Teaching

The Labour years can, in retrospect, be seen as a massive experiment into the link between cash and education. Gordon Brown almost doubled spending per pupil over the past decade, the biggest money injection in the history of state schooling. But as he did so, England hurtled down the international league tables. It now languishes in 18th place, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The plan didn’t work. Only now is the full cost of that failure becoming clear. In an age when ‘work’ is increasingly something done with the head rather than the hands, education standards determine the wealth of nations. There is now enough data to draw a direct relationship between the two and put a price on it. Smarter nations are richer nations.

Peering over my son’s shoulder as he forced himself through a pile of practice IGCSE maths papers in readiness for this week’s exams, I was shocked both by the absence of pounds sterling and by the ardently international imaginary first names dreamed up by the question-setters. That ‘I’ stands for ‘international’ — and goodness, you’re not allowed to forget it. ‘Nyali paid $62 for a bicycle.’ ‘Alejandro goes to Europe for a holiday. He changes 500 pesos into euros at an exchange rate of…’ ‘Abdul invested $240…’ ‘At 05 06 Mr Ho bought 850 fish at a market for $2.62 each…’ ‘On 1 January 2000 Ashraf was x years old.

I like to tease my friend Wei about being a tiger mother. She once told me of an incident where her daughter Shu was making an artwork for a friend as a birthday present. Shu doodled for a few minutes, then showed her mother a sketch of a funny face. ‘I told her to knuckle down, spend more time, and come back with a far better drawing,’ said Wei. ‘It just wasn’t good enough.’ I said that was a bit harsh on her eight-year-old, especially since it was not schoolwork but part of Shu’s leisure time. Wei snorted. ‘It was a gift for her best mate, yet she hadn’t put any thought into it,’ she said. ‘She needs to know that you must make an effort for the things you really care about.

Michael Gove has written to schools across the country telling them that they can deduct a day's pay from staff who try to disrupt school time by carrying out 'work to rule' industrial action. This form of action involves teachers fulfilling their job description to the very letter, with the NUT and NASUWT issuing list of activities their members should refuse to undertake. These include refusing to submit lesson plans, refusing to agree to timetable changes, refusing to undertake clerical tasks or covering for colleagues' absences. Gove's letter, seen by Coffee House, says: 'I respect the right of teachers to take industrial action, but this action short of a strike lacks a clear purpose or even a set of coherent aims.

Michael Gove had a very good autumn statement: not only did he get £1bn for new free schools and academies, but he also got performance-related pay for teachers. Gone will be the days of automatic rises and pay based on length of time served, replaced by rises based on merit as in many other professions. As James notes in his column this week, accepting the recommendations of the School Teachers' Review Body is a 'full-bore assault on union power'. So, unsurprisingly, the unions are terribly upset by the change. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, released this response: 'The war on teachers waged by the Coalition government continues. The value of a national pay framework has been recognised by other pay review bodies but the STRB appears to be seriously out of step.

The teaching unions like to dismiss talk of introducing regional pay to the public sector as a plan that will hit deprived areas hardest. Their fierce opposition to the plans touted by Michael Gove and other ministers threatens to crystallise into strike action should the government make any serious moves towards the changes. But research from Bristol University published today changes the terms of the debate rather, as it suggests that pupils are paying the price for a national pay rate for teachers. The study, which compared pay to performance in around 3,000 schools, found that in areas where salaries in the private sector are significantly higher than in schools, pupils can drop one GCSE grade in one subject.

The Spectator's Schools Revolution conference is being held on Tuesday next week. One of the speakers, Mark Lehain, writes below about his experience setting up a free school. Other speakers include Michael Gove, Michelle Rhee and Barbara Bergstrom, all of whom will take questions from the floor. There are still tickets available: to book, click here. When I’m asked why I’m setting up a free school, or why I think they’re necessary, I tell a story about a Trades Union Congress meeting on the subject that I went to in December 2010, a few months into our campaign to open a new school in Bedford.

Good teaching matters; that’s something we don't need to be taught. But how much does it matter? What are its measurable benefits? Today’s education select committee report collects some striking, if pre-existing, research into just those very questions, and it is worth reading for that reason. There is, for example, the IPPR’s suggestion that ‘having an “excellent” teacher compared with a “bad” one can mean an increase of more than one GCSE grade per pupil per subject.’ Or there’s the American study which found that the best teachers can ‘generate about $250,000 or more of additional earnings for their students over their lives in a single classroom of about 28 students.

Michael Gove's latest prognosis for schools was delivered at a lunch in Westminster yesterday, but it's important enough to repeat the morning after. The Independent has a full report here, but the key quotation is this: ’Education is like trying to run up a down escalator. There are some uncomfortable decisions that will have to be taken. There will be years when, because we are going to make exams tougher, the number of people passing will fall. There are headteachers who have been peddling the wrong sort of approach to teaching for too long, who are going to lose their jobs.’ Just read that bit again: ‘the number of people passing will fall’. It's a deeply encouraging admission by Gove, and one that he ought to repeat frequently.

Michael Gove’s giving a robust defence of his plans to make it quicker and easier for schools to sack bad teachers. ‘You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,’ he says in the Mail. ‘Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?’ And he was similarly forceful in an interview on the Today programme, the full transcript of which we’ve got here. Gove is emphatic about how important this is. ‘The evidence is quite clear,’ he says. ‘If you’re with a bad teacher, you can go back a year; if you’re with a good teacher you can leap ahead a year.