Personal reflections on a changing system of education

Back to school

Last September, I made the move from university teaching to being based back in a secondary school, exactly a decade after I had left to go the other way and was very surprised to be inundated by comments from staff in both sectors. Higher education (HE) staff, often based in Teacher Education (as I had been), said that they wished they had been brave enough to go back: their comments ranged from missing teaching (of all stages 4–18) to feeling that they had lost their moral purpose in Higher Education Institutes that are run for profit (where staff have to earn their own salaries plus oncosts from their student numbers), where the pressure is on from research income generation, and work relationships often become competitive, as genuine collaboration is put to the test. However, colleagues who have always been based in schools couldn’t understand why anyone would leave a role where I had the opportunity to travel internationally and present at conferences in comparison to being in a school Monday–Friday through term time. These staff, although clearly interested in HE roles, were largely unaware that as University Executive Team salaries have gone through the roof, along with student tuition fee rises, the Terms and Conditions of lecturing staff have continued to decline in many ways.

As an 11–18 qualified teacher for 12 years, I had been a ready teacher educator: I had graduated with my first degree, Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), a year in teaching and my MSc by 23, so I was keen to help support staff training to teach or doing their masters when I was a Head of Department in the 1990s. I had deliberately come into university teaching at the end of the 2000s, in part to do my EdD while I had small children, but consciously also in part to share my 12 years of secondary and post-16 experience with would-be teachers. At undergraduate, this meant teaching students on the BA (Hons) Education Studies programme – about a third of whom went on to the PGCE programmes. While also teaching on the MA Education programme at my local ‘teaching university’, the mainstay of our postgraduate students were teachers in full-time practice, at that point largely funded through the Teacher Development Agency (TDA) government-funded places, another world from where we are today in terms of public funding.

In the decade since, a large number of combined posts (what we would have called general lecturing posts with teaching and research) have morphed in many universities into posts that are either teaching or research – not both combined; so for a member of staff like me – having gained an EdD, having published in a reputable journal and producing a paper that was considered suitable for the 2020 Research Excellence Framework (REF) – being in a department that didn’t submit to that evaluation exercise seemed just a little nonsensical and made me question the value of some of the work I was doing.

In universities where the teaching and the research have been split, there isn’t a pool of doctoral students to teach as they are allocated to research staff. This meant that in 2017, I applied to a different university to be a Director of Studies, a role that includes supervising doctoral students; this is a role that I really enjoy and that actively develops my skill set: teaching online; regular Skypes; needing to navigate Blackboard Collaborate; using Zoom for virtual Ethics meetings, all rigorous protocols followed to the letter and a student in another time zone studying a fascinating education topic.

The self-improving school-led system

The educational landscape has shifted hugely in England in the last decade, and there are now many more senior posts in school leadership than there used to be. While not many of these deal with Teacher Education and Professional Development, the post-2010 legislative changes created ‘the self-improving school-led system’ and Teaching School Alliances (TSAs) often perceived to be in competition with universities. In my local area, these were established by four lead schools with a view to being ‘by schools, for schools’. The organisation that I now run is set up as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation to provide a range of services for schools to support teachers, governors and support staff. We have six main areas of work: Continuing Professional Development and Learning (CPDL), which includes Primary and Secondary subject support Networks; ‘School Direct’ Initial Teacher Education in Primary and Secondary (in partnership with our local university); Special Educational Needs and Disabilities; Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths; Leadership; and Governance and S2SS with both National Leaders of Education and Specialist Leaders of Education through our local schools that ensure that they are meeting the needs of the local areas. The Department for Education (DfE) is currently operating a pilot that may lead to the phasing out of the TSA annual income and will replace this with larger ‘Super-TSAs’ of groups of around 200 schools and clear School Improvement targets in a ‘Test and Learn’ pilot over 2019–2020. Although we work collaboratively with the six other TSAs who operate in our city, and some of those have the protection of being in just one Multi-Academy Trust (MAT), our own organisational strength is in being across groups of schools, or MATs, even if that is not currently where DfE policy growth lies.

All change

I have a diverse team working across a range of educational areas and based in a school where they are growing a MAT for local schools. We are organising a range of services that meet teachers’ needs and the needs of those who support them in non-teaching roles: support staff, governors, heads and executive head teachers. However, the systemic changes that we have witnessed in the past decade have often acted to erode collective power and leaving power in the hands of small groups who are often unaccountable or accountable through very complicated structures. For individuals who take issue with the decline of ‘local authorities’ in England and the rise of these MATs, supporting staff through organisations like Teaching Schools may well be regarded negatively as one of the consequences of the neo-liberal marketised turn in education. But, I feel that, in reality, they represent an opportunity to empower school leaders to maximise what they achieve, given the limited resources and funding available in order to do their very best to help generations of children. Recognizing that current English policy direction, both funding and mechanisms are far from ideal.

Best of both worlds

I am fortunate that I am still an external examiner on an MA Ed programme, still a Director of Studies for an EdD with an international teacher, still a second PhD supervisor of a local primary school deputy head, still able to attend the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Teaching Profession that I sit on and able to contribute to the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS) Council, and still able to co-convene our Leadership Preparation and Development Research Interest Group. My mix of roles means that I work with head teachers who are actively encouraging these areas of work and enable their views to be heard and reflected in forums that they would otherwise not be. So, when people ask me why I have left HE, I am tempted to say I haven’t – it has left me: I still train teachers (something that is now largely done outside universities, as University Vice Chancellors don’t want to lose money doing it); I still run CPDL for teachers (but it is not accredited by universities any longer, as schools can rarely afford that); I still run conferences for staff, at various levels, but these are now ‘not-for-profit’ for school staff and no longer ‘for-profit’ in universities. We can’t put the clock back on the changes that have been made, but it is possible to work collaboratively with staff in universities to ensure that good practice is not lost, and to maximise the small pots of funding made available to us, working with the third sector and the wide range of educational groups to try and make a difference: We are not in conflict unless we choose to be – we are all part of the same system and have children at the heart of all we do.