The Impact of the planned changes in post-16 teaching qualifications

It is an irony that The Lingfield Review  established to ‘consider how best to sustain the professionalism of FE teachers so that the quality of service to learners might continuously improve’ (p6) concludes with recommendations that will predictably lead to undermining the enhancements to professionalism the sector has achieved since 2001. Is it intentional that the review’s definitional criteria underpinning professionalism (p22) does not acknowledge that gaining ‘expert and specialized knowledge of the field in which one is practising’ requires an initial gateway qualification as well as ‘continuous enhancements of expertise’? 

The text seems intent on drawing readers into a cynical game. Amidst the  UCU boycott and controversy, the Institute for Learning remains the only professional body FE teachers have had.  The fees are a bargain when compared to membership fees paid by other professionals. The proposed guild, as an employer rather than a professional body, is no substitute.  

The review positions FE as central to creating and sustaining a ‘technically accomplished workforce’ that will enable the UK to outperform its competitors in a difficult economic environment.  Amidst all of this,  colleges will no doubt be held to the same or higher quality standard.  I am sure they will achieve it. But at what cost? 

My concern is that many will create a workplace environment in which the only thing that counts is 85% more, and improving. Where 100% is not good enough: only perfectly perfect, and getting better,  is good enough. 

The preparedness of teachers to deliver these outcomes is now to be based on an employer’s sense of ‘duty’ as if this were the only counter balance to coercive co-ordination. Those of us who express concern about the professionalism of post 16 teachers may well be missing the point.  The line of argument that points out the compulsory nature of pre-16 teaching no longer holds. School teachers no longer require qualifications if they teach in an academy and most schools will have academy status by 2013. It is the well being of teachers that may be greater cause for concern; their well being is at stake. I am amidst interviews with trainees for a Portraits of Authenticity and Professionalism project; those participating in the research have recently completed a PgCE / Cert Ed.  In conversation with teachers of apprenticeships working for a private training provider, they describe - without a flicker - conditions that made my eyes water.  As a freelance trainer they may turn up to teach a session in an empty room - desks and chairs are a maybe;  there are no guarantees of what they will find and finding a room that has been appropriately booked - is considered a success. If they need to use a projector, a computer or anything – they are expected to provide them without help. There is minimal contact with colleagues – and certainly no informal contact.  Freelance trainers are unlikely to sit down with each other for a pint or have lunch. How would they; they hardly ever meet face to face. They are required to pay the company for access to the materials they need to teach – professional standards, assessment criteria - or obtain them independently from an awarding body. The organisation provides one weekend of training per year. This is the only time when colleagues are able to meet.  Held somewhere down south, attending the session is free but travel is paid for by teachers themselves.  

The contractor achieves success rates of 85%: more and improving. So, that’s all right then.  That is after all what what counts as quality. These teachers understand the value of initial teacher training.  In some instances they have funded their own PgCE / Cert Ed from redundancy money, personal savings or wherever they can get it.  

For many trainees, teaching regulations have been a safeguard and an opportunity. They safeguard the quality of teaching, and therefore it's status as a profession by ensuring only those who have been rigorously assessed gain entry to the field.  By defining standards and expectations, they have at least the potential to provide a basis for securing conditions that lead to genuinely good quality outcomes - something broader and more meaningful than 85%.  They also provide a valuable opportunity, ensuring FE teachers are allowed to develop the pedagogic expertise required to do a continuously improving job.
P

for Adults Learning

NIACE quality and professionalism in FE

Nov 2012

When is a Teacher not a Teacher?

When is a Teacher not a Teacher?

It is interesting that the Leader of the National Union of Students calls on government to require HE teachers to be trained and qualified as teachers in the same week that the BIS publishes its Govean Review of teaching qualification for FE. FE - the neglected middle child of the education system - does not (according the the Interim Review) require either a professional body or qualified teachers.

Should Higher Education Teachers be required to gain a teaching qualification?

If HE retains control over what and how lecturers are qualified to teach - so that depth and passion for a subject are translated into enthusiasm for sharing that passion with others – qualifications can only be good.  But the argument here seems to be about securing the quality of the education product that students are purchasing. This misses the point.

If teachers need to be qualified, why should a teacher of an 18 year old not need to be qualified?

Why should the teacher of a 14 year old need to be qualified when teaching in schools but the teacher of the same 14 year old when in an FE college, need not be qualified. This seems to be what the revocation of the Further Education Teachers’ Qualifications (England) Regulations 2007 would imply.

