Improving Teacher Recruitment and Retention: The Importance of Workload and Pupil Behaviour - Literature review Example

Critical Review of the Research Article "Improving Teacher Recruitment and Retention: The Importance of Workload and Pupil Behaviour The study by Barmby (2006) addresses the issue of teacher shortage in England and Wales and seeks to examine the reasons highlight the important features that impact on teachers’ reasons for joining or leaving the teaching profession. The primary objectives of the study are based on the premise that teachers of Math Science and English have proven to be scarce in London and its environ in the last few years with many teachers leaving the profession and the number of graduates opting to join it reducing. The design of the research is in the form of a survey done through phone interview on teachers from around the UK; the teachers were identified from the list of those on student loans (Barmby, 2006). The sample were collected with 25% of the teachers interviewed being from London, this was to allow the researchers to carry out and comparative study between teachers from London and other parts of the Kingdom. The study which was carried out in the period between January and July 2004 aimed at collecting data through interviewing teachers throughout Wales and England in a relatively short time period. The end result was that the teachers were found to have joined teaching either for intrinsic or altruistic reasons (Carrington and Tomlin, 2000), however the students’ behaviour and workload issues were the primary motivation for their leaving. The study concludes that these issues must be tacked from the teacher’s perspective if the government was to have any hope of impacting on the teacher numbers in the long run. The rationale for the survey was based on the fact that the priority subject or shortage subjects by the teacher training agency have in the recent years experienced a perennial shortage, London was the most notably affected area. From the early 90’s the study found that there has been considerable difficulty in obtaining teaches for any of eh subjects and those who are found are not always very well qualified (Hutchings et al., 2000). The paper alludes to Sir Stewart Sutherland who retrospectively carried out a study on the effectiveness of the current arrangements for the recruitment and desirably of introducing a wider range of incentives in the priority subject areas,” (1997). According to the cited information, more research on the subjects needs to be done, so that the reasons for the shortage can be better understood to improve the efforts of mitigating the problem. This paper is evidently one of the aforementioned efforts although its writing was not necessarily a result of the recommendations of this particular scholar. This paper takes to account efforts by the government to address the problem; these include initiatives such as the giving or bursaries to those undertaking teacher training as well as the golden hell, a scheme designed to motivate teachers entering the field with financial incentives (Menter, 2002). The repayment of teachers education schemes was also introduced as a pilot project between the 2002, 2004 (Barmby and Coe, 2004), it was meant to increase the rate of teacher recruitment and retention by paying of the student loans for the as long as they remained in the profession for over a 10 year period. Surprisingly, it appears that despite the shortage, there are actually more teachers than there have ever been in England and Wales, in fact the number of students seems to be following (Barmby, 2006). However the reason the low numbers are a concern is because education has more value today than it has ever had in retrospect and therefore the number of teachers and students should be at per. The percentage of teacher classified under wastage in London is comparatively higher than the rest of the Kingdom (National Assembly of Wales, 2003). A parliamentary report that was part of the literature on which this survey used prosed that in the long run the shortage of teachers could be accommodated since there was notable reduction in the number of primary school pupils in 2005 and this is likely to be felt also in high schools in the long run thus reducing the demand for teachers there as well (Menter, 2002). The authenticity of the survey is underlined by the extensive literature review which bespeaks a great deal of research given that not much attention has been given to the subject of teacher retention and attrition in the recent past. The study was primarily carried out online through databases to in which information pertinent to the subject was likely to be found, researcher ensured they located all the relevant data by being very specific with their search terms. They used; teacher retention, teacher recruitment, teacher attrition teacher motivation and job satisfaction as well as teacher morale, this way any document that had addressed any of this subjects independently or separately was retrieved and their abstracts reviewed to determine how relevant they were to the study in question (Barmby, 2006). Although many citations were found, only those whose full texts could be retrieved either online or in hard copy were used, for the study, 41 one sources of data are examined cited, given that no source from past 1991 was used the study is able to avoid repetition and duplication of data. In addition, the use of data predating 1991 ensured that there was a currency of information since very old information may not be relevant to the problem as of now. The original sample was 330 teachers but eventually only 246 teachers were left, this a significant number and there if correctly