Michael Gove’s plans to make it easier to sack underperforming teachers are sensible, but they will be meaningless unless there is a major cultural shift in schools
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, 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 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 are needed;
* 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;
* 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 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.
Gove’s 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 promise if the freedom to manage teacher performance more flexibly translates into a new mindset in schools themselves.
This post first appeared on Conor’s Commentary
In my opinion Michael Gove (and in turn Conor Ryan) miss the point.
Of course teacher assessment is an integral and important part (emphasis upon part) of improving performance. And yes, teachers who can’t help children learn should be helped to improve and then if still incapable, removed. Although it would be much better to do this when they are training to be teachers. The difficulty comes in being able to understand what ‘poor’ performing actually means.
The UK education system has been dominated for decades by central targets (5GCSEs), with standardised exam results reporting in league tables and passing Ofsted inspections (against prescribed standards). These were introduced because it was believed a these were levers that could ‘motivate’ improved performance.
In UK schools teachers are not stupid and they understand that career success concerns meeting targets, scoring well in league tables and passing inspections. This has driven activity in the classrooms (some of which has proved scandalous). Teachers teach to the test. They try to find easy exam boards. They have classified children as special needs (to look better in league tables). They have spent tens of thousands on preparing for inspection. They aren’t bad teachers. But it is a bad system.
The UK was reported last year to be heading down the international league tables for school performance. And there is growing evidence that when our young adults head into the workplace now, companies have been shocked at their poor skills and now set their own tests to assess skills and learning needs.
Could it be that UK classrooms are packed full of underperforming teachers? Or could it be that teachers focusing kids on passing exams has led them to learn less and for lessons to become training sessions? My money is on the latter.
Could it be that the very things believed to be levers for improvement, actually harm our children’s learning? Could it be that in the drive to improve standards, standardisation drives down learning and achievement? Could it be that the purpose of school and education is to help children to learn how to learn?
This is a very different purpose from targets and tables. What looks like ‘good’ teacher activity in the target regime, looks like activity that will damage a child’s learning when you have a learning purpose.
In Finland, who came near the top of the PISA international tables, they have no targets. No league tables and limited standardised testing. No heavy-handed inspection and inspectors have a different relationship. Oh yes. And they have no private schools.
Food for thought? Or another bout of targets, inspections and sackings?