NAHT Evidence to the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB)
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NAHT evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) 31st remit Introduction 1. NAHT welcomes the opportunity to submit evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) to inform its 31st remit report. 2. NAHT is the UK’s largest professional association for school leaders. We represent more than 33,000 head teachers, executive heads, CEOs, deputy and assistant heads, vice principals and school business leaders. Our members work across: the early years, primary, special and secondary schools; independent schools; sixth form and FE colleges; outdoor education centres; pupil referral units, social services establishments and other educational settings. 3. In addition to the representation, advice and training that we provide for existing school leaders, we also support, develop and represent the school leaders of the future, through NAHT Edge, the middle leadership section of our association. We use our voice at the highest levels of government to influence policy for the benefit of leaders and learners everywhere. Structure of NAHT’s response to the Review Body’s 31st remit 4. This year’s submission sets out a brief context to the crisis in teacher and leadership supply. We provide an analysis which demonstrates how successive Secretaries of State have constrained the Review Body’s role by setting increasingly narrow remits that bear little or no relation to the STRB’s preceding analysis. 5. We demonstrate how government has further undermined an already febrile relationship with the teaching profession through its response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its actions have driven unnecessary new workload, harmed teachers’ and leaders’ well-being and done enormous damage to morale. The implications for retention are serious. 6. Matters have culminated in the needless and foolhardy imposition of another pay freeze leading to another real terms pay cut. Not only is government’s case without merit, our evidence shows that it risks precipitating a catastrophic leadership supply crisis. 7. Our submission provides detailed evidence setting out the way in which pay acts on leadership supply; the findings of our recent survey of school leaders; evidence on the gender pay gap; and a brief of other key evidence and data. 8. Our evidence refers the Review Body to previous submissions to the 28th, 29th 1 and 30th remits. We also attach: A Career in Education, NAHT, 2020 Context: Recruitment and retention - teacher and school leader supply 9. This year, concern about the longstanding, intractable crisis affecting the supply of teachers and leaders has been further sharpened by the multiple impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on schools. The pandemic continues to disrupt initial teacher training, impact on recruitment rounds and place extraordinary, continuing and ongoing pressures on teachers and leaders, and the pupils and communities that they serve. 10. The key summer recruitment round was severely affected, with much less movement and turbulence in the system than is normal, while the pandemic sparked an increase in applications to initial teacher training. 11. At this early stage, the uptick in applications to teacher training courses should be viewed cautiously. Training, and particularly bursary funded training, can provide a safe harbour from the economic and social turbulence of the pandemic – parallels exist with the global financial crisis of 2007/8 after which teaching failed to retain many of the new entrants that sought refuge from the economic storm, as teaching salaries failed to keep up and other occupations became more attractive to graduates and career-changes. 12. Nor do high trainee numbers necessarily promise a solution to the intractable issue of the need for more quality candidates at all levels – a recurrent theme of NAHT’s survey findings since 2017. Furthermore, the 2020-21 trainee cohort has already endured greater disruption to their teacher education than their immediate predecessors, posing even more significant induction and support challenges for schools in the academic year 2021-22. 13. The largely unaddressed issue of teacher, and to an even greater extent, leadership retention remains. Last year’s recruitment rounds suggest that many teachers and leaders may have postponed future career decisions, creating the potential for very significant losses of experienced professionals when the pressure of the pandemic is released. 14. It is possible that there may be an outflow from the profession, particularly of late-career teachers and leaders exhausted by a year of constant crisis management, and the inadequacy and incompetence of government’s chaotic approach to the school sector. NAHT is deeply concerned about the impact that the profession’s loss of trust and confidence in government may have. 15. This is compounded by the extraordinary folly of a new pay freeze based on the flimsiest of propositions. Delivering yet another real terms pay cut to a profession where recruitment and retention is through the floor is inexplicable; doing so where that profession is reeling from the huge personal costs to individual professionals of supporting young people, families and communities through a global pandemic is simply incomprehensible. A ‘slap in the face’ doesn’t even begin to describe the betrayal that many school leaders feel. 2 16. NAHT’s view is that, once again, there has been no substantive or significant im- provement to the national state of teacher and school leader supply, including rates of retention, vacancy rates or the quality of candidates entering the profes- sion. Our previously submitted evidence to the preceding three remits continues to apply. The Secretary of State’s 31st remit Introduction 17. The remit set by the Secretary of State for the 31st report of the School Teachers’ Review Body is depressingly familiar. Once again, a Secretary of State has set a narrow remit, this time based on a specious notion of comparative pay in the public and private sectors, and ‘probity’ in the dissemination of public finances. 18. Over the last decade successive Secretaries of State have deployed similar tactics to systematically constrain the work of the pay review body, repeatedly refusing to allow sufficient breadth in its work to address the overarching and systemic problems that cause too few graduates and career changers to choose a career in teaching; too few teachers to want to stay in teaching; too few teachers to want to become leaders; and too few new leaders to be retained in their posts. 19. The STRB is charged with taking account of vacancy rates and recruitment and retention issues alongside the wider labour market in England, in order to make recommendations on the salary and allowance ranges for teachers and school leaders, so that pay acts as a lever on teacher and leader supply. Yet, time and again government has prevented the Review Body from conducting the full breadth of this work, insisting, for example, that the STRB must focus solely on early career teachers, regardless of the weight of evidence that so clearly demonstrates the leadership pipeline is broken. Government constraints on the STRB undermine solutions to the recruitment and retention crisis 20. Since 2010, the STRB has been hemmed in by repeated public sector pay freezes, pay caps and other interference in its role. The last three pay rounds provide ample evidence of government’s unwillingness to allow the pay body to make a full and independent assessment of the challenges and solutions to the parlous state of teacher and leadership supply. 21. Nevertheless, the Review Body has continued to flag the issues that government is unwilling to hear, or address. 22. The 28th remit saw a relaxation of the 1 per cent pay cap but a continued fettering of the STRB’s work through government’s emphasis on a continuing 3 ‘need’ for ‘pay discipline.’1 Recognising the impact of the deteriorating position of teachers’ and leaders’ real pay, the Review Body rejected the government’s case for targeting rises at early career teachers to the detriment of experienced teachers and leaders, recommending instead a 3.5 per cent pay uplift to all pay and allowance ranges. 23. The Review Body’s report offered a detailed and clear rationale for the proposed uplift based on its review of vacancy levels, the overall labour market and the relative position of teachers’ and leader’s pay which had been in real terms decline2 for close to a decade. The STRB noted that: • teaching had continued to lag behind other graduate professions, both in terms of starting salaries and pay progression prospects • over recent years, the relative position of classroom teachers’ median earnings had deteriorated • data from major graduate recruiters suggested a continuing significant gap between teachers’ minimum starting salaries and median starting pay in other professions • the overall position of teaching in the graduate labour market had deteriorated since STRB’s 27th report, exacerbating the challenges faced in attracting good graduates to become teachers and retaining teachers in the profession • the evidence showed that there had been very little improvement in any aspect of the teacher supply situation in the last year, while there was clear evidence that some factors, most notably teacher recruitment, had worsened • there was evidence that teacher supply challenges were apparent across the school system in England at all stages of teachers’ careers • the pay and allowance framework was central to making teaching an attractive and rewarding career and signalling to graduates the value that was placed on the profession • the relative pay trends described above were important contributory factors in the recruitment and retention problems facing the teaching profession in England and Wales • few classroom teachers told [the STRB] …they aspired to become senior leaders, and most assistant and deputy heads… did not wish to become head teachers. The statistical evidence available also supported this picture, showing emerging problems in recruiting and retaining school leaders.3 24.