Winston Brookes: GTP BERA Paper 2003

Title:GTP Training – Is adequate good enough?

Author:Winston Brookes

Address:Institute of Education

University of Reading

Reading RG6 1HY

Conference

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, 11-13 September 2003

Abstract

In its recent report on The Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP)[1] the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted)found that although almost all trainees meet the standards for Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), too often they do so at an adequate level, rather than achieving the high levels of which they should be capable. The underlying reason for this is the quality of mentoring provided in the schools. The inspectors concluded that school-based trainers are often not adequately prepared for their role in implementing wide ranging training programmes for trainee teachers. In addition, there is inconsistent practice in reviewing trainees' progress. In a few cases, where trainees have serious weaknesses, assessment is not secure at the pass/fail borderline. Despite this generally bleak picture, Ofsted concluded that "the minority of cases of good practice in the training programmes and of high quality teaching by trainees indicate that the GTP can be an effective alternative route for training teachers".

This paper reports on a small-scale project, funded by the TTA, the key objective of which was to ‘strengthen the existing partnerships (GTP) by improving the quality of school-based tutor training and CPD of staff’.2 The project began with an initial survey in which six experienced GTP mentors, three primary and three secondary, were interviewed in March 2003 in order to find out their views on mentoring GTP [2]trainees. Further evidence of how mentors perceive GTP training was then sought by means of a questionnaire which was completed by GTP mentors who attended a day conference at the University of Reading (46 out of 60 (76.6%) in the summer of 2003. These mentors also offered their views on what works well in their support of GTP trainees and what the challenging issues are that confront them.

The interviews took the form of informal but guided ‘conversations’, that were taped, transcribed and analysed and out of which the initial findings, or insights, emerged. The overall focus of the interviews was informed not only by the Ofsted survey but by the direct experience of the researcher as a GTP tutor working for a Higher Education Institution (HEI) Designated Recommending Body (DRB). Mentors were asked to describe the training provision in their schools under a number of headings. In particular, they were asked how they ensured that individual trainees' development needs are systematically assessed and what final assessment issues, if any, they had to address. They were also invited to comment on the extent to which they considered that GTP mentoring is different from that for the Post-graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) or the Induction Year. Finally, they were asked what their own training needs were in order to be more effective mentors.

This paper does not purport to describe a substantive research project because it is modest in scope and tentative in its observations: however, it offers a prologue to the swelling research scene that no doubt lies ahead.

  1. Context

The debate about craft apprenticeship and professional training, which is at the heart of any discussion of employment-based routes into teaching, has a long history. As far back as 1805 Bell and Lancaster, early pioneers of popular education, were at odds over what Dent (1975) terms ‘the barren dispute about the relative value of theory and practice in the training of teachers’. Of Joseph Lancaster’s training methods, which included lectures ‘on the Passions’, the Reverend Andrew Bell observed:

It is by attending school, seeing what is going on there, and taking a share in the office of tuition, that teachers are to be formed, and not by lectures and formal instruction[3].

Two centuries later this opposition has not shifted: there are those who view the growth of GTP as no more than a response to teacher shortage, growing by accretion and lacking a conceptual base; others see it as the way forward for teacher training. Many questions remain unanswered. Is it possible to characterise a typical GTP trainee? Are GTPs ‘teaching fodder’, the compliant seeking compliance in a less demanding route into teaching? What are the significant differences between the GTP and the Post-graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) routes? Is the GTP route appropriate for those who have had no prior experience of teaching? As in America, is the debate about certification versus qualification? Is it about adequacy versus accomplishment? Although the graduate teacher route to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) is now well established since its inception in 1998, very little research has been undertaken to date to address such questions and to determine its effectiveness as an alternative to more familiar teacher-training approaches, such as the PGCE.

This point is readily acknowledged by Rob Foster who conducted a similar survey to the one described in this paper in the North-West of England[4]. Foster concluded that, despite a largely positive view of the GTP in principle by the schools involved, ‘The findings suggest that most schools are not interested in taking full responsibility for training their own teachers. The GTP is supported as a suitable option where a flexible, individually-tailored scheme is needed, e.g. for someone who already has substantial teaching experience, but it is not seen as an appropriate model for training large numbers of beginning teachers’. In a subsequent paper[5] Foster reflected on the revised GTP in the light of the new funding arrangements and priority categories for prospective trainees. Despite his view thatthe GTP has proved it can make a valuable contribution to the supply of skilled and committed teachers, he still had serious misgivings about the variable quality of the provision:

There was a view that, in certain respects, GTP training did not have to meet the same standards as PGCE. It was pointed out, for example, that schools in partnership with HEIs have to meet specific quality criteria (DfEE Circular 4/98) whereas there is no such formal quality assurance mechanism in the GTP. The range of practice highlighted by the research and the lack of reliable Quality Assurance mechanisms is clearly a source of concern. Assessments tend to be outcome-based, summative assessments of the Graduate Teacher’s performance against the QTS standards. There is, to date, no systematic monitoring of the training process. [6]

This point had been addressed by Stewart Sutherland in the Report of the National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education[7]:

The establishment of the new Quality Assurance Agency provides an opportunity to develop a more effective and coherent means of guaranteeing Quality Assurance in higher education. While I recognise that the proposals of the Joint Planning Group do not meet some of the distinctive needs for the assurance of quality in teacher education, I believe, nevertheless, that it would be regrettable if teacher education continued to be subject to multiple approaches towards QA. In my view, there should be a dialogue between the stakeholders on the arrangements that are necessary to guarantee, maintain and measure standards in teacher education and to consider how these could be brought within the structure of the new Quality Assurance Agency.7

According to Foster, abuses of the spirit if not the letter of GTP, albeit unintended, were revealed in his research: for example, some Graduate Teachers, although nominally supernumerary, were effectively being regarded as additional members of staff. Others were taken on into vacant posts in under-staffed departments, where they ran the risk of receiving little more than a minimal ‘tips for teachers’ training fitted around a full-time teaching commitment. His prescient suggestion that Recommending Bodies be given an allocation of places, which would then make them responsible for approving and monitoring training plans, has since been adopted. However, his notion that this would allow them to control payments to schools on the basis of delivery of approved plans has yet to be demonstrated.

OFSTED undertook an evaluation of the GTP in the autumn and spring of 2000/2001, by visiting 72 trainees as they approached the end of their training, and meeting with larger recommending bodies when applications were being scrutinised. The resulting survey concluded that the GTP can be an effective alternative route for training teachers. It also found that trainees using this route to qualification were well-suited to be trained to become teachers. With a minimum age requirement of 24, many of the GTP trainees were moving into teaching as a second career, or after raising children, or in a number of cases, had qualified overseas.

However, inspectors echoed the concerns reported in Foster’s research. They judged that many of the candidates had the potential to become very good teachers, but that more should have been exceeding the minimum standards, rather than just meeting them. Indeed, while almost all trainees met the QTS standards, inspectors considered that a significant minority of secondary trainees achieved these at only an adequate level. This was also the case for over a half of primary trainees, where subject knowledge of English and Mathematics was often a major weakness:

Almost all trainees meet the QTS standards. However, too often they do so at an adequate level, rather than achieving the high levels of which they should be capable.[8]

There were found to be several factors contributing to this underachievement:

  1. the trainees' needs assessment, upon which subsequent training is based, often employs informal methods, that are of limited effectiveness in identifying all of their needs
  2. the trainees' individual training plans were mostly only adequate, with 25% of primary plans being of poor quality;
  3. school-based trainers are often not adequately prepared for their role in implementing appropriate training programmes;
  4. there is inconsistent practice in reviewing trainees' progress;
  5. the management and quality assurance procedures have not kept pace with the rapid expansion of this route into training.

In a few cases, trainees with "serious weaknesses" have been allowed to qualify as teachers although they are not up to standard, the report, based on the experiences of 72 trainees, concluded. However, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, Mike Tomlinson said in a press release at the time: "Teacher training is a fundamental component of developing good teachers and good practice and if the weaknesses we have highlighted are addressed, the GTP can make significant improvements and deliver an effective, comprehensive programme." Ignoring this reassurance, The Independent newspaper ran the headline ‘Graduate scheme allows 'less able' staff into the classroom, warns Ofsted’[9].

Since the Ofsted evaluation the GTP has grown in size to the point where, according to the TTA, it is responsible for at least one in ten newly qualified teachers (NQT). The recent Graduate Teacher Programme Trainee Survey[10], commissioned by the TTA, reports that in the academic year that the survey covers (2002-03), over 2,800 trainees have been employed and are progressing towards qualified teacher status (QTS). These trainees are overseen by a network of 80 Designated Recommending Bodies (DRB). There is also a pool of places (600) administered centrally by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) for use by Recommending Bodies (RB).

