The shortage of good, well-qualified teachers in the UK is even deeper than your article suggests (Schools hit by record £1.3bn supply staff bill, says Labour, 14 December) if you take into account the number of teachers “in training” who are allowed a timetable from the moment they enter a school in September. This “on-the-job” training is based on the continuing canard that a “good” degree somehow turns you into a good teacher. Even though they are teaching the 2014 national curriculum – a narrow, regressive programme based on sterile ideas of knowledge transference – they are still not immediately competent classroom practitioners. Thus School Direct, Teach First and even the much-forgotten Troops to Teachers all count the trainee on day one as a fully fledged member of staff, capable and responsible, despite their unqualified status.
And the incentives you quote? The important part of the “up to £30,000 bursary” offered by the government is (like Sports Direct reductions and many holiday offers) the “up to” bit. The £30,000 is only available to graduates with a first or a PhD in physics. In many other cases the bursary is less than the fees (English, history, music) or, despite the importance of the subjects (business, economics, art & design), nonexistent.
This policy of plugging the gaps in the dyke with trainees recruited through dangled incentives was always going to lead to shortages, and will do so until proper training and proper support (fees paid, bursaries for all) is reintroduced.
Dr Neil Denby
Editor, Training to Teach; co-author, Learning to Teach
• In response to your article, may I point out that there is no teacher shortage. There are thousands of teachers who have been aggressively micro-managed out of their jobs, to be replaced with younger trainees who don’t have older teachers to mentor them. They buckle under the pressure and leave. The DfE insists that headteachers are best placed to make staffing decisions and yet rejects the argument of the NAHT that headteachers cannot retain teachers.
The apparent shortage is a direct result of punitive government strategies to weed out failing teachers. Oddly enough, the majority of those alleged failing teachers all appear to be in the 50-plus age group, mostly educated under the now in-favour grammar school system, all holding qualifications under the back-in-favour O-level system and all holding university degrees from some golden age of rigorous examinations. And yet these very people are the ones being hounded out. So those best fitted to deliver the new curriculum are banished from the classroom into casual agency teaching. Then education staffing agencies are profiting from schools by charging them over the odds to buy back what they just threw out.
What schools need is a qualified teacher in every classroom.
There are plenty of qualified teachers who are not in classrooms right now.
There are only two dots. How hard can it be to join them up?
Name and address supplied
• Three years ago a lovely young woman I knew was made very happy when she was given a full-time teaching job in a local school. Eighteen months later her mother told me that the workload took up so much of her non-teaching and free time that she was exhausted and increasingly unhappy. In touch again recently I was shocked to learn that she had resigned but that she was now much happier as a supply teacher as she felt she had her life back again.
Vaughan Melzer
London
• Schools spending £1.3bn on supply teachers? So where does this money actually go to? Ask supply teachers and they will probably laugh cynically or burst into tears. Supply teaching agencies cream off anything from one-third to a half of the money schools spend, just for making a phone call. Training for supply teachers is virtually nonexistent, and millions of pounds is leached out of the system.
Supply teachers working for private agencies are not paid according to the teachers’ pay scales, many experienced teachers are paid up to £70 a day below the rate, and all agency supply teachers are excluded from the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS). By way of contrast, 62,000 teachers working in private or independent schools are allowed in.
There’s also the scandal of so-called “finders’ fees”, where if a school does wish to employ a supply teacher on a permanent basis they will be forced to pay supply agencies thousands of pounds.
In Northern Ireland they have the substitute teachers’ register, and all 8,000 teachers are paid according to scale, all enrolled into the TPS. Private supply agencies do not exist. Schools use a database to find supply teachers based on proximity and/or the required skill set. It is run by a handful of people.
Any major city in England will have scores of supply agencies all competing against each other in a race to the bottom to cut teachers’ pay. No one benefits – children, schools and certainly not supply teachers. Time to end the supply agency rip-off!
Richard Knights
NUT Supply Teachers’ Network
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