with schools having to spend an enormous amount of money on recruitment, partly because the teacher supply agencies will start a negotiation saying, “We want 20% of the teacher’s salary in order for them to come and work with you”. Sometimes heads manage to bargain that down to 15% of salary, but that means that in London schools and schools around the country people are paying those sorts of fees for 15 or 20 teachers a year. It is £60,000 to £100,000 a year going out of school budgets just in finders’ fees for agencies. I hope that the Committee will look at that as an area to investigate further.

Chair

We will.

Caroline Nokes

Can I pick up on that? I think all three of you have mentioned the cost of recruiting good teachers. I would have to say one of the best head teachers in my constituency, who I have discussed this issue with, told me that recruitment was not about the amount of cash that you spent on it, it was about the attitude and the prevailing behaviour of the children in your school and that if you had nice, polite pupils who behave themselves—much of her ethos is about making sure that standards of discipline are extremely high—she says that makes it easier to recruit.

Emma Knights

Absolutely. Cost is not the only thing by any stretch of the imagination and that is why we cannot make gross generalisations about this because some of it will absolutely be down at school level. The ethos of the leadership in the school can be a great attraction to folk or, indeed, it can put people off. I think that is incredibly important, but I do want to support what Kevin said about the cost of agency staff. It is a phenomenal cost and you are not necessarily getting the best folk. We do not want to go down the route that has happened with the NHS with costs escalating because of that. I do think that is incredibly important at a time when we are all constrained by costs. I completely agree with you that retention is also an issue as well as recruitment. I do not know how long we have to talk about this because certainly that is something—

Chair

Not that long.

Emma Knights

Not that long. I thought you might say that, Neil. Perhaps we can come back to it in another inquiry. I really hope that you will as a Committee spend some time looking at school leadership and school management because we have structures that are being developed without necessarily the thought that one would want to give to them. They could be real forces for good in terms of recruiting good people and having the best people leading our schools, but we are sort of muddling along. This is something we have been trying to get the Department and STRB to take seriously for the last four or five years. It has not been grappled with and I really hope it will be.

Lucy Frazer

I would welcome your expertise on an idea in relation to recruitment. In my own constituency I ask every single school every time I go to them, “What issues do you have with recruitment?” I must say the answers are very patchy. It is not just about outstanding schools and it is not just about location, although that plays into it a lot. The teaching schools do not have a problem with recruitment and, as I understand it, but this is very anecdotal, the cost of that pays for itself. Is a potential answer that more schools, particularly in areas where they have poor recruitment, become teaching schools—then they are nurturing their own staff, then it is indigenous, then it is locality driven—or that they have relationships with other teaching schools and they share provisions? Would that be a potential assistance or answer to the problem?

Russell Hobby

I think expanding the teaching school networks and alliances is part of the answer to that, but not every school is able to participate in those. The risk of the system that we have is that those that have the capacity can get even more capacity. If a teaching school is short of staff, it has no problem recruiting, as you have noticed, because it can take the pick of the best graduates. Yet not every school can and should participate in those teaching schools. If you have just taken over a failing school where the behaviour is not good enough, every part of your attention must be on turning that school around. Your ability to get involved in wider system leadership activities is not necessarily there, and yet that is the school where we do want our best teachers to go. The danger is where the networks are not all-encompassing because those that fall between them lose out.

Lucy Frazer

Is there a potential link between a multi-academy trust, the sponsor of a school, who nurtures the talent and spreads its fruits around? Kevin, what do you think about what Russell said?

Kevin Courtney

Multi-academy trusts, the ones of size, maybe can do some of that but the way the model looks like it is developing means that the groups of schools are going to be much smaller because the sponsors are going to be successful schools rather than these big chains. Given how the model is developing, I am not sure that the answer is there. I thought the first panel addressed most of these questions and identified that we need to have a system for teacher recruitment, that the model that generates the numbers of teachers needs to have regional information, and then we need to run that system nationally. Even if the training is being done in schools it would be better if people could apply to the system and then be allocated to a school rather than apply to the individual schools because the risk of the differences opening up is really profound. Caroline is absolutely right that the variation can be between schools based on school characteristics and it certainly has been easier to recruit to a school that Ofsted has called outstanding than to a school that Ofsted says is not. There are more pressures in such underperforming schools, so it is understandable why teachers do not go there as a first option.

Darren Northcott

Can I just briefly follow up on that? I think you make a good point. Different schools can adopt different approaches to recruitment. Some might be more successful than others. There might be a way that a particular school can promote its ethos that helps. Of course that is true, but fundamentally if we are talking about significant shortfalls between the number of teachers we need in the system overall and the number of teachers who are coming through, no end of ingenuity will address that issue across the piece. Yes, there are local solutions and approaches, absolutely. There is also a national systemic issue we will have to address because where some schools gain through their more effective approach, other schools will lose out in the teacher recruitment battle and the people who suffer most are the children in those schools. You have to look at it systemically, not just school by school or trust by trust.

Lucy Frazer

If we do look at it systemically, is there also a place to increase teaching schools? Should the teaching school system be increased?

Darren Northcott

Just reflecting again on the evidence you heard earlier, I think it is variable. Some teaching schools have well-established approaches, they provide high quality training and good links with HEIs. I think some of the problems with some teaching school reliance is they are still fixed into growing their own, growing our teachers for our particular collection of schools and the danger you sometimes identify with that is we should be developing teachers to work across the system wherever they are needed. Sometimes that training it is rather too localised, I suppose. I think we need to have a system that includes schools, absolutely, but we need to look at the needs of that system. Teachers are mobile and they want to move around. Sometimes it is attractive and worthwhile that they do that but I think the teaching school approach is in some instances the means to solve an immediate problem but not to provide the longer-term solution we need to look for, if we look at it systemically.

Emma Knights

We get a lot of reports, and they are increasing, that the lead schools in the alliances or partnerships of various sorts are now snaffling the best trainees and that is what I mean about being divisive. If you are up there running a great TSA then yes, you have a nice stream of great people coming to work for you whereas the schools that are struggling more will not have that. We are great fans of groups of schools, whether that is multi-academy trust or federation and one of the main reasons why is that they provide great professional development for their staff and they have the ability to move staff to where they are needed most within their group. We are encouraging schools to become part of school groups. Again, that does not help our stragglers and I would absolutely agree we need to have enough people in the system.

Chair

Russell, I have just been looking through your school recruitment survey, on Emma’s point and John Howson’s earlier point about multi-academy trusts, have you been looking into that and the effectiveness of MATs in providing training opportunities, leadership roles and so forth? If so, can you give us some evidence?

