Oral evidence: Training New Teachers, HC 879
Oral evidence, 7 March 2016.
Witnesses
Sinead O'Sullivan, Director of Programme Delivery, National College for Teaching and Leadership, and Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary Department for Education, gave evidence.
Chair
Good afternoon. Welcome to Chris Wormald, on my right, the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, and to Sinead O’Sullivan, the Director of Programme Delivery at the National College for Teaching and Leadership—did I get your title right, Sinead? I want to make sure I had it accurate.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Yes.
Chair
Well, you have heard the first panel and, obviously, seen the Report from the National Audit Office. You have clear objectives as a Department for training new teachers, for making sure that there is a supply—that is part of your responsibility—and for giving teachers and head teachers proper professional autonomy and responsibility for recruitment and training, Mr Wormald, but your Department, the NAO Report tells us, has missed recruitment targets for the past four years. This is in the light of growing signs of teacher shortages in the profession as a whole, as we have heard from our witnesses. A number of us have had witness of that from people in our own constituencies. At the Department, you take a national view of the number of teachers needed, which at one level is fine, but you have heard—Caroline Flint will come in on this—that you are perhaps not paying enough attention to the patterns of where there might be vacancies. We want to question you about what planning you are doing on that. Those meaningful patterns of supply and demand are important. We are also quite interested in looking at the different types of model of teacher training. There is quite a myriad—I cannot remember which page of the Report the graph is on, but there is quite a complicated chart of those who are applying for places. So we are keen to focus on that. Those confusing choices for applicants that we heard about from our earlier witnesses is something that we want to focus on as well. Before we go into questioning, Mr Wormald, congratulations on your appointment as Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health. Do you know when you will be taking up that role?
Chris Wormald
No, I don’t quite, because it partly depends on recruiting a replacement for me at the Department for Education. The current Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health leaves, I think, at the end of April, so it will certainly not be before then.
Chair
Are you hoping—we would be hoping, I think—that there will be no gap in either Department? Can you assure us that there will be a permanent secretary at the Department for Education in time for you leaving, to make sure that there is no gap?
Chris Wormald
I cannot assure you, because I am not running the recruitment.
Chair
Do you hope?
Chris Wormald
I certainly hope.
Chair
We do, too, so that is good news. Generally on this issue, when we were discussing it as a Committee before the sitting, we thought that for what is not quite your valedictory appearance—
Chris Wormald
No, there might be some others.
Chair
Yes, there might be some others—we have you back quite regularly. We looked at this. I remember being in Barking town hall with you sitting in a similar position, although I was not Chair then. We were looking at school places. I summarise your evidence as saying that it is not the Department’s responsibility. Perhaps that summary is a bit brutal.
Chris Wormald
Not entirely.
Chair
Well, some of the things. We heard that it was not all your responsibility. Children in care—a lot of that was deflected from your responsibility. Now we have this Report on teacher training. We hope that today you will be really clear about what is and what is not departmental responsibility. If it is not the direct responsibility of you and the Department, how are you ensuring—as a Department with strategic overview—that the gaps get plugged? A free economy on schools is central Government aim, but if there are gaps, the buck must stop somewhere. We hope that you will answer questions in that frame of mind. Caroline Flint will pick up on some of those issues.
Caroline Flint
Mr Wormald, given what we have heard from the previous witnesses and what we have said about feedback from teachers in our areas, including teachers as heads of outstanding schools, do you acknowledge that there is a mismatch between the national figures that are issued by the Department for Education and what is happening at a more local or regional level?
Chris Wormald
I do not think I would describe it as a mismatch but the conversation you had with your previous witnesses captured the nuance of the situation rather well. As you said yourself, a lot of the national numbers would give us reassurance, but that is clearly not the experience in every single part of the country. I would not say that there is a mismatch between the numbers. Our national numbers show exactly what they show, which is the picture when you average it across the country. There clearly are some issues at an individual or a local level, as there are in individual subjects, which comes out very clearly from the Report. I would not describe it as a mismatch. Your previous witnesses described the situation quite well.
Caroline Flint
Can you imagine how galling it is for headteachers in different parts of the country who are facing real difficulties in getting good new teachers in the disciplines they need when it does not sound like the national Department responsible for education in England is taking seriously their concerns about shortages?
Chris Wormald
I hope we do take those concerns seriously. I was answering your question directly in terms of what we see from the national—
Chair
Sorry, Mr Wormald, could you speak up clearly because the room is not good for acoustics?
Chris Wormald
What we see from the national numbers does not deflect at all from the experiences of people locally.
Caroline Flint
The national numbers are showing that there are more teachers than ever before, and there are obviously more pupils than ever before. Some of the figures provided show that the teacher-pupil ratios are pretty static—obviously there is a difference between primary and secondary schools—and that those entering are balancing those going out. If I were to look at that at face value, I would say, “Yeah, that looks pretty good.” How much are you aware of in the Department? If you went back to the Department after this session, would you be able to put your hands on something that would show you some of the differences in shortages of teachers on a regional basis?
Chris Wormald
We look at numbers at a regional and at a local authority level. I would not be able to do it in the way that your previous witnesses described—at an individual school level. Actually, that is one of the reasons why we think that School Direct is the right way to go with teacher training. It does actually make it a lot more local than our previous approaches. We accept the challenge that the National Audit Office made in its Report that we need to look better at local and regional data. We can answer your question to that level.
Caroline Flint
How are you going to do that? That is really interesting because you seemed to acknowledge in that last answer that you need to look a bit more at the local and regional data. How will you do that and how will you incorporate that into the Department’s report on the state of recruitment and retention in education? How will you use that?
Chris Wormald
It is extremely difficult for some of the reasons mentioned by your previous witnesses. We review how the teacher supply model and our policies on teacher recruitment work every year in the light of changing labour market circumstances and we will be thinking about these issues as we review those. I do not have an easy answer for you because it is a very difficult thing to do.
Caroline Flint
You have acknowledged that you are going to have to look more at some of the local and regional data. How will you source that? How will you collect that data for us all to see?
Chris Wormald
There are sets of things that we can do to improve how we use our national data, some of which are set out in the National Audit Office Report. Some of what we need to do is what your previous witnesses described. Sinead might like to say a bit more about how we actually do this in practice—
Caroline Flint
Who is collecting the data on the local and regional picture, for you to be able to pull that in from? If you could explain that to me—because one of the things I find more and more these days is it is quite hard to pinpoint who is responsible for collecting the data. Is it the local authority who should therefore do that on your behalf, and submit it in to you? Is it the schools individually, in their various different guises, from academies to free schools? Who is going to collect the data, to enable us to have a national picture of what has happened, so we can see where some of the problem areas are, on a national level?
Chris Wormald
I will deal with that one, and then I will ask Sinead to explain in rather more detail. Our primary data source, which I think Mr Hobby referred to, is the school workforce census[1] that we do every November. Do you want to describe how that works, Sinead?
Chair
I think we know how it works, in November. That is not the issue.
