There is a third option – and in my experience this is the option most teachers choose. This involves exercising professionalism in trying to make sense of contradiction, and absurdity. Individual teachers who try to reconcile aggressive managerial impositions with emerging priorities from below will inevitably become Janus – the embodiment of opposed and split imperatives. This will be difficult, uncomfortable, and bewildering, if it is even possible. Even the most resilient of individuals will find this eating away at one’s inner-most conviction and incubate resentment. No wonder so many leave.
In short there is no optimal choice for teachers here. And this should justify why hyper-controlling approaches to the management of a workforce are bad. Let us therefore explore this in more detail and seek some examples of this in practice.
Pupil attendance is acknowledged to be a serious problem at the moment. Schools need to do whatever they can to get more pupils especially those with low attendance levels to come in more consistently. The data will be crucial here. Many schools approach this with care and attention and make heroic efforts to bring low attenders back in. However, bring in high stakes and controlling scrutiny into this and suddenly schools need to consider whether it is easier to find ways to avoid counting those who don’t turn up – including off-rolling pupils altogether. While inspectorates have got better at spotting off-rolling and calling it out, some schools have also become inventive and found new ways to conceal it. The cleverest approaches involve hiding it in plain sight. One such approach is implementing hyper-draconian disciplinary policies into schools, which goes hand in hand with over-bearing and top-heavy management (for examples of reports relating to these see example 1, 2 and 3). While these schools may not explicitly off-roll pupils, the frequent effect of these approaches is that parents will voluntarily take their children out of such environments. There should be no surprises that those who find it difficult to conform to very rigidly enforced codes of conduct are also those who tend to have lower than average attendance (see here). So in short and in hyper controlling cultures, schools can ‘solve’ poor attendance not by making pupils attend more but by making those who are already poor attenders not attend altogether. How does a professional working to improve pupil attendance and engagement become reconciled to this? With great difficulty.
Another example is the age-old exam grades bind. Schools need to continually improve standards of learning and teaching. Nobody questions this. Ever higher exam grade results from pupils is generally accepted as one way to show improved standards. However, given the pressures to provide this data, schools often simply focus on chasing grades and turn themselves into exam factories (i.e. continuous monitoring of data generated by constant examination practice; gaming examination rubrics, question level gap analyses etc.) which has been shown in so many studies to be detrimental to curriculum breadth and standards of teaching and learning. Consequently, pupils leave school with improved grades but seem to be less well educated and prepared for the world.
Nobody wants pupils to do less well in exams, nor to be less well educated; and clearly there needn’t be any contradiction in these goals if teachers were able to focus on improving curriculum breadth, teaching and learning. One would have thought that doing so would end up in better exam performance – and if not maybe the exam and mode of assessment needs to change?
However, if the instruments of hyper-accountability and management control are brought to bear on this situation requiring all teachers to do exam practice every week; analyse gaps at the level of each exam question; and do away with anything and everything that is not on the specification that might enhance understanding then we get the madness of learning on the one hand and exam performance on the other becoming opposed goals. In this way, top-down control brings about a bottom-up response which causes the very opposite of what is intended. How is a motivated professional expected to make sense of this contradiction and willingly acquiesce to degrading a pupil’s education to serve a mirage of improving standards?
So let us now exemplify this with an issue directly relevant to teacher retention, for here too is another example of opposed imperatives derived from controlling management. Some time ago, a school history department I knew very well as we had collaborated on enrichment projects in former years, was experiencing some challenges. There were a number of problems. Falling numbers opting for the subject at GCSE; results that were going in the wrong direction; poor morale and almost a complete lack of relevant CPD opportunity to help the individual practitioners. Furthermore, some of the remedial action taken by the senior leadership in the school were making things a lot worse. This included instituting tighter surveillance systems around the individual colleagues of the department (learning walks; book scrutinies; pupil informants etc); and threats to put individual colleagues on to ‘support plans’ the school were using at the time to encourage individual colleagues deemed ‘problematic’ to leave.
