Abstract
Of all the questions that we usually ask people coming into teaching at interview, ‘What challenges do you know and understand about in education?’ is my favourite one – as you can get some really interesting and thoughtful answers. In an English context, these usually garner wide-ranging responses, from knowledge of the Pupil Premium Policy through to knowledge about Looked-After Children, but something that rarely gets a mention at interview is the recruitment and retention debate. This has been such a huge issue for us in education over the last few decades, yet potential students coming into teaching, in my experience, rarely seem to know about it. On the one hand, this is a good thing, as we don’t want people beginning their training thinking that they are only going to last a few years, and those who often come in from ‘teaching families’ happily come from homes where the positives of teaching (access to education and the role that it plays in social mobility) have been positioned to outweigh the current negatives (such as marketisation and the performativity culture).
This lovely text, edited by Ovenden-Hope and Passy, is split into halves, the first half dealing with England and the second covering international perspectives. We all know that in times of recession education looks like an attractive career, or career change, and those of us currently recruiting are noticing the vast climate difference from this time last year, just prior to the first Covid-19 lockdown. I graduated to teach in 1995, in the mid-90s recession, and to my knowledge only 1 other from our pathway of 30 remains in teaching. But what this text shows is that none of our issues are new, or different to those that have gone before, and as such this book has many possible uses. I have used extracts from it this year – with my teacher training cohort – to show that the issues of teacher retention, as Howson points out in the first chapter, are neither new nor were ever dealt with very effectively by the system, post the Second World War. This is followed by a chapter from Noble-Rogers which highlights that problems with recruitment and retention are as a direct result of government policy, and have been for some time. This is followed by Newton’s chapter on attrition: what could better incentivise people to stay in teaching, and ‘what it feels like to be a teacher’. From their vantage point as teachers experienced in professional development, Linda la Velle and Alex Kendall write lucidly about how creating a profession that is genuinely research-informed could really be the way forward to creating a high-status profession, a concept that the majority of Management in Education readers will no doubt be busy trying to enact. The following chapters examine a research-informed model for Early Career Teachers (ECTs), and the role of professional communities of practice in ‘ed tech’ and its potential influence in teacher recruitment and retention. The remaining chapters in the first half of the text on England focus on the interesting topics of coastal communities, ‘educationally isolated’ schools, and small schools – all worthy of mention and often overlooked.
It is easy to think of recruitment and retention as something attached to neoliberal education systems that place education in a marketised system, but what the second half of this text shows us is what we can often forget: that the recruitment and retention of teachers is an international issue. Here, we have a range of fascinating chapters moving seamlessly from larger-scale studies to individual case studies ranging from the vastly different countries of Canada, China, Israel, Jamaica, Sweden and Australia. Recruitment and retention is clearly not just an Anglo-American problem: our issues appear no more stark than those elsewhere. Post-Covid, much of this will stay the same; yes, recruitment into teaching this year and next may be easier, but longer term, as this collection highlights, governmental policy has missed opportunity after opportunity to make teaching a more attractive profession, in very many countries. This is an ideal text for use on undergraduate, postgraduate and teacher-education programmes, both for the study of policy and to examine where we could – if governments finally chose to – invest in teaching all around the globe, in order to make it a worthwhile career. Now, wouldn’t that be nice?