It is a perfectly formed case study in policy incoherence. One department, BIS, publishes two reports on the same day, on the same subject, but draw two very different conclusions.

Teachers in FE do not need to be qualified:

http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/p/12-670-professionalism-in-further-education-interim

Teachers in FE who are qualified make better teachers:  

http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/e/12-693-evaluation-fe-teachers-qualifications-regulations

When is a 14 year old not a 14 year old? FE teaching qualifications.

Consultation on Revocation of Further Education Teachers’ Qualifications (England) 2007 and Further Education Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development and Registration Regulations (England) 2007: Response Form

My draft of response to BIS consultation about teaching qualifications for FE teachers - not written on behalf of any organisation. 

The Department may, in accordance with the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information, make available, on public request, individual responses.

The closing date for this consultation is 4 June 2012

Name: Dr Carol Azumah Dennis

Organisation (if applicable): 

Address: 

Completed responses should be returned to:

Sue Ruck

Teaching Learning & Workforce Reform Team

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

2 St Pauls Place

Sheffield

S1 2FJ

Email:sue.ruck@bis.gsi.gov.uk

Please tick a box from the list of options below that best describes you as a respondent. This allows views to be presented by group type.

	Business representative organisation/trade body
	Central government
	Charity or social enterprise
	Individual
	Large business (over 250 staff)
	Legal representative
	Local Government
	Medium business (50 to 250 staff)
	Micro business (up to 9 staff)
	Small business (10 to 49 staff)
	Trade union or staff association
ü	Other (please describe) HE / FE ITE Partnership

Question 1

Do you agree that the Further Education Teachers’ Qualifications (England) Regulations 2007 should be revoked from 1 September 2012?

                       

Yes                         No                          Not sure

Comments:

The University of Hull Partnership would refer to the recently published BIS Evaluation of FE Teachers’ Qualification Regulations in stating that it is important that the 2007 regulations are maintained. Although the regulatory framework is recent, there is evidence that it has had a positive impact on the confidence, skill, knowledge and understanding of FE teachers. In addition, they have reinforced FE colleges existing  contractual requirements for staff to be qualified and led to more consistent application and monitoring of staff training.

We agree with the writers of the interim review that the qualifications require updating. The content and structure are in urgent need of revision; the regulatory framework itself is in our view valuable and should be retained.

FE overlaps significantly with compulsory education, working with vulnerable 14+ students unable to achieve in schools. These students present significant behavioural challenges that only well trained and suitably qualified FE teachers are able to manage. Without a professional workforce, FE will be unable to contribute towards ensuring these young people are catered for. 

The needs to FE teachers are more closely aligned to the needs to secondary school teachers rather then HE lecturers who largely work with successful and motivated students. The market mechanisms in place to ensure the quality of HE lecturing does not exist for FE. Students who attend FE colleges do not have the choices that school student have, in most instances attending the only available local college.

Young people, unemployed and unqualified adults in need of basic education, redundant workers looking to develop new career opportunities are the groups that FE colleges work with. They are difficult to teach and if they are to make the most of the 2^nd chance that FE offers, the confidence, skill, knowledge and understanding of their teachers cannot be determined by individual college HR policies. Regulation needs to establish a framework; local policies can and should determine the detail of content and structure.

The deregulation of FE qualifications would seem to undermine the recommendations of the Wolf Report that recognises the contribution of FE teachers and recognises equivalence between QTLS and QTS.

Question 2

Do you agree that the Further Education Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development and Registration (England) Regulations 2007 should be revoked from 1 September 2012?

                       

Yes                        No                          Not sure

Comments:

We are of the view that participation in a community of practice is central to FE professionalism; membership of a professional body should be voluntary rather than regulated and enforced. CPD should be viewed as an entitlement rather than a requirement.

The comparison with secondary schooling is of value here and we are of the view that QTLS should be awarded on the basis of recommendation upon the completion of a PgCE (FE)

 Question 3

Do you think there will be any unintended consequences or implications by revoking these regulations?

                      

Yes                         No                           Not sure

Comments:

The potential consequences of deregulation may be unintended but they are not entirely unpredictable.  While local institutions can set the content and structure of qualifications within a mixed market model of awarding body and HEI provision, without a regulatory framework set and monitored by a government body FE will revert to the amateurish approach of previous years. The sector plays too important a role in the local and national economy for that to be allowed to happen.

