Since Labour came into power, talk has been of expanding and using the school workforce more creatively and flexibly. More teachers would be employed, while a growing army of support staff would take on new roles, sign up to new courses and take advantage of new routes into teaching.
Yet despite the Government's rosy picture of school employment, staff in coming years may find themselves pondering not their career paths but whether they will have a job at all.
The most immediate threat to jobs in schools is budget allocations. Last year's budgets put a brake on the already stuttering Government plans to restructure the school workforce, with most schools seeing cuts, or no real rises in funding. Many resorted to using reserves of cash just to retain existing staff in current posts; some resorted to staff redundancies.
Now the talk is of a further round of tight budget setting. The DfES recently announced that school budgets will rise again this year, but what is unclear is whether the increase will be 3.4 per cent for everyone, or on average by 3.4 per cent.
Like last year, the funding will barely cover increases already programmed into the system, including pay rises and threshold agreements. As a result, this year's funding can only at best maintain the fragile status quo, although local education authorities are already projecting job losses on a growing scale.
Smaller schools, in particular, are unlikely to be able to afford support staff because of financial constraints, and now with the timetable for the implementation of the workload agreement in place, they are also less likely to be able to put it into practice.
Adding to the budgeting problems of some schools is falling rolls. At present, school budgets are directly linked to the number of children on the roll. Therefore, any decline in pupil numbers automatically triggers a reduction in overall grant, regardless of just how much the Govern- ment provides or the LEA actually passes on. What rise will schools with falling rolls receive this year?
And it is these declining pupil numbers that pose the far greater threat to the numbers and types of school jobs in the future. Alarmingly, neither Government nor the professional associations seem to be seriously addressing this longer-term picture for employment.
The two factors that will determine the future make-up of the school workforce are both demographic:
- First, pupil numbers will fall by 610,000 by 2016. Based on current pupil:teacher ratios, this means that 41,000 fewer teachers will be needed.
- Second, 50,000 of the teachers who trained in the late 1960s and early 1970s are due to retire before 2010.
In the balance
Raising concerns about longer-term employment prospects may seem overly pessimistic. After all, won't the number of teachers retiring equate very roughly with the drop in teaching posts? Unfortunately, natural wastage will not offer a simple solution to the problem.
Obviously, pupil numbers within a school will fall by dribs and drabs, not conveniently by whole classes. The fall in pupil numbers will also be disproportionate across LEAs. Some areas can expect substantial rises in population, notably London, where we are constantly told that teachers find it extremely difficult to find affordable accommodation. So, while numbers may add up, staff may not want or be able to afford to work where the jobs will be. And rising rolls don't necessarily lead to job creation.
Training expands
The increasing numbers of training places available also suggests a rosy future for employment in schools, but again this may be misleading. Government commitment to education has driven the expansion of places available on teacher training courses, and recruitment is buoyant.
This expansion of teacher training is part of the wider expansion of higher education, which has become a central plank in New Labour education policy. So too is the expansion in training for teaching assistants, and the revision of their roles and responsibilities.
The burgeoning number of places available for training teaching assistants is set to rise further as the Teacher Training Agency awards contracts to universities and higher education institutions to deliver the Higher Level Teaching Assistant qualification. TTA money will fund 7,000 training places in 2005-05, 14,000 in 2005-06 and a massive 20,000 in 2006-07.
Along with the expansion in training places comes the increase in the 'routes' into training. Flexibility is the watchword, as opportunities to train proliferate. But more training places do not necessarily mean more jobs.
Planning a workforce of 400,000 people isn't simple, but the DfES has successively failed to estimate and project teacher numbers with any accuracy, as has been demonstrated by the litany of emergency measures and schemes to attract recruits. This pattern of crisis management is an unfortunate by-product of poor demographic planning that stretches back over 40 years.
In the 1960s, the Government responded to the large rise in school population with a major expansion in teacher training places, a policy that continued unabashed throughout the decade. The capacity of existing teacher training colleges was expanded, and new colleges were built to cater for the demand for teachers.
This increase was part of a more general expansion in opportunities in higher education, which had seen the creation of the first clutch of new universities, such as East Anglia, York and Warwick - a situation similar to that of today.
By the early 1970s, the Department had finally woken up to the fact that it faced a rapid and steep decline in pupil numbers and an oversupply of teachers. In response, draconian cuts in teacher training places were implemented; the boom was over.
The lessons from this experience were quickly forgotten and the Department was again caught out during a similar dramatic reduction in the school population in the 1980s. Now once again we are on the brink of a similar huge decline in the school population just as the number of training places is rising.
Future forecast
So what will be the fallout from this mismatch of pupil and staff numbers? Nationally, there seems to be a policy vacuum about how to respond to the impending changes. The Government is happy to take the credit for the extra money that it is pumping into education, but is choosing to stay out of the employment debate and saying nothing about falling rolls. There is little prospect of the Government changing the current system of capitation-based funding to schools, and there is simply no prospect that employment levels will remain stable if such funding continues.
As pupil numbers fall, support staff are initially likely to see their job security become more precarious, but as the decline in pupils becomes more acute, it is teachers' jobs that will become more vulnerable. A teacher costs almost three times as much to employ as a classroom assistant.
Emerging to take their place is likely to be a tier of better trained and more skilled support staff. Such 'higher level' assistants are likely to take on more teaching duties, and a starfish formation is likely to develop with a highly-paid teacher at the centre as the manager of learning and supervising a number of teaching assistants.
Such a restructured workforce was mooted in the leaked DfES report Workforce Reform - Blue Skies, which was criticised by the teaching unions.
If we are to have the restructured workforce that we need and want to educate our children in future, it is time that the Government:
- examined the factors that will influence employment
- forecast the number of teachers and assistants that will be needed
- considered the roles and responsibilities that teaching assistants can expect to undertake, and what terms and conditions they will enjoy.
We also need to have a far clearer idea of whether the past seven years of Government policy has provided children with more support and opportunity in the classroom.
We don't know what impact policy is actually having on the education service. The numbers of teachers, nursery nurses and teaching assistants appears to have increased, but additional support for children has been disproportionate and very unevenly spread across the system.
The reformed school workforce, with a redefinition of roles and responsibilities, marks an important change in the way we will educate children in the future. And only when we are eventually able to see what the structure of school staffing is like will employees - teachers and assistants alike - know their job prospects.
