Teacher recruitment is in something of a crisis. For well over three years now, teacher recruitment and retention has been in the headlines, and never more so than this year. The Commons Public Account Committee have noted that there is a “growing sense of crisis”, whilst policies to address shortages have been “sluggish and incoherent.”

The figures around recruitment are pretty stark. In the last six years, the number of primary age students increased by over 14%, and the numbers in secondary are predicted to rise by 19% by 2025. The crisis is neatly illustrated by the following statistics:

• 2016, 42,830 teachers left the workforce (9.9% of the total workforce).
• Nearly 34,910 of these teachers left for reasons other than retirement.
• In the same period just 24,120 newly qualified teachers were trained (replacing 5.6% of the workforce)
• The remainder of workforce replenishment is coming from teachers returning to the profession (14,200).
• Although the number of teachers rose between 2010 and 2016, the numbers of secondary teachers actually fell by 4.9%.

If we assume that pupils numbers increase as stated, we will need a teaching workforce of around 55,000 to cope with numbers by 2025. With applications for PGCE courses reported as being down by as much as 29% this year, it is no wonder there is a feeling of crisis.

Solutions

In my last blog, I spent some time explaining why I think we still have a long way to go in teaching students how to engage fully with historical interpretations, and not simply dismissing views on the grounds of an historian’s motive. Today I want to deal with a second key aspect of helping children to become better critical readers both in history, and more broadly, namely historical truth.

Putting truth back into history
I fear we spend too little time talking about historical truth in schools. This is because the idea of historical truth has become immensely unpopular. Post-modernists like Jenkins have argued that history has no objective truth, and that to pretend otherwise is a dangerous fallacy. Indeed, Jenkins (1991, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2009) suggests that all history writing is a battle for different groups to construct their own histories in their own self-interest. Taking this to its extreme, he even made the case for the removal of the study of history altogether (Jenkins, 1999, 2009). To my mind, this rejection of the possibility of historical truth is a dangerous stance to take, now more than ever, and one which prevents our students from being properly critical of different truth-claims.

I have long been a fan of Tom Bennett’s no nonsense approach to behaviour management. I have recommended Bennett’s blog many times to trainees and NQTs nervous about expectations in the classroom (as you will see from these pages). As such, there are many things I like about the ITT behaviour report (one of the long-awaited responses to the Carter review) which was published on Wednesday:

• I think it is good for trainees to learn about classroom routines at uni as well as at school (I can’t think of many providers who won’t cover this, although SD/SCITT courses may use their own particular school approaches which might be accused of lacking breadth).
• I think it is a great idea for trainees to have considered how they might respond effectively to common misbehaviour or issues in the classroom (again this is covered through observations of experienced teachers, discussions of approaches to behaviour management, use of videos etc.)
• I think it is good for trainees to be aware of the importance of relationships with students (again this is covered and dealt with in our course and certainly by the schools we partner with. Of course things break down more when schools have their own ideas about those relationships which jar with university input eg. When schools allow children to take a time-out by their own choice, or when pupils can ‘appeal’ a teacher’s sanction.
• I think it is very important for trainees to get support with behaviour management. This does however need to come from the most credible sources – often this means in schools.
• I love the idea that trainees should have to observe people with excellent behaviour management – behaviour experts. However I also feel that schools tend to define these as the people who don’t have behaviour problems. Far more useful might be to observe a teacher for whom behaviour is an effort, but who does not let their standards slip and deals with issues. The risk with the “behaviour expert” approach is that it becomes all about personalities and those behaviour demagogues which all schools have.
• I think it can be a powerful tool when trainees video and watch their lessons critically.

​So far, so vanilla. Yet I also feel there are a number of fundamental issues with the approaches suggested by Bennett and his team. The following points are very much a response to the report and to Tom's blog "Let's fix this together" published today.

After a bit of a pause, Fri-deas is back. This time, everything has a bit of a Cold War theme. Thanks to Sarah for sending these through. If you like these ideas, or indeed try them in class, do let us know how you get on! Equally, if you have a Fri-dea to share, do send it on through.

​Fri-dea 1: Revising knowledge and chronology through "match reports"

During CBT days last week I set my Year 9 classes the task of summing up the events of the Cold War that we have looked at so far in a sports/ football match commentary. The aim was that they could revise and consolidate everything they have looked at over the last few weeks, and also decide at each point which superpower could be said to have "scored a point/goal".

