NAHT North East Lincs conference, January 2009

last updated:30 Apr 2009

Extracts from a speech by GTC Chief Executive Keith Bartley given at the National Association of Head Teachers North East Lincolnshire conference, 21 January 2009

This speech looks at the future of the national curriculum, pedagogy and innovation in schools. It also discusses the support for schools and teachers available from the GTC and looks ahead to the shape ofteaching in 2012.

Check against delivery

Change is in the air

Colleagues,

I am delighted to be here. It is a real pleasure to be in North East Lincolnshire.

…I am going to set out some thoughts on the curriculum, on pedagogy, on innovation and on the services that the GTC can provide to support you and your schools - particularly the Teacher Learning Academy.

Then I am going to stop and take comments and questions – and round off with a discussion about the GTC’s vision for teaching in 2012 – and how that can provide a vehicle for all of us to shape the future we want for teaching, for learning and for children and young people.

Of course, at a fundamental level, the future of teaching will not be shaped here – it will be shaped back in the classroom and in the schools you lead. It is the individual and collective effort of teachers and schools that gives teaching its shape and identity.
But as busy practitioners, you also know the value of having space to step back, to pause and reflect; to network and exchange ideas; and to experience the burst of energy and commitment which comes from sharing your hopes and aspirations with people you respect – your peers.

Being a school leader and especially being a head teacher is infinitely rewarding but it’s tough and high profile. So, before we move on to the very real challenges you face, let me encourage you to pause for a moment and soak up some praise… your contribution to children’s wellbeing and achievement; your role in shaping society for the better, is well recognised.

Beacons of hope

Perhaps the most powerful recent endorsement of the difference you make came from one of the interim reports of the Primary Review led by Sir Robin Alexander. That particular report documented children’s anxieties – their fear of crime, their worries about climate change and global warming; their fears for their own safety.

But the report found that primary schools are beacons of hope; sanctuaries in a hostile world and highly effective in helping children develop a sense of control over their own destinies.

…As we take this opportunity to think about the challenges facing primary education and primary head teachers, it is heartening to know we have some very powerful evidence to support us in taking some of the radical steps that I believe are necessary to move primary teaching and learning to the next level.

The Primary Review and the Good Childhood Inquiry led by the Children’s Society provide both a forensic analysis of the negative pressures on schools and children, and an optimistic vision of what can be achieved.

Assessment – time for change

…I take heart from the growing – in fact the almost universal – consensus that our assessment system needs radical reform in order to support learning more effectively. That we will not take learning and achievement to the next level unless we free up the curriculum and unless we actively support a culture of teacher and school led innovation.

I would like to recap briefly on the GTC’s proposals for reforming our current assessment regime. We gave these proposals to the Children and Families Select Committee in the form of written evidence and then took part in an oral evidence session with the Committee in January last year.

In summary:

We conclude that the current assessment regime attempts to serve too many purposes – and therefore fails to achieve any of the purposes successfully. The SATs are an inadequate basis for supporting pupil learning because they measure too narrow a range of topics and the high stakes nature of the tests means that all the other good uses for formative assessment or assessment for learning inevitably get sidelined because they don’t carry the political weight of the SATs.

We argue that we don’t need to test pupils as often or as formally as we do currently – and that we should give much greater weight to and place greater investment in teacher assessment.

We are not saying that we should abandon summative assessment – but we suggest that a bank of externally developed tests should be developed and accessed by teachers when they judge that their deployment would add value.

We argue that a system of cohort sampling would actually help us track standards over time more effectively than the current system of universal testing. If we sample, we could actually test children’s understanding of a much wider range of curriculum areas. We couldn’t do that now because the testing load on each individual child would be even more oppressive!

And we argue that accountability is important – but needs to be much more real – and much more useful to parents – we suggest investing in a really rich and regular dialogue with parents about the progress of their children.

When the Select Committee report came out, it was tremendously encouraging to see that it was peppered with endorsements for the points the GTC had made in evidence.

Professional judgement and innovation

…For me, one of the defining characteristics of a profession is its capacity for renewal, growth and innovation.

That is placed at risk if professionals feel stifled and constrained by excessive levels of prescription. If a teacher is constantly told what they must teach, how they must teach it, for how many minutes per day and what the outcomes must be; then small wonder if they feel that they can’t take risks; that they don’t have permission to be creative and innovative.