Sinead O'Sullivan
At the moment we collect the school workforce census data just once a year. I think that is what you were getting at, really, that it is a once-a-year collection. We are reluctant to run it more often, not least because of the burden it imposes on schools—and I think Mr Hobby was suggesting he did not really want further data collections. However, we do have relationships with those schools that are leading School Direct and, indeed, with providers—SCITTs and HEIs—who do ITT training. We are building our network of School Direct groups of schools, to find out what is going on in each area—not just each region, but below that. What we are hoping to be able to do is to work with them to develop, if you like, a basket of measures and an ongoing dialogue to find out what is going on. There is just something else I wanted to add; you are right that there is a good deal of frustration out there about how much more challenging it is to recruit teachers. We are attempting to respond to that, even at a national level, so we are investing much more in marketing; we have invested much more in bursaries in those subjects where we think the challenge is greatest; but what we want to do in the future is to be able to work with groups of schools in localities, to see what more we can do to work with them to solve problems.
Caroline Flint
Thank you for that, Ms O’Sullivan. I think, though, that some of the evidence seems to suggest that some of the biggest challenges are in our poorer areas—I think coastal areas particularly have some problems—and our more rural areas. That is also often reflected in the number of trainees in those areas; I think in the east of England, particularly, the number of trainees per 100,000 pupils is the lowest of all the regions.
Chair
We have a reference in the Report.
Caroline Flint
We do. I think it is figure 11.
Tim Phillips
Page 30.
Caroline Flint
Thank you. We have got “547 trainees for every 100,000 pupils in the North West”—that is the top—“compared with 294 in the East of England”. As I asked in the previous sitting, given that we know, also, that trainees will often stay in an area to seek jobs in schools, is not there a mismatch there, which means that we need to look nationally at how we can incentivise and encourage maybe more trainees in those areas, but also incentivise them to stay on and go for jobs in the schools in the communities, as well? Is that your role?
Chris Wormald
This table largely reflects the historical pattern. I think Mr Jackson pointed to the way universities are dispersed around the country as being part of the cause of that; and actually School Direct gives us an opportunity to start addressing that question by encouraging schools in those areas to come forward themselves to run teacher training. What we see with these numbers is they do not particularly correlate, then, with the number of teachers who actually teach in that area. So if I took the two extremes on this chart, the east of England and the north-west, the current pupil-teacher ratio in the east of England averages to about 17.2 and in the north-west it averages to 17.1; so we do not see in the overall workforce these numbers replicating—which does suggest people do move. That does not deflect from your main point. We do want to look, particularly through School Direct, at having a pattern of provision across the country that means that we are training people everywhere, and that is one of the advantages that we get from moving away from a purely HEI-led teacher training system.
Caroline Flint
Where are the greatest teacher shortages in England?
Chris Wormald
I would need to check in terms of our overall numbers.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Do you mean teacher training shortages?
Caroline Flint
I mean both. Where are the biggest teacher training shortages and where are the biggest teacher shortages? Because you cannot fill those jobs.
Sinead O'Sullivan
One of the things you said earlier is that most people work in the area in which they train. We are doing a piece of work to link our ITT data directly with the school workforce census data to understand that better, because actually, as the Permanent Secretary suggested, pupil-teacher ratios are not varying that much, so we need properly to understand just how far people are travelling for their first job.
Chris Wormald
I will say a little about that in a moment, but if we look at the regional breakdown, on our last census the areas with the most full-time posts vacant were: Yorkshire and Humber; inner London; and the south-east. That masks within it an awful lot of variation between individual local authorities, but just on a regional level that is what we see from the census.
Caroline Flint
Is there a better way to track what is happening to teachers and where they are going? This might be a crazy idea, but every teacher has a unique number linked to them, so—I am not arguing for a big, bureaucratic process—how difficult would it be to put those numbers into a system so you know where your trainee teachers are going and where teachers are? When they are leaving, you could also track teachers who go on maternity leave or those who want to come back into the profession. Why aren’t we using that special way of following where teachers are?
Chris Wormald
We are going some of the way to that—
Sinead O'Sullivan
This year for the first time we have used unique teacher numbers to link those who trained in 2013-14 with those in teaching in 2014-15 who we see in the school workforce census. There is quite a lot more work to do, but I think there is quite a lot of potential for us to be able really to drill down—
Caroline Flint
Then you could have a more real-time sense of what is happening. Do you see—
Sinead O'Sullivan
Well, it has still got a lag. But yes, it should give us much better quality data, particularly over time.
Caroline Flint
Are the NCTL and the DFE the institutions in prime position to lead on that piece of work?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We are currently leading on that piece of work to link the ITT—
Caroline Flint
But you are only doing it for trainees at the moment—
Sinead O'Sullivan
Linking trainees through to the school workforce. Obviously, the particular cohort we started with have only been working for just over a year, but over time we will be able to see how long they have stayed, where they have gone and where they moved to for their second job.
Caroline Flint
That sounds like a much more effective way to track what is happening.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It will take a bit of time to build it up, but I think we have made a start.
Chair
Any new system requires a bit of time. So the system is there.
Chris Wormald
Just to be clear, what we are not doing is creating a giant tracking system of every teacher in the country in real time. I do not think anyone would particularly welcome that, and it would be extremely bureaucratic to collect the data. What we are doing is taking the data sets we currently have and linking them together much better, so every year we should have better data on these things. I still do not think it is going to be a perfect answer to all these questions, and we do think that the bedrock of this ought to be autonomous schools running School Direct, but we do think there is more we can do on national data—
Chair
Before Caroline carries on, a point was raised with me by a primary headteacher in Hackney who runs two schools as an executive head who talks about the School Direct approach. Those schools, which are often outstanding—they would not be training schools otherwise—are able to cherry-pick the best candidates, so from the teachers they are training they think, “I’ll have them.” That means that often the weaker schools in the area end up with the less good candidates. Is that a fair comment—do you agree with that?
Sinead O'Sullivan
I have heard the comment made before. What we try to encourage—we are not yet insisting on it—is that School Direct partnerships include a range of schools. So they would include an “outstanding” school, “good” schools and schools in “requires improvement” so that the trainee gets a fairly wide range of training opportunities. Indeed, the partnership hopefully gets access to good quality people at the end of the programme. We are not in the position of insisting on that yet, but I have heard that comment, and we are in constant dialogue with schools about how much further we should go and whether or not their partnerships are working as effectively as they can. The best partnerships are helping their weaker schools, and doing a lot with them.
Chris Wormald
That challenge is also why the Government is looking to develop the National Teaching Service, so that we can increasingly move great teachers into challenging places. There is, of course, a trade-off. We want our next generation of teachers to be trained in good and outstanding providers, so—
Chair
I wasn’t saying they shouldn’t be.
Chris Wormald
We recognise the problem you are raising. As I say, that is one of the reasons why we are developing the National Teaching Service.
Chair
I should say, for balance, that in my area there are also federations where they have taken on weaker schools, and the teachers are being trained to go into leadership roles, which is a stretch. They enjoy it, and it keeps them in place. There are some perfect situations, I am sure, but there are many imperfect ones out there. The NAO is wanting to come in.
Tim Phillips
I just wanted to mention page 40, paragraph 3.12, where we describe how schools in different circumstances are currently participating: 57% of state-funded schools currently are not participating in School Direct. Those that do not participate are disproportionately primary schools in rural areas and secondary schools in areas of high deprivation. So the point you make, Chair, is absolutely correct at the moment.
