Testing teachers

I wrote this blog post for Independent Voices on why improved test scores are a far better measure of success than student surveys

Good teaching is at the heart of good schools. We have done a lot to improve the quality of new teachers, but there has been much less focus on the quality of the existing workforce. Yet, while 35,000 new teachers enter the profession each year, the teacher workforce is 440,000-strong.

Schools need to make the most of teachers’ talents if young people are to get a decent education. For a disadvantaged pupil, an excellent teacher can deliver the equivalent of 1.5 years learning in a year, whereas a poor teacher contributes just half a year: the difference is a whole year of a child’s education.

That’s why it is important we evaluate the contribution that teachers are making and can make with the right support. A new Sutton Trust study, Testing Teachers, shows that the contribution that teachers make to improving exam and test results is the most reliable way to predict a teacher’s long-term success.

The study, by Richard Murphy of the London School of Economics, drawing on the latest international research, shows that improved test scores are nearly twice as effective as student surveys and nearly three times more effective as classroom observations.

But schools can’t simply look at a single year’s test scores to assess performance. A reliable and fair approach requires a sensible combination of these and other measures taken over several years, and might also include teachers’ contributions to sports and school trips.

When Labour introduced performance related pay in 1999, it did so within a very bureaucratic framework that didn’t work as intended in most schools. By contrast, the education secretary Michael Gove is hoping that leaving schools to develop their own systems will improve results and see the best teachers more effectively rewarded.

But without the right systems in place, schools may be no readier to do so now than they were in the past. So what are the characteristics of an effective system of teacher appraisal?

Most importantly, it should involve clear standards, fairly and consistently applied. External advice can be helpful in getting this right, and could assure staff of its fairness and governors of its robustness.

Teachers or school leaders involved in evaluation should be properly trained, and should discuss their evaluation fully with the teachers concerned.

When using exam or test results, it is important to focus on value added rather than absolute results, as they are the most objective and comparable assessment of a teacher’s contribution. It is also important that the baseline for such comparisons is sufficiently robust.

With classroom observations – where teachers or school leaders witness teaching in practice – the report suggests that those designed to help a teacher improve should be carried out separately from those used for appraisal, as this is more likely to promote honest feedback.

Pupil surveys can also be used – particularly with older pupils – as they are the ones in most day-to-day contact with teachers, but when they are they should be clearly structured, be age appropriate, and should complement other measures.

Getting all this right can have real benefits for pupils and teachers alike. Earlier research for the Sutton Trust has shown that if we were to raise the performance of the poorest performing tenth of teachers to the average, we would move into the top rank of the OECD’s PISA tables internationally.

But there is a more compelling reason: by improving the quality of our teachers collectively, we can ensure that every child has a decent education, and is not held back by poor teaching. That is a goal well worth pursuing.
 

Mobility could be a casualty of regional pay

In today’s Budget, George Osborne confirmed his plans to push through regional pay settlements for the public sector. This is likely to affect not just civil servants, but teachers, nurses and police officers, once current pay freezes have finished.

 

On the face of it, this makes good financial sense. Relative pay between public and private sector workers is much higher in parts of the North than it is in the South East. London already has a weighting payment to reflect higher costs in the capital, so why not have regional pay levels in every region?

But it is not as simple as that. The market for many public sector workers is not a regional one, but a national one, particularly with senior posts like headteachers or senior civil servants. It is already very difficult to move back into London if you have moved to take up a post in the regions. Now it will be harder to move between regions, making it more difficult to match the right people to the right job. This could prove an added complication when trying to rescue failing schools or respond to Ofsted’s tougher inspections, for example, or to persuade more public bodies to move out of London.

In education, there is an added complication. 1600 academies are able to set the their own pay rates, though the majority follow national guidance. They will certainly be in a stronger position to recruit the best talent if they choose to vary from the norm, potentially distorting the market and outweighing any savings from the regional pay cuts where wages are lower. And it does seem odd to be talking about regional pay at the same time as schools are all being encouraged to go it alone.

Of course, there is one group that gains from this move: the teaching unions. They will have the chance to negotiate separate deals for each region and have much more work to do with the school teachers’ review body, so will find they have more to do than ever. But I’m not sure they were the beneficiaries George Osborne really had in mind when he announced the move.

This post also appears at Public Finance. 

Can Gove change the culture on capability?

