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Pause “destructive” teacher training reforms, DfE urged, after new survey finds more than three quarters of teachers say their training was good or excellent 04 Oct 2022

by Warwick Mansell

 

More than three quarters of teachers in England say the initial teacher education they received was either good or excellent, a survey of more than 1,000 of them reveals today in a finding which seems to undermine the government’s case for drastic changes to the sector.

Some 30 per cent of those surveyed said their training had been excellent, with a further 47 per cent rating it good and only three per cent being of the view that it was poor. The data, from a YouGov survey of 1,087 teachers of all ages, back up numerous official surveys up to 2018, which had been carried out for the Department for Education and found largely positive views. These regular surveys have since been abandoned by the government.

But the latest findings come with the DfE having announced the results last Thursday of its hugely contentious “market review” reforms of initial teacher education (ITE), which will see the number of providers in the sector reducing by a quarter.

The report’s author said the findings showed the government was being “wilfully destructive” and “playing politics” with the teacher education sector, with a quarter of the survey respondents who were aware of the ITE reforms believing they were putting teacher supply and quality at risk.

The survey also found that more than three times as many teachers had a negative view of its “Early Career Teacher” attempts to improve training for relatively new recruits after they entered the profession, compared to those who were positive about it.

The detail

 

The survey was commissioned as part of the Political Economy of Teacher Education project*, which is conducting research into teacher education across several countries, and which is currently based at Monash University in Melbourne in Australia. It is led by the former King’s College London education academic Professor Viv Ellis, who is now dean of the faculty of education at Monash.

In July and August this year YouGov surveyed a weighted sample of 1,087 teachers in England who are eligible to vote in UK elections. The questions covered both ITE and continuing professional development.

Asked “How would you rate the quality of your teacher training programme?”, 30 per cent said “excellent,” 47 per cent “good”, 20 per cent “satisfactory” and only three per cent “poor”. The survey report said this was “broadly comparable with how doctors have felt about their training,” citing a study in that sector from 2017.

“Senior level teachers” were slightly more likely to be positive about their teacher training – 31 per cent rating it excellent and 47 per cent good – compared to “teachers” as a whole, the survey found, the corresponding figures for the latter being 28 per cent and 47 per cent.

In relation to teachers who had followed a university-school partnership leading to a PGCE, the distribution of responses was the same as for the sample. For those who had followed a Graduate Teacher Programme course, the results were slightly less positive, with 25 per cent saying it had been excellent, 47 per cent rating it good and 22 per cent finding it only “satisfactory” – though this still translates to a good or excellent score for this route of 72 per cent.

There were some regional variations: while 40 per cent of those living in London rated their teacher education as excellent, the figures were only 25 per cent in the North of England, 26 per cent in the South, and 28 per cent in the Midlands.

And opinion varied according to when training was received: 36 per cent of those who had completed their ITE less than five years ago rated it excellent, but this was the case for only 28 per cent of those trained more than 20 years ago**.

Despite these slight differences, however, the overall thrust of the survey is clear. And the report highlights how the findings are in line with previous government surveys.

In 2015, it states, the last year that the English government surveyed the entire population of newly qualified teachers, 89 per cent of primary teachers and 90 per cent of secondary teachers rated their training as at least “good”, with 43 per cent of primary and 53 per cent of secondary teachers stating it was very good.

A further sample survey in 2018, carried out by the government’s National College for Teaching and Leadership, had contained similar findings. This survey work, however, was then abandoned by the Department for Education.

Last year, the DfE published its “market review” recommendations for fundamental reform of the sector, in which all providers would have to seek re-accreditation from government to continue to operate.

“Market review” based on weak foundations?

 

It is interesting to look back to see how the “market review,” led by the multi-academy trust chief executive Ian Bauckham, framed its case for such thoroughgoing reform. What was it saying about quality in the sector, in order to justify an approach which has now seen 12 university teacher education providers failing to be re-accredited, and 58 school-based trainers either failing the process or not attempting it?  

In fact, what the Bauckham review says on quality within the sector seems thin. Under “Why undertake a review of ITT?," the Bauckham report included only one paragraph giving any detail as to what was wrong with the current system.

Citing Ofsted’s visits to 75 ITE partnerships during a period of Covid lockdown between January and March 2021, which were themselves controversial, the report had stated that Ofsted had highlighted “some significant areas where further development is needed; for example, it found that too few partnerships had a sufficiently ambitious curriculum, including on subject-specific content, and some instances where partnerships did not work closely enough to ensure effective and integrated curriculum delivery.”

It had also added that “Ofsted also found that too often, curriculums were underpinned by outdated or discredited theories of education and not well enough informed by the most pertinent research,” although as I reported last year, Ofsted was subsequently unable to provide the detail behind that conclusion.

