Part 4 in Gary Hammonds' new series looking at Britians crumbling education system.
Author: Gary Hammonds
Britain's education system is in disrepair, in a new series of articles, Gary Hammonds explores how we got to this point and how we can fix Britain's education system.
The English system of education requires improvement regarding its treatment of the staff working with the most disadvantaged children and young people. The argument here is that a failure to invest the time, resource and energy in creating a highly-trained and professionally engaged workforce - which is empowered and trusted to do its job - results in the problems for disadvantaged children and young people being compounded. The tools of the state that support and enable the quasi-privatised, market system that we have had since 1988 – standardised test-based accountability, league tables, and Ofsted – work against an improved education offer. There is insufficient evidence that competition and choice are driving systemic improvements, and there is ample evidence that the perverse logics of rigidly centralised control are making matters worse.
The recruitment and retention crisis in schools is a nationwide problem, with the number of secondary school teachers falling since 2010 and the number of teachers leaving the profession for reasons other than retirement rising since 2012. In line with these falls in staffing numbers, pupil numbers have been increasing. The financial costs to schools of the recruitment and retention crisis are clear, as is evident from claims that schools spent £821 million on supply staff within one academic year, equivalent to £168 per child. In the years since that, the crisis has worsened. Most of this money is spent on job advertisements. The amount of money spent on advertising posts by 2016 had risen 61% since 2010, and the proportion of schools that waste money having to re-advertise when they fail to recruit the first time more than doubled over five years, 2011-2016. The post-COVID commitment of teachers to staying in the profession has not reached even the dizzying heights of the 2010s. The impact of this crisis on outcomes and learning should also be evident:
“When teachers leave schools at high rates, student learning drops. Furthermore, the effects of turnover extend beyond the compositional changes to teachers and include broader-reaching disruptive effects. Given the harmful nature of turnover, policies designed to increase teacher retention are a promising avenue to improve student achievement.”
There has been plenty of research conducted into how English teachers fare relative to those working in other countries. Teachers in England have less classroom experience than their counterparts in other OECD countries, and the same is true of head-teachers. English teachers report working around fifty hours per week – a figure which has risen over recent years, and constitutes ten additional hours a week compared to those worked by peers in similar OECD countries. The belief that workload is unmanageable is now held, for the first time, by a majority of teachers working in the English system. In 2013, “only” a third of English teachers found themselves wondering if they maybe shouldn’t have considered another profession: this was over half of all teachers by 2018. Job satisfaction – unsurprisingly, given the above – for teachers in England was low by OECD standards. The pipeline of talented aspirant headteachers to steer the sector through the coming years and decades is not there.
The Department for Education models how many teachers it needs to support pupil populations. As pupil numbers have grown, the proportional shortfall in teacher numbers has grown more: there was a one per cent deficit of staff in 2013, growing to five per cent in 2014, and up to nine per cent in 2015.
The year of this enormous shortage of staff – 2015, which saw nearly one in ten teacher posts empty – also saw increasing numbers of those teachers who were in the system reporting an increasing level of dissatisfaction with the job. This coincided with the growing belief, as evident in survey data, that assessment and testing obligations hindered rather than helped pupil progress and a well-documented tendency for testing regimes and curricular reforms to drive anxiety, stress, and other mental health problems for children and young people. Such high-stakes testing arrangements, which typify the experience of English school pupils, are premised on at-best inconclusive evidence that they are effective drivers of our publicly shared policy goals, and can be seen to place the burden to reform and improve on teachers and school leaders, rather than on policy-makers.
Teachers tend to enter the profession to make a difference, to work with children, to share their love of their chosen subject specialism(s), and because they believe they will be good at it. Teachers do not enter the profession, then, to oversee a regime of over-testing and hyper-accountability which drives dissatisfaction in both the classroom and the staffroom. Discussions of the testing regime and its consequences cannot be divorced from the accompanying league tables and school accountability measures, which are collated and published by central government. The World Bank has recognised that excessive testing and high-stakes accountability practices tend to produce undesired behaviours in teachers and school leaders. UNESCO – whose own arguments that accountability aligned with autonomy are the two drivers of system-improvement – themselves caution against making schools accountable for measures outside their control, because doing so will lead the sector to become risk-averse, minimalist in its efforts, and inclined towards self-preservation rather than improvement. Their advice – make schools accountable only for that which they have control over – has seemingly been missed by designers of accountability measures in England.