I had a weary sense of deja vu listening to Michael Gove on the radio this morning, talking about his plans to toughen up capability procedures. For the Today listeners, Gove highlighted his plans to 'allow' schools to remove poor teachers within a term rather than a year. Since they have been able to do so since 1998, when a fast-track process was introduced, which was later widening in its scope, this was not quite news. The real problem is partly that the procedures, thanks to the teaching unions, were more complex than they should have been - and Gove is easing this - and partly the same culture in schools that has made performance pay seem more like incremental progression in too many cases.

Gove's changes include:

• giving schools more freedom over managing their teachers through simpler, less prescriptive appraisal regulations;
• removing the three-hour limit on observing a teacher in the classroom (the so-called "three-hour observation rule”) so that schools have the flexibility to decide what is appropriate;
• a requirement to assess teachers every year against the new, simpler and sharper Teachers’ Standards – the key skills that teachers need;
• allowing poorly performing teachers to be removed in about a term – the process can currently take a year or more;
• an optional new model policy for schools that deals with both performance and capability issues; and
• scrapping more than 50 pages of unnecessary guidance

All this is perfectly sensible. However, unless there is a major cultural shift in schools, particularly primaries, they will be relatively meaningless. Heads often fear that unless they promote virtually all those eligible for progression they will cause discord in the staffroom. Equally, there is a sense among teachers that unless they get pay progression for excellence reasonably automatically, it is a sign of failure rather than a spur to do better. A growing minority of schools - particularly academies - have the confidence to challenge this consensus. But it remains too strong in too many schools, and it is the reason why the apparently radical reforms to performance pay - hugely contentious at the time - have been far too ineffectual. There is also a strong case for an annual reward scheme for schools showing the biggest improvements.

The truth is that it is this culture, as much as the complexity of the guidance, that explains why it can typically take a year to remove an incompetent teacher. Teachers are often given far more informal chances to improve than they would get in most other working environments before any formal process starts: of course they need the chance to improve, but it can become quickly apparent whether they are willing to do so. So, these Gove changes are perfectly reasonable, and build sensibly on changes introduced in the late 90s, but they will only effect the radical difference that their prominence in today's news bulletins promised if the freedom to manage teacher performance more flexibly translates into a new mindset in schools themselves.

I am quoted on this issue at the Financial Times and this post also appears at Public Finance.

Getting pensions in perspective

The education secretary Michael Gove has played his designated role when faced with teacher strikes: he has urged teachers to turn up for work to show their professional commitment on Thursday, as two of the three big unions, the NUT and ATL, strike over pensions, and suggested that schools should defiantly remain open staffed by militant mums. Meanwhile the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has joined the chorus of criticism over the strikes, recognising that any sign of union support could terminally hurt his already weak leadership ratings.

Of course, the strike is a fairly blunt instrument, and has been more used in conference motions than actual pickets by the teaching unions over the years. The NUT rarely manages fewer than half a dozen such threats at its annual Easter shindig. But this time the anger among teachers, as with other public sector workers, seems a lot stronger than usual. The relatively moderate ATL is striking, and even the moderate leadership of the National Association of Head Teachers is tempted to join in, though the second biggest union the NASUWT has so far resisted doing so.

The issue is pensions. The typical teacher will have to pay an extra 3.4% a year of their incomes into pensions by 2014, up from 6.4% to as much as 9.8%. At the same time, the retirement age is rising, the value of pensions will fall with a link to the Consumer Prices Index rather than the Retail Prices Index. And, most contentiously for headteachers and school leaders, the value of the pension will be based on average rather than final salary. All of this comes amidst a pay freeze that happens to coincide with significant inflation. As the NUT's attempt to justify its action shows, it makes a powerful combination in teachers' pockets. The change could knock £16,000 a year off the pension of a secondary head and cost an average teacher an extra £1000 a year in pension deductions.

Teachers feel that the salary gains made in the Labour years are already being eroded, and that without strike action, their pensions case will not be heard. This government is certainly more sensitive to the unions than the Thatcher government, and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has been presenting himself as the Government's union point man.

It does seem premature to be having strike action, as some unions have recognised. However, talk of banning strikes in the weekend press seems at odds with Maude's efforts too, and can only increase the tensions on both sides. And the case on pensions may enjoy more public sympathy than ministers expect. Lord Hutton, the former Labour minister whose excellent report on pensions heralded many of these changes, has warned of the dangers of moving too quickly.

