Posted on by Dr James Shea

Are you a PGCE mentor or PGCE trainee? Read on…

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Every year, around this time, a PGCE trainee is preparing to meet their PGCE mentor or vice versa. And this year, more than ever, I’ve seen on Twitter  ‘Anyone got some advice? I’m about to become a mentor/start teacher education.’

You’ll be pleased to know the whole world has been training teachers and using mentoring to do this for some time so you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. That said, get that starting point wrong and you’ll all be playing catch up until the time comes for the mentor and trainee to part – in some cases with the trainee leaving the profession forever. Attrition (losing trainees from the course) is a real problem in our profession. When trainees across the country start their training, we lose them, nationally, immediately – they are put off by what they find and how they are treated. This loss continues throughout the year. They find child care too hard to arrange around a placement school. They don’t have the finances or time to travel to some placements (they don’t all have cars). There’s also a very wrong set of ideas that the trainee timetable is light – our work on directed time budgets show trainee teachers have more directed tasks than early career teachers. Finally, there’s a wholly unevidenced thought amongst some that giving a trainee ‘intensity’ helps prepare them for the sheer horror of overwork later on in their career. It doesn’t (they leave the profession) and I’d rather we reduce the workload of teachers than think: how can we burn off those who won’t behave like workaholics? If someone comes up with an idea about teaching, ask them where the evidence is. The research even says block placement with twilight sessions leads to lower numbers (isolation, lack of community and support) whereas a day release course (off site once a week to get input, support and reflection) is shown to lead to better retention. All of this is why we’ve extended the NQT year to the two year ECT approach. We need to stop ‘stress testing’ trainees out of the profession and instead support them to stay in the profession. And that leads us to our two year long research project.

When looking at trainees, you’ve got to think about that very first meeting. We have undertaken a two year action research project into this ‘first meeting’, finding out just what mentors and trainees think are important questions for that first meeting. The distilled wisdom of hundreds of mentors and trainees can now be shown in the end set of questions which we recommend be explored for this first meeting. Some of them are quite obvious

What boundaries do we need to set for communicating with each other? Are you okay with phone/email/text? When? When not? How quick does my response need to be?
Do you want the opportunity to speak to me briefly every day about what you’re doing or are you happy to keep it to the weekly mentor meeting?

Some mentors are quite laissez-faire – a trainee can text them on a Sunday evening whereas others would be appalled. Best establish these things quite quickly. And really? I think as a profession we would rather that weekend communications were kept to a minimum these days.

You know how organised we have to be in teaching right? Well, best get it out there quickly if organisation isn’t someone’s forte. And whilst we don’t just mean the trainees, do ask them what their time management is like. But don’t ask them to plan lessons from scratch at the start of their placement. Give them the plans and ask them to learn with you how to adapt them to their class. When it comes to planning from scratch, co-plan with them before letting them progress to full solo planning.

How are you at managing your time – is this something you feel you need to develop?

Some of the questions are about getting straight to the point so people aren’t trying to engineer conversations around to crucial topics so they can finally ask the question that they really need to ask.

What information do you think you need from me to start this placement off as well as you can? What do you expect of me throughout the placement?
What would you describe as your strengths and weaknesses and how do you think they might help or hinder you on placement?

Some of the questions our mentors came up with were quite clever. This one for example:

If you truly had no idea what to do for a lesson, but had to send something in, would you send in something which was in your opinion not very good or would you write in and say you could not do the task?

And what the mentors said was – I can’t give you feedback on empty air. Just because you don’t think an idea is of a good quality, doesn’t mean others will. Send it in.

There was also a tacit acceptance that trainees sometimes arrive to a second placement having had quite a specific first placement experience or previous school experience.

How were you mentored/inducted on your previous placement/employment?  Tell me about what went well and what could have been better.