studied, could be expected to give results that were representative of reality. The interviews were carried out through the telephone, before, before they were done, the teachers would be sent a copy of the questions they were expected to answer so they could go over them beforehand. While this is important in allowing them to consider the questions, it presents the challenge of their being over thinking on the questions which could hinder their objectivity. In addition, there is also the possibility of their trying to get the most intelligent sounding answer or even sub-consciously trying to figure out which answers they though the questions wanted. The fact that the interviews were to be carried out on the phone has several advantages, for one, teachers from a wide geographical area could be quizzed within a short time. In addition, the telephone bill was most likely lower than it could have cost to travel to where the specific teachers were. Therefore, the sampling was more open since the interviewers did not have to consider logistic factors which could potentially have made them eliminate some areas which may have been inconvenient to reach (Barmby, 2006). However that said the phone interview as opposed to face to face one present significant disadvantage as well. For one, some of the teachers who were eliminated from the study were cut because they could not be reached on the phone; the telephone interview is therefore highly prone to “no shows”. In addition, the telephone interview limits the interview in several ways in as far as acquiring feedback is concerned. When speaking face to face, one gets to talk to the subject and in addition to the oral answers they get a lot of other feedback through non-verbal communication. For example, the facial expression one wears when they hear or when responding to a question is likely to tell the interviewer more about their attitude towards the subject or the particular line of enquiry. In addition, the questions were of a very personal nature and the phone is by any standards a very impersonal tool given that it precludes personal contact. Teachers may not have expressed their sentiments on the phone as clearly and coherently as they would have if they had been giving a face to face interview. Theoretically speaking, the survey was in most part inclined in examining the motivation of the teachers and the reasons they seemed to lose it on the job. Maslow theory of motivation proposes that people are likely to perform better in their various jobs if they are adequately motivated and their physiological security and esteem needs are met (Hood, 2001). The study was interested in finding out why teachers got discouraged and decided to quit given that the main motivation was altruistic. The answers given to many of the questions suggested that financial inactive was not a very important reason for joining the profession, in fact the monetary benefits were never listed as the motivation for the job since less than 0.4% admitted to having taken up the job for those (Evans, 2001). Majority of the teachers claimed they had signed up for teaching for a variety of intrinsic reasons, among these were the desire to pass on the subject experience, to influence other people, the survey showed that 80 of the teachers quizzed claimed they had always wanted to teach. While there were other less intrinsic considerations such as the attractive paid holiday time for teachers, the data collected seems to suggest that teachers were on the most part motivated from within (Barmby, 2006). However given the questions being asked in the study, it begs the question, why is there so much attrition if the majority of those who enter teaching are intrinsically motivated? Followed to their logical conclusion, these answers would suggest that the teachers would be likely to put up with the hardships and remain in the profession. Evidently this is far from true, it is possible that some of the interviewees may have either been dishonest gave doctored answers to protect their professionalism or ego. For example, a teacher will may have a hard time admitting that the only reason they got into the profession was possibly because it was the only profession they could afford or which their grades permitted. Someone may have wanted to be an engineer or doctor but could not make the cut so they opt to go for teacher training which is relatively cheaper and requires comparatively lower entry grades (Kyriacou, and Coulthard, 2000). In addition reasons that do not appear to be very professional such as the long paid holidays of the financial incentives may have been avoided by many of the interviewees (Rawlinson et al., 2003). This would explain why the results of the study were not entirely consistent with the reality on the ground (Thornton and Bricheno, 2002), majority of teachers enter the profession because they were intrinsically motivated but end up leaving because of the conditions of the insufficient funds because in a way, staying on under such circumstances can be seen as part of the motivation (Jones, 2002). The study found that over 26.8% of the teachers said they were planning on leaving the profession within the next 10 years while 71.1% said they had no intention of leaving, the rest were undecided. The major reasons given for leaving included; students behaviour, low salaries as well as poor image of the teacher and negative portrayal by the media. Once again, it is evident that the reasons given are not entirely in line with the intrinsic motivation that was cited as the main reason for teacher joining the profession. However one must also acquiesce that from the survey several issues that people rarely associate with teaching were revealed to have been among the courses of discontent among teachers. For example, many teachers quizzed said they had entered teaching because it was preferable to working in office or a government job, ideally this would imply that they though as teacher they would have more autonomy and less of the drudgery associated with the normal office jobs. Contrary to this assumption, it turns out that teaching involves a great deal of bureaucracy and can at times wrap the teachers so deeply in red tape that they cannot make decisions without involving a third party. One of the respondents is quoted saying “…there are times when I feel I daren‟t breathe without having permission in triplicate” (Bamby, 2006. 15) The survey is relatively neutral in as afar as ethics are concerned; this notwithstanding, there are still some ethical issue that may arise. For example one may suggest that the study may have indirectly served to motivate teachers to develop a negative attitude to teaching by suggesting that the job does not attract or retain staff. The teachers who were interviewed may end up questioning their motives for teaching and at the end of the day decide start noticing a lot of things they do not like about the job since the study suggested by the nature of questions that teaching is a less desirable job than many other professions. Another issue that may be considered in respect to ethics is the source from which the study acquired information about the teachers who they requested for the interviews, the teachers were selected from information from the teachers loan scheme which provided details on the teachers who were still paying loans and had been in the job for less than two years. This brings about the issue of privacy of information, based in the paper, one can deduce that the party carrying out the study took the data, which included personal addresses and other private data and used it to contact teachers. The loan scheme staff evidently did not consult teachers first to ask if they would like their documents and personal data revealed to a third party. Therefore, one may argue that teacher privacy of information was disrespected. In addition, telephone interview can be considered to be a way for those who carried out the study to avoid meeting their subjects and given that they already had a lot of information about the teachers even before they called they could easily have indirectly coerced the respondents to agree and take part in the study. Nonetheless, despite the apparent weaknesses and underlying ethical issue it must be admitted that the paper has several strong points. For one, by using phone interviews, the interviewers managed to save a great deal of time and money. On the other hand as a result of using information from the loans scheme, they were able to sample the best teachers for their study since they were guaranteed that these would only report on the most recent issues as they had been on the job for less than two years. In addition from a reading of the survey, one notices that a variety of sources have been cited and thins is testimony of considerable research which was used to inform the researchers of most pertinent factors relating to the questions at hand. In conclusion, this study was quite illuminating and provided valuable insights into the issue of teacher attrition and lack of motivation among other reasons for their wishing to leave the profession (Hammond, 2002). Nevertheless while the sampling methods other technical aspects of the survey appear to be in satisfactory and effective, it has been found that the means through which these samples were identified were ethically questionable. Based on this it is recommended that in future when such as study is done, it should take to account the privacy of the subjects and no data that has been gathered or accessed without their content use. At the end of the day despite this issue, is nevertheless evident that the survey was a success and it provided explanation albeit not entirely indisputable for the high teacher turn over in the UK. References Barmby , P, W. 2006. Improving teacher recruitment and retention “The importance of workload and pupil behavior” Education Research. 43 (3) 247-265. Barmby, P. W, and Coe, R. 2004., Evaluation of the Repayment of Teachers‟ Loans Scheme (Nottingham, DfES) Carrington, B. and Tomlin, R. 2000. Towards a More Inclusive Profession: teacher recruitment and ethnicity. European Journal of Teacher Education, 23, 139-157. Evans, L., 2001. Delving Deeper into Morale, Job Satisfaction and Motivation among Education Professionals, Educational Management & Administration, 29, 291-306 Hammond, M. 2002, Why Teach? A case study investigating the decision to train to teach ICT. Journal of Education for Teaching, 28, 135-148. Hood, P. 2001., Human Resource Development: Motivation and Movement, Management in Education, 15, 19-25 Hutchings, M., Menter, I., Ross, A., Thomson, D. and Bedford, D. 2000. Teacher Supply and Retention in London 1998-99: A study of six London boroughs, (London, Teacher Training Agency) Jones, N. 2002. The Tandem Project – Inspiring the Teacher: South West regional pilot programme 2001, Education Review, 15, 29 - 34 Kyriacou, C. and Coulthard, M. 2000. Undergraduates‟ Views of Teaching as a Career Choice, Journal of Education for Teaching, 26, 117-126. Menter, I. 2002., Border Crossing – Teacher Supply and Retention in England and Scotland, Scottish Educational Review, 34, 40-50. National Assembly of Wales. 2003., Schools in Wales: General Statistics 2003 (Cardiff, National Assembly of Wales) Thornton, M., Bricheno, P. and Reid, I. 2002. Students‟ reasons for wanting to teach in primary school, Research in Education, 67, 33-43 Read More