Caroline Flint
To that end, why wouldn’t you want to direct some resource into those particular areas to make sure that they can—using your national role, you can have that overview, and you should be able to see where the gaps are. Where you have got money, you could maybe push it into those areas to make things change and happen. Is that your job?
Chris Wormald
Yes. We do want to see School Direct running in all parts of the country. As I say, it is also why we are looking at things like the National Teaching Service.
Caroline Flint
But could you help it happen?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We have encouraged schools in all parts of the country to get involved in School Direct. It can be a challenge for them to recruit trainees, as well, because they are in a rural area.
Caroline Flint
But are you doing any specific work, Ms O’Sullivan? I understand you are saying “We encourage all schools,” but that is a bit like motherhood and apple pie, isn’t it? Given that we know there are particular gaps in different parts of the country, are you doing specific work to see how you can encourage and market it into those areas, both for the schools to pick up and looking at other training providers going in?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Yes, we do encourage it and market it into specific areas.
Caroline Flint
Could you give me an example of what you have done on that?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We go out to groups of schools and to teaching schools. We target specific areas where we encourage them to get involved in School Direct, and many of them do. We also have to balance that with whether or not they are in a strong position to actually recruit into training places in those schools. We have some really successful schools in market towns and untraditional areas that recruit well—for example, there is a primary school in Norfolk that has recruited really well to all the places given them—but others struggle. We help them develop their marketing activity. We run training days for them. We give them packages of materials they can use. We encourage them to come to Train to Teach events that we run on days, in evenings and on weekends, but ultimately, some of them still struggle to recruit enough trainees to meet their need.
Mrs Trevelyan
On that issue, Berwick-upon-Tweed, at the northernmost end of my constituency, has one high school, of which I have been a governor for many years. We went academy. We have a new head, and we have got a fantastic senior leadership team now. We were “RI”; we just missed coming up “good” in our last inspection, but we are very much there. The key problem is not enough teachers of quite the quality required in the subject areas. The head works incredibly closely as best she can, but the nearest school we can work with is 50 miles away. It is not easy, but you are spending £167 million on bursaries. If you gave her an extra £100,000 a year, she could find ways to get teachers there. It would revolutionise that school. There is no other way. There is the Scottish border, and there is a school 50 miles further south. Which bit of thinking about how coastal, white, poor areas are being left behind are we not doing to make sure those teachers can get people in—trainees or fully qualified teachers—to really make a difference? It doesn’t feel like there is support from the Department.
Sinead O'Sullivan
One of the things we are doing this year is launching the National Teaching Service in the north-west. I would hope there is some assistance we could provide there. We are always interested in looking at new ideas and new ways we can use our resources to make this work more effectively.
Caroline Flint
They have already got more trainees in the north-west than anywhere else. What about within segments of the north-west? My colleague’s point is that the north-west is a big region, but there are distinct areas across the north-west.
Mrs Trevelyan
We are the top, far right-hand corner of the north-east before Scotland. It is very isolated. The challenges of trying to get—the sense is that we can’t be alone, there are others. If all else fails, the Department needs to be thinking more about those areas. I wonder if that is on your radar.
Chris Wormald
That is exactly the thinking that goes into the National Teaching Service—how do we get some of our best teachers to work in different places? It is a big challenge which we recognise.
Mr Jackson
What comes across, though, is it is a bit reactive. Referring back to the details of the per capita training positions, you said it is historic that the east of England is lagging in that because of higher education. Are you proactively looking at demographic changes, say the number of pupils and the number of new schools? Obviously, you know that Peterborough is the second fastest growing urban area in England. We are going to need new teachers because we have so many more pupils in new schools. Are you proactively looking at that and matching it up to the initiatives that you are pursuing at the moment?
Sinead O'Sullivan
The more local you get the more challenging it is for us to be able to analyse what is going on using data. That is why a dialogue with schools is so important.
Mr Jackson
We have got a lot of those difficult areas, so we have a lot of rurality, big counties with lots of little village schools, which is difficult; poor infrastructure; coastal communities like Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth, et cetera; and we have pockets of serious depravation—Thurrock, Luton, Peterborough, Stevenage, et cetera. Using the east as an example, how would you do that? A few DVDs and a couple of posters is not really going to cut the mustard, with all due respect.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It was not my intention to suggest that that was what our answer was.
Mr Jackson
Perish the thought!
Sinead O'Sullivan
We also have Teach First which is targeted specifically at schools in areas of deprivation. They are helping us understand what they are learning from being in the east of England, which is one of the last of the regions they have moved into. We talk to teaching schools all the time, which deliver a range of workforce initiatives for us. We have been growing the number of SCITTs in the east of England—school-centred ITT providers.
John Pugh
Can I just clarify? Did you actually say the more local it is the more difficult it is to match up needs?
Sinead O'Sullivan
I said the more local we get the more challenging it is to look at things at a national level.
John Pugh
Is that in no uncertain terms really just saying, you can’t do it, from the centre?
Sinead O'Sullivan
I think because the data we have is always going to be historical, it is always going to be important to be talking to the schools about what is going on in the area.
Mr Jackson
That is why we need forward planning, which I have mentioned. Maybe you missed that.
Chris Wormald
We do that on a national level. I think there is some merit in what Mr Pugh says. Will we ever from a national Department be able successfully to predict some of these very local things? Certainly not on our current quality of data, and I think we would be quite a long way from that. It is one of the reasons why we think school-led approaches to teacher training are a good thing because they allow local leaders to react much more to individual local circumstances.
Chair
Can I just say, we have talked about local schools a couple of times. We know it is a good thing. One of my assistant heads said he feels worried that it is a bit of a cottage industry. That is even from an inner London perspective. Then there was a real concern about the number of schools that are involved. We heard from the NAO 57% are not, but also the number that are involved and the level of inspections. A very high percentage have not yet been inspected for the quality of their training. Do you worry about the quality of their training, Sinead O’Sullivan? Can you guarantee to the people watching this that their children are going to be taught by well-trained teachers coming through this programme?
Sinead O'Sullivan
A lot of schools are involved but we are encouraging them to work in partnerships rather than create a cottage industry.
Chair
It is still quite small—two or three small schools is still quite small.
Sinead O'Sullivan
The average is over five schools working together, and we are seeing further growth. I think your reference to inspections refers to the school-centred ITT providers, where we have grown the number of providers quite a lot over the last few years. Those providers, as I think one of your earlier witnesses said, are scrutinised quite heavily before they are set up and they are inspected within two years of operation. The fact that a number of them have not yet been inspected is because they are either not yet operating or have only recently started operating.
Chair
Does the NAO want to say anything on that, Tim?
Chris Wormald
May I just add that within School Direct, it is the HEIs who are doing the quality control? So we have not changed the quality control system—
Chair
I think that this all just underlines the point that Caroline Flint and others have made about the complexity of the system. Tim Phillips, do you want to add anything?
Tim Phillips
So 81 out of 174 SCITTs are yet to be inspected. Of those, 22 are currently only at the stage of recruiting trainees but 41 are in the first year of training trainees, so they will be training trainees but they will come to be inspected by the end of 2018.
