'The Importance of Teaching' White Paper - underpinning the Education Act of 2011 – emphasized the impact of high quality teachers on children’s educational achievements: the most important factor in determining how well children do is the quality of teachers and teaching. [1] It also announced an ambition to reform the business of initial teacher training and a plan to develop a national network of new teaching schools under the guidance of the National College for School Leadership. In addition, as part of its ambitious plan to improve the quality of teaching, the government proposed to re-examine the range of professional designations that currently exist (e.g., advanced skills teachers) and replace them with a single simple designation which identifies more clearly leading practitioners who work to support others. [2] This is a much needed policy initiative.

In the UK and the US, around 50% of all qualified teachers leave the profession within five years. This figure has been stubbornly resistant to change for much longer than a decade and between 2000 and 2007, more than 25,000 people in the UK qualified as teachers but never taught in a school. Such statistics suggest there is something fundamentally wrong with the way teachers are recruited and trained which prevents a flow of high quality recruits entering and staying in the profession. Simultaneously, the training secondary school teachers receive from the majority of initial teacher training providers fails to engage them as career minded, subject specialists with an aspiration to contribute to the nation’s cultural and scientific, as well as educational success.

Although policy-makers have identified the need to improve the standard of teachers working in schools, and programmes like Teach First have begun to address it, exact measures to reform the wider teacher training industry in the UK are still unclear. This project will seek to identify just what does constitute excellence in teaching. While assessing the importance of recruitment and training, it will critically explore the role of a teacher’s subject specialism as a factor determining their ability to perform to a high standard in the professional environment. This project promises to prove instrumental in designing and improving the recruitment and training programmes of the increasingly wide range of organisations interested in delivering high quality teachers into schools: higher educational institutions, NGOs and even businesses.

The project will be a flagship output of our Models and Partnerships for Social Prosperity workstream, one of the three core workstreams of the ResPublica Trust, the not-for-profit organisation established in July 2011 which undertakes all of ResPublica's domestic policy work. The project is still open to external engagement from third party organisations and ResPublica would like to establish a consortium of partners from the public, private and third sectors, who will feed in to our further research and debate in this area and benefit from co-branding on publications and events.

If you would like further information, or to discuss partnering opportunities, please contact Dr Patricia Kaszynska, Senior Researcher, patricia.kaszynska@ respublica.org.uk

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