These bodies, the GTP training providers, were created as a result of a significant reform of the GTP operating system. This reform, implemented in September 2001 by the then Minister of State for School Standards Stephen Timms, aimed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the GTP by stripping away the existing bureaucracy and giving substantially greater autonomy to the providers. The reform programme responded to questions about the overall quality of the GTP by setting out to better assure trainees’ entitlement to good quality training that would enable them to meet the Standards for QTS. In doing so, a range of measures were introduced:

  • annual sampling of, analysis of, and feedback about individual training plans;
  • a programme of structured support for DRBs;
  • external scrutiny by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted); and
  • an annual trainee survey.[11]

DRBs, regarded at the time as transient organisations, will have to become accredited providers after at least three years of operation. At this point, GTP provision will be entirely within the initial teacher training (ITT) inspection framework. The first round of Ofsted inspections is planned for 2003-04.

Vivienne Griffiths’ recent paper, ‘Access or Exploitation? A Case Study of an Employment-based Route into Teaching’ (2003), despite the implications of the question, echoes Ofsted’s conclusion and reinforces the TTA’s optimistic assessment that, for most trainees, the GTP offers a positive way into teaching that would otherwise be unavailable to some mature career changers. She acknowledges that in the early stages of the implementation of the GTP there were inconsistencies both in provision and methodology and that mentorship in particular, was problematic. However, as schools and DRB’s are becoming more familiar with the programme the early problems identified by Ofsted are being addressed. In response to her own question, ‘Access or Exploitation?’ Griffiths, concludes:

If the Graduate Teacher Programme can give access to teaching to people like Yvonne, who started work in school as a dinner lady, then I would argue that it is providing an important new route into the profession. In spite of the challenges involved, for most trainees on this particular GTP, the course offered a positive way into teaching that would otherwise have been unavailable.[12]

Despite this relatively positive picture of the GTP a note of caution is needed – for two reasons. Firstly, most of the research to date appears to have been conducted by researchers who have a vested interest in this particular training route: that is, they belong to DRBs, which are funded by the TTA. This point is explicitly acknowledged by Griffiths when she describes her research methodology:

However, I had to be careful to avoid bias by undertaking triangulation between respondents and data collection methods[13].

Even so – and this is the second reason for caution - there have been some sceptical voices among university ITT providers that the GTP does not measure up to the quality of the Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE). This is not surprising in view of the former Chief Inspector’s preference for employment-based routes into teaching and the open antagonism between him and the universities in general, which culminated in his jibe that of some of them sacrificed students on ‘the altar of vacuous theoretical convolution’.

Woodhead’s views were, and still are, broadly in line with the agenda of the New Right under the Thatcher government in the 1990s who proposed the abolition of pre-service teacher education, and thus all faculties of education in universities. Derek Sankey (1996) explains the growth of this thinking in conservative circles as a direct consequence of the weakness of the response from teacher educators and their failure to respond to the discourse of derision to which they were being subjected:

What was truly astonishing about the challenge of the New Right, in Britain, was not so much the questions they posed about teacher education, the solutions they offered, or the presuppositions and biases that underpinned these. Rather it was the almost total inability of teacher educators to mount convincing answers and combat the biases and alternative proposals of the New Right. There were a number of reasons for that, but one important reason was that the necessity of teacher education programmes had been naively assumed, on the basisthat teachers need to be properly prepared for the role of teacher in school. The alternative school-centred approach, based on a craft apprenticeship model clearly demonstrated that the concept of proper preparation does not imply the necessity of pre-service courses.[14]

He argues that ‘school-based training can become an ideological trap for the profession, unless it is underpinned by a sound and coherent philosophy of teacher education that relates theory and practice within the context of practice’. This would entail a move away from the simplistic, and to some extent misplaced, model of ‘theory-into-practice’ and the concept of ‘reflective practice’. It should be replaced by the notion that student teachers on school practice are engaged in ‘reconciling competing interpretations’ and that this hermeneutical principle provides a better model:

This is particularly appropriate because students on school experience are primarily in a survival context where they have to resolve interrelated but also conflicting or, at least, competing interpretations.12[15]

Teacher educators and school mentors could thereby develop a form of training similar to the Oxford Internship Scheme. In Benton’s words (1990), ‘Internship, by challenging the arid monopoly of theory-based university, deploys the language of partnership. But partnership is reciprocal and without a major part for university or college teacher education will become, as it was a century ago, unimaginative, docile and repetitive.[16] In addition, the LEA under the leadership of Tim Brighouse was a strong, partner in the scheme. This concept of partnership is what both Foster and Griffiths advocate for the GTP and which, alongside the development of the role of LEA recruitment and retention managers (RSMs), is becoming more typical of GTP partnerships.