How can we keep great teachers? Creating cultures for learning and curriculum development

Among the alarming teacher recruitment statistics released by the Department for Education last month are some particularly dispiriting headlines for English teachers. Back in June, The Guardian reported that many secondary heads are ‘shocked to find it is now a battle to find teachers for English - traditionally a subject that buoyed recruitment numbers’. It stated that, at the time of print, there were more than 900 vacancies for a September start. Which begs the question, why are so many English teachers leaving the profession? 

These issues are not exclusive to English, of course. If, as Schools Week reported recently, 40,000 teachers left last year, we might well ask whether the recently hard-won pay offer is going to be enough not just to attract people to our profession, but to keep them in our classrooms. The real question might be, why are we not talking more about teacher retention?

At the point when I left full-time teaching, I had taught English in secondary schools for twelve years. I look back on the early years of my career now as a kind of ‘golden age’, where I had almost total autonomy over my classroom. No one seemed to pay attention to what I was teaching, so long as the students’ results were good. Yet I clearly remember the point at which this seemed to be changing: at the end of my third year, as I handed over the coursework folders completed by my Year 11 class, the Head of Department asked me, how was I going to make sure the students who hadn’t achieved their target grades would be able to by the two-week deadline?

The introduction of target grades signalled for me the beginning of the era of accountability, when the ability of teachers to produce results became more important than the quality of their teaching, and the pressure to do the former often resulted in the distortion of the latter. At a time when ‘outstanding’ teaching was defined by an Ofsted-style tick list and was identified in a once-yearly performance management observation, a great deal of professional energy was expended in ‘playing the game’. I often tell teachers I work with of the ‘outstanding’ lesson I kept in my top drawer to roll out for such high-stakes occasions - a doughnut-shaped paper wheel designed to facilitate student discussion which met the criteria for success: 20% teacher talk, 80% student-facilitated learning. It barely seemed to matter that virtually nothing would be learnt – I still received the grade I would live or die off all year. That paper wheel got me at least six outstanding grades, including two during Ofsted inspections. But I didn’t come into teaching to tick performance checklists, and while I was always relieved when I passed my appraisal, I knew it said nothing about my expertise as a teacher. These early experiences of accountability paled in comparison to what was to come over the following years, as changing assessment practice, new specifications and inspection frameworks came to drive too much decision-making in schools. As the noose of toxic accountability tightened, I found myself increasingly falling out of love with the job I had once seen as my vocation.

Thankfully, the national conversation around curriculum and pedagogy has evolved significantly since, ironically propelled forward at least in part by the latest Ofsted framework. It would be disingenuous to deny some of the positive impacts it has had, not least the focus it necessitates on the quality of curriculum design and delivery, and its impact on student learning. But like all things in education, it is vulnerable to lethal mutations, and there are still schools where fear of accountability weighs too heavily on how curriculum is planned and delivered. I have worked with many English departments across the country and, in the worst examples I have seen, teachers are being directed to deliver centralised curricula they have had no involvement in creating, that reduces the complexity and beauty of the subject to lists of knowledge and vocabulary, delivered by what many professionals depressingly label the ‘teach by PowerPoint’ approach. In a recent Twitter interaction I saw this described as promoting a kind of ‘intellectual emptiness’ for some teachers, and this resonated with how I had felt in the latter years of my full-time career. It is one of the reasons I eventually sought that intellectual stimulation outside of the classroom.

When teachers are denied the intellectual engagement that comes from deep curriculum work, we take away one of the motivating factors that brings them to and keeps them in the profession (Perryman & Calvert, 2020; Basar et.al, 2021; Vieluf et.al, 2013). There is nothing more deskilling and disempowering as an experienced professional than being directed to deliver a pre-planned curriculum where you know the quality of that curriculum to be below what you could produce yourself or with your team, given the time and resources. It is often said that ‘the teacher IS the curriculum’ - but that doesn’t mean giving the teacher a set of PowerPoints and just expecting them to be taught. It means that curriculum development is also teacher development, because the collaborative work involved is the highest form of professional learning. When, instead, you are asked to deliver lessons which deny you the opportunity to teach in ways you know work, when the content of pre-planned slides reduce your subject to lists of things to know and do, when the questions you can ask students are dictated and their responses assumed - that is a sure fire way to make English teachers feel completely disconnected from their subject and asking themselves whether this is a profession they want to stay in. And I suspect these experiences are not the sole preserve of English teachers. Is it any wonder, then, that we are losing teachers in their droves?

