Teachers for Supply

When Vicky Blake launched into her PhD at Durham University eight years ago, she believed it was the start of a thrilling research career. Now, as component to the silently growing army of educating staff paid by the hour in British universities, she is starting to wonder at what stage she should walk away.

“i believe I owe it to myself to attempt, because I’ve invested loads on this. But i’m 30 years old and that i can’t keep existing on a month-to-month basis,” she says. “i need to put a cut-off date on how long i will be able to hold out for a correct research job, and that i think that’s really sad.”

Blake may spend her life juggling, with out a ability to devise ahead, not to mention apply for a mortgage, but in some respects she is without doubt one of the fortunate ones. When she came to the top of an eight-month, part-time research assistant post at Leeds University last year, in place of letting her fall off the tutorial cliff, it put her on a distinct redeployment register. This led her to a component-time, one-year assistant post on an educational journal on the university. She has a second part-time clerical post at Leeds, a commitment-free, “zero-hours” clerical job at Durham, and an hourly paid teaching job at Leeds, for which she has to secure a brand new contract each term.

This “patchwork of incomes” has become a typical picture for children – and those that were young after they began – fighting for an educational career. “You are feeling lucky in the event you score any form of fixed-term contract,” Blake says. “I’ve had a much better financial situation over the last year but, if I compare my situation with someone in what frequently gets called a ‘proper academic job’, I still have nothing like their security.”

According to the most recent data from the better Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), greater than a 3rd of the educational workforce is now on temporary, fixed-term contracts. Moreover, the official staffing statistics conveniently exclude the 82,000 academics employed in jobs which include hourly paid teaching, that are classed as “atypical”, so the actual figures look much worse.

While universities are jostling to provide themselves as committed to “the coed experience”, following the ramping up of fees, it’s teaching staff who’ve been hit hardest. The selection of teaching-only staff on temporary contracts went up by a 3rd between 2009-10 and 2011-12.

The University and faculty Union (UCU) is holding a countrywide day of action for informal workers next month. It says that higher education has become essentially the mostsome of the most casualised sectors inside the UK – second only to the hospitality industry. Edward Bailey, who’s leading the protest for the union, says: “We’re seeing a rise in those people who are on successive fixed-term contracts for years on end. There’s a feeling that universities are calling each of the shots they usually ought to be grateful simply to have a role, but these places just isn’t sausage factories.”

Of course, in case you are a vice-chancellor there’s an obvious business case for having an enormous swathe of your employees on more flexible contracts – especially when most fear that another expensive national salary rise won’t be distant.

A former vice-chancellor says that each one this may backfire as higher fees bed in and scholars become more demanding. “Universities now publish their contact hours. But contact with whom With the celebs the colleges claim makes them what they’re, or an element-timer i believe there’s a pressure point build up here, with lawyers waiting within the wings to challenge.” Blake agrees. “I work incredibly hard and feature had magnificent feedback for my teaching. But there’s certainly a fascinating tension within the system because some students arrive at university expecting to study predominantly by senior staff with permanent positions.”

Ian Jones (not his real name) tells a well-known story. “i assumed I’d battle through the motions of being on casual contracts for a few years after which I’d move as much as an enduring job,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting to still be here in this basis 10 years later. I teach at three institutions to attempt to present myself more security. i’m lucky if i do know what I’m doing two weeks before teaching is because of start. If you happen to do not get the hours, often nobody rings to inform you. Once, i used to be notified by text message.”

Jones lived along with his mother for many of his twenties and early thirties, because he couldn’t be sure that he would make his rent every month. “Without a doubt , that has a definite stigma attached – i started to feel like Norman Bates. Attracting a partner was difficult,” he says.

But this insecurity isn’t confined to teaching. In accordance with Hesa, 68% of study-only staff are on fixed-term contracts, which generally last up to the research grant.

Dr Jennifer Rohn, a cell biologist at University College London, explains: “The majority of research is conducted by apprentices, whether that be PhD or postdoc, on anything from six months to 5 years. Individuals are in denial. They’re taking these temporary training positions after they won’t usually result in anything permanent.”

Despite winning among the Wellcome Trust’s coveted early-career fellowships at 45, Rohn is on a rolling three-month research contract. “My boss would do anything to maintain me – he finds bits of money under the sofa cushions – however the university isn’t employing me,” she says.