Initially, league tables just reported raw outcome data. New Labour, recognising that this was punitive to schools serving disadvantaged catchments, introduced value-added measures between 2002 and 2005, and contextual-value-added measures between 2006 and 2010. Contextualising performance was criticised by the Conservatives for equating to low expectations, but contextualising data “does not a priori expect different levels of progress from different pupil groups… In reality, nationally, some groups do make less progress than others, and this must be adjusted for if we are to make fair comparisons, as otherwise we penalise schools with disproportionately high numbers of pupils in these groups.” The Conservatives, in 2010, replaced CVA with the expectations of flat “levels of progress”. This measure, even more than those which preceded it, rewarded schools for serving affluent catchments and punished schools for serving more disadvantaged communities. This had real-term consequences – with flat measures such as this “perversely incentivising schools to concentrate their efforts on borderline pupils”.
This had been seen in the 1990s, too, when raw attainment was reported on: they incentivised the continued educational neglect of pupils perceived as being likely to fail, and incentivised ‘tactical’ rather than genuine improvements where patterns of subject selection mattered more than quality teaching. In recognition of these and other problems, the Conservative government introduced Progress 8 as the performance measure used from 2016. The problem, though, is that by “failing to adjust for differences in schools’ intakes, P8 will continue to penalise schools serving educationally disadvantaged communities, and reward those serving advantaged ones.” Other problems include changed school behaviours around admissions and exclusions (as argued earlier), the increased barriers to meaningful school-to-school support through the creation of competition-based systems and structures, and the promotion of a hyper-competitive normative arena, and a narrowing of the curriculum – both in terms of subjects offered, and ‘teaching to the test’ within any given subject. It remains to be seen what the Labour government will do with school accountability metrics. The present Key Stage 4 cohorts having no Key Stage 2 data buys the sector a couple of years’ respite. It will be of real interest to map trends of attainment along identifiable sub-cohorts for these two years.
Performance measures are best used by school leaders as tools for self-evaluation, and as a starting point in the search for policies, procedures and practices which should either be amended, or shared with fellow school leaders. If government bodies insist on continuing their involvement in the process of collating and analysing data, then they should be used as screening devices which identify schools performing unexpectedly well or unexpectedly poorly. Even then, though, governments should exercise much more caution: teaching, learning and progress are invisible and not easily captured or measured. There should be efforts made to resist the preoccupation of policymakers with ‘governance by numbers’.
What policy makers and central government should certainly stop doing, though, is the publication and defence of league tables presenting data in a way that punishes the professionals working with the very people we most need them working with, and which fails to serve its intended goal of informing parents-as-consumers, and which leads to undesirable other consequences.
Performance measures and published league tables attempt to capture outcomes; professional practices and behaviours of those working in education are supposed to be, similarly, captured and reported upon via inspection. Ofsted is the body responsible for doing so, and the pressure they exert upon school systems, leaders, and workers is enormous.
There are concerns around the validity and reliability of inspection judgements. Studies have found that, when prior performance at eleven and familial socio-economic status are controlled for, Ofsted ratings of secondary school quality accounted for less than one per cent of the differences in educational outcomes. As a proposed means for informing parental choice of school, it is even worse: there is next to no evidence supporting the claim that Ofsted judgement of a school correlates with individual level outcomes – be they with regards to personal happiness and well-being, or educational outcomes. But it is not just that Ofsted do not very successfully fulfil their own role. The problem is that their existence and practices in their current forms place undue pressure on staff and warp school behaviours in undue and undesirable directions.
