20 June 2019

By John Jerrim

Five years ago, when results from the TALIS 2013 survey were released, there was one thing that particularly caught the attention of education policymakers, unions and school leaders – teacher workload. This study revealed how lower-secondary teachers in England had one of the longest working weeks anywhere across the world.

This subsequently led to a huge policy effort by the Department for Education to reduce teachers’ workloads. Amongst other things, this included setting up numerous workload review groups, reducing the data burden being placed upon schools and publishing advice and guidance to school leaders about how teachers’ workloads could be reduced.

Today, results from the latest wave of the TALIS survey (conducted in 2018) has been released. This provides the first real opportunity, using genuinely comparable data, to consider (more…)

20 June 2019

By John Jerrim

There has been a lot of talk recently about the harm caused by social media and that young people are experiencing ever-greater levels of cyber-bullying. These relatively new phenomena have implications for teachers and schools, who often have to intervene in cases of unwanted electronic contact and potentially harmful social media posts being shared about their pupils.

But is this really more of a problem in England than elsewhere?

New results from the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 study suggest that this may be the case. Yet, as always, the devil is in the detail. In a nationally representative survey, lower-secondary headteachers across more than (more…)

19 June 2019

By John Jerrim

Pay is a key concern of teachers in England. It is one of the key aspects of their employment conditions, with previous research suggesting that pay is closely linked to the recruitment and retention of teachers.

At the same time, teacher pay is an area where there has been a lot of change in recent years. Reforms were introduced in 2013 that reduced the link between teachers’ pay and their length of service, while also giving schools more freedom to set starting salaries. Moreover, up to 2018 the public sector pay cap was in place, limiting annual salary increases of teachers in England to one percent.

This then begs the question, how satisfied are teachers in England with their pay? Evidence from TALIS 2018  provides important new evidence on this issue. (more…)

19 June 2019

By John Jerrim

Today, new results have been released from the TALIS 2018 survey – a study of the teaching profession conducted within more than 40 countries across the world. Along with Sam Sims, I co-authored the national report for England.

The survey, conducted amongst a large, nationally representative sample of primary and lower-secondary teachers, included several questions about job satisfaction. As an international survey, we can therefore compare the job satisfaction of teachers in England to teachers in other countries. Also, as the second time TALIS has been conducted in England, we can also examine trends in teacher job satisfaction over time.

This blog will be short and not-so-sweet. The results (more…)

Rob Webster.
Sometimes it’s not just the victory; it’s the manner of the victory.
Just last month, London teacher (and IOE alumna), Andria Zafirakou, beat more than 30,000 entrants to win the Varkey Foundation’s annual Global Teacher prize. Leading the tributes, Theresa May highlighted the qualities of ‘resilience, ingenuity and a generous heart’ that earned Andria the closest thing teaching has to a Nobel Prize – and with it, a nifty $1m.
For all its sincerity, the Prime Minister’s eulogy must jar a little. The English education system, with its obsession with academic performativity, is at best ambivalent towards ‘progressive’ art and textiles teachers like Andria. Had she been nominated for a national ‘best teacher’ prize, adjudicated by May and her education ministers, one can’t help feel she wouldn’t have made it out of the group stages.
Andria, and teachers like her, are motivated not by the numbers game of dragging a proportion of their pupils over some arbitrary – and often slippery – grade boundary, but by how they can change the lives of them as individuals. All the more so if they have the additional challenge of social disadvantage.
(more…)

Philippa Cordingley and Toby Greany.

We need to talk about how teachers become expert – not just at teaching, but at teaching across different subjects.

All too often in education we get side-tracked by debates about issues such as high stakes accountability systems, assessment reforms, recruitment and retention, anxiety about the breadth of learning experiences and funding.  Even when we do remember that it is the quality of teaching that matters most, we tend to focus on the challenges, such as teacher recruitment shortages.  Yet, as Professor Dylan Wiliam has argued, the biggest priority should be to ‘love the teachers we have’ by investing in their professional development and learning. (more…)

Sam Sims
In a recent IOE London blog post, Professor Becky Francis highlighted wide and persistent gaps in GCSE attainment and university entry rates between rich and poor pupils. This follows the recent Social Mobility Commission report, which argued that policy makers have spent too much time on structural reforms to the schooling system and not placed a high enough priority on getting the best teachers into struggling schools, echoing Francis’ own research. Francis concludes that, in order to improve social mobility, we need to do much more to “support and incentivise the quality of teaching in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods.”
In recent work, Rebecca Allen and I found that there are indeed reasons to be concerned about disadvantaged pupils’ access to good teachers. Experience (or lack thereof) is a good indicator of teacher quality. We found that pupils in the most deprived fifth of schools are around twice as likely to get an unqualified teacher, and a quarter more likely to get a teacher with less than five years of experience, when compared to pupils in the least deprived fifth of schools. Moreover, we found that, even within schools, disadvantaged pupils are more likely to be assigned to an inexperienced teacher. (more…)

The IOE blog has asked colleagues from across the Institute what’s at the top of their wish list. Their replies have appeared over the past few weeks.
Muslims, education and citizenship
Given the present turbulent and divisive environment, how should a new Government approach British Muslims? I believe the new government should approach British Muslims first as citizens of this country and then engage with their concerns in terms of religion, class, gender and other identities.
It is true that being a Muslim means at least some attachment, theological or cultural, to Islam. However, the degree of attachment varies enormously from person to person – ranging from those for whom it determines every aspect of life to those for whom it is one among many loyalties and identity-markers.
There is no all-encompassing ‘Muslim community’, with a shared way of looking at the (more…)

Caroline Conlon. 
In the ‘Modern Foreign Languages Pedagogy Review’ published last November by the Teaching Schools Council for the Department for Education, Review chair Ian Baukham paints a bleak picture of language learning in England’s secondary schools. He says, ‘… currently fewer than half of pupils take a GCSE in a language’ and ‘beyond GCSE, modern languages are in crisis.’ He adds, ‘Without concerted action, languages in our schools are at risk, and may become confined to certain types of school and certain sections of the pupil population.’
On top of that, the Guardian reports that Brexit is threatening the supply of teachers who have come to the UK from Europe because Theresa May has refused to give EU nationals  any assurances that they will continue to be welcome. This is of particular concern for MFL teaching.
But as we demonstrate in our new book, Success Stories from Secondary Foreign Languages Classrooms – Models from London school partnerships with universities, all is not doom and (more…)