Dr Eric Silverman, a researcher at Southampton University on his second fixed-term research contract since his PhD, echoes her frustration. “So far as i will exercise routine, there are just two options: leave academia and quit the dream, or search for jobs 100% of the time,” he says.

Prof Janet Metcalfe, chair of Vitae, a career development organisation, says researchers can improve their possibilities of success. “People naturally get obsessed on a specific research area, however the message is: the more flexible you’re, the more employable you’re,” she says.

Yet many at the ground are removed from optimistic. Silverman says: “If a student asked me whether or not they should do a PhD, sadly, I’d say take a really careful seriously look into the alternative options. If you are young you believe ‘the job insecurity won’t happen to me’ – however it will.”

I want to start this letter by trying to be understanding. I am making every effort to empathise with your situation. I can see that you’re in a government that has made an assessment of what’s wrong with the British economy and what needs to be done about it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but your colleagues must have told you that this country will go to the dogs unless poor people are poorer and rich people are richer. No doubt they put it in terms of “keeping labour costs down in order to stay competitive” or “providing incentives to entrepreneurs”, but that’s just the kind of euphemism you with your love of clear English must despise, so let’s not use that kind of phraseology.

Your cabinet seniors, I guess, must turn to you (as to all the other departments) and say, “OK, Michael, what can you do to help with the job of keeping poor people poor” And you are doing all you can to help, aren’t you

You have shown them that you can offer the economy an army of 16- to 18-year-olds who will have failed. Thanks to you, these will be people who have failed, failed and failed again through the many-layered exam system and who, as a result, won’t see themselves as talented people who on occasions happen to have not succeeded, but rather will see themselves as failures – intrinsically, essentially, irrevocably dud.

Clearly, this army should have no lingering sense that they might be can-do people, a feeling about themselves they might have acquired from a time at school when they completed a project, finished a module, investigated, discovered, created or invented anything; interpreted for themselves some evidence or a piece of writing. You’ve abolished all that.

Instead, you and your colleagues need these failures to have had a sense that their education was a sequence of knowledge injections which in their case, didn’t work; the injections didn’t “take”.

Wherever we look in the education system – curriculum, assessment or structure – you have built in a guaranteed failure rate. The way you have secured this for your cabinet superiors is to lock into the system constant competition: with norm-referenced exams, pupil competes against pupil; with performance-related pay, teacher competes against teacher; with league tables based on exams, each “autonomous” school “freed” from local authority planning, school competes against school. The result of all this competition is of course that many must fail: pupils, teachers, schools.

This enables you and Sir Michael Wilshaw of Ofsted to keep up a dual rhetoric: a) blaming people or schools for failing (even though, under this system of yours, many must); b) complaining that there are bright children somewhere in the system not “getting on”. In reality, hundreds of thousands of state-educated children “getting on” will be a nightmare for this government by toffs for toffs. The service-industry economy wouldn’t know what to do with them. That’s why you’re locking in a perilous combination of high university debt and the downgrading of arts, design and technology. This kills off the aspiration and achievement of thousands of teens. As your cabinet masters should be saying, “Well done, Michael, we rich people can’t afford to have huge numbers of high-achieving youth. We’re practicing becoming the decision centre of the arena, an aircraft carrier for vertical-landing millionaires to pop in, make a swift buck, pay no tax and take off again.”

Well done, Michael, for talking the controversy about “rigour” and “most fulfilling”; it offers the loads the appearance of upping the standard, while guaranteeing that almost all won’t achieve it.

Well done, Michael.

Late last year, the education secretary, Michael Gove, conceded that, while determined to adhere to his timetable for qualifications reform, if a “red light” flashed, he would bear in mind it.

It is tricky to visualize a brighter “red light” than last week’s education select committee report on Gove’s plan to exchange GCSEs with English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs). The committee dissected the challenges facing the coalition’s most contentious education reform and concluded that there have been serious concerns about almost every aspect of the proposals.

With the clock now ticking towards the introduction of the brand new exams in 2015, a seemingly intransigent minister, opposition to his plans from many quarters and a Labour Party policy review not because of report for several more months, even seasoned commentators can’t quite predict where this process will end.

But one group of headteachers is taking matters into their very own hands and pressing ahead with a grassroots reform movement, determined to construct support and consensus around an alternate vision of what education could and may be.