Caroline Flint
I find it interesting that, so far, every time we have asked about what is happening locally and regionally the response is, “We can’t manage that situation”. I do not think that anyone is suggesting that we want the DFE to be running every school, although I have to say that the schools commissioner seems to be in charge of a lot of things that are happening on a local level. My own area, Doncaster, does not have a single teacher on the board of the schools commissioner so I am not sure how she can decide what is best for those schools. Before I move on to your missed targets, surely there is something that should be a national level responsibility, to have a better picture of what is happening at a local and regional level so that when the Department proclaims about what is happening in teacher training and recruitment they can reflect a more meaningful sense of what is happening and, in some ways, encourage good practice from the national level, for others to learn from each other—there are different communities with similar challenges, but some might be doing it better than others.
Chris Wormald
I’m sorry, I was not trying to suggest that the Department did not do those sorts of things. We want to do those things better, and that comes back to the point about how we are linking up our data, which we were discussing earlier. But that is definitely a role of the Department.
Caroline Flint
Let’s move on then to the targets. For four years now, the Department’s trainee recruitment targets have not been met. Why are you missing these targets for filling training places?
Chris Wormald
It is obviously disappointing that we have not recruited to a number of our targets in a number of subjects, and it is something that we worry about a lot. We particularly worry about STEM subjects, where we have launched a number of things. Figure 10 on page 29 of the National Audit Office Report reflects a very tough year—2015-16—for graduate recruiting. It was a period when the number of graduates was going down and a number of our competitors in the market were recruiting more and more graduates. We found it extremely tough in a number of subjects, as that figure shows. As I said before, we review what we do on teacher recruitment every year and try to update our approaches, and this is something that we will need to be responding to, particularly around STEM subjects. A lot of the missed targets are because our targets are going up, so when you look at the total number of graduates we recruited it actually went up, but not as fast as the need, and that is something we will need to be responding to via the various techniques that I am sure we will discuss, around bursaries and other things.
Caroline Flint
As I mentioned in the previous session, in 14 out of 17 subject areas you are not hitting your targets. It used to be that we met them in all but two subject discipline areas. What is going on here? Do you need to re-look at the model for how you ensure that you meet the targets?
Chris Wormald
As I said, we do—we look every year. Bluntly, while the economy was in recession we recruited very heavily, so some of those earlier figures were in times when the market was with us. In this year, 2015-16, the market was heavily against us and we struggled in the way that that chart describes. I think I am right in saying, Sinead, that our early numbers from 2016-17 suggest that we are moving in the right direction.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Yes. It varies by subject. We recruit, probably, one in five maths graduates. The demand for maths teachers outstrips the available supply to some extent, given the competing employers in the market. This is also true for physics and a number of other STEM subjects. What we have seen is that in some subjects the new teacher supply model that was developed for 2015-16 changed the numbers required significantly, so we recruited more art and design teachers than we had the previous year, but the target had moved much further ahead. We recruited more physics teachers than we had the previous year, but we still missed the target. The reasons vary by subject, depending on what is going on, but in broad terms there aren’t enough people coming through at undergraduate level for some of the subjects we really want to see more people taking A-levels in.
Caroline Flint
Given that I think I understand you feel that some subject areas need more specialists coming through, what can you do to incentivise that to happen, both in terms of training and also to continue to being a hands-on teacher?
Chris Wormald
Shall we take the example of STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—where we probably have the biggest concerns. A year ago, we launched a new package STEM of £67 million, which was partly about recruiting more teachers in that subject and partly about upskilling people who were capable of teaching those subjects but were currently teaching other subjects. We also increased the level of bursaries—
Caroline Flint
Could you give me a breakdown of what the £67 million is paying for? For example, let’s take physics. If someone had a degree in physics, what could they expect from that £67 million to encourage them to go into teaching—a ballpark figure.
Sinead O'Sullivan
So, someone who is a physics graduate—
Sir Amyas Morse
Could I just help with something before we move classes? The £67 million is over how many years?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Over five years.
Sir Amyas Morse
So, applying a small amount of division, that would be £13 million a year. I just thought it would be helpful to clarify that so we know what we are actually talking about.
Chris Wormald
That is part of what we are doing.
Sinead O'Sullivan
This is not about paying more money to people who would come into training anyway. They would get access to the bursaries as they always have had. This is about trying to see if we can get people who wouldn’t otherwise come into training. For example, we have already been working with universities to develop an undergraduate physics programme that also gives people a qualification in initial teacher training at the end of it. We are going to expand that to look at maths and computing as well. We are running a programme to encourage schools to offer internships during university holidays, again to encourage people who might not otherwise think about teaching.
Chair
Are university holidays the same as school holidays?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Not entirely. There are months when they do not overlap. We are running future teacher scholarships to engage A-level students to commit to teaching in return for some financial incentives during their undergraduate programme. We are also, as the Permanent Secretary said, running training programmes through schools to provide greater knowledge enhancement in maths and physics for people already teaching in schools. These programmes are being designed in conjunction with the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. This year is the first year we have been doing any of this and we will, of course, find that we need to tweak various strands of this work as we learn more, but for now over 2,000 people doing the training are existing teachers. What we hope to see as a result of that training is that they teach maths and physics for a greater number of hours at the end of the programme and do it well.
Stephen Phillips
So what is the answer to Ms Flint’s question? Of this £13 million annually, if I am a physics graduate, how will I see that in some way enhance the attraction for me to enter the teaching profession to teach physics?
Sinead O'Sullivan
If you are a physics graduate considering teaching, it is not likely you will see it. It is more about catching people earlier in the pipeline, at A-level or during the time they are doing their degree. If you are doing a physics degree right now—
Stephen Phillips
All right; if I’m doing A-level physics, how does this £13 million that you are spending annually attract me into teaching?
Sinead O'Sullivan
If you were to sign up for our future teacher scholarships, you would be eligible for a £5,000 bursary.
Stephen Phillips
But how do you know those are not people who would have entered the profession to teach physics in any event?
Sinead O'Sullivan
That is a challenge, but it is—
Stephen Phillips
Can I have an answer to my question? How do you know that those are not people to whom you are paying £5,000 to study physics A-level who would have gone on to study physics at university and then gone on to teach physics anyway?
Sinead O'Sullivan
The blunt answer on that is, at the moment I don’t know, but—
Stephen Phillips
So it’s just a £5,000 gift to people who were intending to teach physics anyway.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It’s not a gift because you have to pay it back if you don’t go in.
Chair
You have to pay it back if you don’t go into teaching?
Sinead O'Sullivan
If you don’t go into teaching, you have to pay it back.
Chair
What if you decide that you’re just not going to be a very good teacher—you don’t like it and you wouldn’t be good in the classroom? You might go into teaching anyway, in order not to pay back the £5,000 on top of your student loans.
Sinead O'Sullivan
At that point, you would be looking to the school to identify whether they were going to be—
Chair
Just to be clear, let’s say I am a headteacher and I have one of these people who got £5,000. I have a candid chat with them and say, “Look, this is not for you. You’re clearly not coping in the classroom,” and they say, “But I would have to pay back my £5,000. I have to last the year”—or two years or whatever. How long do they have to teach for before they are off the hook?
Sinead O'Sullivan
I don’t have the detail on that with me.
Chair
Could you write to us, because we would be interested to know that?
Stephen Phillips
I’m sorry to interrupt Ms Flint; I hope she will forgive me. This £5,000 is available, let’s say, when you are at secondary school, studying physics.