If head teachers like you have one eye on the league tables and another on the local press; if you are drowning in guidance documents and data requests, innovation can feel very risky – a “brave” decision ….. in the Sir Humphrey sense of the word. Which is why so much of my time with Ministers and senior officials is spent advocating a reduction in central prescription, a shift of professional accountability to one in which you have greater freedom and support to exercise your professional judgement responsibly.

…Evidence from research commissioned by the GTC and the Innovation Unit found that, despite the pressures bearing down on teachers, 84 per cent of them report that they do have scope and space to innovate.

Their capacity to do so was crucially dependent on whether the school’s leadership team encourages innovation and demonstrates its commitment to it by leading change themselves.

The research identified some of the characteristics of successful teacher-led innovation. It found that many of these characteristics are also found in schools that foster innovation.

I am going to return to the theme of innovation in a few minutes, - for me innovation in schools and creativity in the curriculum are two sides of the same coin – but today I am going to start with the curriculum, creativity, and the sense that something new and different is in the air.

Curriculum and pedagogy

Clearly, providing a creative curriculum is highly dependent on creating capacity for innovation. But I am also going to argue that it requires us to return to a debate about pedagogy.

Colleagues, I really think we have been missing a trick in recent years. I know, and you know, that teaching is a complex and creative activity; that good teaching cannot be based merely on a series of “hot tips for teachers” – it is rooted in a rigorous understanding of learning and requires skill and perseverance.

Parents regularly say “I don’t know how you do it….”

But the problem is …. We haven’t always been very good at saying how we do it either. We need to re-engage with a concept that has not been fashionable in recent years – pedagogy – and we need to become much more articulate about the art and science of teaching.

If we are serious about being a national and international professional community – and I hope we are – then we must open the secret garden of teaching to a much wider audience.

That way, our profession will grow in stature with the public. Schools and teachers will at last be accorded more freedom to innovate, to use sound professional judgement and to lead creative developments in learning.

For the avoidance of any doubt, let me be clear that I believe we needed a national curriculum – we needed greater consistency and focus on learning – we needed to give children an entitlement to a corpus of knowledge, learning and skills that was both broad and balanced.

But that does not mean – and it should not have led to - the monstrous edifice of central prescription that now bears down on schools and teachers.

We know that the current state of the curriculum, by which I mean:

• over-specified
• too instrumental, and
• too formal, too early

works against the whole-child approach of Every Child Matters. Nor does it help schools and individual teachers to implement the requirements of equalities legislation.

The GTC’s well-established policy position in this area includes

• a call for greater curriculum flexibility across Key Stages 1 and 2
• including the provision of incentives to schools who explore the existing flexibilities

Creativity and inspiration

…We know that many of the adults who contributed to the Good Childhood Inquiry agreed that teachers should be allowed more flexibility to decide how they teach, and what they teach to inspire both themselves and their children.

We know that children themselves told the Inquiry that they enjoy learning when they are taught by teachers who are passionate about their subjects and who bring fun into lessons.

Teachers are well aware that a creative curriculum is not synonymous merely with “fun.” And giving teachers permission to bring a bit of fun into lessons is a limited vision of flexibility and creativity. But, as highlighted by Ofsted before Christmas, bored and unmotivated pupils are a distraction in the classroom and pupils do behave better when they are engaged with their learning. I am not suggesting that this issue confronts a large number of teachers, but it should be highlighted as yet another reason why we need to give teachers the freedom to use their professional judgement in classrooms so that teachers can confidently make a call on what will motivate and inspire their pupils, using their expert knowledge to determine when something is working, and equally, when something is not.

Questions need to be asked… I do wonder whether, as a profession, we have lost some of the capacity to lead learning with confidence and without prescription.

…We need to ensure that leadership and head teacher positions are made accessible and appealing to younger teachers. All teachers are leaders of learning and we need to ensure that confident, expert classroom practitioners can make the move into leadership positions early enough to prepare them for headship at an earlier age than before.

We need to move on – to learn from each other and to support each other to get the most for our pupils from greater curriculum freedoms.

We know that teachers want space within the curriculum, to give everyone room to breathe, and thus to breathe life into what you are required to teach.

We know that you, as headteachers, long for greater autonomy, less central direction, more freedom to manoeuvre.

So we need that debate about just how much of the curriculum needs to be specified as an entitlement for all children and how much can – I would argue, should - be left to teachers to determine locally.

