Bridget Phillipson was appointed Labour’s shadow education secretary in November 2021. After 18 months in the role, she has now finally unveiled Labour’s ambitious new idea to help tackle the teacher retention and recruitment crisis: use the tax raid on private school fees to fund a £2,400 welcome bonus to every teacher who has completed their two years of training.
This is a classic case of copying someone’s homework, except – no surprises – it wasn’t very good the first time round. The Conservatives have already increased the starting salaries of newly-qualified teachers to £30,000. Teaching unions have already overwhelmingly voted to reject a one-off payment. The government has already tried giving bonuses to maths teachers, chemistry teachers, physics teachers, modern languages teachers, on top of generous, ever-growing training bursaries.
Yet still teacher vacancies have doubled in the last two years. Still nearly one in five teachers who qualified in 2020 have since quit. Even the behemoth Teach First has just signed up its smallest cohort in five years. Has Phillipson been caught at the back not listening?
If this is Labour’s big education idea, then it is a dreadfully uninspired one
There are three simple reasons Bridget’s bright idea won’t work. Firstly, £2,400 in a cost-of-living crisis is unfortunately, really not that much money: after income tax, national insurance, pension contributions and student loan, this ‘bonus’ equates to roughly 0.002 per cent of a deposit for a modest flat in London.
Secondly, it’s hardly a long-term strategy: stay for a third year, take the golden hello and then wave a hasty goodbye.
Finally, the problem with education, education, education is workload, workload, workload. Anyone who has spent any time in an actual school will know that there are far more pressing problems facing teachers than pay: punitive inspections, chronic underfunding, poor behaviour, ever greater expectations, growing class sizes, lack of parental support, the pressure of league tables, the explosion of mental health issues and other learning needs, to name a few.
If a bucket is leaking, you don’t fill it with more water: you fix the bucket. The same logic needs to apply to teaching. These problems aren’t insurmountable; they just require a level of creativity and imagination that apparently surpasses our politicians, who prefer to try the same thing over and over again but expect different results.
For example, why not instead use the £50 million budgeted for teacher ‘bonuses’ to pay for more planning and marking time for classroom teachers in the schools and areas where they are most likely to quit? Too often schools are forced to prioritise quantity over quality when it comes to planning teachers’ timetables; they max out teaching time so that all marking, planning and admin has to take place outside of school hours, and there is no time to reflect or hone classroom practice.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Some schools are now offering compressed hours, where teachers are paid full-time but only teach four days a week, with the fifth day dedicated to non-teaching tasks that can potentially be done from home. One academy offers staff the opportunity to take three days off in a row during term time; another offers staff the chance to work from home if they are not teaching rather than insisting they come in.
More flexible working arrangements like these would be attractive to all demographics: Gen Z, with their more mindful approach to work-life balance; middle-career teachers with young families or childcare needs; or older teachers who may not have the emotional and physical stamina they used to (over the last decade the number of over 50s teaching has reduced from 25 per cent of the workforce to under 19 per cent).
Alternatively, use the money in other ways: for example, could we incentivise teachers by writing off student loans in some way, perhaps gradually over time in relation to years of service? Or could we use the money for subsidised housing for teachers who work in disadvantaged areas, as one way of tackling geographical disparities between schools? When I did my teacher training, Teach First paid for us to stay in private student accommodation in London for six weeks; this was a great way to develop support networks, encourage diversity of applicants and was also just good fun. One academy chain recently built 100 homes for teachers to stop them being priced out of London; could a similar idea be rolled out on a larger scale?
I’m a teacher, not a policymaker, and I don’t know the answers to these questions. However, I firmly believe there must be more exciting, more interesting conversations we could be having around education rather than continuously dangling one-off payments in front of teachers and wondering why they don’t take the bait.
If this is Labour’s big education idea, then it is a dreadfully uninspired one: repetitive, ineffective, and – every teacher’s least favourite word – boring.
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