Sinead O'Sullivan
No, it’s available when you’re an undergraduate.
Stephen Phillips
Right; so you get £5,000 as an undergraduate. Presumably, because of the rules by which we are presently governed, that applies to non-UK citizens as well. Is that right?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Well, the people we are targeting are people taking A-levels at the moment.
Stephen Phillips
But if I am studying an equivalent qualification in a European Union country, do I have access to the £5,000 bursary?
Sinead O'Sullivan
No.
Stephen Phillips
If I am coming from a European Union nation to the United Kingdom to read physics at an English university or a UK university, do I have access to the £5,000 bursary?
Sinead O'Sullivan
At the moment, we have been targeting it through UK schools, so—
Stephen Phillips
That wasn’t my question, Ms O’Sullivan. If I am a European Union national and I come to a university in the United Kingdom to study physics, am I eligible for the £5,000 bursary?
Sinead O'Sullivan
I will have to check. You potentially—
Stephen Phillips
You had better write to us.
Chair
Yes, I have evidence from one of my assistant heads who is involved in this that there is a concern—it would be good if you could answer this in your written response—that people come, study for a year in London with a £30,000 bursary, do not enter the teaching profession and have no requirement to pay it back. It would be very interesting to get an answer on that, because that is a major leech of taxpayers’ money, regardless of whether they are British or European citizens, if they do not go into teaching. Can we be clear: if they do not go into teaching after a £30,000 bursary, do they have to pay that back?
Sinead O'Sullivan
No, they do not, but that is only available to physics graduates with a first-class degree.
Chair
Obviously that narrows it down, but still, it’s quite nice for a physics graduate with a first-class degree to spend a year training to be a teacher and never enter the classroom.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It is still a large commitment. It requires them to pay tuition fees and spend a year of their life training.
Stephen Phillips
And even with your £5,000 bursary, you only have to teach for a year. Is that right? And then you do not have to pay it back if you leave the profession.
Sinead O'Sullivan
I will have to check that, I’m afraid.
Stephen Phillips
You had better write to us on that as well.
Chair
There is a list of questions on which you are going to write to us. I am going to bring Anne-Marie Trevelyan in, but I just want to ask about international evaluation and models. I know that the Irish Government gave extra—whatever the equivalent is of UCAS points—university entrance points to students sitting the higher maths qualification, which apparently is devilishly difficult, and that massively increased the number of students at the leaving certificate end of the Irish education system getting a higher maths qualification. I do not know whether that led to more people doing maths degrees, but have the Government or the Department for Education thought about any incentive, if you’re talking about down the pipeline, encouraging people to get higher grades at GCSE and an A-level in maths in order to get extra points for university, or some other incentive that will encourage more people to become maths undergraduates in the first place, or physics undergraduates or whatever?
Chris Wormald
I don’t think we have looked at that specific idea. We have been looking at how we boost the number of people who do A-levels in maths and science, and we have seen the numbers go up quite rapidly.
Chair
Can you give a couple of examples of what you have done to boost people doing A-levels in maths?
Chris Wormald
Well, the A-level number has actually doubled over the last 10 years, I think—
Chair
Sorry, I couldn’t hear that.
Chris Wormald
The number of people doing A-level maths, I think, has gone up from about 50,000 to about 90,000 in the last 10 years.
Chair
Do you know why? Is that just chance?
Chris Wormald
The Government have been promoting it.
Chair
Promoting it in adverts? When you say promoting it, what was the incentive? Presumably a good maths teacher in school is a good incentive. That is partly what I am driving at.
Chris Wormald
That is undoubtedly true. I mean promoting as in encouraging people. We have not been putting in direct financial incentives to do that. But that is an extremely positive sign. Of course, the EBacc, which we discussed before, will hopefully get more people to do these subjects. In a combination of those things, we want to see a larger number of people doing maths and science at university, which is the ultimate answer to some of our problems.
Chair
That is one of my points. We will drop that for a moment, but we might come back to it. Anne-Marie Trevelyan is itching to get in on a number of issues.
Mrs Trevelyan
On maths, we are big into incentivising and trying to encourage people in STEM subjects, particularly maths and physics. Maths is my favourite subject, although I didn’t become a teacher, I confess. I trained as a chartered accountant instead, not because it paid more at the time, but because it seemed to be a more attractive option. Many are coming out at the end of their teaching careers in their mid-50s with full pension pots, which is partly why they are coming out, and maybe they are fairly exhausted because it is quite hard work being a full-time teacher. After a few years, they often look for something new to do. Are we looking at how we might tap into that really experienced teaching and high quality, particularly maths, resource? We do supply and we do part time. We do all those things these days to work in schools. Can we locate and encourage those really experienced teachers to come back into the profession while we boost our numbers in those STEM subjects?
Chris Wormald
Yes, and it is one of the reasons why we wanted the salaried route in schools, School Direct, which is specifically for people who have work experience in other sectors to go straight into schools. We are also looking a lot at returners to teaching, where the numbers have been going up over the last five years from 10,000 to—[Interruption.]
Chair
Sorry, will you speak up? There is noise outside.
Chris Wormald
The numbers have gone up from 11,700 a year in 2011 to about 14,000 a year now[2]. That is one of the trends that we are seeing.
Mrs Trevelyan
In maths and physics?
Chris Wormald
No, that is across the entire teaching profession. While we are on the subject, there was one thing from the previous hearing that we ought to correct. The Secretary of State’s announcement at the weekend was about teachers who are mothers returning to teaching. It was not as it was described earlier. But on your basic point, yes, we are looking at that.
Mrs Trevelyan
In terms of accessing retired teachers—not a chartered accountant who retires and then decides to go into teaching, but people who have been in the teaching profession who have stepped away—how are you trying to reach out to them to get them to come back, particularly with those maths and physics subjects?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We are not specifically targeting retirees, but we are doing work to encourage people to return—specifically, maths, physics and STEM teachers. We are offering, again working through schools, retraining packages and refresher courses to help those who might lack confidence because of the changes to the curriculum, for example, while they have been out. We are also trialling offering childcare costs for the period that they are training and we are working closely to try and match would-be returners with the schools that are interested. We are also encouraging schools to look more at offering part-time opportunities and to flex their timetable to allow for a more diverse workforce.[3]
Chris Wormald
You raise an extremely important point. We are beginning to see, as has happened in a lot of professions, a change in the way that the labour market is working for teaching. Certainly from the numbers we are seeing, it is now much less likely that you will become a teacher aged 21 and stay in teaching for 40 years. It is much more likely that people will move in and out of teaching, and we will over time—as a lot of employers, including the civil service, need to do—look much more at those sorts of careers and how we help people back into teaching, as well as recruiting them in the first place. We are seeing that in the numbers, which are going up. The kind of thing that Sinead has described will be a much bigger part of the future.
Mrs Trevelyan
Is the Department planning ahead to support schools to actually run schools in that framework? Running a school is a fairly specific world. What is the Department doing to think ahead? It feels to me as though everything is very reactive. Do you actually plan ahead to say, “In the next 10 years, we expect half the schools teaching body to be a part-time workforce”? How does a school work with that?