The Heads’ Roundtable started with a handful of college leaders, drawn together via Twitter by shared concerns in regards to the effects that government policy would have on their pupils, and by frustration in regards to the loss of a powerful alternative.

Since their original meeting on the Guardian’s offices in October last year, they’ve gathered greater than 6,000 Twitter followers, and feature met with the colleges minister Liz Truss and shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg. Michael Gove has yet to just accept their invitation.

As the federal government held its consultation over EBCs, the Heads’ Roundtable held another consultation at the curriculum and qualifications, to which 150 headteachers responded. On Monday last week, greater than 40 of these heads met in Leeds to debate the effects and to begin thrashing out their alternative vision.

“None folks really expected this to take off inside the way it has,” explained Ros McMullen, principal of the David Young community academy, Leeds, and chair of the hot conference. “We were only a group of heads, who had never met beyond our Twitter conversations, but what we’ve discovered is that there’s a broad and growing coalition of faculty leaders accessible who’re not “enemies of promise”.

“Actually we’re among those that have delivered change and improvement and we wish to be actively curious about shaping the system of the longer term on behalf of all our pupils with the intention to raise quality and standards for all.”

Several key issues emerged from the consultation: rejection of the EBC and of norm-referenced assessment systems (from which Mr Gove has now distanced himself); disquiet in regards to the primary phonics, spelling and grammar tests, concerning the extent of political interference in curriculum and qualifications and in regards to the loss of time and thought given to major changes. Moreover there has been fear that a two-tier qualifications system will emerge and anger about what one founder-member of the crowd, John Tomsett, head of Huntington school in York, describes because the “curriculum cliff”, that could result in some subjects dropping by the wayside of young people’s lives.

The next step is to construct support among a fair wider group of heads using Twitter, local networks and other social media. Five key principles are the root for the movement:

• Major change ought to be separated from political politics;

• No child must be excluded from the qualifications system;

• Policy development should start with identifying what teenagers should know, understand and manage to do;

• Curriculum design should come before assessment and accountability;

• The teaching profession must be centrally eager about shaping future reform.

By May of this year, when the crowd meets, again they hope to have developed a radically different approach in response to the theorem of a “real” baccalaureate. Instead of the coalition’s EBacc choice of subjects, this will be a countrywide framework that might allow pupils to accumulate point scores with credits within the core subjects of English, mathematics and science and a decision of arts, humanities, languages, sciences, technical subjects and project work.

Extra points will be earned for “personal development and repair” in areas like PSHE, citizenship, outdoor education, arts and sport. Accountability does not just rest with the purpose score, but with a whole transcript of scores in the complete component parts. The technical routes could lead on to a “tech bacc” and there could be some large single units akin to engineering. The general baccalaureate awarded on the end of a student’s school career will be a “best fit” and, according to the Heads’ Roundtable core principles, would haven’t any maximum score, no ceiling on achievement, no limits on aspiration and a chance for each student to realize the qualification.

Tom Sherrington, headteacher of the King Edward VI grammar school in Chelmsford, Essex, who drafted the proposal, explained the thinking: “i’m the pinnacle of a highly selective grammar school, however the EBC just isn’t chatting with me – and it’ll. This is essentially a brief-term response, which leaves out lots of the problems while bypassing the tutorial/vocational completely.

“There isn’t a must exclude some subjects and no value to the nation in doing this – art and music are as intellectually rigorous as history and geography and one shouldn’t be intrinsically any less valuable than the opposite. Pupils don’t always need to have an analogous education, but all of them should have a great one. Education could be valued in its entirety, not only on that that is easily measured.”

The next stage of development involves eager about how the units, which can evolve from existing qualifications, could be assessed at different levels, similar to piano grades; how they would be banked through the years so students can take them once they are ready, building on success other than failure; and the way a baccalaureate approach can be extended back to primary schools.

Involvement of headteachers in future development of policy is important, in step with Alison Shaw, principal of Seaton Burn college in North Tyneside. “I came to feature my voice to these of a bunch of heads who’ve in common a want to contribute constructively to the national education debate,” she said.

“There’s considerable concern currently concerning the proposed changes to assessment and qualifications. In areas of critical professional importance, the voice of heads on policy-making ought to be portion of the talk. i’m hoping that the Heads’ Roundtable will influence policy by engaging resolutely in areas where there’s a need for greater consideration of different models to these being proposed, and by bringing to bear proper research.”