Russell Hobby

Certainly from that survey we found that academies were experiencing the same level of recruitment difficulties as any other school and one of the interesting things that is not happening in our system is the use of pay flexibilities. One of the major reasons to convert to academy status was supposed to be that you could then structure the pay. In the face of recruitment difficulties, one obvious answer is pay more to get people in. But we are not seeing, for example, academies offering differential salaries for different subject areas or anything like that. I think that implies that heads want a very simple pay framework that they can make ready decisions within rather than having to reinvent their pay frameworks. So that casts doubts on the issue of the freedom. Where you see schools in multi-academy trusts and where you see, say, a group of a dozen schools who can work together, then you start to see some very interesting stuff going on. It particularly comes alive when we are talking about middle leadership, heads of department and senior levels because you have far more career opportunities. If you are head of a department in a small rural school, you can look and say, “It is going to be 20 years before I get into a senior position”. If you are looking across six schools, there will be opportunities all the time so you can develop people’s careers. You can create more structure around the very senior positions and it is easier as a younger leader to step into headship in a group of six schools where you have five other heads supporting you than it is to stand alone. I do not think it is the freedom that makes the difference. I think it is the collaboration that makes the difference for those schools.

Kevin Courtney

To resolve the problem, pay, workload and CPD must be addressed. Another issue is the routes into teaching and I thought that James and Martin, from the universities and the schools providers, made a call that there should be much more co-ordination. I think you saw the furore over the Cambridge history PGCE and the way that was really messed up by Government targets. The Committee needs to make some recommendations so that Government will sort that out. Government, it seems to us in the NUT, is running down university training but it needs to be a vital part of it. Government describes university training as university-based training and it is not. When it is organised by university, it is still based in schools. The teachers are in the school all the time and schools and universities need to be working together in a seamless system.

Chair

You saw me ask James earlier for more details because I think that is an important point, but Russell’s point is also valuable in the context of senior leadership in a MAT. Lucy, do have any further questions?

Lucy Frazer

No, that is it, thank you very much.

Ian Mearns

We are going back to retention, Emma, so we are not leaving it alone, but we have a panel here that among its membership represents a huge proportion of the teaching profession and the leadership profession in the country. What have you been doing to gather evidence on the reasons why teachers are not staying in the profession?

Darren Northcott

We surveyed our members’ work as classroom teachers and school leaders across England and we have tried to find out what the drivers are. Why is there this dissatisfaction, this expression that people are contemplating leaving teaching? I think it boils down to a number of important issues and we have touched on them already. One is increasing workload. Another is that pay in real terms for teachers has declined relative to other graduate occupations. I think the way sometimes that teaching is portrayed does not help. Sometimes the teaching profession is demeaned in some quarters and that is found by teachers to be unattractive. I also think the extent to which teachers are able to concentrate on teaching and leading teaching and learning in their working lives is another issue. With all those challenges, the stress, I think it is very clear from the evidence we have gathered that those are the fundamental drivers making teachers stop and think, “Is this the career I want to continue with?”

Kevin Courtney

We have used YouGov to do scientific samples of all teachers and we have done surveys among our own members; the YouGov sample had this figure of 53% of teachers contemplating leaving—53% of teachers will not leave. They will not be able to find other jobs to go to but the fact they are contemplating it is an issue and it means there will be a recruitment and retention problem. When we ask them in a free-form question why they contemplate leaving, it is remarkable that it is workload and accountability that come top however you ask the question, higher than people behaviour by a considerable margin. The latter is an issue for teachers but by a considerable margin it is workload and accountability that people cite as their reasons for contemplating leaving. I think that is important. I am glad you have another inquiry looking at the purpose of education, to understand why teachers are so concerned about the accountability system and the hours, because the hours they work is one issue but the content of them is another. Teachers feel demeaned by the fact that they are being asked to write down the verbal feedback they give to a class because otherwise how will Ofsted know they gave that feedback? They are demeaned by the fact that they are told to take photographs of the practical work they do with their maths classes because otherwise how will somebody know they did the practical work? It is important to get to the issue of what is done in the hours and really crack on so that hours come down and teachers feel trusted by the system. What Darren says about the language matters. It feels to teachers like all the blame is put on them, so when the Secretary of State says she will not tolerate areas of the country where fewer than 50% of children gain five A* to C and she names Rochdale, Salford and Knowsley, the teachers in Rochdale, Salford and Knowsley believe that all the blame is being placed on them. That is not the right way to do it.

Chair

Are there any more questions?

Ian Mearns

Can we get an initial answer from Russell, please?

Russell Hobby

Those are all valid points that are echoed in hours. It is not the number of hours you work; it is how you spend those hours that is the crucial thing. Teachers should work hard and it is good they should work hard in front of the children rather than late at night. Picking out the issues of leadership retention and recruitment, probably the No.1 issue is the risk associated with the role. Head teachers and senior leaders should be held to account in quite strict ways, I think, but consider the idea that a single year’s data could end your career, particularly if you are trying to support a family of your own and particularly as that is most likely to happen in the most challenging schools that are under the greatest scrutiny. You go in there and you have one bad inspection, one set of cohort measures, and of course we are changing the measures every time so you do not know whether next year will be a bad year or not. That means a lot of people decide to stop at deputy level rather than going on to take the full lead. We need to find a way to hold people strongly accountable but they should know why and when and how it will happen.

Emma Knights

I agree with that as well. We also survey our members and it has been quite noticeable in the last couple of years that this issue of recruiting and retaining staff both at senior leadership level and classroom level has shot up the agenda. Three years ago it was not in our members’ five top concerns, this year it is right up at the top alongside funding and you all know how critical that is. Therefore, in the coming year we are going to ask much more about that to try to get to some of these particular issues. It was very interesting to note from our surveys that the issue about valuing and trusting teachers came absolutely to the fore in the open comments section in a way that has not been seen in our surveys before. I know that by and large governing boards are really concerned about the sort of issues that people have been talking about here and of course the Department has its own inquiry and working groups on workload. But it is a very serious issue. There is so much change going on and I would agree with the point made about middle leaders. We have not talked very much about them but if you are head of a department, you have an awful lot of change in each of your key stages. In secondary level that is a lot of work to be getting on with at one time.

Suella Fernandes

Can I just clarify something? What are you basing your statistics on because the school workforce census from last year suggests a slightly different picture in that the actual total number of in-service teachers is up by 5,000 in the last year, up by 13,000 in the last five years? The retention rate is stable. About 90% of teachers are staying in the profession, and of people leaving, over 70% of teachers are still working five years later. That presents quite a different picture from your one, and that is school workforce census data.

Russell Hobby

One of the biggest problems for us is that we do not have a shared view of the problem. What schools and governors are saying is happening and what the Government’s data say is happening are two different things. Both sides are being sincere in their presentation and I feel at one level the vacancy data are the wrong measure to be looking at because by November head teachers have filled in the gaps but not in a way they would wish to have filled them. They may, for example, have reduced the number of classes they are running and increased the class size so they do not have a vacancy anymore. If you are newly recruited, and if you have not yet decided teaching is right for you, you are ready to leave by November. So, I do not think we are sampling in the right way at the right time, particularly, for example, for recruitment into leadership positions. Looking at the number of times the school has to re-advertise is, I think, one of the best indicators of the challenge. That number is going up and, from memory, 25% of secondary and plus 30% of primaries have to re-advertise at least another time. That means for the duration of that period, and it takes at least a term, you do not have a full-time head in post so you may have persuaded the old head to stay for a bit longer, long after they wanted to, you may have a deputy acting up, you may have an interim head or you may have the head of a neighbouring school running the school. That shows there are all sorts of interim solutions that hide what the data are saying.

Emma Knights

I completely agree the vacancy data does not work because we have to find a head.

Ian Mearns

We are talking about retention but do you think everything you have talked about is also adding to the problem in terms of recruitment in the first place? Is it the same reasons, do you think, that are leading to problems with recruitment?

Darren Northcott

Do you mean in terms of the way teaching is perceived?

Ian Mearns

You describe scenarios from your own perspectives in terms of what your members are telling you. Do you think the reasons that are providing problems for the retention of teachers are the same reasons for finding it difficult to recruit teachers in the first place?

Darren Northcott

I think there are links. For example, I would stress absolutely that the issue of workload is about what teachers do with their time. It is also about excessive workload. That is not just my saying that, that is the Secretary of State saying that last year. It is accepted that overall workload levels are too high. That is obviously going to send a signal to graduates choosing what career they are going to undertake. Is the workload in this job excessive? That is a kind of tick in the negative box rather than the positive box but clearly an issue like workload then also feeds through into retention. If teachers feel the workload they have is unmanageable, that it impinges upon their work-life balance, their family life, all those critical things, that is going to make them more inclined to consider leaving teaching. There is read across between certain factors; pay, workload and the way teaching is organised, the way it is perceived, absolutely has an impact on the retention and on recruitment.

Kevin Courtney

Probably at entry pay is more of a key issue for graduates considering other graduate professions but we do get anecdotes of student teachers who are on their placement who see the stress and the workload in their school and they say, “I do not think this job is for me”. If a school is having difficulty recruiting and you are the head of physics and you do not have physicists to teach your lessons, there is a lot of work you have to do supporting the biology or chemistry teacher teaching that subject. If there is a turnover in your department, your role in inducting that member of staff increases the workload for those middle leaders if you do not have those—

Ian Mearns

We are running out of time. Just one last one from me. We heard from James earlier on about the 23 routes into teaching and how some of those are the same routes so there are not really 23 at all. Is that landscape of the way teachers or potential teachers can get into the profession causing any confusion or is it putting people off?

Chair

Yes or no will do.

Darren Northcott

I think there is a little bit of confusion out there, to put it mildly, around the different routes and James made a good point earlier about there being a lot of commonality between them. Just one point I do not want to get lost in that is that having some diversity of routes into teaching is quite important because some routes target, for example particularly underrepresented groups in the teaching profession. There are some programmes that target teaching assistants who have a lot of experience who want to make that step to become a qualified teacher, so some diversity is important but you do not want confusion and you also have to make sure that whatever the type of route, those benchmarks of quality of training apply across the piece.

Chair

I think we are all nodding at that so we are going to move on to Kate for the final question.

Kate Hollern

It has been interesting listening to both panels because it appears they are setting out a looming crisis in the system and it appears to be in two parts; the attracting of teachers and retention. The Government obviously has a bursary scheme. How effective do you think that bursary is in attracting people into a profession?

Russell Hobby

The evidence suggests the bursaries do work but they are an expensive choice and you cannot deploy them for every subject in every way you would like. One of the problems we are now facing is we are robbing Peter to pay Paul, so we are taking stuff away from primary bursaries because the need at the moment is now more acute at the secondary level. But then we are expecting 500,000 more pupils to enter the primary system over the next few years so will we be then taking it back from secondary to pay back to primary? Yes, bursaries are a good strategy but they are expensive.

Kate Hollern

Do you think there needs to be a re-look at the bursary, how it is allocated or should there be an incentive, perhaps a reduction in the fees and that graduates leave the debt when coming into the profession?

Russell Hobby

I think Sam’s suggestion of loan forgiveness is a strong one to be considered.

Darren Northcott

I think bursaries may have a role. I am just looking here at the latest recruitment and some of the biggest paying bursary subjects are still under their target, so it makes a contribution but it is not getting to that crucial point. In terms of subjects across the education system, it is about getting some of the fundamentals right, so getting the basic issues on pay and workload right. If you address those, you are going to make a difference in all subjects including those that attract bursaries. I am not saying those incentives do not have a role. I think the evidence is a bit mixed, to be honest, over time but there are fundamental issues around pay and working conditions that we have to address. If we address those we can tackle some of those problems and it is important to bear in mind we have been here before. We were here 15 years ago with vacancy rates, a teacher supply crisis, and that was addressed because there was a will to address it at the time. Part of the solution was looking at those fundamental issues of pay, workload and working conditions.

Michelle Donelan

Just on the bursary note, would it not be better though if it was mandatory so they had to work in the profession for five years or so, otherwise they have to pay some back, to ensure that teacher retention?

Russell Hobby

That is one of the reasons why I think a loan forgiveness thing could work because you could forgive it after three years in the profession or something like that, so you could secure a certain level of retention. It is very hard to predict at the start of someone’s career whether they will stay, or whether they should stay, and a certain of amount of experience shows that you have to weed people out as they learn more about the profession as well. So there are tactics you could use to strengthen retention.

Emma Knights

The idea of doing it to pull people through the system in a positive way is really important because let’s face it, you were talking about it being a noble profession; we are never going to be able to compete with the sort of salaries being paid by banks where a lot of our young mathematicians are going at the moment. We cannot equalise things on that score, it has to be a much bigger issue in promoting the profession and certainly I think concentrating more on the people who are committed to staying in our schools is important.

Kate Hollern

I will just come back then on retention because that is obviously an issue. There is a lot of investment going into teaching and the retention appears to be a problem. Is that because there was bad press over the last few years on Ofsted inspections? Do people, teachers in particular, feel undervalued and how do we work with teachers to improve the system, so that it improves reputation, improves recruitment, improves retention but mainly improves the chances of children?

Kevin Courtney

Whether people agree with this or not, whether it is true or not, teachers believe the dominant narrative from politicians is of school failure, coasting schools and locating that blame with teachers. We think that narrative has passed its sell-by date. We are all in favour of school improvements but you have to do that with the profession; the narrative has to change and that applies to trusting teachers about accountability and workload.

Chair

Thanks, Kevin. One quick question.

Kate Hollern

The National Teaching Service, do you think there will be real improvements?

Darren Northcott

I do not think we know enough about how that service is going to operate. Are you talking about the National Teaching Service the Government is proposing?

Kate Hollern

Yes.

Darren Northcott

We do not know enough about how that is going to operate so we do not know the extent to which it can address those issues. It is unlikely to be big enough to address the scale of the recruitment and retention issue and there is also a bit of confusion about its purpose. I thought the purpose of that service, whether you agree with it or not, was to help raise standards in particular parts of the country, not to address teacher supply problems. We need to be clear about what functions we think this service is going to fulfil before we can begin to answer that very good question about whether it will contribute. I think the jury is out, to say the least.

Chair

Russell, do you have any thoughts on that?

Russell Hobby

It is a good idea but like Teach First it is only one part of the jigsaw. The numbers are not sufficient enough to cope with a national problem. I think also at a time of recruitment problems, getting these teachers out of their current school to deploy them in another school is going to be quite hard because the heads are going to hold on to those talented teachers as hard as they can.

Lucy Frazer

I have to be really quick so I would appreciate a yes or no answer. I think we know the demand for secondary teachers has increased by nearly 5,000 in the teacher supply model, so is one of the factors in relation to teacher shortage not just that people might be not interested in joining the profession but, as a fact, there just is an increase in demand as well?

Russell Hobby

Yes.

Darren Northcott

Yes.

Emma Knights

Yes.

Kevin Courtney

We are all saying yes to that.

Emma Knights

Very quickly, I just want to talk about the regional issue. The small-scale schemes will not address the problem that we have all identified in that London and the south-east are very much at the heart of this crisis, if we are going to call it that, followed quite closely by the north-east and the east of England. The problem is not just in those areas that HMCI and the Teaching Service are looking at.

Chair

Thank you for the clarification. I just want to ask one question myself. What about the College of Teachers and the idea of professional training? Have you any thoughts on that quickly?

Emma Knights

A very good idea.

Russell Hobby

Yes, a very good idea.

Kevin Courtney

An entitlement to good quality CPD would be very welcomed by teachers.

Chair

How would you like that college to emerge because you were quite definite in your answer there, Russell?

Russell Hobby

A profession needs a body that can speak up for it that is not about pay and conditions as the unions are. When teachers have a voice in the public debate maybe that rhetoric of failure will be replaced and we can have a rhetoric of ambition instead.

Chair

Could you give us a bit of rhetoric by letter on the subject because I would quite like to hear more about your thoughts?

Russell Hobby

I would be happy to.

Darren Northcott

Chair, there may not be unanimity on this on the panel. We think a College of Teachers might have a contribution to make but we have serious reservations about the current model that has been proposed by the Claim Your College coalition. We would be happy to write to you.

Chair

I would like a letter from you as well. Kevin, are you in letter writing mode?

Kevin Courtney

Certainly we will write to you about the College of Techers. We think the profession needs a voice. There are concerns about the way the thing is developing but we are engaging with the college.

Chair

Express those concerns in your letter. Emma, we might as well go for you as well.

Emma Knights

We will write to you too.

Ian Mearns

Put a Christmas card in for him.

Chair

A letter from all of you on the subject of a College of Teachers and how that might address some of the issues you have been discussing would be much appreciated. Thank you all very much indeed for your contributions. We are only seven minutes over time but I think we have covered some interesting ground. Thank you. Examination of Witness

Witness

Mr Nick Gibb MP, Minister of State, Department for Education, gave evidence.

Chair

I want to say first of all I am certainly very impressed that you came to listen to all the evidence we have heard from 9.30 am. That is an example to other Ministers, so I think the Committee should note that, thank you.

Mr Gibb

May I write to you about that?

Chair

You certainly can, Nick. I like correspondence and your letters are notably brief but to the point so that would be appreciated if you feel the need to amplify the point I have just made, thank you. Michelle, you are going to start.

Michelle Donelan

Thank you for coming. Just to get down to what we are talking about, have you changed your mind, having heard the evidence this morning, and do you think there is now a crisis rather than just a challenge with teacher recruitment and retention?

Mr Gibb

I spend a lot of time visiting schools around the country and meeting head teachers in groups and I do hear the same message I have heard this morning from those professionals around the country. I do know there is an issue and, to quote what Darren Northcott said about dealing with this issue when it arose 15 years ago, if there is a political will to tackle it, that is what is needed. I have to tell the Committee there is a political will to deal with these challenges. If I can just put these issues into some perspective. We have at the moment 454,900 teachers and that is an all-time high and, as Suella cited earlier, that is 5,200 more teachers this year than last year and 13,000 more teachers than 2010. There are also record numbers of returners to the profession. Some 14,000 more returners joined the profession again last year compared to 11,000 a few years before that, so the idea there is some view prevailing that teaching is not a profession that people want to join is simply not true. There are record numbers in the profession and record numbers returning to the profession. This is a time of huge opportunity for teachers to join the profession when there are challenges, particularly in shortage subjects like maths and physics. There are huge opportunities now for graduates in those subjects to join the profession and to do extremely well in it.

Michelle Donelan

I am not denying there are fantastic opportunities or that it is a fantastic career, as we have already stressed as a Committee this morning, but just because a situation is improving does not necessarily mean that it is not still in crisis. There were 2,300 shortages in 2014-15, coupled with the fact of the baby boom, which puts added pressure on to the situation. I think what I am trying to boil down is: do you think that there is still a massive problem, even though it is improving and the Government is acting on it, that it is a substantial issue of concern?

Mr Gibb

It certainly is an issue of concern, but it is an issue that we are addressing. We have taken a huge number of measures to address these issues, such as introducing the bursaries, £30,000 for a top physics graduate, £25,000 for top graduates in other subjects, and a whole range of other bursaries. We issued something like 16,000 bursaries last year, and we have had a wonderful marketing campaign to encourage people to come into teaching. If you look at the figures this year compared with last year, we are seeing an increasing number. For example, in physics, the number of people recruited to the physics teacher training has risen from 637 last year to 746 this year. In mathematics, it has risen from 2,100 last year to 2,400 this year. So in absolute terms we are increasing the number of people coming into teaching in those shortage subjects.