Chris Wormald
Yes, and that requires a number of the processes that Sinead described. Those are the things that we are doing. Both you and Mr Jackson raised the reactive point. We do have to be reactive to some extent. Labour markets change very quickly and we look at what is happening out there and adapt our policies accordingly. Through the teacher supply model, we also try to take a longer-term view, but what we do not try to do is predict exactly what the world is going to be like in 10 years’ time and make our policies adapt.
Mrs Trevelyan
You have a pretty good idea of what the pupil numbers will be like in 10 years’ time, because if they are born this year they will be in secondary school in 11 years’ time. Do you feel that the teacher supply model is forward-thinking enough? The numbers seem to vary: from the report, there seems to be a huge potential gap in what you might come out with each year in teacher numbers that you are going to need.
Chair
And you abolished your target model for teacher trainees.
Tim Phillips
Are you referring to the target for undergraduates?
Chris Wormald
We stopped having the target for undergraduates, which was quite a small proportion. We have retained our overall targets. The model does produce variable results—particularly the further ahead one goes—because there is quite a lot of econometric data about the future performance of the economy, which is of course highly variable. I have discussed with the Committee before that, although our projections of pupil numbers at a national level can be reasonably easy to predict, actually predicting where in the country those pupils will be is increasingly difficult, given that we have a more mobile population. In the teacher supply model we currently look mainly three years ahead.
Mrs Trevelyan
Some of them will go much further forward.
Chris Wormald
Yes, but like any model, it becomes much more uncertain, particularly those bits that are dependent on economic data.
Mrs Trevelyan
I come back to the same word: reactive. With the secondary school area, where you have your subject need in a way that perhaps you do not have in primary in the same way, there is timing. Are you saying that, realistically, the boom and bust of the national economy is going to be what ensures whether you can get physics teachers or whether the Army or BAE Systems gets them?
Chris Wormald
I will speak specifically about maths and physics, because those are our two biggest challenges. We need to do two things: we need to increase the overall supply of graduates in those areas, to benefit not just teaching but the wider economy. It is hoped that teaching will get a proportion of those graduates. We have got encouraging numbers about people taking up A-levels in those subjects and we now need to see that translated into more graduates. That is the long-term part of the game. The shorter-term part is ensuring that we are competitive with other employers—that comes back to what we do about bursaries and looking at how we better upskill other teachers who can teach those subjects, as Sinead was describing earlier. We are trying—and some of it is reactive—to deal with those short-term issues at the same time as we look at the longer term drivers of how many scientists and mathematicians we need in the economy.
John Pugh
On the supply side, for the last year for which figures are available a quarter of all teachers who left were retirees; the other three-quarters left for other reasons—not to retire. The startling thing is that in 2011 the proportion that left not for retirement was not three-quarters; it was only 64%. In 2014 it went up to 75%. In terms of your planning, you are seeing a trend here in the 10% rise over four or five years. Are you working on the assumption that that trend will persist, both in terms of the balance of people leaving the profession and also in terms of a 10% rise over five years?
Chris Wormald
Yes. One of the things the teacher supply model does, which is one of the variable parts, is that it takes forward economic numbers and predicts a number of leavers. Page 15 of the NAO Report has a helpful diagram at figure 3. The two numbers that are particularly relevant—
John Pugh
Could I just stop you there? I am surprised you answered yes, because that is obviously a dramatic trend. If that trend is going to persist, why do you think it is as marked as it is? A second supplementary question, putting them both together: do you think there is any policy change the Government could make that could alter or modify that trend? Or is it some inexorable rise that you just have to deal with?
Chris Wormald
I will say a couple of things. The conversation we were just having about the changes to the structure of the labour market does make the number on figure 3—that 31,350—that has been going up.
John Pugh
That is how you would explain it, by the labour market?
Chris Wormald
The other number that is going up is that of returners, that 14,100. What we see is that a little under half of the people who leave eventually come back to schools, and we do expect that sort of change to continue. In terms of what the future will look like, we will probably see that number of people who are leaving for non-retirement reasons go up and we will also see that number of returners to the profession go up. That is what gets built in to the teacher supply model. We do expect to see that as a change to the way the labour market operates. There are various things—the Comptroller and Auditor General has raised this point—that we can look at around retention as well, so that we don’t simply take that number as a given. Some of those things are in schools’ hands, to do with how you deal with individual teachers and the use of the pay freedoms and such things. Some are things that national Government need to address around some of the issues that your witnesses raised about workload and some of the other pressures on teachers. We will look at retention but we do think that there is an overall change in the structure of the labour market going on here. Where it is not happening is at the front end of teachers’ careers. When we look at how many newly qualified teachers are still teaching five years later, that number has been steady at a little over 70% since 1996. On the specific topic of this Report, initial teacher training, we are not seeing the number of leavers go up. It appears to be later in people’s careers that they are going in and coming out of the teaching profession rather more.
Mrs Trevelyan
Coming back to the bursary framework in more detail, I think we are looking at £167 million a year being spent. That is a big fat chunk of cash, so understanding how you are assessing the effectiveness and value for money of that money you are spending in a variety of areas is important. Are you getting the right people—as we discussed, would they have gone into the subject anyway? On retention, what are you doing, as you identified in one case, to get the money back if it is a failure and does not work out? Are you comfortable that you are getting value for money for that £167 million?
Chris Wormald
We assess the bursary route every year and move the bursaries up and down, and we analyse the effect on applications and retention rates every year. I think the NAO quotes in the Report the number we currently calculate, which is on average £1,000-worth of bursary equals a 2.9% increase in applications. So we can see that as bursaries go up and down, it is reflected in the number of people studying.
Tim Phillips
I don’t think the Report says that you assess the impact of bursaries every year. You assessed it in 2012-13 and found a connection between an increase in the value of a bursary.
Chris Wormald
We do do that ourselves; I’ve been looking at in preparation for this hearing. We will do more and more of that as we do more years of bursaries. It is important that we do that because, as you say, it is a lot of money.
Sir Amyas Morse
Are you saying you are going to do that every year?
Chris Wormald
I think we do in continuously.
Sir Amyas Morse
So now you are doing it continuously every year from now on. We can look forward to that, can we?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Yes.
Chair
What a swift result.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Even before we had a model, though, we assessed each year how much of a bursary we should pay, based on how many applicants we had seen.
Chair
The Comptroller and Auditor General is grinning like a Cheshire cat at the idea that his Report has had such an impact.
Chris Wormald
I think he is right. It is obviously a lot of money, and we can measure the effect on applications of changing bursaries.
Chair
Anne-Marie is going to continue this line of questioning.
Chris Wormald
What I was going to add is the importance on average. What we do not currently know is the marginal impact of some of these very high bursaries, because we have not done that. That is a specific thing we will need to look at.
Mrs Trevelyan
So how many bursaries were handed out last year?
Sinead O'Sullivan
It would be a challenge to give you a specific number. I do not have the briefing with me.
Mrs Trevelyan
Do I take the Teach First number of 35,000 per year and divide it into £1.67 million, or are we looking at bursaries from—
Sinead O'Sullivan
No, because the 35,000 people includes undergraduates, who do not attract a bursary, and all those people who take subjects such as PE, which also does not attract a bursary.
Chris Wormald
About 17,000 trainees a year get bursaries, it says on my piece of paper.
Mrs Trevelyan
Right. So we are looking at an average of about £10,000.
Chris Wormald
Well, they vary considerably, don’t they?