Though the DfE did row back on some of the Bauckham review’s conclusions, the thrust of its findings, including the need for providers to gain re-accreditation to continue to operate, and the tying of provision to the government’s centrally-defined Core Curriculum Framework (CCF) have been implemented, leading to the looming closure of both university-based provision and School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITTS) and seemingly serious regional risks to supply.

Conclusions on rationale for reforms

 

The survey report, written by Professor Ellis, states that the “market review” reforms – and associated ones in relation to continuing professional development (CPD) - have been based on a government rationale that ITE and CPD in England have been “poor”. But the survey results showed that, in the case of ITE this was not generally the view of teachers.

It said: “On the basis of the findings of this survey and also the most recent national surveys of NQTs and the historical Ofsted database of inspection reports, there does not appear to be any evidence for this claim.

“Rather, there are extremely high levels of satisfaction…Teachers in England express remarkably high levels of satisfaction about their initial preparation through the ITE system. The English government’s own data prior to 2021 (when the current reforms were enacted) corroborates this finding through surveys of newly-qualified teachers and more than two decades of government inspection reports.

“England is now facing both potentially exacerbated shortages of teachers (especially in specific reasons) as well as [a] crisis of confidence both in terms of the government’s rationale for change and the nature of the reforms themselves.”

The report therefore calls on ministers to “pause” and “reconsider” the reforms, and consult with a wider group of experts – the Bauckham review was conducted by a group of only five education policy insiders, including Mr Bauckham himself – on “whether a change of policy direction is not only now advisable but necessary”.

Speaking to Education Uncovered yesterday from Australia, Professor Ellis added: “What they [the DfE] are doing is wilful destruction: it’s intentionally destructive. There have been a number of financial sector commentators over the last week that have commented on this government’s willingness to trash institutions, and to trash due process in economic policy.

“I would say the same has been true in education for a very long time. The market review and Core Content Framework, these things coming together in 2021 and then in 2022 leading to so many universities and so many SCITTs being de-accredited shows the same kind of reckless approach.

“If it was based on solid evidence, then I’m sure they’d have a section of the public on side with an argument that says ‘there is demonstrably bad quality in ITE and it’s really important that we are doing something about it, and we’ve gone on and done it’. But there’s just no evidence of that. So this just looks intentionally destructive. It looks like people are playing politics with something that is actually very precious, and that the country needs in order to produce the next generation of teachers.”  

Other findings

 

Professor Ellis’s report also argues that the government has not communicated its reforms properly, with only one third of the teachers in the YouGov survey saying they had even heard of the ITE reforms.  

And of those who had heard of them, the reaction from teachers was generally negative, with only 10 per cent describing them as “necessary and timely to improve the quality of teaching”, while 25 per cent were of the view that “these reforms put both the supply and quality of teaching at risk”.

Some 69 per cent – again among those who were aware of the ITE reforms - agreed or strongly agreed that the reforms “may hinder innovations, flexibility, and adaptation to local contexts in teacher training”.

And 76 per cent agreed – 46 per cent strongly agreeing – that the ITE reforms “do not address broader teacher recruitment issues, especially regarding the under-representation of individuals from socio-culturally and economically diverse groups in the profession”.

There was also bad news for the government’s Early Career Framework (ECF): its attempt to improve the quality of training for teachers in their first years in the profession.

Of those aware of the ECF – some 62 per cent of those surveyed were – only seven per cent agreed with the statement “The ECF will make a real, positive difference to early career teachers”.

Some 58 per cent agreed that the ECF was “hit and miss: there are some good parts and some problematic ones”, while 23 per cent agreed that “The ECF is unrealistic and may actually put some early career teachers off teaching”.

On CPD more widely, although 52 per cent said their current opportunities for this were “plentiful” (11 per cent) or “regular” (41 per cent), some 47 per cent said they were “limited” (42 per cent) or “non-existent” (five per cent). Some 21 per cent said CPD opportunities provided to them either made no difference to them (15 per cent) or actually “put me off teaching” (six per cent).

The government said last week that the successfully re-accredited providers “show the array of outstanding training provision for aspiring provision we have in this country”.

The full survey results are available from Monash’s website.

 

*I have been involved in this project myself, having been a co-author with Professor Ellis on the paper “A new political economy of teacher development: England’s Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund” and on the forthcoming book “The New Political Economy of Teacher Education: The Enterprise Narrative and the Shadow State”.

**However, it was also the case that the proportion of more-recently-trained teachers rating their training as poor, at seven per cent for those trained in the past five years, was higher than the four per cent of that opinion among those trained more than 20 years ago, or the figure of only two per cent for those whose ITE was between six and 20 years. So the opinions of more recent trainees appear to be slightly more polarised.

Comments

It is distressing that government is so highly selective in its reading and interpretation of research on teacher ed and indeed learning. It feels as though there has been some form of 'state capture' of education policy with its narrow focus on subject knowledge outcomes and high levels of surveillance and control. (There is a part of me that admires the ruthlessness and single-mindedness of this effective grab - but of course another part that is completely horrified).
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