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The Execution of University Based ITT - An Obituary?

11/26/2015

5 Comments

 
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​“[Hugh Despenser]…as a traitor…you shall be drawn and quartered, and your quarters dispersed throughout the kingdom…and because at all times you have been disloyal and a formenter of strife…you shall be disembowelled, and after that your bowels shall be burned. Confess yourself a traitor and a renegade! And so go to meet your doom. Traitor! Evildoer!! and Convicted!!! (Brigstocke Sheppard, 1889, p.413)”
​The story of Hugh Despenser’s conviction and later execution was the first thing which popped into my head as I fired up Twitter last night to be greeted by the news that, due to new application rules for 
Initial Teacher Training, some of the most successful and important History PGCE courses were not likely to be viable to run from 2016. Meanwhile, school based training still had a bank of reserved places, despite struggling to fill these in many cases in the past. Now, I have no inherent opposition to schools providing ITT, if it is done well, however I would argue that much of this has been driven by an ideological desire to break up university control of Initial Teacher Training. Just like the unfortunate Despenser, university education departments have been accused of formenting strife, being disloyal to the cause of traditional education, and ignoring the practicalities of training classroom teachers. What is bitterly ironic is that many of the places which are facing the prospect of being forced to shut their doors, are at the forefront of the fight against the dumbing down of education, exam driven practice and pandering to Ofsted’s latest whims. The stage has been set for the final execution of university based ITT, for it to be divided up for academy chains and private education companies to fight over. Much like the execution of Despenser, the process has been long and painful.
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Drawing
“On 24 November 1326 …Despenser was roped to four horses…and dragged through the city…”

Over the last few years, the government has pursued a consistent policy to drag education departments through the dirt. When Michael Gove was Education Secretary he referred to the ‘vested interests’ of university based teacher trainers, suggesting that they were only interested in propping up their finances. Indeed he went so far as to label ITT providers as part of “The Blob,” a group he described in the Daily Mail as, “the network of educational gurus in and around our universities who praised each others’ research, sat on committees that drafted politically correct curricula, drew gifted young teachers away from their vocation and instead directed them towards ideologically driven theory.” (Gove, 2013). He continued to explain how “The Blob” were: opposed to rigorous academic education; in thrall to Sixties ideologies; and promoters of the worst elements of child centred learning. Instead Gove pushed the idea that teachers should be trained in designated teaching schools by the School Direct route.

The School Direct route gets trainees to apply directly to schools to gain a placement. Schools, supported by universities, then provide the majority of teacher training in-house. Whilst this has worked brilliantly in some instances, there is huge variation in provision. Whilst Tory policy has championed traditional academic education, the use of textbooks and direct instruction, many training schools are actually opposed to such measures. A head teacher at one large training school network I visited in North Yorkshire made the comment that knowledge was no longer necessary because students could just “Google it”.  In the worst cases, teacher training has been used as a means to keep academy chain funding high – the exact charge levied against universities.

One of the key findings of the Carter Review into the quality of ITT was that the best providers had a constant and challenging focus on subject knowledge. In the example of the teacher training academy chain given above, no funding or time was put in to support teachers’ subject specific development, meaning that the majority of training fell under the banner of generic classroom management. Ironically again, this kind of practice falls well short of the best university ITT providers where subject knowledge is at the very centre of training provision. This is an issue of both access to expertise in many schools, and the time and funding to do subject specific training effectively. Indeed, many schools are being forced to cut back on their training budgets and are resorting to generic cross-curricular training as a means to “fill” the CPD space which is left. Compared to the detailed exploration of subject specific pedagogy which happens in the best university ITT, a huge gap exists in the potential quality of training for new teachers. Even in the best meaning examples, much school based training revolves around activities to engage students rather than really unpicking how one might say, teach the significance of the Norman conquest effectively to 11 year olds. Partly as a result of these issues, many trainees have continued to opt for a PGCE route into teacher training. By contrast, School Direct places sometimes go unfilled as universities have been forced to turn away good trainees thanks to limited places. Yet government attacks have been enough, up until now, to bruise, if not kill university based ITT.

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Disemboweling
“Despenser was raised a full 50 feet… A man climbed along side him, plunged a knife into Despenser’s abdomen and cut out his entrails and heart…”

With the failure of School Direct to comprehensively overtake university based ITT, 2015 has seen a concerted effort to force trainees down the School Direct route. This year for example, universities have only been allocated around 30% of the potential trainees for history. Coupled with this has been a change to the admissions procedures. Instead of the recent practice of allocating each university a set number of places to fill, the government has created a national pool of university places which are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. This has had disastrous consequences. The impetus for some university providers has been to offer places and secure funding as quickly as possible. This has played directly into the hands of universities whose advertising is strongest, and whose selection and interviewing processes are potentially the fastest and least rigorous. Ultimately those willing to sacrifice the rigour of selection are those who have ended up with the most trainees. By comparison, the History PGCE at Cambridge, a world leading course, only managed to secure its future through government intervention which allowed the university a guaranteed 75% of its previous recruitment level. This was done as the national pool of places would all have been allocated before the full selection process was completed. Eight other universities had their courses saved in this last minute measure. However the same issue was true for all those institutions who took the time to carefully select candidates for interview and follow a rigorous process of selection. The market system has yet again created a race to the bottom.  School Direct providers on the other hand have a ring-fenced set of places to allocate to whom they wish. This has increased significantly from previous years, forcing many to choose School Direct as their only option. If the government was looking to secure quality in ITT, this move is achieving entirely the opposite. It has effectively ripped out the beating heart of university based ITT. The fact that it is busy trying to stuff the organs back in is really neither here nor there at this point.