…If we are entering a new era in education, where teachers and schools will have much greater freedoms and responsibilities for the curriculum; where testing will genuinely be used to support learning rather than to feed a rather narrow understanding of accountability, then our ability to innovate is crucial and it is important that we understand the drivers that lead and sustain successful innovation.

We all want a curriculum that engages and develops children’s creativity; and collectively we have the capacity to provide it – but some of your staff – perhaps all of your staff in some cases, will need support, encouragement and development opportunities to take those next steps.

So what will help? What did the GTC and Innovation Unit’s research tell us about the characteristics of successful innovative schools?

Characteristics of innovative schools

In these schools, teachers:

• saw their leaders modelling innovative practice
• there was a commitment to continuing professional development as a core practice - not a bolt-on
• time was found to initiate, experiment and reflect

Where the school has a systematic approach to improving teaching and learning, ‘innovation’ is also about school-wide change to bring about improvement in the way the school works.

In these schools teachers are more likely to refine, test and evaluate their ideas. The skills to develop and evaluate new ideas are actively developed in these schools.

Most ‘innovations’ are the adaptation and development of approaches tried elsewhere. In the most innovative schools, national initiatives and evidence from elsewhere will be picked up, assessed for relevance, adapted for the local context, evaluated and improved and disseminated to other schools.

Teachers say they introduce innovation in their teaching to respond to the needs of their pupils, and that this increases their own job satisfaction.

They also innovate to meet expectations of their head teacher and in response to colleagues’ encouragement – in this way, leadership and opportunities to develop practice with colleagues are key incentives to teachers to improve their teaching through innovation.

The motivation to innovate comes from the professional satisfaction associated with ‘making a difference’ to learning, and from being supported to do this by colleagues.

Innovation thrives in schools with strong and reflective leadership attitudes and behaviours. Heads who deliberately seek new ideas from other schools, who consciously share their reflections on school practice as a function of their leadership role, who distribute that leadership, who give permission to experiment and to learn from individual and collaborative mistakes – these are the heads most likely to model successful innovation. These are the heads most likely to enable not only their teachers, but their pupils, to play their part in the design and fulfilment of successful innovation.

So in summary, the research concludes that successful teacher-led innovation is most likely to emerge from leader-led innovation. Successful schools had continuing professional development at the very centre of the life of the school – not at the margin, not as an optional extra, not as a bolt-on.

As your professional body, we want to support you to keep continuing professional development at the centre of your schools. By supporting teacher professionalism, we discharge our remit and our passion for improving standards of teaching and learning.

So I am now going to give an unashamed plug to some of the policy services that I believe can help you develop and sustain your school’s capacity for successful, creative innovation.

GTC support for teacher professionalism

Many of you are the de facto leaders of continuing professional development in your schools. Some of you will have a nominated member of staff in that role. If you, or they, haven’t already done so, I urge you to visit and join our Connect network. It is specifically set up for CPD leaders to access up to date information and support on effective professional learning.

Those of you who have new teachers in school – teachers in their first three years of practice – encourage them to take part in the Engage network – established specifically to support the retention and development of new teachers.

I wholeheartedly recommend the Achieve network to you all. Established to promote race equality and diversity in schools, it has some really practical resources to help schools fulfil their legal duties under the Race Relations Amendment Act – and it has material relevant to both ethnically diverse and more mono-cultural communities.

We will be developing our network offer over the next few years, as part of our Teaching in 2012 programmes – and I hope that you will give us your feedback on the kind of network activity you would find most relevant, stimulating and worthwhile.

Innovative practice is not a series of hunches and guesses. We are talking about disciplined creativity, about permission to innovate that is based on a foundation of evidence and a commitment to reflection and evaluation.

So let me highlight the GTC’s research programme, including our very popular and accessible research series - ready to use, accessible research digests for busy teachers.

And last, but by no means least:

The Teacher Learning Academy

The Teacher Learning Academy helps schools and teachers make small changes in practice that have a sustained impact in the classroom and beyond.

…It has been our watchword from the very first days of the GTC to marshal the best possible national and international evidence for our policy proposals and to ensure that they are practical and workable – rooted in the experience and expertise of practising teachers. We therefore developed the GTC Teacher Learning Academy using precisely that approach.

The Teacher Learning Academy is currently being developed as a national system open to all registered teachers, and operated by a series of national and local partners. At last check 15,000 teachers are enrolled.