I haven’t got time to go through all the questions from the research here, but I think I’ll finish with an awareness that there are different pedagogical models that are present in other schools. The DfE says that teacher education should prepare someone to teach in any and all schools in England. All approaches come with limitations and recognising that a trainee is a teacher in development not a teacher being inducted into a school as an employee is a good thing to do. E.g. just because a mentor doesn’t agree with group work or direct instruction doesn’t mean a trainee has to follow suit. Indeed, if your department or school eschews a particular pedagogy then you should ensure your trainee gets an opportunity to develop this area. What happens if they go to another school that is opposite? E.g. some schools have projectors in every classroom and expect the trainees to be comfortable with using well designed and dual coded materials. Other schools have gone the opposite way and stopped using projected materials. Both schools would need to work with their trainee to practice both approaches.

What kind of pedagogical approaches and techniques have you had the opportunity to experiment with previously?  Is there a particular pedagogical approach that you would like to develop in this placement?

That first meeting then – it crucial to getting everything out and ensuring that lines of enquiry, boundaries, fixed ideas, prior knowledge, expectations and so forth are all explored so that you can move forward from that point as a team.

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 3 Comments

A 21st century curriculum for the fourth Industrial Revolution

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As the profession reacts to Starmer’s speech on curriculum reform, it is time to return to thinking about a long term curriculum for pupils rather than a short term curriculum for the school. A while ago we published a controversial blog asking if it would ever be possible to create a curriculum for the white working class. Most replies suggested that people very much hoped we would never create such a curriculum. They did miss the point that we have already got a curriculum for the white working class – the one that they currently study and in some places, reject. We asked, why is it that those in the UK, ourselves included, react uncomfortably when asked to design a separate curriculum for anyone, rather like the curriculum which we see in Germany?

It now seems that Germany have issues with the two sided curriculum they design. Joe Kaeser, who leads the Siemens group, said at the recent Goodwood Festival of Speed a thought he’s been having and saying for some time: the fourth industrial revolution is going to make a lot of people redundant. Anyone in a job where some of that work can be done by computers will see their sector shrink and this means large numbers of people will need to retrain for other careers. People will have to take the knowledge they have learned in one context and move to another working context. I suggest this gives us an opportunity to think about the knowledge we provide as part of the school curriculum as we, as a profession, are producing the 21st century generation of workers for this fourth industrial revolution.

Whilst I see many issues with Bourdieu’s work on habitus (a difficult to define body of knowledge which reproduces cultural and social hierarchies), I have found the notion of transposable habitus much more relevant to today’s society. This is the notion that when you arrive at a new context you use both your explicit and tacit knowledge to help you meet the challenges of the new context. My doctoral research found that pre-service teachers on arrival for their post graduate teaching course immediately set up private social networking groups through WhatsApp and closed Facebook pages, groups which excluded those in power: mentors, tutors and so forth. This tacit knowledge – the use of private social media interactions to subvert power lines, access & create knowledge, and resolve community & individual problems is both transposable and also seen in other areas of society. The European Research Group, run by Jacob Reese Mogg, used a WhatsApp group to function from within the Conservative party.

There exists, I suggest, knowledge which is more transposable. Knowledge which is better suited to being moved from context to context. Knowledge which is not rooted precisely in context, but which functions very well when moved from one context to another: how to collaborate successfully, how to problem solve, fundamental ideas from academic subjects which apply to a wide range of situations and so forth. A transposable curriculum of knowledge which would help those entering a workplace going through the fourth industrial revolution. A period of regular transition rather than a lifetime of working in one context.

When I look at the curriculum in schools for transposable knowledge I see a variable picture. We are doing well in some areas and not so well in others. Knowing explicit knowledge as part of learning has improved, but the debate over what should be known has somewhat stalled, caught in an intellectual vice of the debate between skills and knowledge. There is also a lack of tacit knowledge in many of these curriculums. Something which Spielman sees in her attack on the ‘PiXLfication of education’.. Being able to interact with others online and physically in fluid ways e.g. as a temporary community of practice, is patchily done. Efficient online interactions are clearly not being taught despite efforts from the DfE to push it into the PSHE curriculum. It’s no longer ‘programming in code’ that every child needs to know (AI will do that for them), it’s interacting with others online in a safe and productive way. Physical social interaction skills also need work. Being able to show up to a new context and be socially confident has to be part of a transposable habitus.