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Quartering
“The corpse was lowered to the ground and the head cut off. It was later sent to London, and Despenser’s arms, torso and legs were sent [to the four corners of the kingdom]” (Mortimer, 2003, p.162).”

The question is now is what will happen to education departments in universities. Certainly, many will continue to support the School Direct provision as they have done. However their influence will (as presumably planned) be extremely fragmented. The point of the School Direct route was to give heads more control over the way their teachers were trained, but what this risks doing is training teachers whose primary aim is to follow school systems and increase school outcomes (in the narrowly defined terms that they often are). The move risks narrowing ITT and creating institutionalised trainees who are only taught within the bounds of their school experience. It is notable for example that many training schools I have had contact with up and down the country, have either failed to respond to the issues of life after levels, or have introduced systems which recreated many of the old issues. Additionally, many I have spoken to have not even read the recent report of the Commission on Assessment Without Levels. This begs the key question: how are such schools providing trainees with the recommended focus and training in in high quality assessment. In other cases, many of the academies which now train teachers, have had the freedom not to change their KS3 curriculum at all. As a result, they continue to teach the unreformed history curriculum which Gove criticised so heavily as being Hitler and the Henries. Of course there are, and will be training schools which do an excellent job, but time pressures and the funding crisis in schools will always lead to reduced theoretical and subject specific input without extremely careful planning. Even where such support is planned for, it will be entirely dependent on the staffing and expertise within the school, and the goodwill of those people assigned training roles. Again, in the North Yorkshire example, such roles are being assigned to UPS3 teachers as a way for them to “earn” their money, rather than to those who necessarily want to train teachers. In this example, teachers were given no only an hour of time to fulfil the role and no extra, subject specific input. This is clearly not a good way to build high quality teacher training. It is a far cry from the tight knit bodies of mentors which are built up over years at the best teaching universities. Two North-Eastern trainees I spoke to in the last few months noted that they had received no subject specific training in their training schools at all. One even noted that they had spent two hours learning about De Bono’s Thinking Hats and the “Flipped Classroom.” The new model of ITT seems to be entrenching many of the issues Michael Gove began battling back in 2010: the rejection of traditional methods; a suspicion of direct instruction; a slavish focus on the perceived demands of Ofsted; a lack of subject specific training; ignorance of educational research and theory and so on. This issue will only get worse as the expertise of universities is further cut up and divided between increasing numbers of school based trainers.

Action
The impact of the reforms to ITT admissions are certainly a worry for anyone involved in teaching or teacher education. This is certainly not a blog supporting universities at the expense of schools. There are many schools who are doing an excellent job, working with universities, to provide outstanding training. Equally there are several universities whose provision might well raise some questions. What it important is that we keep flying the flag for high quality provision, and demand that the government does not continue to damage the future of British education through its ideological crusade against university based education.

5 Comments
Anon
11/26/2015 10:53:48 pm

Great to read this blog as I was thinking it was just me! I am a mentor for teach first and am depressed about the low quality training and support I can provide due to lack of time. My trainee is short changed in comparison to the excellent PGCE training I received at Durham under the fabulous Martin Richardson.

Reply
Alex Ford
11/27/2015 07:14:45 am

It is a very tough issue. I know that I received brilliant support and training in my second school and that such support does exist. I am just worried that many academy chains do not have the philosophy of teaching at their heart - whereas my departmental colleagues were very keen to train and support me. Government really needs to be supporting high quality partnerships and ensuring all training schools give trainees fair access to theoretical and subject specific training

Reply
Anon 2
11/27/2015 10:15:20 am

As a former PGCE course leader can I say this is the most accurate and compelling account of what has happened to ITT or ITE (Initial Teacher Education) since 2010. I have acted as external examiner at a range of Universities since the 2004 and the nature and quality of ITE has been consistently of a very high standard. You correctly identified the strengths of University based ITE with the strong focus on developing distinct and rigorous subject pedagogies. In 2015 I was asked to act as external examiner for a School Direct partnership in parallel with the University based PGCE. The differences were instructive. The SD students had similar qualifications (2.1 degree or above) and they were enthusiastic and effective teachers in the classroom, however they were less well informed about developments in their subject nationally and were never really clear about what was happening with pupils 'subject' thinking. Much of what they had learnt was from imitating mentors, it was a case of fads and neat tricks. They were also more rigid in terms of what they perceived to be good practice - this was usually what they had observed or what they had been told to do in their placement schools. The SD schools were also largely based on the periphery of the city in what might correctly be called the leafier suburbs, the schools were successful but not typical of the schools across the region. The PGCE students based at the University had experience of partnership schools in a wide range and variety of setting and saw the challenges at first hand. Most of the SD students expressed a view that they probably wouldn't seek jobs in inner city areas. In some of these inner city schools senior staff spoke highly of their partnership with the University and its ability to recruit highly qualified and well motivated PGCE students because of this link.