‘Support plans’ have become custom and practice in many schools. They involve an informal capability procedure in which individual colleagues are given a series of priorities to target alongside success criteria that a senior manager will assess after a given period. Failure to achieve these targets will result in a formal capability process though it rarely leads to this as individuals often either leave or go on long term sick leave if things begin to look bad. There is often no access to any additional training as part of these plans and it is well known (and partly why they are used) that they impose additional and often intolerable pressure on individual colleagues who are already struggling. In short, and let’s be honest, they are a tool management uses to get rid of unwanted or problematic staff.
I have heard many accounts of individual teachers leaving both their jobs and the teaching profession through the ‘support plan’ process. The irony of the euphemism of ‘support’ is not lost on those familiar with self-fulfilling prophecies. So why are we trying to get rid of teachers so much when we know that doing so is unsustainable?
The answer lies in a cultural legacy of distrust in the teaching profession. There is a very long and complex history to this which is exclusively to be found in Britain (though some of this has been exported to the USA too) – and there may be a separate post about this in times to come. In brief, for now, this suspicion links back to the Middle Ages and the beginnings of pre-Reformation protest. In England this led to the unpopularity and eventual dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and to the establishment of Anglicanism. Thereafter suspicion remained strong with the critical broadsides aimed against seditious teaching whether by Catholic or Puritan preachers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Into the 19th and early 20th Centuries when schooling began gradually to become more secular, and more widely available (through Sunday schools, ragged schools etc at first) this suspicion of teachers and teaching became manifest in pressures not to educate too much, particularly those who came from ‘undesirable’ backgrounds.
In the modern era, and certainly since the Plowden report in the 1960s, there has been a u-turn on this and a concern to give all children no matter their background equally good educational opportunities. Distrust in teachers then became focused on practices deemed not to provide this. This is best exemplified by the infamous outburst of Ofsted’s former Chief Inspector, Sir Chris Woodhead, in 1999, that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers, and 3000 incompetent heads.
This sowed an important seed that has grown into a spectre that still looms over public perceptions of the profession; and to an extent over the job role of headteachers. Woodhead’s comment resonated, perhaps deliberately, with many dissatisfied ex-school pupils and parents who saw an opportunity to pass off their own bitter memories of school by blaming teachers. I am not denying that there are incompetent teachers of course – there is incompetence in all professions. However, Woodhead, and later on, Sir Michael Wilshaw, portrayed the teaching profession as riven with it and headteachers too slow to take action. Some of the latter’s outbursts were equally detrimental to wider public perceptions of the profession. For example:
“If anyone tells you that staff morale is at an all time low, you know you are doing something right.”
Consequently, through rhetoric and state apparatus (outcomes data, league tables, Ofsted frameworks and mythologies and realities of inspection etc.) they pressurised the profession (over-bearing and controlling management again) to take more action in the face of perceived incompetence – hence the invocation of the informal ‘support plan’ and now an unsustainable exodus from the profession. I do not question for one moment that their motives were good and based on their own personal evaluation of the problem and remedy. Without doubt, the professional standards of teachers generally have risen overall too (though there are other legitimate reasons for this).
One way in which this ‘get rid’ approach has now been taken too far is in the use of ‘support plan’ processes for staff who question things, are seen as maverick, or ‘a bit too’ innovative rather than incompetent. The history department colleagues in the school mentioned before were exactly this way inclined. Before they had got on to the management radar they were popular among pupils, quite successful in terms of exam data, and were attracting high numbers into GCSE. They blotted their copybook with the senior leadership because they did not see the point of following the preferred lesson design sequencing format that had been imposed. This had been a decision made by senior leadership to make lesson sequences Ofsted-proof and ‘evidence-based’. However, there was no sensitivity at all to the differences between subjects. Each subject had to fit their curriculum into this format and that was it. The history colleagues asked legitimate questions about this decision and this was how they ended up on the management’s radar. As management scrutiny became more and more onerous on them, so the demoralisation and resentment set in more and more. Soon genuine problems formed and colleagues became demotivated and unable to address them. Incompetence had been created from nothing and the self-fulfilling prophecy did its relentless work thereafter. So highly knowledgeable practitioners with a lot to give and a joy in teaching children and an enthusiasm for their subject were hounded out.