That is not to say, of course, that a centralised curriculum is never the right approach. Where it is genuinely implemented to reduce workload, to act as a model to be developed, or to support non-specialists, it can be a very positive move. Sometimes, though, citing workload reduction as a reason to impose an ‘off-the-shelf’ model is a thinly veiled veneer for avoidance of the root causes of teacher workload issues. It can be a misconception that it does actually reduce workload: it is often significantly more difficult to deliver lessons planned by someone else. And even a high-quality, fully-resourced curriculum model requires time for teachers to work together to make sense of it, to make adaptations to suit their own classes, and then eventually to review and refine it. It does not negate the need for collaborative planning time. While it may feel contentious to say so, failure to prioritise time for teachers to work together meaningfully to plan or adapt a curriculum which meets the needs of students in their context and develops them as specialists is a failure of leadership.

Too often, leaders expect teachers to develop a quality curriculum without really understanding the time that is needed to do it well. There are no quick-fixes and this work cannot be done in a void: clarity of vision and a commitment to professional learning must come from the top. Embedding a culture of collaboration is essential to continued success, and it is on school leaders to create supportive environments characterised by autonomy and trust, so that teachers can engage in the hard intellectual work necessary to drive real, sustainable improvement. But because of the importance of curriculum to those who determine how the success of our schools is perceived, there is a temptation for leaders to try to control it, rather than to entrust it to the hands of those best placed to improve it: subject specialists. There is a real danger that the biggest lever we have to genuinely improve the life chances of young people becomes another stick to metaphorically beat teachers with, that the very focus introduced to deter schools from ‘game-playing’ becomes another checklist of ‘what Ofsted wants’. Curriculum intent statement or roadmap, anyone? 

Without trust, and honest, open relationships between staff, control is just a façade anyway, because we cannot have an accurate understanding of what is actually being implemented unless teachers are bought in to the vision, and know that when they do, they will be supported not judged. Genuine curriculum improvement begins with the collaboration of colleagues, facilitated by subject specialists, around concepts and big ideas. Real innovation - of the kind that genuinely excites and motivates teachers and promotes transformational change in classrooms - can only be happen in a culture of high challenge and low threat.

Too many things stand in the way, still, of making curriculum work our focus and keeping great teachers in classrooms. Is it any surprise some teachers groan at the thought of devoting more hours to developing schemes of work or undertaking curriculum training, if we still ask them to write full lesson plans, written reports, do tick-page marking, or any number of the pointless things too many teachers have to do which have virtually no impact on children? Curriculum work is intellectually challenging: it requires headspace and focus. As Mary Myatt says, ‘thoughtful leaders’ know that ‘in order to make a difference, they have to focus on fewer things in greater depth.’ To make room for things that support curriculum and teacher growth - training, co-planning, professional learning communities - other things have to go. Strip away everything that doesn’t directly contribute to designing and delivering a great curriculum, and make sure staff know that it is the priority. Many teachers will find it easy to buy-in and focus on this work, because it is purposeful, collaborative and intellectually rewarding – the kind of work that motivated many to become teachers and inspires them to stay.

At the Greater Manchester Education Trust we have committed to providing protected time for teachers – currently a minimum of an hour a week – to engage in collaborative curriculum work. This is in addition to weekly whole-school CPD time and, in some of our schools, time for instructional coaching, including the professional learning of coaches. In response to overwhelming staff feedback, we are about to launch subject networks in English, Maths and Science, to ensure staff have opportunities for the subject-specific learning which is at the heart of high-quality curriculum development. We do not, and will never, mandate specific approaches, but we are developing a framework based on evidence-based principles to support staff and to ensure some alignment between our schools around what we know is important. It’s a start. We are a relatively small, newly-established Trust and we know we have much work to do. But we are committed to improving the lives and outcomes of the young people of Greater Manchester, and we know that to do that, we have to put our staff first. We want to keep great teachers in our classrooms, and we can only do that by giving them the time and resources to do their jobs well.

References

Basar, Z, Manson, AN & Hamid, AHA. (2021). ‘The Role of Transformational Leadership in Addressing Job Satisfaction Issues among Secondary School Teachers’. Creative Education 12, 1939-1948.

https://www.scirp.org/pdf/ce_2021082015524724.pdf

Myatt, M. (2020). Back on Track: Fewer Things, Greater Depth. London: John Catt Educational Ltd.

Perryman, J & Calvert, G. (2020). ‘What motivates people to teach, and why do they leave? Accountability, performativity and teacher retention’. ULC Institute of Education.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10068733/3/Perryman_Teachers%20Leaving%20revised%20final.pdf

Vieluf, S., Kunter, M., & van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2013). ‘Teacher self-efficacy in cross-national perspective’. Teaching and Teacher Education, 35, 92–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.05.006

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/17/schools-across-england-face-unprecedented-struggle-to-hire-english-teachers-as-recruitment-crisis-grows

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/record-rate-of-teacher-departures-as-40000-leave-sector-last-year/