Teaching by Degrees

 Back in the late 1990s, teaching had a poor reputation. Nobody could argue that it was an occupation of choice for many graduates. Hence the cruel idiom, “Those who can, do; those who can’ t, teach”. But during the early years of the new millennium, a number of factors came together to turn that phrase on its head. Under Ralph Tabberer’s leadership, the Teacher Training Agency started to make teaching attractive again under the slogan “Those who can, teach”; new bursaries started to attract good graduates into shortage subjects like maths, science and languages; and a new programme called Teach First, based on a successful American model, actively brought the best graduates into teaching.

The approach which was adopted by successive governments – with Michael Gove as keen on making teaching more attractive to good graduates with bursaries and Teach First as Andrew Adonis – would appear to have produced some real results, as the data in our report Teaching by Degrees [ADD LINK] today shows. However, there is still a way to go to match the independent sector.

A little over a decade ago, a report by Prof Alan Smithers and Dr Louise Tracey for the Sutton Trust found that there were significant differences between the number of state and independent teachers who had attended the UK’s top-ranked universities. Overall, independent teachers were more likely to have attended Oxford or Cambridge than their state school colleagues. Indeed, despite there being far fewer teachers in the independent sector than the state, the majority of Oxbridge graduates in teaching worked in independent schools.

As successive governments have advocated the recruitment of more state school teachers educated at the UK’s top-ranked universities, that picture has started to shift. We already know that independent school students are more likely to attend Oxbridge, but these policies have sought to level the playing field in terms of their ability to recruit teachers from leading universities.

But Teaching by Degrees, based upon new surveys by the National Foundation for Education Research and the Independent Schools Council suggests that while there remains a significant gap between the proportion of teachers at state and independent schools that have studied at the nation’s best universities, the state sector has increased the proportion of its teachers who studied at Oxbridge. The report estimates that there are now nearly 11,000 secondary teachers with a subject degree from Oxbridge; an increase of about 6,000 since our previous analysis in 2003.

However, the report also shows that in secondary education, independent school teachers are more likely than state school teachers to possess a postgraduate degree. In many subjects, including the shortage subjects of maths and physics, independent school teachers are also more likely to be specialists. Secondary independent teachers are also more than three times as likely to have been awarded a subject degree by Oxford or Cambridge as their state school colleagues.

So there are still challenges alongside the signs of progress. But why does all this matter? In October last year, we published one of our most successful reports, What makes great teaching. We found that one of the most important factors in being a good teacher is thorough subject knowledge. Yet in some key subjects – such as physics, maths and languages – access to specialist teachers (defined here as those with a degree in the subject that they teach) is often lacking in state schools. We think that this harms the chances of their students getting the A levels and GCSEs that they need to study at some of the UK’s leading universities.

Access isn’t just helped or hindered by making (and being able to make) the right subject choices. It can also be a matter of who your teacher knows and their particular experience of university life, including the university that they attended. Research by the Sutton Trust last year found that more than four in ten state school teachers, for example, would rarely or never advise a bright student to apply to Oxbridge. While causality is always difficult to infer, we think that this is partly because proportionally fewer teachers in the state sector were educated at these universities. One way we’re working to change attitudes is through our teacher summer schools; but having more teachers from the best universities working in state schools can help change the culture more fundamentally.

In the future, we’d like to think that students will have equal access to teachers from the UK’s top universities, regardless of the school that they attended. To make this happen, the Sutton Trust would like to see more partnerships between independent and state schools, including in the sixth form for shortage subjects such as physics and languages. We would also like to see the teaching in the best independent day schools open to all on ability rather than ability to pay, through Open Access. And we would also hope that at a time of budgetary restraint, the incentives to encourage good graduates into teaching are developed not curtailed – not least because of the concerns about teacher shortages and rising rolls.

However, the evidence of today’s report is encouraging. It shows that while significant differences remain, there has been real progress. The right policies are needed to continue this progress and ensure that pupils from low and middle income backgrounds are even more likely to access the best specialist teachers and those with the most experience of our leading universities.

Dr Philip Kirby is the Sutton Trust research fellow and author of today’s report.