Michelle Donelan

Would you say it is a regional problem? I am an MP in the south-west, and there are eight times the levels of vacancies there. Would you say that it is particularly a regional problem, as opposed to a national problem?

Mr Gibb

The overall national figures show that the vacancy rate for teachers is very low, at 0.3%. I take on board the comments about the date of the census, and that is something that we did consult with schools about too. We originally wanted to take that census in January; we were told by schools that it was a burden because they were doing the pupil census at that time. We wanted it to be September, but of course that is the beginning of the school year, and that brings with it other challenges. We are talking to the unions about what data sets we should be using and when we should be taking this census. But I think all these figures do conceal, if you like, the regional variations that you are hinting at. It is not just local and regional variations. Within a region and within a locality it can be variations between schools as well, that—

Michelle Donelan

Yes, and subjects. That moves us on to design and technology, which is a very important thing in my own constituency, which has a strong engineering background. I know that Dyson have joined with you in reforming some of that course, and it is an excellent course, but we already have such low levels of teachers in that area of subject. Then with EBacc and no vocational element, do you think that will exacerbate the situation further? Yes, there are bursaries, but there are no scholarships for design and technology, and the levels of the bursaries are a third less than physics. So I am wondering what message we are sending to people going into the teaching profession. If we are pushing so hard on the academic core, do you think there is a danger that in 10 years’ time it is going to be a massive problem?

Mr Gibb

I accept the problems with design and technology. The numbers taking the subject have been in decline for several years, in fact before we introduced the English Baccalaureate measure. I think part of that problem was the content of the curricula.

Michelle Donelan

Yes. Exactly. Yes.

Mr Gibb

We have revised that, and we have worked with Dyson and we have worked with the design and technology association to improve both the GCSE and the A-level, and I think we have a very high quality product as a consequence of that. I am optimistic we will see an uptake in those subjects in the years ahead, and then that, of course, will feed through into qualified teachers. In terms of design and technology numbers, we have again increased that number from 409 last year, coming into ITT, to 526 this year. There are bursaries for design and technology.

Michelle Donelan

Yes, there is no scholarship, but there is a bursary, but it is a third less than physics. I am concerned that if we are trying to attract the same people that are taking those kinds of subjects, the message we are sending out, and the very financial incentive, is to opt for pure science when going into the teaching profession.

Mr Gibb

Yes, but, £12,000 is a significant bursary. We are taking this issue seriously. This is a generous bursary.

Michelle Donelan

There are no plans to try to attract more people?

Mr Gibb

We address these issues every year. We look at the bursary levels every year in terms of the numbers coming into the profession and where the shortages are. We have a limited pot, and we take a lot of time allocating the level of bursary, both to the subject and to the degree class, and it will be reviewed every year.

Ian Mearns

Minister, you have quoted some raw numbers there in terms of the number of recruits this year as opposed to last year, but the figure that we have is that it is 41% of the target. It might be an improvement, but it is 41% of target in terms of design and technology.

Mr Gibb

Yes, but of course we increased the target as well. We have increased the targets across all subjects that we are concerned about. But it is a challenge, there is no question, and we have engaged in marketing campaigns as well to try to recruit specifically for design and technology. I am optimistic for the future because we have improved the curriculum. I think that will feed through to more youngsters taking the subject, and in turn more qualified people ready to come in to teaching in years ahead.

Ian Mearns

On the broader spectrum, and we have seen other data, certainly the chief inspector was sitting there a number of weeks ago and repeated the statistic about the number of youngsters going into apprenticeships aged 16 to 19 are only 6% of the cohort. That is a problem, because the Government have a target of getting 3 million apprenticeships in the next five years, and if only 6% of the cohort are going in, and we have so few design and technology teachers, who are going to be important to that whole agenda, really some urgency might be required.

Mr Gibb

Yes, but design and technology is not the only preparation for apprenticeships.

Ian Mearns

I agree with that. Yes.

Mr Gibb

All the EBacc subjects, all the other high-quality vocational subjects that are taken in schools as a consequence of the Wolf Review in 2011, are also very good preparation for apprenticeships. I am very confident that with all the other measures we are taking we will meet our target for 3 million apprenticeships.

Ian Mearns

But equally in specialist subjects, maths is under-recruiting, physics is under-recruiting and business studies and computing are under-recruiting. They are all aspects of the vocational agenda which is so important to that part of the Government’s agenda for recruiting apprentices in the future.

Mr Gibb

There are two points; first, in absolute terms, those numbers are going up. We have increased the target because we are ambitious to recruit as many people in those shortage subjects as possible. Absolute numbers are going up. That is in the context of a strong and growing economy and an increasingly competitive graduate market in terms of the employer, from the employer’s perspective. That is a consequence of success in our economy, but it is a challenge that we face. It is a challenge that Teach First face and it is a challenge that many employers face as they are competing for better graduates.

Ian Mearns

One the of the reasons you have had to increase the targets this year in particular is that a number of those subjects have under-recruited in the previous two years as well. Therefore, you have had to increase the targets for this year in order to try to rebalance that.

Mr Gibb

Yes. We have also increased them because of the changes to the curriculum. We have increased them because of the point that Michelle Donelan was making about the increasing numbers coming through into the school system. But if you look at things like maths, we recruited 2,170 graduates into the maths training last year. This year it is 2,400. In physics it is, as I said, 637 to 746, chemistry from 823 last year to 1,003 this year, which is 95% of our target. So in absolute terms it is going up, but of course our targets are going up, and that is why the percentage overall for secondary is 82% rather than 100%.

Chair

Nick, it is really a question of scale, is it not? Because many of us will remember when Jim Callaghan returned from Guadeloupe facing strikes left, right and centre, and his slightly understated response was quickly turned into, “Crisis? What crisis?” Do you think there is a crisis or do you just think it is a challenge?