The outcome would be to lower the standards of teaching and learning for post 14 students. Experts sharing a passion for their subject need to understand principles of teaching and learning to work with the extremely challenging learners who attend FE.

Question 4

What do you consider to be the minimum level of qualification needed to teach in Further Education?

Comments:

A positive outcome of the regulatory framework, as mentioned in the BIS Evaluation, is that it creates a career path for teachers and professional aspiration. While some sort of introductory, preparatory programme as part of institutional induction is of value, a minimum level of qualification should be as suggested in the report – broadly equivalent to a level 5 certificate with the option of level 7 diploma.

Difference and diversity is the hallmark of this sector and a one-size-fits-all approach will always produce tensions. The value of localism is that it is able to accommodate complexity.  The content and structure of courses is most ably decided by teacher educators working within a framework that ensure the important gains of regulations are not undermined.

The danger with focussing on a minimum level of qualification is that it potentially creates the misleading perception that the preparatory programme constitutes a teaching qualification rather than merely a licence to practice as part of an extended institutional induction.

Question 5

What do you consider to be the most effective means of maintaining a professionalised workforce?

Comments:

The single most important aspect of FE teacher professionalism is teaching expertise – qualifications at an appropriate level. Without it this important sector reverts to its previous amateurism. Nor can college principles be charged with securing the professional status of their workforce. To be effective, FE teachers need to provided with a regulatory framework that allows them form a new identity as teachers – as they leave behind their previous identity as specialists in a specific area of work.  If FE is to attract accountants, engineers, plumbers working in well regarded, understood and high status occupations, it needs to be attractive.

Maintaining the newly emerging professionalism in this area requires – a clear inspirational regulatory framework, qualifications, membership of a community of practice, a voluntaristic professional body, career structure – and a inspection framework that ensures suitably trained, qualified and competent teachers are employed. 

Question 6

Do you consider that any minimum expectations for training and qualifications should be stipulated as a condition of public funding?

Yes                      No                           Not sure

Comments:

Public funding is a valuable steer; with funding linked to qualification government can ensure that only high quality provision is supported.  The broader lifelong learning sector including work based learning and adult community education has not necessarily been brought within the regularity framework but they do benefit from the exemplary leadership of FE and over the past few years have been able to improve their provision based in part on the increasing numbers of qualifying staff they employ.

Do you have any other comments that might aid the consultation process as a whole?

Please use this space for any general comments that you may have, comments on the layout of this consultation would also be welcomed.

It is notable that there is a distinct difference between the Interim review and the BIS Evaluation. The content and depth of analysis of the BIS review offers a more accurate, considered and welcome analysis of the area and in our view provides a firmer basis for shaping policy.

Thank you for your views on this consultation and for taking the time to let us have your views. We do not intend to acknowledge receipt of individual responses unless you tick the box below.

Please acknowledge this reply

At BIS we carry out our research on many different topics and consultations. As your views are valuable to us, would you be happy for us to contact you from time to time either for research purposes or to send through consultation documents?

Yes                         No

© Crown copyright 2012

You may re-use this information (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence. Visit www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence, write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email psi@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk.

This publication is also available on our website at www.bis.gov.uk

Any enquiries regarding this publication should be sent to:

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

1 Victoria Street

London SW1H 0ET

Tel: 020 7215 5000

If you require this publication in an alternative format, email enquiries@bis.gsi.gov.uk, or call 020 7215 5000.

URN 12/706RF

On being seduced by OfSTED

In May 2002 Initial Teacher Education (Further Education) at my then University was inspected by OfSTED – mainly 3s and a few 4s meant the area was considered as inadequate: bad department. 

We work in a partnership with two other local colleges – and while each are distinct institutions with their own organisational culture, the unit of performance is ‘The Partnership’. The inspection process ties us together; something like a three legged race. Despite OfSTED's designation, there were glimmering shards of fluorescence amidst the devastation. 

OfSTED does not resonate with the same degree of authority in Higher Education as it does within schooling. The reaction of the University has been – until recently benignly supportive.

At some point in December the reaction changed from polite supportive indifference (with the assumption that the re-inspection would be a pass) to an anxiety driven aggression.  I understand this. The Teacher Education team at my former University – Primary and Secondary - were graded as 2 and 1 respectively: good department. They are in a desperate and vulnerable situation as the Coalition plans to move teacher education out of Universities into Training Schools, takes hold. They are firmly of the opinion that another 4 for  ITE FE will have repercussions beyond the minuscule FE team, smearing the credibility of the Centre for Educational Studies. There are so many theoretical tropes to draw on in attempting to make sense of this.