I think there is only one aspect of your post that I might not entirely agree with and this is the issue of 'emergency' recruitment. I still have links with the subject community through a range of organisations and personal and professional connections. When the NCTL announced it's inept and ill-advised processes last year there was discussion in HEIs about the implications of these changes. There was an undersatnding that the process from interview to offer would have to be significantly accelerated. At open events potential candidates were made aware of the changing situation and urged to submit applications as soon as UCAS opened.
I was advising and guiding a family friend on the application process this year and everything was proceeding relatively normally, it seemed at first that this was even more efficient than in previous years. 2 Universities offered interview dates within a couple of days of receiving the application. When news began to filter through about the fate of PE clearly these Universities were concerned that something similar could happen to their PGCE courses and interview dates were rapidly brought forward. Seeing this from the other side of the fence, from the perspective of the applicant was interesting. Using my privileged contacts I was able to see that there was a growing worry that courses would close if they could not get their applicants into the respective universities urgently.
I don't think the criteria that HEIs have used have been diluted in 5 Universities the minimum degree remains 2.1. There is also a significant amount of 'regionalism' in ITE recruitment, certainly in the NW where I lived and worked 75% of the recruits were from the region made up equally of people who had stayed in the NW and gone to a local university, or who had come back to the NW after studying at a University outside the region. The 25% were usually 'stayers' who wanted at least another year in the region.
This is another significant failure of the NCTL process - it never took account of regional need or regional variation, something which has been significantly compounded by the closure of courses in some parts of the country following Ofsted Inspections where providers ONLY got a grade 2 outcome.
It is a crazy world in ITE and in many ways I am relieved that I largely watch from the outside: Never thought I'd end up quoting Rudyard Kipling but this does seem appropriate:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
I did see the things that had been part of my professional life for almost 20 years broken. I could have stayed and fought but I dedcided to do other things.

Reply
Chris Culpin
11/27/2015 10:59:25 am

A brilliant - and accurate - analysis of the real situation, rather than the fiction that the DfE prefers to believe (rather like Cameron's reasons for going to war - but that's a different problem).
I would only like to add this, based on our experience of taking on a Schools Direct-trained teacher. Even in good training schools students learn to teach with the approaches, and often the resources, of the school they're in. But teachers move to other schools, with different approaches, and governments change curricula and assessment systems with monotonous regularity. Without PGCE-style training, giving young teachers the deep understanding of what History education is about, they are left floundering

Reply
C.Stollberg
12/5/2015 05:14:41 pm

Educators should be open to change, even when it takes an abrupt and radical form. And yet is the very concept of change that demands an interplay of the old and the new, the proven and the innovative, the baby and the bathwater.

It is most regrettable and discouraging that the recent decisions concerning the Cambridge History PGCE (and similar courses) seem to be based on one-dimensional quotas instead of data that is more meaningful for the quality of teacher training.

I have greatly benefitted from a course with such a close-knit community that allowed the integration of myself as an EU trainee. It was not only the renowned quality of this particular course that made me apply, but also the international reputation of the PGCE and its compatibility with the German equivalent of a 1-2 year course that integrates school-led mentoring with seminar-based reflection. While my own experience might be somewhat unique, the principles of outstanding mentoring and training apply to the needs of every history trainee. To stay in tradition with Counsell’s five Rs, I am going to present them in the same mnemonic way:

Rigour: an unapologetically comprehensive take on the philosophy of history education, subject knowledge and educational research
Reflection: this is delivered in study sessions led by experts and individual tutorials that supplement the school experience. This cannot be shouldered by school mentors or week-end seminars.
Relationships: the course lives and breathes through the relationships between lecturers, mentors and guest-speakers that have been built for years, fostering a community strong enough to include trainees from all walks of life.
Routines: in order to achieve the very ambitious goals of the course, it relies on routines that emerged from years of meticulous planning and collaborative work with local schools.
Reach: some might not realise that almost all trainees escape the Cambridge bubble and make use of the ties with schools all over Cambridgeshire and beyond. Even wider is the reach of individual course leaders and practitioners who share their work at conferences and in journals. The reach of these conference outcomes and publications goes beyond national borders and contributes to a European and global discourse of history education.

Those principles are not only true for the Cambridge History course, but all other courses that are run with enthusiasm and track records of excellence. I am yet to see an alternative that would justify their extinction. Losing the CamHist PGCE in its current form is an unprecedented act of sabotage that undermines the very principles needed to create meaningful change in education. On a personal level, it is heartbreaking and ethically questionable to deprive candidates, former trainees and established mentors of this cornerstone of their professional development and practice at such short notice.

As an incredulous bystander, I can only hope that the decisions will be reviewed - this time with quality of teaching and learning in mind - and that the course will be allowed to be a motor of change, not a casualty.

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