Having scoured the research evidence on effective continuing professional development for teachers – and by effective – I mean learning that actually makes a positive difference to classroom practice; we developed a framework for teacher learning that is intellectually rigorous, but flexible and practical.

It has been piloted and independently evaluated by the National Foundation for Educational Research and we intend to publish the findings next month.

Projects can be undertaken at four different levels of complexity and challenge. Smaller scale, Stage One projects can be completed in less than half a term and help teachers identify and investigate a modification to their practice that will directly benefit their pupils and can be shared and adopted by colleagues.

You can see, I hope, that this could be ideal for testing out a small change in curriculum delivery.

At the most advanced level, Stage 4, projects are breaking new professional ground and contributing at a national or international level to the collective knowledge of the profession about pedagogy.

All projects are verified by fellow teachers, trained to use quality assured criteria for judging whether a project has met the standard for formal recognition.

Teachers have told us that they derive immense satisfaction from seeing the professional development they have always undertaken voluntarily and without reward, now recognised and celebrated by their peers.

It is a fundamental principle of the TLA that it’s a voluntary commitment, with teachers choosing their own focus of enquiry. But when the whole school adopts the Teacher Learning Academy it acts as a very powerful tool for school improvement, and a genuinely supportive means of implementing the outcomes of performance review.

One of the cornerstones of the Teacher Learning Academy is that participants share their newly acquired knowledge and learning.

The rationale for this is both pragmatic and moral. Teachers know that when children share, articulate and record their learning, that learning is reinforced. The same applies to adult learners.

But we also believe that there is a moral imperative to share and disseminate effective practice as widely as possible. That is how the TLA becomes an engine for school improvement and for effective cross school collaboration and networking.

We know that the centrally driven approach to numeracy and literacy led to some important gains in achievement but they have now reached a plateau – to the frustration of Government and to the anxiety of school leaders like yourselves.

As we all rise to the challenge of taking teaching and learning to the next level, we know we need a more flexible and responsive approach to the curriculum and to the individual needs of each child.

And teachers and head teachers are telling us that it is great to validate professional learning through a national system that recognises and values individual teachers!

Looking ahead

...When I joined the General Teaching Council as Chief Executive in March 2007, I made it an immediate priority to meet as many teachers, head teachers and partners as possible.

What I found universally when talking to teachers, partners and to GTC staff was a strong desire for clarity about the role of the GTC; a great willingness to work in partnership and a strong desire to see professional judgement and creativity at the heart of teaching and learning.

Because the GTC works with all the major interest groups in education – but because we are independent – there was strong support for the GTC to take a role in championing a new vision for teaching.

So over the last six months, we have been working on a vision statement for teaching in 2012. We have tested our ideas with quite a wide range of teaching and education organisations – and we have refined our ideas in response to their very constructive feedback.

Let me be clear that we are not just talking about words on a side of A4.

We are talking about a programme of work for the next three and a half to four years. It is a programme of work that is intended to help secure a new vision for teaching and for children and young people.

We all need something to aim for; something to get us out of bed in the morning. For me, it has always been teaching. You chose teaching and then many of you moved into headship presumably because you want to make more of a difference, you want to help more children and young people achieve their potential.

But we are all busy working away in our localities – and the schools and settings that we work in are very different.

I assume that all of your schools have some kind of vision statement; or mission statement; or welcome statement that sets out the school’s ethos; its aims and how pupils, parents and teachers will be treated and will work together.

Think too, about what binds us together despite the very different schools we work in and the different challenges faced by our children and our local communities.

So we believe that a shared vision for teaching, and a shared Code that expresses our shared values, will be useful tools – or useful glue – to express how much we have in common despite the fragmentation that is a growing feature of our education system.

…Colleagues I end where I began – change is in the air – I am optimistic that you will soon have new freedoms to shape the curriculum in your schools; new opportunities to invest in the talents of your teaching staff, to unlock their professional judgement and to use it to assess and support learning much more effectively. The GTC is increasingly seen as an independent, authoritative, body, bringing together the evidence from teachers and I hope we can further support you in your work.

Our role in facilitating teacher learning and collaboration and developing the means by which the profession can hold, share and celebrate its pedagogical knowledge is well-recognised. I hope I have shown how the GTC can support a debate about teaching and learning and I hope that you will join that debate and work with us.

Thank you