What I am experiencing here is the brutish force of what Lyotard (1984) refers to as performativity.    

What do I mean by performativity? Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change, based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects or organizations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. As such they stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgement.

Lytotard 1994, cited by Ball (2003) 

The classifications driven by OfSTED and the coercive power encoded within them define the professional (and personal) worth of not the department as an abstraction, but of named individuals. With decisive implications. As our consultant made clear, whispered supportively to me over a buffet lunch, ‘You’re in the firing line.’ The terrors of performativity are a totalising terror: an embodied, physical terror.  The assault is to more than reputation or creditability. 

But it is not just fear and avoidance that drives the willingness to colonise the self to the OfSTED process.  Gallies’ (2007) analyses the rhetoric of excellence by reference to condensation symbols.  The physical threat coercively encoded in OfSTED grade 1 and grade 2 demand a passionate commitment to excellence as a mask for personal and professional aspirations, fears, subconscious desires and beliefs. It is a deeply embedded metaphor that, when we suspend criticality, when we operate in the day-to-day mode we are unable to recognise or resist. Quality is a commonsensical Desirable Thing. To place yourself beyond a framework that values excellence is to place yourself beyond a framework that confers intelligibility and worth.

And so – the seductions of OfSTED.  

For Bjerrum-Nielsen (1995) seductive texts as texts which operate somewhere between an assault and a conversation.  Where the reader is disarmed in the process of reading and as such suspends critical faculty.  The reader is willingly swept off their feet; all texts aim to be seductive texts. Yet the seductive text bases its claims to credibility not on persuasion or force of argument but on empiricism.  This matters. A credible charming and extraordinarily authoritative inspector has made a decisive and welcome intervention in the re-inspection process. Without her - we would have been headed for another inadequate. Yet, this same credible charming and extraordinarily authoritative inspector consultant convinced me - for more than a moment - that the purpose of OfSTED was not – to promote government policy, was not to instil in each professional an acquiescent and suicidal ‘technology of self’, was not the promotion of an externally persuasive, government sponsored version of quality but was rather to promote equality. The data driven analysis of quality was premised on the desire to ensure that all were being treated as equals. This is a proactive strain in the framework. The compulsion was to not only to treat all as equals but to actively promote equity.

If presented well, even elephants dung is beautiful.

I do not doubt the integrity or charm of our consultant. My refusal is not inter-subjective.  What I am making clear is that the assault and conversation in this instance although embodied, but not with a person.  I am willingly subject in the process of being disarmed, I am passionate about equity. My life depends on it. There are 13 black female professors in the UK, Mirza (2009) points this out in Black Women and Educational Desire, I will work, a proud resident of strivers' row for equity and social justice in ITE FE. I conduct myself with a vigilance that notices that discrimination come in all sorts of shades and tones. My colleague's blitheness: ‘the reason Pakistani boys do less well in FE is because they leave college to work in the family business’; this area is typically white working class – by implication, before the Polish, the Africans and all the ‘others’ we were all the same.  I remind myself of difference, of diversity not only as a source of strength but as a source of power (Hall 2011).

Stuart Hall on Multiculturalism - difference as a source of power

The belief  - a belief I was seduced for more than a moment into accepting - that OfSTED's coercive apparatus is deployed to promote equity is an abstraction, a defining aspect of quality; it is a belief that makes OfSTED's data obsessed version of e/quality beautiful.  A beauty reminiscent of Ofili's paintings. 

Incompressible guidelines

We spent – all of us - teachers, managers, academics with years experience – 2 full days with a consultant explaining a text. A framework all of us felt we knew. And even if we didn’t know, all us with the skill, passion and expertise to read and understand. We were reassured that there are no surprises in OfSTED. It is all explicit. But if it is explicit – why is it so troubling to understand. Why does it take 2 days – 2 very expensive days and the request for more and the assertion that it was worth every penny spent for us to understand this document.  The organisation has more than 1 OfSTED expert. There is a contradiction here between quality as generic and quality as highly contextualised and specific, an incomprehensibility I have explored elsewhere, (Dennis 2011).

