It's been a long, A long time comin', but I knowA change gon' come, Oh, yes it will
American singer and songwriter Sam Cooke had it right, as those of us working in education know better than most.
And with a new school year well underway, a new government in office, changes to Ofsted grading, a Curriculum and Assessment Review due to report next year – we can guarantee that change is going to come.
The question is, will it be change that we want and need? And what are the alternatives?
Of course, change is built into the education system – each year children join and leave, there are timetable changes and staffing changes…
But what bigger changes. For example, we have already seen some positive change in terms of the minimal service levels being repealed. And of course Ofsted has been forced into what many hope will be a period of great change. The inspectorate has already announced an end to single-phrase judgements, replacing them with a report card system to describe how schools are performing, and it is piloting reforms to the way that they inform schools of inspection visits.
Going forward, new regional support teams are being formed to work with schools in response to the areas for improvement identified in report cards, and multi-academy trusts will be inspected, too.
All significant changes to be sure – but it is too early to know what impact these changes will have and whether any of it will make a difference to the teachers and support staff on the ground. Will it reduce the stress when Ofsted comes to call? Will it improve trust and confidence in the outcomes? And will it have any impact on the day-to-day life of our schools?
So what changes do we want to see?
It is essential that our schools have the right staff, paid at a rate that is attractive and supportive. This means teachers and support staff, because at the moment many support staff can get better pay for the same hours working in a supermarket – as SecEd has reported.
The reintroduction of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body is one recent change that we hope will have a positive impact in this regard.
We need to address workload issues. We know that the top two concerns our members have are pay and excessive workload, and we have been campaigning for planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time to increase as a way to support teachers to remain in the sector.
A big change on the horizon may be the ability to take PPA time at home, which the new government has put forward as a potential policy – although how this will work in practice across the whole staff of a secondary school remains to be worked out.
Workload reduction is not about carbon copy lesson planning or greater use of Oak Academy, both of which risk damaging teacher inspiration and creativity and weakening their autonomy in the classroom.
No, it means taking the time to understand the needs of the class and ensuring that we meet those needs. What we need is to teach fewer classes and have more PPA time to facilitate this.
We need better support for children with diverse needs, and for those needs to be addressed earlier, in pre-school even, and for the funding to be available in a timelier manner so that support can be afforded at the time, not after the fact.
Labour’s manifesto stated that “SEND provision is a critical concern” … with “inadequate funding and inconsistent support services”. This is one change that is desperately needed and soon.
The current SEND improvement plan contains some encouraging ideas, but unless they are supported with the necessary specialist staffing – educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, paediatricians, mental health and behaviour specialists – with the funding to realise the ambition, these plans are unlikely to be the magic bullet we so desperately need.
Another change that we are pleased to see is the Curriculum and Assessment Review which is underway and is being led by Professor Becky Francis.
In 2022, 275,000 11-year-olds “failed” to meet the expected standard in literacy and numeracy, and we have observed annually the hundreds of thousands of pupils who fail to achieve a Grade 4 in English and maths GCSE. We have a whole generation of children who genuinely believe they are failures because they cannot excel at tests, and this cannot be allowed to continue.
So change is coming and you may welcome it and you may not. But it is important that the profession gets involved to influence as best we can what changes are to be enforced and how they are to be implementated.
Change happens all the time, and it is up to us all to make the best of it.
- Helen Osgood is operations director at Community Union. Read her previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/helen-osgood and visit www.community-tu.org/education-and-early-years