Mr Gibb

It is a challenge. What concerns me about the use of that word— and I am concerned by some of the words used in the previous sessions and words used by people in issuing statements to the press—is that people are in some ways talking down the profession. Actually the profession is in very good shape. Record numbers of people are in the teaching profession. We have a very high qualified profession; 18% of new recruits now have a first-class degree, and these figures are increasing in percentages. There are large numbers of returners coming back into teaching. This is not evidence of a profession in crisis or a profession that has a morale problem. These figures would not show that improvement if that was the case. If we look at the pupil/teacher ratios around the country, those figures are not increasing; they are still relatively low. If we look at vacancy rates, they are still low. I accept all the points about challenges that head teachers are facing in recruiting around the country, and we are addressing that. In terms of policy, we are doing all the things that a Government that has the political will to address these problems is doing, such as the marketing campaign, such as the bursaries. There are a whole range of incentives to encourage returners to come back into the profession, such as looking at School Direct salaries and making sure that that is at a sufficient level to encourage career changes. There is not an area that we are not examining. The researchers in schools, the chairs in schools, our steps to encourage more PHDs to come into our schools, all that is a very successful programme. We are looking at every single aspect of policy to see what we can do to improve recruitment, and it is working. We are seeing larger numbers of graduates coming into teacher training as a consequence of those measures.

Chair

Earlier you heard a discussion about data, and the different aspects of data, and the question about vacancies, and so on. Do you think that the Department has suitable data to make the judgments you have just made?

Mr Gibb

Last year we published for the first time the teacher supply model, the black box that outcomes the numbers at the other end. We have opened up that black box so that people can see precisely what the assumptions are that we make in coming up with those numbers, and we invite people to submit views about that. We are very happy to tweak and change that teacher supply model if it is not coming up with the right numbers or we are not using the right data on which it is based. This is a very transparent, open Government in terms of data. If there are improvements that can be made, we will make them.

Michelle Donelan

At the moment one-sixth of the teachers going into the profession are qualified oversees. Are there any learnings that you have taken on board from other countries where you think that they are getting it right, they are getting more people who want to go into the teaching profession and whom we are now employing here in the UK?

Mr Gibb

You have to be careful with these kinds of stats, because a lot of people who qualify using our qualification system here are teaching abroad and have been abroad. So it is not always the case that these figures necessarily reveal what you imply that they are revealing. What was your question? I am denying that statistic.

Michelle Donelan

I was just wondering if, as a Government, you have taken on board any learnings from other countries as to how they are getting people into the teaching profession or managing to keep them there. I am in big favour of do not reinvent the wheel if we have other learnings from elsewhere.

Mr Gibb

Yes. There are a lot of surveys about this country, about why people leave the profession and why they are concerned. They were mentioned today in this session, things like excessive workload, pupil behaviour, and pay and conditions as well. These are the issues that affect the profession and we are addressing these issues. The excessive workload is something that I take very seriously and the Secretary of State takes very seriously. We had the Workload Challenge, which had 44,000 responses. We have set up three working groups to address the top three concerns raised in that survey, and Darren Northcott is on the marking working group. That is, I think, the second largest issue people raised about workload. So we are addressing workload, we are addressing pupil behaviour and we are giving teachers more powers to deal with poor behaviour in the classroom. We have clarified the powers that they have. We have removed the ability to undermine the head teacher’s authority in terms of expulsions and exclusions from school. We are taking measures, and they have been successful. All these help deal with the concerns that teachers have about their own profession.

Chair

Nick, what is the life cycle of your current recruitment plan?

Mr Gibb

The teacher supply model does look several years ahead. This is a slightly technical question, in which case I will write to you about the precise elements of the—

Chair

Thank you. I am looking forward to the post. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you very much. Suella.

Suella Fernandes

Yes. Minister, you said that there are opportunities now in the teaching profession for entrants and people already there. Could you say a bit more about some of the schemes that you have mentioned that have been piloted, like the Workload Challenge, like pay flexibilities? I am interested to hear a bit more about the support for returners and career changes.

Mr Gibb

Yes. In terms of pay flexibility, that is something that we introduced in 2013. If schools are finding difficulty recruiting a maths teacher or a science teacher, they can use the flexibilities that we have now given them to address that. We have introduced a scheme for returners. We are piloting it at the moment in, I think, about 43 schools. That is about an incentive scheme to the school, £1,900 per returner that comes to the school in order to encourage the school and also to provide things like training, because some people have been out of the profession for several years. They may be very knowledgeable about mathematics, but they may have forgotten how you teach long division to a class of 9-year-olds, or how to teach physics to a secondary school pupil. So there are schemes in place now to help with that return as well.

Suella Fernandes

There have been some changes to the initial teacher training allocation to help the recruitment drive, so could you say a bit more about that?

Mr Gibb

Could you clarify your question a bit more?

Suella Fernandes

Yes. As part of the drive, the approach to ITT allocations has been changed in that there is not going to be a specific number of places given to individual organisations.

Mr Gibb

Yes. One of the elements of the political will to address this issue is that we decided this year to remove the cap from universities. We did not want people at universities who had reached the target level to stop recruiting suitable candidates simply because they had reached that cap, so we took off the cap. That has been very successful. In fact, in one instance it has been too successful and we have had to use the reserve powers that we took to re-impose the cap in order to protect a number of universities that had a slightly slower recruitment progress. But it has been successful. Right across the board we are seeing higher numbers and a speedier application process than has happened in previous years. We will have to look at the situation at the end of the year to see how successful it has been in recruiting, in absolute terms, more than last year, or whether it has just speeded up the process.

Suella Fernandes

This is the last question. There has been a lot of talk about morale of the teaching workforce. You obviously visit a lot of schools and meet teachers and members of the profession. What is your sense of the attitude of people coming into the profession and those who are long-standing members of it at the moment, based on your experience?

Mr Gibb

We have a very dedicated, highly qualified profession who, as we said earlier, do want to make a difference. It is a vocation, but it is also a vocation of professionals who want to do the best for their pupils. There is an issue about the pace of reform. There is no question but that the pace of reform over the last five or six years has been very intense. That has been deliberate. We have to make sure that our education system continues to improve, because other jurisdictions around the world are continuing to improve and we want to make sure that our youngsters leaving school are able to compete, not just for jobs in this country, but in the global jobs market. We do not apologise for that. I know sometimes that is taken as criticism, but it is not meant to be taken as criticism. If you read the speeches of the Secretary of State—this Secretary of State and the previous Secretary of State—and you read my speeches, you will see that they pay huge tribute to our profession. But the pace of reform has been intense and the Secretary of State has made it clear that she wants a period of stability over the next few years. Of course the reforms that were put in place are really coming into fruition now. It takes many years to bring about a GCSE. The English and Math GCSE are beginning now, this September 2015; next year we have a number of other EBacc GCSEs coming on-stream for the first time; and the year after that the remaining GCSEs. The same with the A-levels, a whole raft of new A-levels are coming on-stream this year. Last year, in September 2014, we had the new primary curriculum coming on-stream. You can see why the profession is under pressure as they implement all these reforms, but we are going into a period of stability. These reforms are very important and schools are responding well to the introduction.