  

The abstract nature of guidelines
create awkward spaces, interstices within which professionals are required to act.  An awkwardness that when coupled with the exclusive colonisation of an area enclosed by policy and defined as quality, as e/quality and desirable - an incomprehensibility that seduces professionals, compelling them to define themselves - and what they do - in ways that subject their selves to damaging designations. 

During the meeting our consultant - charming, authoritative and worth every penny - a consultant who has changed what would have been in adequate into something that is potentially good, a consultant who has made my job infinitely easier advises us of the link OfSTED will make between recruitment and retention  If students do not stay on courses, and achieve - it is because you have not selected them appropriately. 

On hearing this, a colleague who had temporarily zoned out asked if such a judgement would persist, '...even if they died?'

Ball, S. (2003). "The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity." Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215 - 228.

Bjerrum Nielsen, H. (1995). "Seductive Texts With Serious Intentions." Educational Researcher, 24(1), 4-12.

Dennis, C. (2011). "Measuring quality, framing what we know: a critical discourse analysis of the Common Inspection Framework." Literacy, 45(3), 119-125.

Gillies, D. (2007). "Excellence and education: rhetoric and reality." Education, Knowledge and Economy, 1(1), 19-35.

Mirza, H. S. (2009). Race, gender and educational desire: Why black women succeed and fail: Taylor & Francis.

Blog Wordle

Learning to read: a detective story

There are so many reasons why I #loveTwitter, but it is unusual for me to tweet for inspiration.

 I needed a sentence to start, an opener. Thanks to the New York Public Library, @nypl I found one that seems to echo something of what this blog is about:

There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me!

The idea that I am developing here is one that takes as its starting point Fairclough and his notion of reading as dialogic exchange between writer, actual and imagined readers: the imaginary reader. 

The 'exchange' in the case of written texts is played out between the writing and the reading of the text, and there may therefore be considerable temporal and spatial gaps between the initiating and responding moves. Moreover, a written text and especially a mediated text (e.g. a book) will figure in a great many exchanges corresponding to its many readings. Written texts often consist in themselves of nothing but Statements, and responses to them may go on only in readers' heads, so it may seem somewhat tenuous to insist on the concept of exchange in such cases. Nevertheless, all texts imply and are oriented to dialogue in a broad sense, even a diary I write for myself inevitably involves choices in what sort of imaginary reader (be it an imaginary self) to address, and this generalization of the concept of exchange is one way to capture this. ¹

I want to extend to reshape this idea, the stance from which it is written to suggest the ‘imagined reader’ as not the reader the writer had in mind when drafting their text, the active audience.  Not the ‘imagined reader’ that the actual reader imagine (and does or does not identify with) when reading a text. It is the readerly self I create in the process of reading.

I want to think about the ‘imagined reader’ as the readerly self I create in the process of reading.

Hence the image of ‘Coffin’ Ed and Gravedigger ‘Jones’, two fictional detectives created by Chester Himes, one of the many black writers I have read and loved – obsessively.

The readerly self, the academic readerly self is on a quest to find ‘the truth’.  This is a truth that may be pluralised: ‘to find truths’; it may also by qualified – ‘to find plausible truths’ rather than find ‘the definitive truth’.  To read, published texts or data to be able to make statements about how the world is: plausibly rather than definitively.  This is of course a risky undertaking.

The readerly self, the academic readerly self is sceptical. The stance taken in relation to everything read, heard, suggested is one of incredulous disbelief. A critical stance that demands, show me, prove it how do you know that’s the case, but what if, who says and so on. The questioning is relentless.  Whatever ls left intact at the end of the process, is temporary until old answered questions re-emerge alongside new unanswered questions.

The readerly self, the academic readerly self relies on informants. The reading process is an entirely dialogic one. The plausible truths to emerge through text do not reveal themselves spontaneously – they are actively sough be and through the engagement with the writer, through places several writers alongside each other, through looking and text and the world the text refers to – which may be a world other then the one he writer was specifically referring to –my reasons for reading may not be same as the writers reading for writing, or for wanting me to reads.  None-the-less the detective self forages for truth and draws on whatever is available to assemble plausibility.

This is one possible version of the readerly self – there are many other possible: the diver,  the orchestral conductor, the explorer, the hair stylist. The more I read, the more and newer selves I discover. There is nothing I enjoy more than being lost in text, lost as an imaginary self in a unexplored world.

¹ Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (London: Routledge, 2003) 109, Questia, Web, 13 Jan. 2012.