I also thought it would be useful for them to consider chronology, because we've jumped around a bit in the last few lessons. I've taken their books in to mark today and what they have come up with has by far exceeded my expectations. They were able to use their knowledge really cleverly to make some brilliant, and creative reports. Here is an example in which the student is describing the Berlin Airlift:
"The Americans go flying over the top of the reds, a defiant goal for the blues!"
Maybe, more importantly than being really impressed at what they've produced, reading their reports is certainly making marking much more entertaining for me!

​Fri-dea 2: A game of chicken with this egg-cellent approach to understanding MAD

My Year 9s have recently been studying mutually assured destruction (MAD) in the context of the Cold War. We were about to move on and look at the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, when I marked their homework ("overall did MAD make the world safer?") they had ALL argued that it did! This made me wonder if they had failed to grasp the implications of MAD , particularly that the USA and USSR both had highly destructive weapons [nice focus on the substantive concept here - Mr F].

To help demonstrate the implications and dangers of the MAD situation and the fact that there are no guarantees in nuclear war, I tried to make the concept a bit more accessible. I invited a "brave volunteer" to join me at the front and play the part of the USSR to my USA. I then produced a box of eggs and held an egg over the student's head, and armed them with an egg also to hold over mine. The class loved it, and were very much encouraging their class-mate to egg me. We then had a discussion (eggs still suspended) about what the guarantees were (or weren't) in this situation, and how safe everyone ought to feel.  I also acted out being very nervous, egg-agerating (groan) ​[Omlettin' this slide] being in a dilemma over whether I should get in there first and drop my egg.

Thankfully I avoided an egging, but the activity had meant that when we went on to look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, the class seemed to really appreciate the tension and danger of the situation, and that there were no guarantees. They thankfully lost the modern mind-set and benefit of hindsight that had been hindering them, and they were certainly engaged in the lesson! ​[A really nice use of an accessible demonstration to help make the abstract more concrete here. Importantly this is linked back to the core content really well. Cracking! *sorry*]

A few weeks ago I was  working with trainees at Leeds Trinity on the theme of local history. I wanted to place a particular emphasis on how local stories might be a means to help pupils connect to the wider national narrative. This is not only a great way to approach complex national stories, but also ties in with the new focus in the curriculum on putting the historic environment in context, something which I think is a hidden gem of those specifications where you get to choose your study!

The idea was to replicate some of the planning processes we used to go through when I was head of history and to build an interesting historical enquiry rooted in a local story. As such I hope this might be of some use to departments planning their own local history enquiries.

Over the course of a day, we were able to wrestle with enquiries which linked pupils'  localities with the bigger national picture. We were also able to grapple with real issues around appropriate sequencing, disciplinary development, and the interplay between contextual knowledge and historical thinking. We also learned some interesting lessons about letting the history lead the lesson sequence, rather than the other way around, as I will explain in due course...

This is a primer post which goes with my upcoming blog on progression in history. You can find the main post HERE. You can also find my other primer post, in which I attempted to do a demolition job on the idea of linear progression models HERE.

Linear progression models are riddled with problems. In this post, I want to focus on one response to the confusions created them: research-based progression models. Let me be clear from the outset, research-based models of progression were not designed as a replacement for National Curriculum levels, rather to address their myriad shortcomings and help teachers to really get to grips with what progression in history looks like.

The best thing to do to understand research-based models of progression is to read Lee and Shemilt’s seminal article in Teaching History 113, “A scaffold not a cage”. Research based models differ from linear models because they take students’ work and understanding as a starting point to describe what improvement in history actually looks like. In the above article, Lee and Shemilt offer some descriptions of what pupils’ thinking about historical evidence looks like. They then divide this into “stages” of development. The upper four stages of their model are given here.

This blog is a primer for my upcoming post on thinking about progression in history. You can find the main post HERE.

Linear progression models have dominated the way we talk about progression in history for many years now. Once upon a time, they were an odd perversion created by the mis-use of National Curriculum levels, but now they are absolutely everywhere, infiltrating everything from A Level to GCSE.

Linear progression models attempt to create a series of steps which pupils must climb in order to improve at a subject. In maths for example, pupils might begin to understand the concept of angles and their relationships to straight lines by looking at how angles on a straight line add up to 360 degrees, then moving on to deal with angles on parallel lines, and so on. In maths this has the potential to work because there are clear steps for pupils to take to improve in their knowledge of angles and lines.

In history the situation is quite different. Linear progression models, such as those used by many schools up until the abolition of the National Curriculum level descriptors, were generally based on the idea that students could improve through a focus on their second-order understanding, rather than knowledge; that is to say, the ways in which we understand history, for example through our understanding of significance, cause, or change. See the example below: