Poorer lessons from supply teachers

Supply staff need careful induction, Ofsted says

Use of temporary teachers by England's schools often results in poorer quality lessons and worse behaviour from pupils, according to school inspectors.

A report from the inspectorate, Ofsted, says many schools have a pool of experienced and trusted teachers they can call on.

But the rest have to use "very variable" temporary teachers - and in half of the secondary schools looked at, pupils' work had declined as a result of having temps for long periods.

The government says it shares Ofsted's concern and is working hard to improve things.

Wide variations

Ofsted looked at the use of temporary or "supply" staff in a total of 93 places, chosen to be a cross-section of the nation's schools, in the 2001-02 academic year.

It says the use varied very widely.

At the upper end, it made up an "unacceptably high" proportion of the total teaching, and pupils' learning and progress were adversely affected.

About a third of the secondary schools and two-thirds of the primary schools had built up a group of trusted and experienced temporary teachers they could call on, often at short notice, to cover for teacher absences or vacant teaching posts.

Vetting

Many of these challenged pupils educationally and "added significantly" to the schools' ability to provide consistently good education.

But in some parts of the country schools relied heavily on teachers from agencies, whose quality "varied considerably".

In some instances, the procedures used by the agencies to vet the competence of the teachers were considered inadequate by the schools.

We share [Ofsted's] concerns about the quality of some supply teaching

School Standards Minister, David Miliband

This is something that head teachers' organisations have complained about.

As a result, the government has just introduced a voluntary "quality mark" scheme for agencies, as well as better training and advice - but Ofsted says it is too early to assess the impact of these initiatives.

The School Standards Minister, David Miliband, said: "Ofsted is right to raise this issue. We share their concerns about the quality of some supply teaching but welcome the decline in supply teachers, down by 2,000 this year.

"We are working hard with teacher, head teacher and local government representatives to develop a more systematic approach to covering the lessons of absent colleagues.

"We know that there are some good supply agencies but fly-by-night operations are not acceptable."

Poor lessons

Its report says temporary teachers taught twice as many poor or unsatisfactory lessons in primary schools as permanent staff, and four times as many in secondary schools.

Common failings included:

• unfamiliar with the school and the pupils, or poorly briefed
• required to teach age groups or subjects for which they had not been trained
• had too little understanding of the national curriculum, teaching strategies or examination syllabuses
• not enough assessment information available to them about pupils' capabilities
• not specialists in the subject they were teaching
• were in a succession of short-term temporary teachers
• performance of long-term temporary replacements not monitored effectively.

Problems with pupils' behaviour were more likely to occur when temporary teachers were employed for very short periods, so did not have time to build effective relationships with their classes.

Most temporary teachers nevertheless found schools "welcoming and supportive".

Most schools gave them lesson plans which were at least adequate.

But procedures for monitoring their work were "at best, informal".

Impact on managers

Ofsted says managers' workloads often increased significantly due to their efforts to minimise the effect of staff vacancies on the permanent teachers and the pupils - what teachers' unions call "papering over the cracks".

In the worst cases this "threatened their ability to function effectively".

The report confirms that the number of temporary teachers has increased over recent years and by January 2001 constituted about 4.5% of the teaching force in England - though it went down a little in the past year.

The cost was a "significant" element in many schools' budgets - on average 3.4% in primary schools and 2.2% in secondary schools, though rather higher in inner London.