Michael Wilshaw, Michael Gove and inadequate teachers - who will win?

I won't lie. I'm delighted that Michael Wilshaw has been appointed Chief Inspector of Ofsted and I'm delighted that Education Secretary Michael Gove is going to have a real go at raising teaching standards, particularly helping schools challenge inadequate teachers, as detailed in this article.

Those who believe in the comprehensive state school system should also be delighted. Because at some point the catch 22 situation needs to be broken.  If you want everyone to feel comfortable sending their children to state schools then there are issues that need to be dealt with in those state schools. Michael Wilshaw has proved he can do it at Mossbourne Academy, and if, through the inspection system he can spread the magic dust he evidently has across the state school system then we will really be onto something.With the help of Gove, he might well do.

That said, there will be some people who will be afraid. Very afraid. Wilshaw has had enough of inadequate teachers. Not just that, he says he has had enough of teachers who are what he calls "coasting along" - doing what they have to do to stay in their jobs but no more - more of those in my next article.

But I want to talk about the inadequate teachers. Nothing has angered and frustrated me more during my teaching careers than teaching alongside plainly inadequate teachers. It is believed that they cost each child they teach a full grade for every year they teach them. The danger is more long term than that though. If you get an inadequate science teacher in Year 9 (in many state schools science teachers teach all three sciences to the same class) a child may lose their love of science. They may choose not to take triple science for GCSE and may drop their idea of going into a medical career. Inadequate teachers can really make that much difference to a child's life.

But it's not just the children. Inadequate teachers make their close colleagues' lives hard too. If you teach A-level there will, on many occasions, be just two of you teaching it. You can either split up the units students are taking or you can try and teach them together, splitting up the content. Whichever way you do it, the students will not learn anything in the lessons with the inadequate teacher. This means you are given a choice. You can teach the content the inadequate teacher can't/won't teach, or you can leave the students to fail.

Think about what that choice means. If you leave the students to fail the units they are taking with the inadequate teacher you are effectively leaving them to..say.. miss out on university, massively lessening their life chances. As a professional are you really able to do that? It's really hard.

So, to teach the content the inadequate teachers can't/won't teach you need to either teach a lot more in the timetabled lessons you have or you need to teach extra lessons after school or in holiday times. You will need to also do extra marking of work and past papers. It's absolutely exchausting, incredibly stressful, and not something that can be kept up for a long time.

So, inadequate teachers can destroy the life chances of their students and the working lives of their colleagues. Yet, as Chris Woodhead, the controversial former Chief Schools Inspector said in 1999, there are about 17,000 inadequate teachers in the UK. Less than 20 have been struck off by the general teaching council. So, why the gap?

Well, it's actually quite complicated. When you try to deal with an inadequate teacher you are, first of all, telling a human being they are at risk of losing their job, their lifeblood, the source of food on their childrens' table. It is an extraordinarily sensitive issue and cannot and should not be rushed. You need to be prepared for accusations of bullying, and possibly discrimination.

Secondly, you are dealing with the teaching unions. Their job is to protect the interests of their members, and they must treat those members equally. Given the power of the teaching unions - in particular the amount of teachers they represent - you need to work WITH them. The teaching unions will appear to support inadequate teachers. In fact this is not true - like any good defence lawyer they make sure that should you be trying to rid your school of an inadequate teacher you go through the proper process.

The proper process involves 'competency' procedures - where you inform the teacher you are concerned about their teaching and you make an effort to support them. Many inadequate teachers may have training needs and they deserve to be trained and given every chance to improve. The onus should be on the school to prove this has happened. Some might well improve. But some have no intention of improving, or some can't. Some will simply not put in the work to improve. They are the ones who are most likely to bleat that they are being 'bullied'. The unions' argument is that as long as the school can prove they followed the correct procedure they will not stand in the way. But too often schools don't do that. Because they are afraid of what it does to 'collegiality' and 'morale'. Not dealing with inadequate teachers is more of a cultural problem than a legal one.

Yet I argue the most damage to 'collegiality' and 'morale' is done to those teachers doing a good job who are either having to carry their inadequate colleagues or watch them fail their students.

What Michael Gove and Michael Wilshaw will hopefully do is make the task of improving/removing inadequate teachers easier - and if that means using legislation then so be it. An example is that a teacher can only be officially observed for three hours a year. Three hours a year! If you ask most Heads of Department about that they will tell you that even the worst teacher in their department can put a show on for three hours in a year. They will then go back to ruining their students life chances and there is little we can do about it.

If I were the teaching unions - I would work with Wilshaw and Gove on this - AND be seen to be doing so. By all means protect teachers against actual bullying and actual unfair treatment - but those union chiefs who understand the big picture should realise that inadequate teachers hurt their own unions' reputation almost as much as they hurt their students.

Because let's just remember who the education system is being run for. The students. Right.......?

You want fair access to universities? - Train the teachers.

So the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), which is supposed to be 'promoting and safeguarding fair access to higher education' according to their website, have come up with yet more ideas that do nothing of the sort. Their new idea is to try and make the top universities offer places to students from poor-performing state schools on much lower grades than others. We're not just talking about AAB instead of AAA, they are talking about Cs. This craziness has to stop. If you want to have fair access to universities you need to train teachers in state schools to do the job they need to do.