Of all European school-workers, it is the English who feel most under pressure from inspection. In clearly not unrelated findings, teacher burnout and departure in England far exceed patterns observed in European countries. Teachers, when surveyed, have in fact named Ofsted as the main driver of the workload crisis - and the problems with workload are driving people out of the profession, and preventing those who remain in the profession from committing the necessary time and resource to getting better at it. So they do not perform their own job with any degree of success, and they make the job of actually working with children both harder and less desirable. Unsurprisingly, some are asking whether or not Ofsted inspections, given what we know, are of sufficient benefit to be worth the cost of them being perceived as ‘exhausting, stressful and demoralising’ by staff in our schools? These questions became all the more stark in the light of the tragic events involving the death of Ruth Perry. Unions fought for reforms to Ofsted, but the reforms suggested so far seem to misunderstand the nature and severity of the problems with an inspectorate exerting such force unduly.
Rebecca Allen and Sam Sims, in The Teacher Gap - a book which explores causes and possible responses to the recruitment and retention crisis – explain that whilst Ofsted inspections up to 2005 had been week-long exercises in evidence gathering, their reform and shortening meant that by necessity they became exercises in evidence checking. The work of the inspector became more about validating the written evidence and statistical analyses generated by school leaders. The growth in audit culture has been so pervasive that now school leaders are busy not with securing more school improvement, but attempting to create a paper trail for historical school improvement. “Bureaucracy has become decentralised. It’s not something to which we are subjected now; it’s something which we are actively required to produce for ourselves.” It has been said of those in education that “we spend increasing amounts of our time in making ourselves accountable – reporting on what we do rather than doing it.”
The book also details how Ofsted exerts different pressures on nominally ‘autonomous’ school leaders. Firstly, they can be compelled – schools are subject to coercive isomorphism, and are all pushed in the same direction from central bodies. Secondly, they copy one another – mimetic isomorphism is the inevitable result of high-stakes inspection visits with reports that detail what has led to positive outcomes. And thirdly, they come to a consensus – normative isomorphism occurs after sufficient time during which Ofsted rewards certain things and punishes others; the profession comes to accept that certain things are just the way they are, and that certain things are to be done a certain way. So Ofsted encourages behaviours that are time-consuming and which, in too many instances, add nothing to the education of children. Lesson planning formats which must be complied with despite having no theoretical grounding, data capture regimes which are ineffective at worst and counter-productive at best, and approaches to assessment, feedback and marking that drive teachers from the classroom whilst adding nothing to learning – all of these, and more, can be laid at Ofsted’s door. The real frustration here is that these isomorphic pressures are so real and so strong that were they harnessed for the actually important factors and drivers, Ofsted could live up to its own mission statement and be a force for good.
Ofsted was supposed to capture the good practice in a system defined by autonomy, but in fact, it serves primarily to suppress that autonomy. The removal of schools from local authority control was justified on the grounds of giving schools freedom from political control, but that freedom and autonomy were mythical, given that the systems of national regulation, determined from the political centre, are so restrictive. The OECD – whose support for systems combining autonomy with accountability has been used to justify much of the English system – argue that it is autonomy over curricular and pedagogical issues that drives improvement, not autonomy over finances or human resources. It is unclear whether English school leaders have actually been given the freedoms here, or whether or not this myth of autonomy is in fact “an unfulfilled promise of greater discretion”. Even where school leaders do have freedoms, the pressures exerted by Ofsted can result in heads aligning systems in schools in ways wholly subservient to Ofsted, even when these systems run contrary to what evidence says would improve outcomes.
Ofsted produces useful reports at a system level. And they may well have useful feedback to offer to school leaders. But the system of high-stakes reports with value judgements which are intended to act as signals to parents choosing between schools in a market-place has not only been shown not to work, but to have unintended consequences which actually hinder school improvement. Their own mission statement is “raising standards, changing lives”. On that score, they are not fit for purpose, and their continued practice runs contrary to a progressive and improving education system.
It has been argued that the tools of inspection and monitoring that underpin the market mechanisms are barriers to systemic improvement. They hamper the autonomy that should actually sit at the heart of a self-improving school system. But as well as freedom from excessive centralised control, there are grounds for granting those in schools more autonomy. Doing so will improve workload, well-being, and student experiences and outcomes.
