FEATURE
is teaching (and believe me it pains me to say this)? Unless something meaningful is done to increase teacher salaries so that they are actually competitive at every level, including at a leadership level, then little will be done to overcome the initial recruitment and later on the retention issue/s that we face. Do we want the best, the brightest and the most able to enter and stay in the profession? If so, well money ultimately talks. As Alan Hansen once famously stated ‘you can’t win anything with kids.’ Whist I would argue that if you are good enough you are old enough there is an issue here for schools. Critically the £3000 being thrown at teachers to move to challenging schools is during their first five years in the profession. The reality for any school is that you need a blend of experienced and relatively new staff to transform a school that is in trouble. If disproportionately your staffing body is made up of teachers in their first few years of teaching then you have an imbalance and an experience gap. Equally, it is worth remembering that ECTs have a reduced timetable commitment for two, not one, academic years. This in its own right will present challenges to schools and there will be a need to invest more heavily (understandably and rightly) in the training and development of these early phase teachers. It takes a good three years for a secondary phase teacher to become truly comfortable in their own skin and to iron out the initial professional mistakes that they will inevitably have HWRKMAGAZINE.CO.UK
made in the early phase of their career. There is also a danger that an imbalanced staffing body will see the over-promotion of colleagues too early on in their career. Whilst people have succeeded through being promoted early into their time within the profession there are also those that have not. Promoting staff early tends to work successfully where there is the staffing infrastructure in place to allow those early advancers to thrive. Invariably, Maths, Science and Computing teachers are promoted more swiftly than others as a means of retaining them because, guess what, these people work out fairly quickly that they can command a higher salary. This over-promotion can bring with it many unintended consequences for schools, most notably in the form of professionally immature leaders. Critically, the missing ingredient that appears to be forgotten within this commitment pledge is the need for quality experienced leaders to move to and work in the most challenging of schools in the country. Having worked in and led a challenging school in an Ofsted category I can very safely and confidently state that the challenges are completely different to working in a lovely leafy school (which I have also worked in as a leader). The reality is a handful of teachers will not change the culture and dynamic of a school. Yes, they will help by reinforcing a staffing body with expertise but ultimately, and contrary to what some argue, school
culture is not amorphous. I find this argument both bizarre and reflective of those holding a very professionally naïve views of school leadership. In schools where leaders know what they want, what they stand for and how a school is to be led, inspired and driven the culture is anything but amorphous. If schools in an Ofsted category are to be transformed then the starting point is to make these schools attractive to leaders who actually know what they are doing and carry the necessary school improvement knowledge, awareness and professional agility to do so. In some part this comes down to remuneration, especially when the salary of a Headship in a school in less challenging circumstances can often be higher than that offered in a challenging school. There is a degree to which danger money, as crude as that will sound, will therefore be needed to attract key leaders but then we need to go further and deeper than this. These leaders will need time, the suffocating hold of accountability and leagues tables to be taken away and the football management approach to leadership removed. It does not take 18 months to truly change a school. Yes, much can be done in this time and children’s life chances can be greatly improved but to really embed your changes takes longer. Challenging schools need to be given time to improve and to come a little more away from the spotlight of scrutiny. Having led a Double RI school (which is N OV E M B E R 2 0 2 1 // H W R K M AG A Z I N E // 2 3
