These are gloomy times in education. Despite claims from the Department for Education that it has “protected school budgets in cash terms”, we can see schools being asked to do more with less. As a result, we have teachers fleeing the profession and headteachers reporting increasing difficulties in recruitment. In this gloom, however, I think we can see some beacons of hope and reasons to be optimistic about the future of teaching, and of education, in this country.
Growing professional trust
In her book CleverLands, author and teacher Lucy Crehan discusses how she travelled around the world to study successful education systems, seeking to discover what they have in common. One thing that became clear was the way that teachers were trained to be highly-skilled professionals and then trusted to do this. She writes that teachers are given autonomy “to get on with their work, which makes the profession attractive, and allows teacher training programs to be selective”.
I think there are clear signs that things are moving in the right direction within our schools towards this culture of professional trust, which gives me hope. We can see this shift within individual schools up and down the country. In my own school, Heathfield Community College in East Sussex, we have experienced a real move away from endless accountability and towards this kind of trust.
One example of this is the introduction of collaboration time on everyone’s timetable. Time, additional to that given for planning, preparation and assessment, which is used to meet with a group of other teachers and discuss teaching and learning. We have used this time to review lessons, discuss alternatives to written feedback, share research and look at how we can offer students greater challenges in their lessons.
We write about our lessons, research and discussions in our in-school blog (Heathfield Teach Share) as a way of sharing our ideas and building a common culture. We are also given further time if we wish to join an innovation team, to research and lead on different areas of school improvement. While there is a cost implication, it is an important way of putting professional trust at the heart of the school.
Grassroots organisations
On the national scale, we have the rise of a number of grassroots organisations that seek to represent teachers as a profession. The Headteachers’ Roundtable (HTRT) operates as a thinktank, exploring how school leaders can influence national policy. Stephen Tierney, chair of the HTRT and author of Liminal Leadership, recently told me that the group is a reason to be cheerful because it is “grassroots, grounded with sensible policy ideas”. It has an active core group, significant social media presence and face-to-face engagement which allows the group to speak “truth to power”. Organisations like this could allow school leaders to take control of the debate over the direction that education is going, and put those with the most experience and knowledge in a position to influence those whose views may be clouded by the need to chase short-term headlines.
The new Chartered College of Teaching, meanwhile, aims to be a professional body for teachers. It gives teachers access to educational research and looks at ways of providing pathways of professional development. Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive of the college, points out that this is a real chance for teachers to lead on their own development and says the body offers “an irresistible suite of professional learning opportunities”.
This initiative is already being seized around the country by individual teachers who are setting up, running and attending TeachMeets; such as Durrington TeachMeet, organised by Shaun Allison, the co-author of Making Every Lesson Count. These free training sessions are a way that teachers are seizing control of their own professional development and sharing good practice. Many teachers are spending their weekends at conferences discussing recent developments in educational research, such as researchED organised by Tom Bennett), and bringing what they learn back into their classes and staff rooms. These things are not happening because of national government, but despite it.
Better professional development
We see it too in the way that continuing professional development (CPD) is offered in schools. Talk to any teacher and they will tell you that in the past this CPD was usually carried out in the school hall, where teachers would sit for an hour while the deputy head, who had been on a course, talked at them about their new, soon to be forgotten, project. This has shifted. What we are seeing far more now is real personalised professional development. Again, in my own school we have far more CPD time given to departments to spend working on their own priorities with shorter, more focused, whole school input.
In his new book, Talk for Teaching, education consultant and author Paul Garvey writes of the importance for this personalised professional development and says: “In doing so, leaders will have to relinquish some control, but staff will respond readily to that increased level of trust, by taking control of their own PPD and improving in their roles.”
This has certainly been the case for us. You can see it in the rapid turnaround of books in the CPD library in the staffroom and in the number of us discussing teaching on Twitter. You can see these changes when the head offers us the chance to attend a researchEd conference and lots of us email back asking to go. Teachers are taking control of education, not just through national groups but in each and every classroom.
The next level
It is clear that all is not well in education and it seems unlikely that the national picture will get rosier any time soon. But there are individual teachers, departments and schools fighting back and taking control of the situation.
To take these positive movements to the next level, we still need two things: funding from government and the goodwill of teachers. Both are in increasingly short supply.
Mark Enser is head of geography at Heathfield Community College. He blogs at Teachreal.wordpress.com and tweets @EnserMark
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