Sinead O'Sullivan
The smallest bursary we have this year is £3,000, and the largest is one for physics, which is £30,000 for a first-class degree.
Chris Wormald
There is another thing from earlier that we wanted to put on record. Those very high bursaries, such as the £30,000 for physics, are only available for people with a physics degree.
Tim Phillips
A first-class physics degree.
Chris Wormald
Yes. So it wouldn’t be the people doing the subject below those levels.
Mrs Trevelyan
So of the sums that you handed out this year, you will be able to assess when you review it next year which ones have been value for money, and you will adapt how you do bursaries next year on the basis of what you get this year.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Yes. We look at the number of applicants and whether it has risen or fallen, and by how much. Where we have confidence, we tend to take money away; where we are concerned, we may look at trying to find ways to give more.
Mrs Trevelyan
On an annual basis?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Yes, we do that every year.
Mrs Trevelyan
So from the students’ point of view, it could be a case of, “My big brother did it, and I hear he got £15,000, but by the time I get there, that may have gone.”
Sinead O'Sullivan
That is possible, yes.
Mrs Trevelyan
Do you consider that to be a helpful way to develop that continuous flow, particularly in the STEM subjects? We have to keep building it.
Sinead O'Sullivan
In the STEM subjects, particularly maths and physics, it has been challenging for a number of years, so the bursaries have not been that volatile. Subjects where you have seen us move money around include primary, where we over-recruited last year; religion; history, where again we have a healthy pipeline. We have had one or two subjects where we have removed the bursary and then reintroduced it, because we saw the number of applicants fall quite significantly, so the bursaries are definitely having an effect.
Mrs Trevelyan
Are you tracking with those individuals what the retention is for them two years further down the line?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We are not at the moment, but we are hoping to be able to do that in future, with the—
Chair
You say you hope to in future. Will you be able to with the current cohort in future, or are you going to set up a system in future?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We would like over time to be able to develop the data linking project that I was talking about earlier. I cannot guarantee that we will be doing it with this cohort this year.
Chair
So, just to be clear, if I got a £30,000 bursary for my first-class physics degree—which I stress to the Committee I do not have—and I got a teacher training position, got my £30,000 and then did not go into teaching, can we be clear again what happens? Nothing? You do not know whether I have gone into teaching or not?
Sinead O'Sullivan
We do not claim it back.
Chair
But do you know if I have gone into teaching?
Sinead O'Sullivan
At the moment, no, but we are expecting to as a result of the work we are doing to link—
Chair
But there is a huge risk there, isn’t there?
Chris Wormald
We know the overall numbers. We know that the rate of people training in physics who go into physics is about the same as for other subjects. It has been constant at about 90%.
Chair
How many drop out, then, if you have the overall figure? What percentage? When I say “drop out”, I mean they do not go on to be teachers although they have a teaching qualification.
Chris Wormald
I think there is a table.
Chair
Which although you say is a hard thing, Ms O’Sullivan—
Chris Wormald
It doesn’t show it by subject, but I don’t think we see big differences in these numbers between subjects. That shows the percentage who then enter a teaching post per route.
Chair
But per route is different from per subject. That is the point. I think we as a Committee understand the crisis in STEM subjects. They are valuable and important. Any child in a Hackney school can tell me about when they have had a teacher not well qualified. They know. They say, “The teacher is one page ahead of us in the textbook.” They get it. They can see when a teacher really knows and when a teacher doesn’t. Pupils are not stupid. There is an old statistic that I heard, so it is probably out of date, but in the past in the black country there was not a single teacher teaching chemistry with a chemistry degree. That meant that those pupils from the very beginning were not able to get into pharmacy, medicine and all sorts of things because they were not going to get a good enough chemistry education to get good enough A-levels to get into university. That is what we are up against and what we are anxious to pin down. You are paying these bursaries to people with taxpayers’ money for good reason. How many people are dropping out and how much of taxpayers’ money is going to people who then do not become teachers?
Sinead O'Sullivan
As the permanent secretary said, just short of 90% go into teaching.
Chair
That is overall, but what about the STEM subjects? It is the STEM subjects that the money is going to.
Sinead O'Sullivan
How long they stay in teaching is the challenge. What we have seen and built into this—
Chair
Are you saying that they do not drop out?
Sinead O'Sullivan
I am saying that they do not drop out in any greater numbers than in other subjects, that we are aware of.
Chair
Let me reiterate. If I have done my degree and self-funded through a PGCE and then do not go into teaching, that is my loss. If the taxpayer is giving me £30,000 to do a PGCE and to go into teaching and then I do not go into teaching, that is £30,000 of taxpayers’ money that has not got the outcome that was intended. Anne-Marie is itching to get that money for Berwick, and I am sure Doncaster and Lincolnshire are keen to get it, too. [Interruption.] I can see the headteacher from Lincolnshire nodding with interest at the idea of having that £30,000. For a small primary school, that would be a lot of money. Seriously, we have got £30,000 possibly leaching out the system, and you cannot tell us how many people getting that £30,000 are not going into teaching.
Sinead O'Sullivan
I cannot tell you yet how many people will get £30,000 either. This is the first year that we are operating it.
Stephen Phillips
Isn’t this madness? What you are really saying to graduates with a first-class physics degree is, “Why not have another year of being a student, and the Government will pay you £30,000? It does not matter if you go into teaching at the end of it.” That is the message.
Sinead O'Sullivan
If that was the way it was received, I would expect to see higher numbers participating.
Stephen Phillips
With the publicity that this hearing may or may not generate, you may well see that.
Chair
Our hashtag is #trainingteachers.
Stephen Phillips
“Have another nice year at university doing a PGCE, which is another great qualification. You do not have to teach at the end of it, and the taxpayer will pay you £30,000.”
Sinead O'Sullivan
And you will have to pay the student loans that you have taken out in order to do that.
Stephen Phillips
Even if we take those off, you are still quids in, are you not?
Chair
You are still earning about what a teacher would earn. Taking £9,000 of tuition fees off £30,000 makes £21,000. You earn £22,000-something as a new teacher.
Stephen Phillips
Did you sign this off as value for money, Mr Wormald?
Chris Wormald
As I said, we have not seen—
Stephen Phillips
No, Mr Wormald: who signed it off as value for money for the taxpayer?
Chris Wormald
We do think this is value for money and we do not want to put handcuffs on people who receive bursaries, because we are trying to create an incentive for people to train and not to create new barriers for people to train.
Stephen Phillips
Did you ask for a ministerial direction in relation to this programme?
Chair
The Comptroller and Auditor General has a point to make.
Sir Amyas Morse
I do think it is important—Ms O’Sullivan has mentioned it a couple of times—in getting the dynamics of this to set against it what people who are training have had to spend on tuition fees. It does give you a better rounded picture than just taking one side of the picture. When you are applying the detail, as I am sure you will, I suggest that you add that in as well.
Chris Wormald
Yes.
Mrs Trevelyan
In terms of the DfE stats, the average cost of training per trainee is £18,900 for university-led, £20,800 for a school-centred provider and £20,000 for the School Direct fee system and the School Direct salary system. For Teach First, it is £35,800. There are quite big variations in there. Obviously 57% are not in the school-led environment yet but are still in the university framework. How are you assessing how the value for money will pan out on that for us the taxpayer to ensure that all those are the very best they can be in terms of the future teachers we need? That is a big difference in the price of turning out a teacher.