Neoliberal political contexts are preventative of teacher wellbeing, because the tools that support such systems are barriers. The additional audit-based workload that neoliberalism and New Public Management demands prevent teachers from concentrating on and enjoying the impactful parts of their work. Lacking autonomous control over the shaping of teacher identity does the same. Neoliberalism fails to account for the emotional and social aspects of the job, because they are not readily reduced to values enterable to spreadsheets. It encourages a naturally collegiate profession and staff body into competition with one another. And it reduces the professionalism of idealistic teachers to a performativity, where teachers work compliantly with systems of surveillance and scrutiny. Through all of this, the neoliberalism that was supposed to usher in a new era of improved and more efficient public services has, in fact, achieved the opposite.
The neoliberal context in which schools operate drives workload up and well-being down. These are both inherent barriers to a more socially just education system. “Reducing teacher workload can make an important contribution to improving teacher retention”. This connection between workload and the recruitment and retention crisis has disproportionate consequences for disadvantaged communities and individuals. At the level of the individual, it matters because good teachers have a disproportionately strong impact on disadvantaged pupils. As well as disadvantaged individuals being more likely to be strongly impacted by a failure to retain teachers, schools serving disadvantaged communities are more likely to struggle with that retention in the first place. This is compounded further by the fact that high staff turnover is detrimental to the performance of staff who remain. So, the poorest children whose education we ought to be most concerned with protecting and improving are more likely to see their teachers leave, more likely to be negatively affected by this, and more likely to see their other teachers also suffer as a result. So where high workload and low autonomy drive people from the profession, it is the already-disadvantaged who are further disadvantaged. There is an imperative for improving the working conditions for teachers. In short, “reducing teacher workload is associated with a period of maintained or improved pupil outcomes.”
That focus on outcomes, and particularly on outcomes for the most disadvantaged, is entirely proper. The education sector is, however, an enormous employer in its own right. The well-being of its workforce is not an irrelevance, and should be safeguarded on its own terms. Kat Howard’s “Stop Talking About Wellbeing” depicts a workforce suffering from panic attacks, concentration issues and sleeping difficulties at a rate disproportionate to the workforces of similar professions. It highlights that teaching is in the top three professions staffed by people suffering from severe depression or stress. It identifies workload being too high and the levels of professional autonomy being too low as the causal factors behind this regrettable situation. “Teacher autonomy is strongly correlated with job satisfaction, perceptions of workload manageability, and intention to stay in the profession… The average teacher has a lower level of autonomy compared to other professions… Teachers’ autonomy over their professional development goal-setting is particularly low.” This pattern is historically long-standing and unvarying with either age or experience. Teachers are simply not trusted to do their jobs, and this is a barrier to progress. It is worth noting that teacher autonomy is lower in Trusts, and that the levels of autonomy tend to drop as the size of the Trust grows.
An oft-heard solution to this crisis is to increase teacher pay. There are, though, clear arguments to be made that teacher pay is not actually the cause of the problem, despite the norm being year-on-year real-terms pay cuts.
“…Teachers who leave the profession for another job see their working hours and earnings fall while their job satisfaction increases. This evidence suggests that teachers’ decisions about whether to leave the profession are not primarily motivated by pay differentials, but are strongly influenced by teachers wanting to change their working hours and improve job satisfaction.”
The conclusion that policy-makers must draw is that only through allowing teachers and school leaders greater autonomy, and through systematically and meaningfully reducing teacher workload, can they hope to achieve better – and more socially just - outcomes.
Research by the Educational Policy Institute found that, on average, teachers in England spent only four days a year on continual professional development (CPD) in 2013 compared with an average of more than ten days across the 36 countries covered by the analysis. The UK has no nationally agreed minimum expectations when it comes to teachers engaging with CPD, in contrast to many more successful education systems. The Scottish Government, for instance, requires its teachers to spend at least 35 hours a year on CPD activities. The Singaporean Government, rather than a minimum requirement, phrases its offer as an “entitlement” to 100 hours each year. The UK government has recognised that “more need[s] to be done to increase the quantity and quality of CPD that teachers undertake” , but in an increasingly fragmented and school-led system, this is left to individual head-teachers or those who run MATs.
Despite our nationally falling behind competitors, and despite our government recognising this and encouraging a response, there remain in the system barriers to effective CPD. 94% of school leaders considered time as a barrier to improving teacher quality; 97% of school leaders said the cost of training, or the cost of cover to facilitate training, was a barrier to improving teacher quality. Andrew Adonis’ ‘Teacher Development Trust’ has calculated that the UK spends on average £33 per year on each teacher’s CPD. 21000 teachers reported receiving no such budget. The government has announced and promised £75 million over three years, through the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund, to support high-quality CPD. However, it is available only to the 12 ‘opportunity areas’, or the category 5 and 6 local authority districts. Far too many areas and local authority districts fall outside of these categories, despite having real and serious needs.
The importance of teacher effectiveness is intuitive enough, but there are further social justice implications and considerations. Disadvantaged pupils benefit a disproportional amount from having highly effective teachers in front of them. So, ensuring that our commitment to developing and improving our staff matches the efforts made by global competitors is one of the means by which we can best ensure that the gap between our advantaged and disadvantaged learners is closed.
The DfE has produced its own guidelines on what constitutes effective CPD. An executive summary of their recommendations follows, and suggests that teachers ought, in line with the teacher standards:
The report goes on to outline a standard for what it expects to see happening in schools with respect to CPD:
And all this is underpinned by, and requires that:
Recent developments, including the introduction of the Early Careers Framework, have gone some way to ensuring that English teachers can catch up with their counterparts elsewhere – but there is still more that can and should be done.
The Finnish model of education has had a varied ride in recent years, in public esteem: they were once “the envy of the world” but are now “slipping”. Suffice it to say that, once, it was doing remarkably well. What’s happened since then can be discounted here, as long as we focus on what Finland was doing in the run-up to its excellent PISA scores. All teachers in Finland, at the time of their systemic triumphs, had completed “a five-year master's degree in education… funded by the Finnish government. Primary-school teachers spend this time studying education at one of the eight universities in Finland that offer teacher training, in addition to a school placement, and they cover all the subjects that they will have to teach the children in school...
Secondary-school teachers, on the other hand, do just a one-year master's degree after their subject-based undergraduate degree; they are still studying for five years, but only one of those years is focused on education specifically. What makes them master's level degrees is that the courses include research training, and all teachers produce a master's level thesis in an educational topic of their choice… They are taught the latest educational science based on up-to-date research on teaching practice, and complete a placement in a special teacher training school (like a teaching hospital) – an essential part of their training.”
The Singaporean model of education is another oft in receipt of glowing praise. See: ‘Why is Singapore’s school system so successful, and is it a model for the West?’ Theirs, too, is a system with much more emphasis on the continued professional development of its staff. “The Singaporeans recognise in the structure of their system that initial teacher training is only the first step. After a one-year induction period where you are mentored in your school and evaluated to ensure you are up to scratch, you are considered a qualified teacher. But you do not yet have the skills required to be a Master Teacher, or a Specialist Teacher or, for that matter, the Director-General of Education for the whole country…” Another feature of the Singaporean model which seems to be of merit is the absolute insistence that training is never a “one-off”. At the very least, there is one follow-up session where the professional learning can be reviewed once trialled.
Recent research into efforts to financially incentivise English teachers to go and work in more disadvantaged communities showed that the use of financial incentives “showed positive outcomes for recruitment but not for retention”. Put otherwise, “the results suggested that while the transfer incentive may have had a positive impact on teacher recruitment and retention during the payout period, the effect did not last once the payment stopped.” Offering financial incentives can encourage people to move, but it is not clear that it attracts better staff. “It is not clear that such external motivation is desirable, or attracts the best teachers, and it is quite clear that the attraction is not lasting.” Given what we know about the importance of ongoing professional development, socially just educational outcomes, and how incentives can shape the teachers’ labour market, it seems as though investing in higher quality CPD for staff serving in disadvantaged communities – Masters’ Degrees, or equivalent, or higher – and allowing these to be fully-funded for as long as those staff continue to serve disadvantaged communities may be a fruitful avenue to pursue.
The tools required to prop up the artificial market system of English education create unnecessary and unhelpful work. They drive people out of the profession, particularly harming the education of those with whom we should be most concerned. The consequences of this are profound. The recruitment and retention crisis, firstly, generates a substantial burden on public money. When the mechanisms which cause it are so ineffective at delivering publicly pursued policy goals, there can be little justification for this. Secondly, the people working in our education sector are people whose job satisfaction and well-being are of inherent value: the public sector should absolutely set the standard for safeguarding its workers. Finally – and probably most importantly – the crisis exacerbates, compounds and entrenches the gap in educational outcomes between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
Retaining and developing the teacher workforce; House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts; London: House of Commons; 2018
Supply teacher spend exceeds £800m; BBC; Retrieved September 23, 2018, from BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36301843 ; 2016
Student achievement and teacher turnover: what is the link? Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol; 2013
Secondary schools spent £56m on teacher job ads last year, says Labour. Retrieved September 24, 2018, from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jul/26/secondary-schools-spent-56m-teacher-job-ads-labour; 2016
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Global Education Monitoring Report 2017; UNESCO; 2017
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Time to say goodbye? The future of school performance tables; J Reed and J Hallgarten; IPPR; 2003
The evolution of school league tables in England 1996-2016; G Leckie and H Goldstein; 2017
Using value-added data for school self-evaluation; A case study of practice in inner-city schools; F Demie; School Leadership and Management; 2003
Measuring Success: League tables in the public sector; B Foley and H Goldstein; 2012
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Workload Challenge: Analysis of teacher consultation responses; S Gibson, L Oliver and M Dennison; DfE Research Report; 2015
Teacher workload and professional development in England’s secondary schools: insights from TALIS; Peter Sellen; Education Policy Institute; 2016
Teachers’ views of the impact of school evaluation and external inspections processes; E Hopkins, H Hendy, F Garrod, S McClaure, D Pettit, L Smith and J Temple; Improving Schools; 2016
Capitalist realism and neoliberal hegemony: a dialogue; M Fisher and J Gilbert; New Formations; 2013
Performativity, commodification and commitment: an I-spy guide to the neoliberal university; S J Ball; British Journal of Educational Studies; 2012
Schools, Governors and Disadvantage; C Dean, A Dyson, F Gallannaugh, A Howes and C Raffo; 2007
School autonomy and accountability: are they related to school performance? PISA in focus; OECD; 2011
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Teacher data use for improving teaching and learning; J Supovitz; in Leading the use of Research and Evidence in schools; 2015
Teacher wellbeing in neoliberal contexts: a review of the literature; R Acton and P Glasgow; Australian Journal of Teacher Education; 2015
Extra-role time, burnout and commitment: The power of promises kept; L Brown and M Roloff; Business Communication Quarterly; 2011
Well teachers, well students; F McCallum and D Price; Journal of Student Wellbeing; 2010
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Supporting teachers through the school workload reduction toolkit; R Churches; 2020
Stop talking about wellbeing: a pragmatic approach to teacher workload; Kat Howard; John Catt; 2020
Teacher autonomy: how does it relate to job satisfaction and retention?; J Worth and J Van den Brande; 2020
Teacher retention and turnover research: Update 3 – Is the grass greener beyond teaching?; S Bamford; NFER; 2017
Teacher workload and professional development in England’s secondary schools: insights from TALIS; P Sellen; Education Policy Institute; 2016
Retaining and developing the teacher workforce; Committee of Public Accounts; House of Commons; 2018
Transforming CPD; Teacher Development Trust; 2017
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Finland’s schools were once the envy of the world. Now, they’re slipping; The Washington Post; 2016 Retrieved September 27, 2018, from Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-schools-were-once-the-envy-of-the-world-now-theyre-slipping/2016/12/08/dcfd0f56-bd60-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a79596969d8a
Clever Lands; Lucy Crehan; 2016
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What works in attracting and retaining teachers in challenging schools and areas?; Beng Huat See, Rebecca Morris, Stephen Gorard and Nada El Soufi; Oxford Review of Education; 2020
The publisher is Citizen Network. Britain's Crumbling Education System. Part Four: Staff Experience © Gary Hammonds 2026.
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