Labour’s school tsar last week sparked a debate about whether England’s teachers are “enslaved” by a “narrow compliance culture”. Schools Week investigates …
Signing off a session at the Confederation of School Trust’s annual conference last week, Labour’s school standards tsar Sir Kevan Collins warned the audience he was about to say something “provocative”.
“There is an irony in the school-led and freedom kind of culture that we’ve worked on in the last 15 years but, in some classrooms, I’ve never seen teachers more enslaved.
“I think we’ve sometimes slipped into a shallow compliance culture, where you see people being told what to do down to the degree of the slide-stack we’re going to use in every lesson.”
So, are England’s teachers “enslaved” by compliance? And if so, in which schools?
Teacher autonomy lower in trusts
The 2018 OECD TALIS, a major international survey, ranked participants based on how much control they have over lessons.
Just 62 per cent of England’s secondary teachers agreed they had control over determining course content – lower than almost all other countries and way down on the OECD average of 84 per cent.
A 2020 report by the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) also found teachers had less autonomy than similar professions, with only doctors and nurses below them.
The study also found teacher autonomy, overall, was “significantly lower” for teachers in trusts, compared with maintained schools. This was “particularly the case” for those in trusts that had ten or more schools.
‘Total freedom’ in some schools
While this analysis looked at tasks other than curriculum, the trend seems to holds when looking at lessons too.
A poll of nearly 10,000 teachers in July by Teacher Tapp found 18 per cent working in local authority-maintained schools had “total freedom to plan whatever they want”. This fell to 13 per cent in large trusts.
However, teachers in standalone academies had the most freedom in the state sector, at 25 per cent.
Teachers at academies were also more likely to report they had pre-prepared lessons they could adapt – 28 per cent at larger trusts, which was more than double the 13 per cent of teachers at maintained schools.
Meanwhile, a recent survey of more than 400 trust chief executives, run by Edurio and the confederation, found one in five trusts primarily direct their curriculum centrally. This rose to a third in trusts with more than 20 schools.
Teachers in private schools were also more likely to have more freedom over lessons.
‘Rigid schemes reducing joy’
Some schools in big trusts have “very set, rigid schemes”, said Caroline Derbyshire, the chief executive of the nine-academy Saffron Academy Trust and a former chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable.
“The argument is that it reduces workload. That may be true, but it also reduces joy and engagement,” she said.
Teachers were taught to plan lessons and be creative in their delivery. But when they “get a job in some trusts and in some schools, they’re effectively delivering a pre-set bunch of slides, and that’s not very entertaining for them”.
Such prescriptive approaches can make the headlines, with unions sometimes getting involved.
Trust says common resources help workload
The NASUWT has been heavily critical of the Astrea Academy Trust, which runs 26 academies in Yorkshire and Cambridge.
It previously claimed the headteacher at St Ivo Academy in Cambridgeshire was not even “at liberty to make a decision on whether or not teachers were allowed to change the desk layout of classrooms”.
Mark Burn, the union’s then-national executive director for Cambridgeshire, told the website Education Uncovered his members had been threatened with disciplinary action if their room was not “Astrea-approved”.
An Astrea Academy Trust spokesperson said “workload is a very real issue for many. This is why we have introduced common curriculum resources – which are a starting point, not the end goal – for our departments and curriculum communities.
“We are passionate about creating the conditions where teachers can use and develop their knowledge and have the agency to be curriculum-makers.”
‘Teachers must have agency’
Collins said in schools with “compliance cultures people aren’t fulfilled and they leave.
“[They] have to feel they have agency, responsibility and support and training to be the best teacher [they] can be.”
The NFER study found that teacher autonomy is strongly associated with improved job satisfaction and a greater intention to stay in teaching
About two thirds of teachers polled by Teacher Tapp in July said that if they moved to a new area, they’d rather work at a maintained school than one in a multi-academy trust – even when everything else in the schools was identical.
Only 11 per cent said they’d go for the job at the trust school.
Teacher Tapp did not ask why local authority schools were overwhelming favoured. But Gráinne Hallahan, its head of community, said it could be because of a “perception” that MATs gave teachers less autonomy and had more bureaucracy because of the layers of management in a chain of schools rather than standalone.
More than half of 7,356 teachers polled by Teacher Tapp in July who had worked in an academy also thought trusts offered classroom teachers less autonomy that other school types. About a quarter said there was no difference
‘Less autonomy isn’t necessarily negative’
But in a 2020 report, Jack Worth, the NFER’s school workforce lead, said less autonomy “isn’t necessarily a negative”.
It could be linked to trusts “standardising or aligning” practices across schools as they developed to ensure they had the “necessary coherence to deliver good pupil outcomes”.
Ernest Jenavs, the co-founder and chief executive of Edurio, stressed trusts were “navigating a complex balance between school autonomy and a shared commitment to improving education quality and pupil outcomes”.
Liz Robinson, the chief executive at the Big Education Trust, said it was “unhelpful” to make it an “academy versus non-academy argument”. The key issue was school culture.
Lumping trusts as having “one big, closed curriculum” was “really reductive. That is true about some MATs, but it’s also true about some maintained schools – and always has been.”
Paul Tarn, the chief executive of the 57-school Delta Academies Trust, said alignment across schools in a trust boosted collaboration, cut workload and boosted retention.
“The idea that there’s some standardisation and sharing of resources is a good thing. You can’t say ‘we should all be able to do our own thing’… but then complain about workload”.
Teaching ‘transformed’
For instance, standardisation across science lessons allowed Delta to send a box twice a term to each of its 38 primaries containing everything teachers needed for experiments. This also included resources explaining how to deliver lessons.
Tarn said it had “transformed” teaching and was a good example of “effective prescription. The staff love it because they don’t have to spend Sunday going around Poundland to find something to do for an experiment.”
In May, a report by the NFER found cutting teacher workload could have the same effect on teacher recruitment and retention as a 3 per cent pay rise.
In 2020 it found that, more widely, teacher autonomy had not changed much over time. Worth concluded it has not been “significantly affected by policy changes since 2010” – when the academy programme was expanded.
However he said some trusts “may be missing the opportunity to harness the benefits of teachers having autonomy over their work”.
Loic Menzies, an associate fellow at the IPPR think tank, added the government had “yet to make clear where it sits on this tension – but they need to be careful: a lack of strategic clarity could wreak havoc with effective policy-making.”