Imagine a GCSE in Physical and Online Social Interactions. Imagine Physical Education reformed as Physical and Mental Health Education. Can you? It’s that kind of contemporary and bold thinking I think we are missing from our curriculum planning as we move into this fourth industrial revolution. One that thinks hard about transposable knowledge and transposable tacit knowledge in a way that answers some of that question of how we as educators are ‘developing a curriculum for the 21st century’.

It looks like 2025-8 will see a new NC formed and then new GCSEs on tap first taught 2030. We should be thinking about what we will suggest for content in the inevitable consultations regardless of our political persuasions.

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 2 Comments

Off-rolling – is this just the tip of the ethical iceberg?

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At university, if we want to initiate some kind of intervention in schools as part of a research project we would be expected to review the British Educational Research Association’s (BERA) guidelines. This guideline is full of sensible advice such as:

Researchers should immediately reconsider any actions occurring during the research process that appear to cause emotional or other harm, in order to minimise such harm. The more vulnerable the participants, the greater the responsibilities of the researcher for their protection.  (BERA, 2018, p.19)

So the first thing we have to consider is the likelihood of the intervention causing harm to the pupil. And the second thing we need to consider is that a pupil’s ‘vulnerability’ amplifies our need to protect the child from harm.

Now let’s turn to schools. If a member of staff in a school or group of schools wishes to initiate some kind of intervention as part of an evidence informed project to increase outcomes for the pupils or schools what guidelines do they have to follow? Well, the answer is, quite simply, none. Yet, if they did the same project in their school as part of undertaking a PGCE or Master’s then it would have to go through the exact same ethical approval process as described above.

It is important and worthwhile at this stage to set out that I am not talking about low level interventions of the sort that schools and teachers do all of the time. I’m talking about practice which could cause harm. And to vulnerable pupils in particular.

Let’s take off-rolling as an example. Here we see that staff in a school or group of schools have decided to create an intervention. The intervention could possibly benefit the pupils in the school cohort through redistribution of resources. It could even hypothetically benefit those who leave the school through the process of off-rolling. As part of an ethical approval process you would evaluate the likelihood of harm falling to those who are being off-rolled and look at the outcomes for them after they leave mainstream schooling.  Well, it turns out the outcomes for those who leave mainstream schooling are poor: 1-6% get their 5 good GCSEs. That’s considerable harm. Then you evaluate who is being off-rolled. Well, it turns out it is SEND pupils amongst others. I think we can safely say that they meet the term ‘more vulnerable’. This intervention would have died at the proposal stage at the table of the ethics committee. Even internal off-rolling such as a grammar school preventing Year 12s from moving to Year 13 if they did not attain specific grades would most certainly fail the ethical test.

But here is the rub. These schools that are off-rolling pupils are ‘compliant’. They meet the requirements that are set out by the accountability framework. The DfE doesn’t approve, OFSTED doesn’t approve, the children’s commissioner for England doesn’t approve, parents struggle to get provision for the SEND children or a second year of A level education for their children and yet despite this, schools are ‘compliant’.

So is that the requirement? That schools have to be ‘compliant’ and that this does not take into account ethics? Should not all major decisions of this type have to go through an internal ethical panel which in itself is reviewed and checked by an external ethical body? If schools are to be more evidence informed does it not also follow they should be ethically sound? Should governors and trustees also be part of this ethical process and receive training?

Before you say this is unworkable, consider how it is done at university. If a student proposes an intervention they have to write a section on ethics setting out how it meets the ethical requirements. It is reviewed by a qualified tutor. There is an ethics board for more contentious interventions. At each stage, if there is any doubt about the intervention, it is passed up further through more senior boards, staffed by more experienced and qualified senior professionals. The bigger the proposal, the more scrutiny for ethics it attracts.

The government could legislate against off-rolling easily and the affected schools would all change their actions and become ‘compliant’ again. Until the next ethically challenging idea thought up to affect outcomes within the accountability framework. Wouldn’t it be better to also have a headteacher’s body draw up a code of ethics similar to that from BERA and for all teachers and schools to use this when considering evidence informed interventions for their pupils?