Top-quality teachers willing to work in disadvantaged areas should be paid an extra 25% to do so, the chair of the social mobility and child poverty commission has said.
Alan Milburn said the £20m teachers’ pay premium would go to 2,000 of the best teachers and help to ensure that within five years at least 50% of all children on free school meals are achieving five good GCSEs.
Speaking at an event organised by the Policy Exchange thinktank, Milburn called for the creation of a teaching “fast stream”, which would allow good teachers to be promoted rapidly but only if they spent time teaching in disadvantaged schools.
He also urged the next government to commission the School Teachers’ Review Body, which recommends teachers’ pay changes, to create new pay grades that would encourage good teachers to work at challenging schools. He said academies had had powers to vary pay rates for teachers for two years, but the powers had been little used.
“National pay bargaining has not helped to narrow the attainment gap,” he said. “The old orthodoxy is not working and is in dire need of reform. The government’s laissez-faire approach of giving schools more freedom and then sitting back to see what happens is not working either,” Milburn said.
“Far too many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds still leave school without good qualifications and the gap between poorer children and others remains unacceptably high. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children in the most deprived parts of the country are still over 20% less likely to attend a good or outstanding secondary school than those in the least deprived areas.”
He said the barriers to progress represented a moral outrage, and cited the example of London as evidence that schools could rapidly improve in poorer areas, and not just due to changes in ethnic mix.
“Most of it is down to earlier improvements that took place in primary school and to London schools finding ways of pulling together to drive sustained improvements in results,” he said. “London explodes the dangerous myth that all too often has dominated policy and practice both in the education and political world: that schools serving disadvantaged communities cannot overcome the very real challenges they face.”
The schools that had cracked the code of success used familiar ingredients, he said. “They use the pupil premium strategically to tackle the barriers to attainment; they build a high-expectations culture; they incessantly focus on the quality of teaching and adopt tailored approaches to engage parents. Critically, they seek to prepare students for life, not just exams. If some schools can do these things, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask the question why others cannot do likewise.”
Milburn also called for regional schools commissioners to ensure that academies focus on improving teacher quality, and said the Department of Education needed to provide clearer lines of accountability about the role of regional schools.
