Parachuting ‘outstanding’ teachers into ‘inadequate’ schools is not a panacea for educational ‘deserts’

This morning has seen the publication of a report by Onward, a centre-right thinktank, and the New Schools Network called ‘Lost Learning’, which is all about tackling the entrenched problems faced in ensuring children in so-called educational ‘deserts’ have in access to excellent education provision. It’s an interesting report and certainly worth reading, and you can do so here. Like all of this type of report, there are some good ideas and perhaps some more questionable ones. The research itself into the problem is certainly interesting. I don’t want to get into the whole thing particularly, but there were a couple of ideas that I thought were interesting and worthy of discussion.

One of the interesting lines in the report was that it recommended that ‘outstanding’ teachers in one school should be offered a bonus of up to £10,000 if they go and teach in a requires improvement or inadequate school for a period of three years (capped at 200 teachers in the first instance ‘to limit the cost to the taxpayer’).

There’s an obvious logic — schools are bad because they have bad teachers, parachute in good teachers, and, hey presto, you’ve got good schools! What will good teachers be motivated by? Money of course! Easy.

Of course, it isn’t that easy. There’s a host of rather obvious problems with this approach.

One of the problems revolves around the issue of how you define an outstanding teacher. In the report, they identify these as being “teachers working in an outstanding school who have reached M4 on the main pay scale”. I mean there are just huge problems with this. Just off the top of my head:

· Some ‘outstanding’ schools per OFSTED haven’t been inspected in nearly 15 years at this point. One outstanding school near me hasn’t had a full inspection since 2006! Now, the school consistently achieves good results, but then this leads on to the second point.

· It is simply much easier to be outstanding if you teach in some geographic locations than in others. Demographics and the socio-economic background of students obviously correlate with OFSTED gradings for schools. They also heavily correlate with exam results — hence why so many selective Grammar Schools seem to do so well in Progress 8 when you would think, intuitively, it ought to be harder to show progress with children who are already high attaining on entry in Year 7 (part of this is because Grade 9s are disproportionately rewarded in the system).

· There are many, many exceptional teachers in schools that are not rated outstanding by OFSTED.

· Even in some outstanding schools that get good results, there are underperforming departments, sometimes a number of these. Are teachers in those eligible for the £10,000 as well?

The fact is, if you were to swap a regular classroom teacher in an outstanding school, with an equivalent teacher in an inadequate school, I am pretty sure perceptions of each teacher would shift quite rapidly. All of a sudden the so-called outstanding teacher will struggle to show progress, while the inadequate one will see their results start to fly.

This is because often what makes someone ‘outstanding’ is their context. Does the behaviour system in their school work properly? Is it calm and orderly? Are the parents of the students in the school supportive and engaged? Do students actually do their homework? Is there a sensible attitude to teacher workload? Does the CPD programme focus on what matters? If you teach an option subject, are students being properly guided onto the correct courses that effectively match their interests and abilities rather than just being shoved through certain subjects because league tables. Does the school have money to spend on the professional development of staff? Lots of these things are factors completely independent of the teacher.

Even using other metrics to determine ‘outstanding’ teachers are problematic. Exam results are the obvious one. But, as Tom Rogers and others have pointed out before, teachers often don’t have as much influence over their individual class’ results as you might think.

The other problem is about how do you get those teachers into the educational ‘deserts’ (I daresay an unhelpful term) identified like North Derbyshire and Doncaster and so on? My guess is that the challenge here goes way beyond a £10,000 bonus. Ultimately these are places where the types of people who become teachers, for all sorts of reasons, on average, are less likely to want to live, unless they have an obvious connection with those places due to family. They also have extremely poor transport links, which makes it difficult for teachers with childcare commitments to make the commute from areas perceived to be more desirable (particularly if you’re going to do a longer school day as is also proposed in the report). I hope that doesn’t sound condescending — I lived in Harehills in East Leeds for nearly 12 years until the summer just gone, in an area in the bottom decile of the IDACI index, and I absolutely loved it, but I can appreciate why many people wouldn’t want to live there as well! [I’m aware that I’m framing this issue through the lens of my own experiences and viewpoints and that they are not catch-alls that apply to everybody].

Let’s say I want to take my moral convictions, give up my nice job in a nice school, and go and work in Doncaster, which is 35 miles away from west Leeds where I live (which is a city with quite a few outstanding secondary schools). It’s a drive of over an hour to get there. With two kids who can’t be in childcare any earlier than 7.30am, there’s just no way I’m going to make it on days where I need to do the drop off. Doncaster is right next to two big motorways as well! The problems for northern coastal towns, which are almost inaccessible at times, are even more pronounced. I’m up for the challenge of working in challenging schools (regardless of a £10,000 bonus)— but getting to some of these locations is pretty tough!

It’s one thing shuffling teachers around in a city like Leeds from outstanding to inadequate schools — but Leeds is already a thriving city with lots of opportunities. It’s one of the more desirable places to be for people in the North. The challenges in these so-called ‘deserts’ is much more ingrained than just schools. These are areas that have been abandoned by policy makers for years, with significant socio-economic challenges, where the most academically high performing people ultimately have largely wanted to use that capital to leave those places to go to other places with more opportunities — usually London or Manchester or Leeds or whatever.

To me, this idea that just parachuting in a couple of (maybe) good teachers is, at best, a band aid. It also rather unhelpfully perpetuates the myth of the ‘hero teacher’ going in with their outstanding school wisdom to sprinkle some stardust on the poor downtrodden students and staff in their inadequate schools.

More interesting in the report is the proposal for a ‘Teacher Premium’. This proposal is about helping to improve the existing teacher workforce in struggling schools, which to me seems like a much better bet. It says:

“We recommend that the Government introduce a “Teacher Premium” to complement the Pupil Premium, to help and incentivise schools to invest in the quality of their workforce. The Teacher Premium would be an annual stipend per teacher that could only be spent on accredited teacher training and continuous professional development. It would be paid to underperforming schools where over 37 per cent of their pupils are eligible for free school meals.”

Now there are some unanswered questions here. Will teachers get the chance to direct the spending of that money themselves, or is it going to be centrally directed by the school? How do you ensure the money goes to teachers rather than being put in the central pot to deal with other financial problems the struggling school may be encountering (presumably there’d be some form of auditing and inspection element like with the Pupil Premium)? The proposal needs fleshing out for sure, but this seems more of a promising idea than parachuting in alleged outstanding teachers.