Opportunities And Challenges In The Education Sector For 2019

Happy New Year! Traditionally at this time of year we both look back on the last twelve months and reflect on our achievements as well as looking forward to the opportunities and challenges the new year brings.

This is no less true in the world of education; a world where at once it seems everything is changing yet, somehow, much remains the same.

So is it with a sense of optimism we can look forward to 2019? Well, partly. Much of the turbulence of educational reform has abated now. New courses at both GCSE and A Level are now embedded and teachers can concentrate on consolidating their practice rather than constantly rewriting their lesson plans. There also seems to be good news coming out of Ofsted’s headquarters (education’s year-round pantomime villains) with, supposedly, less emphasis on pure examination results and more judgment of a school’s curriculum and the concomitant quality of pupil experience. The growing emphasis on T levels and degree-level apprenticeships is welcome too, as youngsters look more and more towards alternatives to university with, in some cases, better employability statistics as well as better financial implications.

Not all is rosy in the garden of education, however, and the new year brings some familiar problems. I was asked recently by a colleague what I thought the biggest challenge facing education was and my reply was instant: teacher recruitment. It is no exaggeration to say that we are facing a crisis in recruiting suitably qualified graduates to teach in our schools. In shortage subjects such as maths and physics, schools are routinely forced into either employing teachers without a degree in the subject or twisting the arms of the teachers they already have outside of their specialism. It’s a problem that isn’t going to go away; the population of school children is climbing steadily and more and more teachers will need to be found to avoid increasing class sizes to unacceptably large levels.

So why aren’t our top graduates going into teaching? It’s a question that isn’t difficult to answer. A casual flick through the education pages of any national newspaper would be enough to frighten anyone off. The multi-pronged peril of workload, pay, behaviour, the aforementioned Ofsted and the bewildering variety of societal issues teachers are required to address mean the profession just looks too daunting. And it’s not just recruitment of youngsters into the profession – it’s retention too. Around 10% of teachers leave the profession every year and whilst some of this is due to retirements and so on, more are getting out because there are less-stressful better paid options elsewhere. The problem is worse at headteacher level too, with fewer and fewer deputies wanting to make that final step up. Who can blame them, with the current “heads will roll” approach to appointments. A couple of bad years of results and the Chair of governors can resemble the chairman of a premier league football club; small wonder that taking over a school in a challenging area has been described as playing Russian roulette with your career. In many ways I am lucky. We in the independent sector are sheltered from many if not all of these problems. But it’s hard not to despair when looking at our colleagues in the maintained sector.

Can anything be done? In many ways, the key strength of the job is what it always has been: the joy of working with young people and making a difference, however small, to their lives. Whether it is helping them, to get the grades to access the course they want, inspiring them to study your subject at a higher level or simply just making their lives a little bit better, I believe teaching has few rivals as a rewarding career. We need to allow teachers to get back to those interactions because, fundamentally, they are what education is all about.