Collaboration - building relationships of trust
As we head into a general election, we should perhaps be grateful that education isn’t higher up the priority list for election candidates looking for a soundbite. While you might argue that Keir Starmer’s pledge to ‘Recruit 6,500 new teachers’ isn’t enough, I’m quietly pleased that he’s not setting out in detail how his party will achieve that if elected. Why? Because the people who could tell you why they don’t want to be teachers aren’t sitting in party HQ. The people with ideas about how to make teaching more attractive are busy doing the job.
Politicians are rather prone to making policy announcements without talking to the people who know. We saw this when Gillian Keegan told last year’s Conservative Party Conference that mobile phones would be banned in schools - to which most headteachers shrugged and said, ‘we already do that’. As with general elections, Party Conference announcements are more about appealing to core voters than developing education policy.
When it comes to making education policy though, you need to involve the people who will deliver it. If you don’t, you run the risk of losing money, time and good will, and ultimately perhaps losing teachers themselves. I started primary teaching alongside the first national curriculum, and then the first SATs - my headteacher at the time chose not to be part of the piloting but many of my colleagues across the country boycotted a testing system that had been developed without adequate involvement of the profession. Much later, working for ATL (a union for those working in education), we fought against the reintroduction of baseline assessment - an initiative that caused huge workload for reception teachers and was seen by many as disrupting young children’s start at ‘big school’. While we were initially successful, the government ultimately imposed a system, damaging relationships with the early years community. Government will always hold the power to make decisions, but there are ways of working that maintain trust and keep people in the profession.
Since our book is called ‘Improving Education Policy Together’, you won’t be surprised to find that Gareth and I believe building a better education system needs diverse voices to be heard when policies are developed. This includes those with different roles in the system - teachers, leaders, parents, pupils; those with expectations of the system - employers, government, community leaders; and those with different experiences - of life, of place, of education.
In the book, we explore a range of ways in which this kind of collaboration can happen. We look at better ways of managing stakeholder engagement than the weak consultations that we’ve seen recently, involving paper-consultations after plans have been made. Too often, it seems that the stakeholders who matter to government are those who will make the most noise (and will need to be ‘managed’) or those who will agree with the government’s direction of travel and who will then be central to the commissions and working groups that will take policy forward. If a general election brings a new party to government, those people are likely to fall out of favour, and a new set will, over time, become the favoured. And yet each of these groups will remain influential within different parts of the profession. This kind of engagement risks pitting people against each other.
We look at social partnership between government and unions. Under the last Labour government, social partnership was focused on teacher workload and the solutions developed to reduce it. I was part of conversations about fledgling policy ideas - teaching as a Masters level profession; developing a ‘licence to practise’; deployment of support staff; teacher and headteacher standards; leadership qualifications. Unions, representing teachers, leaders and support staff, were involved at the beginning of the policy process, helping to define the problems, identifying possible solutions, and trying to build policies that would meet the needs and beliefs of the different players in the system. It wasn’t perfect, but it brought real world expertise into the policy-making process.
Involving the unions is important, but it doesn’t engage everyone. So we look at moving towards co-production of policy, where government works alongside educators, employers, parents, young people and others to define the problems, to identify and test out solutions. This could bring a role for other organisations, charities and think tanks working on particular issues to provide expertise and evidence. It could work like the Independent Assessment Commission, where we invited each of its commissioners to engage with different constituencies - teachers, pupils, employers, assessment experts and experts in diversity, equity and inclusion - in order to develop policy on secondary assessment. It could look across a breadth of provision rather than a single issue, and it probably works best if it’s set up to work for the long term.
The most radical idea we explore is that of ‘sortition’, which we define here as randomly selecting education professionals to be seconded into the civil service to work on policy. There are many places (including in the UK) which offer a variation of this through citizen’s assemblies. These bring randomly selected individuals together to look at an issue - in many places that’s to do with the environment and climate change, although we look at an example in Ireland focused on education policy. The idea of getting teachers to engage deeply with policy is something we explored at ATL through our member task groups, although we did choose our members carefully - not so that they agreed with our biases but so that we could include as diverse a range of views and expertise as possible. We gave them research reports to read, and opportunities to share perspectives and listen to each other. It’s extremely labour intensive, both for the staff who support it and for the teachers who engage, particularly if they’re also still teaching. But at my leaving party, a former union president whose first major encounter with the union was through a task group told me how much it had influenced her journey in education.
And that’s key for collaboration: to benefit those who are involved in it, as well as improving education. One of our key beliefs about collaborative policy-making is that it builds relationships. When it’s managed well, it becomes about understanding those we’re working alongside, seeing the problems through their eyes and weaving different perspectives into the solutions. It’s about building relationships, and through those relationships rebuilding the trust we need to create an effective and inspiring education system. I’m convinced that it’s those relationships that will keep teachers in education.