Compliance and competence are two quite different things. To conflate them is a grave mistake. Aside from exacerbating the retention crisis unnecessarily, I have found in my experience working in many organisations that those who ask legitimate questions about something – even if unexpected or unwelcome were often demonstrating more loyalty to the organisation than those who were passively accepting. To tarnish non-compliance as incompetence harks back to 16th and 17th century preoccupations with religious orthodoxies and sedition but this surely has no place in ensuring that children are well prepared for the world today – especially a world where there is no more useful skill than to be able to ask questions. In fact, a crucial aspect of raising standards and maintaining those raised standards, is to enable professional expertise to question wider institutional policy and practice. This is in fact a demonstration of competence. Educated people, as all headteachers and governing body members are, are more than able to discern legitimate queries that can lead to improvement from mischievous dissent designed to undermine the institution. Yet in my experience I see independently minded teachers increasingly being made examples of through professional reprimand or ‘support plans’. This is no longer a sustainable or strategic approach from any organisation when there is such a terrible shortage of teachers. And if anything the teaching workforce needs to enhance its representation of the diversity of wider society.
Yet the practice continues. We have mentioned before the model of headteacher ‘surgeon’, who seeks to purge teachers (through ‘support plans’ and such like) instead of investing in training them to be better practitioners. In the end the financial outlay required to coax a teacher to leave, make their lives intolerable through ‘support plans’ are a lot less than investing in training to help them overcome the challenges they face. See here for more information about models of headteacher leadership.
There are a number of changes this necessitates. Firstly, we need to stop denigrating teachers! While professional standards have improved, public perception of the capability and status of teachers is still in question and unlikely to improve unless commentary by influential players in the profession becomes a lot more measured and balanced.
Secondly, national quality assurance systems (like Ofsted) have to play their part too. For many years they have encouraged this controlling hyperactive style of leadership as ‘strong’ and ‘relentless’ largely because of the inheritances left behind by significant Chief Inspectors in times past, whose careers were rewarded by taking such approaches on their own workforces. I worry hugely that we have a system that rewards these approaches to the management of educated people. I shudder to think that these individuals may one day seek political office wishing to invoke the same control to the wider population.
Thirdly, how many teachers who have been hounded out of the profession through non-compliance to overbearing management control could have stayed had things been different, or had they had the opportunity to work in a school that is more in keeping with their personal philosophy? I am certain that the numbers are high and would have contributed significant amelioration to the retention crisis. One great example of where this did happen is my co-conspirator, Nick McDonald, who, because of impatience with many of the schools at which he had been employed and persistence in pursuing his own training and development, eventually found a school in keeping with his personal ideology and is now thriving. So can there be a much more clear-eyed focus on training and genuine professional support for all colleagues, including those who are struggling, so that more teachers stay in the profession, are attracted to it and thrive within it? As part of this, can there be creative ways the profession can arrive at for redeploying staff to different types of school with ideologies more in keeping with theirs? I know that redeployment often happens to teachers within Multi-Academy Trusts, but this is mostly done to proliferate and spread preferred approaches and ensure compliance among all schools in the trust, rather than as a way to match diverse staff needs to the genuinely diverse nature of schools. I had thought that the whole point of Gove’s academisation and free school reform programme from 2010 was to promote diversity within schooling.
So apologies for a long-winded post but I hope I have made the point clearly, complex as it is. Please comment if any of this resonates and look out for the next post in this series!