1) Train teachers in how to teach  A-levels - there's a reason that 'A' stands for 'Advanced'. There is an emphasis on analysis and evaluation skills that students need to be specifically taught. They are not techniques that can simply be taught through the same spoon-feeding many teachers end up doing for GCSEs. They need to be explained, then practiced again and again by the students to make them repeatable, particularly on the vaguer A2 questions, where students have to work out what parts of their subject 'tool-box' to use. In my experience those who are excellent GCSE teachers may think they don't need to learn more about teaching to teach A-level.

2) Measure A-level results and act on them -  what gets measured gets managed, and given the emphasis on GCSE results to compare schools it is no surprise that management effort and concentration, and therefore teacher effort and concentration, is on GCSEs. This is sometimes at the expense of A-level teaching and sometimes at the expense of close scrutiny of A-level performance. I've seen great GCSE teachers take 3 weeks to mark A-level work if at all because it comes last on their priority list. I have no doubts about the importance of concentrating on GCSE results for the lower ability students to help them get the 5 good GCSEs that can get them a foothold in the workplace. But if you want to be engines of real social mobility, regardless of your political and educational ideology, you cannot get a poor student into the best university without good A-levels. By saying that students from poor performing schools can get in with lower grades you are saying that inadequate A-level teaching and focus is OK because you will socially engineer equality of outcome. Is that really the best long term solution?

3) Train teachers in helping students select A-levels - one of the great things about many comprehensive schools is that they offer, under the same roof, courses that suit all types of student. So, for those students who have a more vocational bent there are BTEC courses, and for those with a very academic focus there are the 'traditional' A-levels such as French, History and Maths. The BTEC courses have been a major factor in widening participation, allowing students to study courses in school that they are interested in and follow them through into higher education. But in the middle of vocational and 'traditional A-level courses' are those which the major red-brick universities, on whose back OFFA is climbing, see as falling too much in the middle. Universities such as Cambridge and LSE publish a list of these courses (which include A-levels in business studies, ICT and media studies for instance) which they do not regard as adequate preparation for universities. Other universities do not publish these lists but may be about to be forced to publish them. Whether or not you agree with this categorisation of A-levels, it exists, and every teacher (or at least every Year 11 tutor and Year Head and those in charge of sixth form) should know them. Never again should student not find out until their UCAS applications are rejected that their choice of A-levels automatically disqualified them from the universities they aspired to.

4) Train teachers in helping with UCAS applications - there is no reason why every teacher involved with sixth formers shouldn't be better trained in what makes a good UCAS application great. Teachers are involved all the time with writing subject references for the pupils, writing the actual UCAS references for the pupils and helping with personal statements. I would imagine that in most state schools they do this without any training. Given UCAS is a competitive process, isn't this letting their students down?

At the end of the day, there are loads of ideas for government intervention to try and solve the problem of inequality of access to universities. But why not try and offer equality of opportunity for students before you settle for equality of outcome. You can only, after all, get equality of outcome by offering inequality of opportunity (Oh, sorry, you go to a good school so your application doesn't get decided on merit).

There are many ways that do not cost a lot of money to solve this problem and I would hope this government don't get drawn into offering a politically expedient but shameful solution purely to assuage their tuition fee guilt.The answer is right in front of them.

Surely the teaching unions wouldn't argue against training their members to help students achieve their aspirations. Wouldn't they?

Welcome to the English Baccalaureate

My first reaction on reading the Coalition government's new White Paper on Education was a massive sigh of relief, that some of the most pressing issues in state education today were about to be addressed. This was followed by a sigh of resignation, because my experience in state education suggests that there is a long way to go before most of it can be actually implemented. I'll talk about the quality of teaching and the new rules on exclusion in later articles. But where I really want to doff my cap is to the introduction of the English Baccalaureate.

The problem with setting targets is they then become what is managed. Having seen the 5 A*-C target take over Year 11 to the extent that the bottom 60 and top 60 students barely get noticed for the last 6 months there I am glad there is a new focus that might change the behaviour of some state schools.

There is an academy in Liverpool who 2 years ago achieved 91% of its students getting 5A*-C grades but only 30% of those students got 5 A*-C including english and maths. How did that happen? Students in danger of not getting the 5 good GCSEs were put on GNVQ and BTEC courses which count as four GCSEs. They then have to get a merit to get a C in this 100% coursework course and that's four of their Cs. The Labour government attempted to deal with this by saying they were only going to note the 5 A*-Cs including English and Maths. But the problem was that they allowed non-academic subjects to have equal value in GCSE tables. This encouraged schools to meet their target by entering their students for "easier" vocational qualifications (from 2,300 in 2004 to 550,000 now). This may seem good for pupils and schools but for the long term it is incentivising the de-skilling of an entire generation of our young people.

But this measure still doesn't measure the academic quality of the GCSEs taken. The English Baccalaureate does. To get it - you need to have Cs and above in English, Maths, the sciences, a modern or classical foreign language and a humanity such as Geography or History. Here are some interesting facts on this:

a) Only 15% of all GCSE students attain 5 A*-C grades in the five 'core' subjects of English, Maths, a science, a language and a humanity.

b) Only 4% of pupils on free school meals achieve this.

For the United Kingdom plc this has led to a generation of school pupils with no foreign language at GCSE, without an individual science and without an individual humanity.I'll leave it to Michael Gove - Education secretary, to comment on this:

“That really concerns me, not just because it’s bad for our economic position in the future, it actually is depriving young people of the thing that they should get from education, which is a rounded sense of how to understand this world in all its complexity and richness.”

Quite.