Chair

Thank you, Nick. Can I ask one question that has been overlooked, I think, and that is the role of the regional schools commissioners in this issue of recruitment? Do you think there is a role for them in identifying priorities and working with teaching schools, for example?

Mr Gibb

It is important that the regional schools commissioners confine themselves to the job that they are responsible for doing, which is to tackle underperformance, to tackle the brokerage into academy status for those schools that are failing, and to look at how the academies in their regions are performing. Of course they have very hands-on and locally based experience of who the players are in a region, and they can play a role in ensuring that high-quality leaders of education, national leaders of education, are deployed to help those schools that are in difficulty.

Ian Austin

I wanted to ask whether you have considered not imposing limits on the numbers of students that the universities could recruit or could allow to train as teachers. Professor Howson said earlier that the big argument against this would be the impact on public spending, but there would be no requirement to increase the number of bursaries even if you did lift the cap and allow universities to recruit more students. Why do you not let the market decide?

Mr Gibb

We are doing that to an extent in that we have lifted the cap, but that is within the overall targets. Although we lifted the caps on institutions, we have to keep those overall caps in terms of the overall subject numbers.

Ian Austin

But just because there is a target does not mean there should be limit. The numbers of students who want to go and study law are not limited, and then it is up to them if they can get a job afterwards.

Mr Gibb

Yes.

Ian Austin

Why should the number of students who want to train to be teachers be limited by the universities?

Mr Gibb

There is a cost to the taxpayer, which are the fees that are usually paid for by a student loan. That involves an up-front cost for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and for the Treasury. So you do have to take that into account, and it is not a good use of the UK PLC’s resources to be training a huge number of teachers in a particular subject if there are no jobs for them at the end of the day. We have a duty, first to steward carefully steward taxpayers’ money, but also to make sure that graduates going into teaching are incentivised to go into those subjects where we need those teachers. If we did not have any kind of control over these issues it may be that even fewer would go into maths and physics and more would go into those subjects that already have sufficient numbers.

Ian Austin

Why would fewer go into maths and physics?

Mr Gibb

You do need these bursaries to encourage—and they have proven very successful. If you took away all the bursaries and just allowed a free-for-all—

Ian Austin

No, no, I am not suggesting that at all. I am not suggesting taking away the bursaries; I am just suggesting allowing more people—allowing universities to recruit more people if they are able to.

Mr Gibb

Again I would reiterate the point that this does bring with it a cost. It brings with it a cost for the student loans, and there is an issue about making sure there are jobs for people. It would not be a good use of the undergraduate’s time to encourage them to be taking a teacher-training course in a subject for which there were no jobs at the end of that period.

Michelle Donelan

Is that not an argument then, building on what Ian was saying, to apply that to other fields? Because I think what Ian is also saying is it is not fair that you could do one degree course and not be limited, but do this and be limited.

Ian Austin

It is the only subject that is—

Michelle Donelan

I would argue the opposite from Ian: does that not say we should do that in other courses as well, if we are saying that it is a cost to the taxpayer? The others are equally a cost to the taxpayer, so should we not have one law for all?

Ian Austin

I think the point I am making is that teaching and nursing are the only areas—

Mr Gibb

The vast majority of employers in the education sector are state sector and state funded— 93% of pupils in this country attend maintained or state-funded schools. It is different from the law, which is 99% private sector. There is a difference, and I think it is right that we have system that, broadly speaking, is working.

Chair

On a related matter, you heard the discussion about the idea of student loan forgiveness earlier. Do you think that has some advantages, potentially?

Mr Gibb

Again, it does bring with it a cost. We have looked very carefully at that proposition, and our view is that the bursary system is the most effective. With the bursary, you get a £25,000 bursary, of which £9,000 will be used to pay the fee, and that then leaves £16,000 as the incentive.

Ian Mearns

The ITT, in the last Parliament we saw a rapid and huge growth in the number of places being offered through school-based initial teacher training. It has been said that this has led to a fragmentation in provision. Do you agree that is a concern?

Mr Gibb

No. We are at a position now where 51% of graduates coming into teaching are trained through the school-based system, but that does not mean to say they do not use the universities. They do use universities, both for training and/or for the issue of the PGCE. I would encourage universities that are not involved with the School Direct system to do so, but I certainly do not think it is a fragmentation of the system, and the outcomes of teachers going through this School Direct system are as successful, if not more successful, as the outcomes of students or graduates going through the university route.

Ian Mearns

Have you had any discussions with the higher education providers about their role in this system and the viability of their courses?

Mr Gibb

Yes, we have continual discussions with James Noble-Rogers of UCET, and others. Of course we want to make sure that the university sector remains viable.

Ian Mearns

Concerns have been expressed to us about the viability of courses in the higher education sector. Can you give us some reassurances that that dialogue will be ongoing to make sure that those places are secure?

Mr Gibb

Yes, we will continue to have a dialogue. What we want to do is to move the power, the decision making and the discretion to schools. We want schools to have the ability to recruit directly the graduates that they seek, and we want schools to have a greater say in the composition of the training, because there were concerns that some teachers were leaving the universities without training in things such as behaviour management that the schools wanted. So now the position is that, whether it is School Direct or the School Centre for Initial Teacher Training, there is more control given to the schools, and they can then work with the universities to ensure that the training and the courses at university are geared to what the schools actually need in the classroom.

Ian Mearns

Have you any thoughts on where confusion exists about the routes into teaching? Have you any thoughts about looking at that in terms of trying to alleviate that confusion where it exists?

Mr Gibb

Yes. I think that is an important point to make, and we are looking at what more we can do. There is a centralised application system through UCAS, so to that extent it is relatively simple. We do want schools to have discretion about whom they recruit, which is why we would not want necessarily to go down the Teach First route. But I am very concerned that we might be losing people who are rejected from one institution or one route, and we want to make sure that every single person who has not found a place at a university or a particular school is still within the system so we do not lose those potential applicants, particularly if they are well qualified to become teachers.

Lucy Frazer

Can I start by picking up the point that Ian and Michelle raised about the Government’s role in making sure that our workforce comes out skilled in the right areas in which we have jobs? You mentioned law. I know, having gone through a law degree and Bar school, that a large number of people took those courses not in the knowledge that we were producing more barristers than we needed. Bar school is incredibly expensive, it was £5,000 when I did it, and it is significantly more now. Do you not think there is some role for the Government to help in that process, even if it is just providing information so that people do the courses that jobs are available for?