The problem is that the Government's hurried approach to reform seems particularly inappropriate with pensions. Not all public sector schemes are the same: the teachers' scheme is fully funded whereas the local government scheme could collapse if members withdrew over high contributions. Polling has suggested that teachers don't mind paying a bit more so long as they retain their pension scheme: the problem is less the extra contributions than all the other changes combined. And for heads, the loss of a final salary scheme is a particularly bitter blow. Ministers may not want to signal any retreat before Thursday, but they should be open to looking again at the combined impact of their proposals, and alternative mixes to reach their required savings.

Paid more than the PM?

An ugly alliance between some trade unions and anti-public sector populists in the coalition is taking hold. The latest victim is a London headteacher, whom the Daily Mail (editor's salary: £1.1m a year) this morning claims is being paid £276,000 a year. In fact, he is being paid £82,000 a year as an inner London head, and received around £50,000 a year for helping improve other inner city schools through the very successful London Challenge. The rest would seem to be out of hours work, arrears and pension contributions. In other words, he is being paid for more than being head of his primary school, and even then his salary for the two jobs is closer to £140,000 a year. We are invited to compare this 'outstanding' head's pay (inflated by the GMB and their pals in the Mail to £276k) with the saintly David Cameron, who toils away cutting the public sector for a mere £142,000 a year.

But is it true that Cameron earns just £142k? Well, not exactly. First, the millionaire PM has the ultimate two grace and favour homes at his disposal - the 11 Downing Street flat and Chequers - the annual rental value of which would surely bump up the value of his salary quite a bit. Then, he gets his travel sorted with a chauffeur-driven car. And he has a pretty hefty pension to boot, all of which would surely bump the real value of his salary towards the £300,000 mark. I don't say he shouldn't get such a deal - of course he should as Prime Minister. I just wish he and his acolytes would stop being so sanctimonious about the pay of other public sector leaders who don't enjoy his perks.

The teachers' MOT is a good idea

The final White Paper package showed imagination, with the five-yearly teachers' MOT providing a surprise addition on the day. It makes sense to ensure teachers' skills are up-to-date, though it will be important that the focus is on what matters to good teaching, and not on simply reinforcing passing fads. But given the reluctance of too many governing bodies or heads to remove incompetent teachers, it is potentially a good move. And it is good that the government apparently plans to continue to publish performance table data alongside the Report Card: all the data should be on a single government website if it is genuinely to be accessible. More details are obviously needed on what is to replace the Primary Strategy in terms of quality and pressure to improve, and it remains to be seen how good School Improvement Partners are in their extended role, but with the reinforcement of the importance of trusts and academies, this is a reforming package. It places a considerable onus on the Tories now to give real detail about how they would do things differently.

How much training do teachers need?

The teaching unions have reacted with predictable fury to the announcement that some graduate career changers might be able to gain a teaching qualification within six months instead of the year currently expected on the Graduate Teaching Programme. But they were never all that keen on the GTP in the first place, with its classroom-based alternative to traditional teacher training, whereas headteachers welcomed the real experience it offered. One in five teachers now gains a GTP qualification.

The issue is surely what is learnt rather than how long is spent doing it. There is no good reason why this shouldn't take six months for an able and willing learner.

There is no single route to teacher training any more, and that is a good thing. However, a programme like this will only real work well if it is combined with the sort of experience that happens in Finland, where teachers' professional development is about more than in-service training days. Teachers routinely work for Masters degrees and Doctorates by researching issues that matter in their schools and developing solutions to real problems. This is something that the promised Masters in Teaching and Learning has the potential to offer here.

It is a long way from the traditional theoretical musings which characterised too many of our university education departments in the past.

Scruffy logic in new Tory policy

Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, gets headlines by attacking 'scruffy teachers'. David Blunkett did much the same on school uniform twelve years ago. But the problem for politicians is that they can't impose new rules on every school, because more and more power is (rightly) delegated to headteachers and governors. And Gove talks almost in the same breath about free schools as he talks about a more rigorous curriculum. Isn't it time that politicians pointed out that there is a trade-off between greater freedom for schools - including the freedom, presumably, to set up schools that employ scruffy teachers - and desirable social and educational goals, which they imply should be the norm for all?

The good and the bad

Why is it that whenever anybody makes the fairly obvious point that bad teachers should be removed from the classroom - if, after plenty of support, they simply can't hack it - we're told that this is "demoralising" for teachers? Since those who make this point, as Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, does today, also go out of their way to praise the competence of the majority of their colleagues, it cannot be because they think their critics are anti-teachers per se. And surely it is rather more demoralising for the majority of good teachers and heads to have to cover for their incompetent colleagues until they are replaced?