The challenges ahead for the crowd are clear. The draft proposals will need specialist assessment advice and, more importantly, might want to gain traction with politicians on all sides of the political divide. As Tomsett explained: “Time is absolutely not on our side, so it’s important for us to provide alternatives to Michael Gove and Stephen Twigg, and for them to listen, before schools start to implement the ill thought-through EBC.

“Profound curriculum development takes years and shouldn’t be rushed to fulfill political imperatives. Experienced headteachers with years of expertise are collaborating to supply academically challenging alternatives to EBCs; we all know what we’re talking about. The models we’re developing are rigorous and inclusive – you actually could have both.”

“I’m now being installed a situation where i’m forced to choose from the wishes of my school and the wishes of my pupils,” said founder member Vic Goddard, principal of Passmores academy in Harlow, Essex. “And that’s not right. We wish to develop a system where that conflict doesn’t occur and where we will do the very best for all our youth.”

• To determine more concerning the Heads’ Roundtable, see the result of the consultation or more detail at the “real” English baccalaureate, visit headteachersroundtable.wordpress.com

Close reading of the government’s More Great Childcare report bears out Polly Toynbee’s worst fears (How do you slot six toddlers right into a buggy Ask Liz Truss, 29 January). It’s a sad try to square the circle of “affordable, accessible, high-quality childcare” with no coherent funding way to back it up. In attempting to make it work, it’s likely that youngsters will suffer and parents’ confidence in childcare, and their willingness to go into the workforce, will diminish in place of increase.

The report is defective. It fails to check childcare against a much broader background of family policy as between countries; it really is highly selective in its statistics. It fails to recognize that staffing ratios have “existed largely unchanged because the 1970s” due to the strong professional consensus about what babies and really little ones need. And not using a shred of real evidence, it contends that changing ratios will magically enable childcare settings to recruit more children, get more income, pay staff more, improve quality and decrease costs for folks – all even as!

Unforgivably, it fails to recognize that one in five children in England today has additional needs, and the childcare market already fails them and their parents. Reducing the ratio of adults to babies and youngsters will mean even less opportunity for them to flourish and for his or her has to be met.
Gill Haynes
London

• While I applaud Elizabeth Truss’s vision to enhance and simplify qualifications for those taking good care of our babies and toddlers (What parents really need, 30 January), the remainder of her ideas don’t stack up. I agree that the childcare profession is poorly paid, but increasing the collection of children that a carer can handle is not the answer. In keeping with the recent ratios, a nursery could expect to achieve about £3 per additional child a week, hardly the type of money to extend average salaries from £13,000 to a more realistic £16,000.
Denise Burke
Director, United for Every age & Excellent care Guide

• What concerns me about Elizabeth Truss’s proposals for nursery care is the assumption that somebody with maths and English GCSEs is somehow qualified to cope with large numbers of kids at anyone time. There are NVQs that properly prepare people for working with children and these alone should carry any weight during this context.

The only benefit of a maths GCSE under the recent arrangements is that staff could tell instantly that the workers/child ratio is impractical.
Tim Matthews
Luton, Bedfordshire

• As a former English teacher and head, i will assure early years minister Elizabeth Truss (Coalition splits emerge over childcare shakeup, 30 January) that a GCSE grade C in English bears absolutely no relationship to a person’s ability to take care of children and foster their language growth. Carers could, however, usefully study how children actually learn language. I’ll give her a clue – it isn’t by being taught.
Phil Taylor
Manchester

• Research has shown that the standard of relationships is the one primary aspect of a successful childcare setting. Carers need time with their children to develop strong, stable relationships, on the way to influence a child’s emotional, physical and conceptual development. Allowing carers to seem after more children may reduce costs, nonetheless it can be on the expense of the quantity of time they are able to spend building relationships.

By allowing childcare providers to set their very own standards, the govt is allowing market forces to override years of sound research into how children change into confident and competent adults, and putting a complete generation of kids in peril.
Dr Richard C Dorrance
Chief executive, Council for Awards in Care, Health and Education (Cache)

• Zoe Williams (That is – no offence – the worst idea someone in government has ever had, 2 February) had me doubled over in desperate laughter. Upping child-to-carer ratios within the ways planned won’t work to the great of kids, their carers or the assurance of oldsters.