Mr Gibb

Do you mean in law?

Lucy Frazer

In every profession. I have specific knowledge about law because that is the course I took, but I am sure it must be similar in other areas as well.

Mr Gibb

You are going slightly beyond my brief here.

Lucy Frazer

I know.

Mr Gibb

Generally my view is that if it is in the private sector, the Government are best advised to steer clear and let the market decide. But in terms of teaching and education, this is a largely state sector operation and, therefore, Ministers do need to be quite closely involved.

Ian Mearns

Is that why the Government are reducing the training levy for employers?

Lucy Frazer

Shall I come back to your sector? I wanted to ask you about the recruitment drives that you have done. You said that in relation to bursaries, they proved very successful. What evidence do you have in relation to the bursaries proving successful?

Mr Gibb

That they do result in increased applications into courses. I can send the Committee more details about the data that we have that show that we are successful.

Lucy Frazer

I think Neil would like that.

Mr Gibb

But they have proven successful and, therefore, when we come to look at it every year, it is always a great risk in reducing a bursary level. You have to do that if you want to increase it somewhere else. We take these decisions after a great deal of deliberation, because we do know that if you reduce the bursary level that can result in a reduction in the number of applicants.

Lucy Frazer

In terms of retention, do you have any evidence that people who took the bursaries are still in the profession, or are you tracking how your bursary recruits are doing?

Mr Gibb

Certainly retention generally is in a good place. 90% of all trainees are still in the profession a year later, and 72% are still in teaching after five years. In terms of the tracking of bursary graduates—I am just looking around—we will again let you have that data.

Lucy Frazer

That would be really helpful, thank you.

Michelle Donelan

Have you considered what we discussed before about making people pay it back if they have not been in the profession for four years or a proportion per year that they are eligible for? What about keeping the bursary, not moving to the forgiveness loan, but making sure that they have to work in the sector, which a lot of private companies do if they are paying for training and development?

Mr Gibb

We have very high retention rates in the profession, and the key to us is to encourage people to come into teacher training. This can involve a risk for people, because they have already paid the fees for an undergraduate degree and we are asking them to pay another £9,000, to go into further debt for another £9,000, for this post-graduate qualification. Therefore, the bursaries are designed to incentivise that, to help young people overcome that hurdle. We are confident that the retention rates generally will apply to that cohort equally, as it does to the rest of the profession.

Chair

Nick, do you ever get the feeling that the routes to becoming a teacher are a bit confusing and that it might be a good idea to clear up some of those confusions?

Mr Gibb

I do take that point, and it is something that I am concerned about. We are looking at how we can clarify the information to people who are thinking about coming to teaching, and how to make it clear what the different routes are, and how to simplify the system of applying to individual schools. We do not want to lose anybody who is capable of becoming a teacher, who is well qualified to become a teacher, and who is interested in becoming a teacher, simply because the system is over complex. I do take that point, and it is something we are looking at very seriously.

Ian Austin

I want to ask about raising the status of the teaching profession, because I think if you look at places that consistently outperform Britain, like South Korea or Shanghai, teaching is a high-status, high-value profession, recognised as such in the country and community. What plans have you got to drive up the status of the teaching profession?

Mr Gibb

One of our overriding objectives is to raise the status of the teaching profession, which is why we raised the bar for entry into teaching, the skills test that teachers take. We have limited the number of retakes that can be taken, and we are seeing a higher proportion of graduates with top degrees coming into teaching than previously. Addressing issues like workload and pupil behaviour are all part of that issue as well. On the College of Teachers, again, that proposition is also about delivering for teachers what other professions have, whether it is the Royal College of Surgeons and the Law Society and so on, and we want to make sure that we have the same approach to the teaching profession as those other professions.

Ian Austin

What more can you do to address low levels of morale in the profession and the long-standing issues around pay, and workload, and conditions, and all that?

Mr Gibb

One of the things we can do is not continue to talk down the profession. I think it is an exciting profession to be in. There has never been a better time to join the profession. The opportunities in teaching are now huge. The idea you can set up your own practice, your own Free School, has never been the case in the past. You can see a very rapid rise now in leadership. We are now looking at ways of encouraging high flyers to become head teachers in a much shorter space of time. It has always surprised me that you can become a partner in a city law firm in your early to mid 30s and yet the expectation is that you cannot expect to take a headship until you are in your mid 40s. We are moving towards swifter promotion. There are opportunities now for teachers beyond head teachers, to become chief executives in multi-academy trusts, and so on. It is an exciting time to go into the teaching profession. That is the message that I hope your Committee and the rest of us can send out.

Ian Austin

I do not disagree with any of that, but why do you think under successive Governments, not just yours, but when we were in power as well, the relationship between the Government and the representatives of the teaching profession seems to be so dysfunctional? Annual rows at the conference, and all this sort of stuff, why do you think that is?

Mr Gibb

I do not think that some of the things that have happened in the past at some of the teaching conferences have helped the profession. There is a genuine issue when you have policy makers like ourselves, like me, who see problems with our education system, who look at the international league tables, who look at some of these other surveys about the quality of languages in this country and so on, and who want to introduce policies to put those issues right. Therefore, when you highlight the problem it can sound like you are criticising every single member of the teaching profession working in this country, and it is not designed to do that. If you are trying to reform the curriculum, that is about the curriculum. Even if you are trying to reform an issue like teaching methods and pedagogy, again, that is not a criticism of the teaching profession, it is a self-criticism of what we are doing as a country and the way we approach certain issues. I think we perhaps need to be more careful in the language that we use when we are explaining why we are introducing policies, just as it would be better if the teaching unions did not continually talk down the profession in order to make the points that they are making. So together I think we can do more to improve our language.

Chair

Do you share the widespread agreement on the last panel about the College of Teachers and the value that that might bring to the professionalism of teaching?

Mr Gibb

Sorry, do I share—

Chair

The previous panel all basically agreed with the idea that the College of Teachers was a good one and would contribute to professional development. Do you share that?

Mr Gibb

Yes. It is important to have a similar professional body that reflects the type of qualities and institutions they have in other professions. It is important that it is a profession-led organisation and not a Government-led organisation. We had the problem with the GTCE previously, and the reason why that did not succeed in the end was that it was simply part of the Government’s machinery. All the other professions have these royal colleges which were established centuries ago. That is what makes them successful; they have come from within the profession. That is what I hope will happen with the College of Teachers.

Chair

Okay. Thank you very much, Nick, for coming along today. As I said before, we appreciated the fact that you listened to the earlier evidence. Thank you.

Mr Gibb

Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Supply of teachers, HC 538 2