Back to the future with academy chain accountability?

In this article, Sam Sims argues that the Department for Education’s new performance ranking of local authorities and academy chains is effectively meaningless and therefore not very useful. Rather than repeating the mistakes of past efforts to identify effective education providers, we should focus on evaluating policies

The effect of financial incentives on the retention of shortage-subject teachers: evidence from England

School systems often experience shortages of maths and science teachers, reflecting difficulties in both recruiting and retaining people qualified to teach these subjects. In England, teachers with maths and science degrees face a higher outside pay ratio than other teachers and also tend to leave the profession at higher rates. We evaluate a policy aimed at improving retention by providing targeted uplifts in pay worth 8% of gross salary for early-career maths and physics teachers. Leveraging variation in eligibility across time, regions and school subjects, we find that eligible teachers are 23% less likely to leave teaching in state funded schools in years they were eligible for payments. This implies a pay-elasticity-of-exit of -3, which is similar to results from evaluations of similar policies in the United States. Our analysis suggests that the cost per additional teacher retained through the policy is 32% lower than training an equivalent replacement teacher. Taken together, these results suggest that persistent shortages of maths and science teachers can be reduced through targeted pay supplement policies

Identifying schools with high usage and high loss of newly qualified teachers

In England, teacher shortages have worsened in recent years and one contributor is the declining rates of retention among newly qualified teachers (NQTs). We employ a method developed in the health-statistics literature to identify schools that both recruit an unusually high level of NQTs and lose an unusually high level of NQTs from the profession. We show that this small group of schools, which are likely characterised by poor working conditions, are responsible for a disproportionately large amount of attrition from the teaching profession. This has a material effect on overall teacher shortages and comes at a high cost to taxpayers. Policy solutions, including improving the flow of information to NQTs to help them avoid such schools, are discusse

Essays on the Recruitment and Retention of Teachers

Teachers are among the most important school inputs for pupil attainment (Hanushek, 2011). Despite this, economically-advanced countries experience recurring shortages of teachers, resulting in sub-optimal hiring and deployment of teachers and reduced pupil attainment. This thesis investigates the determinants of entry to and exit from the teaching profession in order to understand how these shortages can be reduced. Very little is known about the correlates of entry to the teaching profession. Non-cognitive skills and personality-type have been shown to be important predictors of occupational choice in general (Cobb-Clark & Tan, 2011; Nieken & Stormer, 2010). However, these have not been used to model entry to the teaching profession. Chapter 2 of this thesis uses rich data from a household panel survey to model entry to the profession. The model identifies groups of people who are up to four times more likely to enter teaching than the typical graduate. This information can be used to target recruitment efforts. Retaining teachers is also important for ensuring sufficient supply. Research using administrative data generally finds the proportion of disadvantaged pupils in a school to be the strongest correlate of turnover. However, recent literature suggests that working conditions are important omitted variables in such analysis. Chapter 3 uses data on teachers from thirty-five countries to develop a rich set of working conditions measures and uses these to model teacher job satisfaction and intention to quit. The results highlight the importance of school leadership and assigning teachers to subjects in which they have been trained. Chapter 4 builds on this analysis by evaluating the impact of a subject-specific professional development intervention for science teacher retention. Double- and triple-difference models suggest that participation in the programme improves retention in the profession, though not in the participant’s original school