As to carers’ qualifications – are we going to sack dedicated and outstanding individuals for not having enough GCSEs The qualities i glance for in a childcare professional are patience, kindness, gentle boundaries, inventiveness and a capability to supply food, rest and cuddles as required. These qualities don’t necessarily include a certificate, but no academic achievement on this planet would persuade me to go away my kids with someone who did not have them.

Please, Dave & co, a good way to help, make childcare tax-deductible and manage schemes for oldsters to take longer unpaid leave and now have a role to go back to. Help us get, stay in and afford to work. I earn a good wage and take home nearly nothing after childcare. I work with young women who know they may not have the ability to afford to come to a task they love in the event that they have babies due to childcare costs.
Hannah Redler-Hawes
London

• Zoe Williams acknowledges that she has no training but doesn’t draw the logical conclusion that she therefore knows absolutely nothing concerning the techniques used to govern, entertain, divert and wipe down multiple toddler at a time. At the available evidence Ms Williams couldn’t take care of the four children the current rules allow.
Catherine Chambers
Bath

• Does the govt really expect any childminder to transport from taking good care of three children at £4 an hour to taking care of six at £2 an hour We childminders is probably not terribly well educated but we are not stupid.
Lindy Hardcastle
Groby, Leicestershire

Politicians should track progress in repairing Britain’s recession-scarred economy by measuring how the typical household is faring rather than specializing in GDP alone, in accordance with a report by a panel of heavyweight economists.

The London School of Economics Growth Commission, in findings published on Thursday, demands statistics on median household income to be published regularly alongside quarterly GDP figures, and for use as a measure of whether government policies are working.

The high-level panel – including Nobel prizewinner Chris Pissarides, ex-BP boss John Browne, the 3 former Bank of britain rate-setters Richard Lambert, Rachel Lomax and Tim Besley, in addition to the LSE’s John Van Reenen, director of its centre for economic performance – offers a sequence of prescriptions for tackling the long-term failings of the united kingdom economy.

They argue that tracking median household income within the runup to the financial crisis would have revealed that the advantages of growth were being swallowed up by a small segment of society. “Increasing inequality seriously is not an inevitable byproduct of growth, especially if policies are pursued that make growth more inclusive,” the report says.

In what they bill as a “manifesto for growth”, the authors argue that during three areas – human capital, infrastructure, and long-term investment – the united kingdom risks falling behind its international rivals.

They demand a lift to education, in the course of the creation of a “flexible ecology” of college types, and longer probation periods and higher rewards for the fitting-performing teachers, to enhance the odds of youngsters from low-income families.

The authors would also want to see a “new institutional architecture” for major planning projects, to prevent politicians delaying decisions for decades and ensure the economy’s long-term needs are met on the basis of the best expert advice.

“Nowhere is the problem of UK infrastructure better illustrated than by airport capacity in the south-east, where generations of politicians have prevaricated to a point where there is serious risk to London’s position as a major hub.”

Under the regime advocated by the economists, there would be a national-level infrastructure strategy board, to give independent expert advice; an infrastructure planning commission to draw up and approve plans for specific projects; and a brand new infrastructure bank to supply a mixture of private and non-private finance.

Channelling long-term investment to promising small businesses is another major shortcoming of the united kingdom economy, in keeping with the report, which requires the federal government to enhance competition in banking, and inspire alternative sources of finance, including by removing the tax advantages of debt-fuelled takeovers.

The latest official figures, published by the Bank of britain on Thursday, show that net lending to businesses continued to say no last month.

The panel can be highly critical of the prime minister’s decision to vow a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, saying: “Calls to go away the ecu through a referendum aren’t only misguided: they bring about the very uncertainty so we can damage investment and productivity at once. It’s analogous to the needless self-inflicted wounds that the usa is causing in its debates over the debt ceiling and financial cliff.”

Presenting the report, Tim Besley said that while the coalition was concerned with short-term deficit reduction, commitment to a sequence of longer-term reforms could help to “crowd in” private sector investment and deliver a growth dividend. “We lack a heart of presidency to drive this through,” he said. “There’s little or no on the centre.”

However, business secretary Vince Cable insisted: “The govt. is implementing an industrial strategy in partnership with business to tackle the very issues the LSE’s Growth Commission report identifies.”