Chris Wormald
The big difference in pricing is between Teach First and the others, which are all around the £19,000 to £20,000 mark. Teach First is the one that we typically pay more for. I think the Report sets out the extra investment is in return for the quality of graduate that we get from Teach First, and their wider impact on the system. The other routes, I think the National Audit Office said, actually come out at a very similar type of cost. The way we judge the cost-effectiveness and value for money of those is by the numbers on figure 15 of the National Audit Office Report, which shows the number that go through to get QTS and the number that then enter teaching posts—those are absolutely key metrics. Over time, as Sinead was describing earlier, we will be able to do more of tracking what then happens to those people in their future.
Mrs Trevelyan
When did Teach First start?
Sinead O'Sullivan
2003.
Mrs Trevelyan
So we have not been tracking it since then?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Teach First recruits—about 95% of its candidates have a 2:1 or a first. Many of them come from Russell Group universities. Those trainees are placed in schools in specific circumstances—areas of deprivation or areas of poor performance—and the cost is a two-year cost, because it is a two-year programme; and indeed they cover their recruitment costs out of the funding as well.
Mrs Trevelyan
But we have not tracked where they have ended up. I remember it being touted as “Try it out for two years; see if you like education.” That was the commitment from the student—it was a two-year investment of their time.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It is a two-year programme, yes.
Chris Wormald
But Teach First do track them.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Teach First track themselves. We don’t distinguish at the moment between different routes when we look at potential.
Mrs Trevelyan
But the Department is handing out 35 grand a pop.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Twenty-six.
Mrs Trevelyan
Not 35, okay—2013-14?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Some of that is school payment.
Mrs Trevelyan
Okay. It doesn’t interest you—something which is allegedly different, supposed to be very much more settled—enough to monitor it yourselves and to be really on top of that? You have just handed over that responsibility to them to monitor without any—
Sinead O'Sullivan
That has been the history, but again—sorry to belabour this—we are tracking teachers as of the 2013-14 cohort forward, so we would hope to be able to distinguish between routes in the future.
Chris Wormald
Yes, and all the providers are also inspected. I think Teach First has been.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Teach First was inspected again this year and seven out of nine of the secondary provision was outstanding—eight out of nine—
Mrs Trevelyan
I don’t think I would question their quality, but it is no good if they all did two years in teaching and are now working as chartered accountants. That does not help my lack of maths teachers in Northumberland.
Sinead O'Sullivan
What Teach First tell us is that a significant number of the people who leave, whether after year 2 or year 3, are now coming back; so they say they have more people from their 2007 cohort, for example, in teaching now than they did at the end of the two-year programme. So they talk quite openly about this portfolio career, where you move in and out of teaching over time.
Tim Phillips
So it is true that we do not have the comparative data for other routes, but what the Report says at page 43, paragraph 3.20, is that for that first cohort in 2003, only 27% of Teach First people remained in the profession after three years, and that reached a peak with the 2010 cohort, where 62% remained after three years.
Sinead O'Sullivan
There were 186 in the 2003 cohort and about 900 in the 2009 cohort.
Tim Phillips
Figure 20 over the page then shows how as a general premise there is a drop-off after the two year point, and that continues to be the case, though more people are staying than previously; but it is lower than retention rates overall, I think it is correct to say.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It is so far, yes, although what we are particularly interested in is the people who are coming back.
Mrs Trevelyan
Are they getting the benefit of more investment from the Department’s money so that they can come back into the system again?
Sinead O'Sullivan
Not as far as I know; they are coming back often working with Teach First.
Chair
Just remind me—are they qualified as teachers after the two years?
Sinead O'Sullivan
They have QTS after the first year.
Chair
I just have some quick questions, and then Stephen Phillips has got something to finish off with. Can I just say, in the first panel we heard—and I had this from some of my headteachers as well—that there is a concern that the standard of applicants has gone down. What I was hearing from one of my headteachers in particular was that they may have the qualifications in teaching, and their degree, but their grammar and basic literacy was poor, and when they interviewed them they were embarrassed to put them in front of a classroom of pupils. I don’t know if you have got any comments about that—whether this is something that you are looking at in the calibre of people coming through.
Sinead O'Sullivan
It is not currently something we are looking at, but this is one of the reasons why it is so important to have schools involved in recruiting trainees—because they will filter out the weakest candidates. They have a vested interest in making sure that they have the best candidates trained at the end of the programme in order to employ them.
Chair
I am not sure that they can necessarily weed them out at that point. How are they going to weed out someone whose grammar is not quite on?
Sinead O'Sullivan
They will ideally either not recruit them or will have developed a programme to assist as part of the training package.
Chair
Okay. I am not sure how you would necessarily be able to tell, until someone was in the classroom writing badly.
Sinead O'Sullivan
As part of the recruitment exercise, quite often candidates are put before a class and asked to teach.
Caroline Flint
If you have a shortage of teachers, you end up having to accept what you get, don’t you? That is part of the problem. If you have a lot of supply, that works, but what if you haven’t? Some headteachers in my area say that they get maybe one applicant for certain jobs or they are competing. I think at key stage 2, there are 35 adverts on the Doncaster recruitment site at the moment, and not enough teachers are applying for those jobs.
Chair
I remember being a school governor in the last teacher recruitment crisis, when you had one applicant if you were lucky for a job, so you just took them with open arms and tried to make it work, but it was very challenging at times. Anyway, that is an issue that we have heard about, so we just want to reflect that back to you, and we may reflect on it further in our Report. The curriculum has been changing quite rapidly, particularly under the current Secretary of State’s predecessor. We heard from previous witnesses, and a number of us have heard from people in our constituencies, that as those changes happen, there will clearly be demand for teachers in those subjects. When you plan curriculum changes, do you look at planning teacher recruitment strategies alongside that? Some of these have been very rapid changes, so I guess that makes it even more challenging.
Sinead O'Sullivan
Each year when we look at the number of teachers we require, we look at what policy changes are coming up, so yes, we take it into account. We don’t build it into the TSM—the TSM is a data model—but we layer it in as part of planning the numbers.
Chris Wormald
Yes, and we did this year—so, for the EBacc subjects where the model would have suggested a lower target this year, we held it at the previous target because we know that there is more demand coming.
Sinead O'Sullivan
And we particularly protected the subjects that are EBacc subjects.
Chair
In terms of policy change, how much notice do you need to start setting a teacher recruitment programme in place to meet the needs of a curriculum change? Is it one year, two years, or three months?
Sinead O'Sullivan
It is about two years. We set the teacher supply model in the summer last year. We are recruiting at the moment. They will be trained next year.
Chair
So you need two years, but sometimes, I have to say, schools seem to be getting less than that at the moment for some of the curriculum changes.
Sinead O'Sullivan
I think that some of the detail comes later in the process, but in terms of understanding the change—
Chair
But the two-year figure is very helpful. On agencies, we have also had evidence from people saying that agencies are now increasingly being used by young graduates. Do you see that at the centre? Mr Wormald, is there anything you are doing to tackle this?
Chris Wormald
Yes we do, and as your previous witnesses said, there are occasions when it is perfectly reasonable to use agencies.