Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

A new school year has just started, new students have just arrived – what about new teachers? Are there a lot of new faces in the staffrooms? One of the stories frequently told about schools serving poor communities is that they suffer from very high and damaging staff turnover. Few teachers stay a long time, and, relative to schools in the affluent suburbs, there is a constant ‘churn’ of staff. This lack of experienced teachers reduces the chances of new teachers learning the trade on the job, and means that both students and school leaders are forever coping with new names, personalities and teaching styles.

Is this true or urban myth? For the first time, we can start to answer this question systematically, moving beyond a collection of local anecdotes. New data collected from all schools about their workforce has the potential to hugely improve…

Rebecca Allen

Chris Cook, the Financial Times education correspondent, has been writing about the Department for Education’s suggestion that the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB)should consider whether greater variation in teachers’ regional pay is needed. He notes that greater variation in teacher pay would create a bizarre situation where schools in our most successful region (London) become even more generously funded, with a deterioration in funding in places where schools appear to struggle.

This observation raises the interesting question as to why London schools do so well, given that the high cost of living should make it difficult for them to recruit and retain the highest quality teachers. Why don’t the capital’s best teachers simply migrate to Stoke or Blackpool where their salary would provide them with a nice family home and a higher standard of living?

I would suggest that there are four possible explanations for this phenomenon, and it is…

Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

This week the House of Commons Education Select Committee published its report on the teaching profession. This post gives the main points of our evidence to the Committee.

We think of Initial Teaching Training (ITT) as encompassing both the initial training and the probationary year. How should this be set up to produce the most effective teachers who will have the greatest impact on pupil progress? ITT plays two roles for the profession – training and selection with the emphasis typically placed on the former. Both are important and neither should be neglected, but we argue that the evidence suggests that if anything, selection is the more important, and this is our focus here. An important role for selection is completely standard for any professional accreditation system in either public or private sectors.

The key argument is this: the sharpest selection should be made…