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Matching staff to learning opportunities


		11-16 schools

		6th form schools

		Colleges

Remodelling the school workforce

Remodelling the school workforce is at the heart of the government’s commitment to raise standards and to achieve a better work/life balance for teachers and other adults employed in schools. The DfES has recently established a national remodelling team within the National College for School Leadership to promote remodelling across the entire school workforce. This and other moves will support schools in developing an effective staff resource that is matched to learning opportunities within the curriculum. This resource will include a range of adults other than teachers, both employed by the school and from outside it, and will enable schools to respond flexibly to the needs of students.

On the premise that high-quality teaching leads to high achievement, the remodelling process will address staff roles, quality, motivation and deployment. It will aim to improve the match between staff and learning opportunities and to build teachers’ capacity to differentiate learning. This development is essential to a flexible, relevant and responsive 14-19 curriculum – in other words, the match between a student’s learning opportunity and the curriculum’s capacity to provide for differentiated learning.

Taking staff and curriculum developments together, there are clear expectations that:

learning programmes, learning styles, learning support and learning outcomes will be matched to individuals
high-quality support will underpin all learning activities
teachers will know and be able to respond to each student’s needs and progress
a wider range of roles will support provision and progress - for example, monitoring, mentoring, coordinating, liaising and managing technology
roles and tasks will be matched to those best placed to carry them out.

Restructuring the teaching profession

The restructuring proposals include three main themes: support for leadership, time for teaching and support for teaching. The latter encompasses wide-ranging support in and out of the classroom, new support roles and increased input from other adults. Developments in the role of support staff include:

a wider range of administrative, technical and student support roles, including new, higher-level teaching assistants
career structures to reflect training, skills and responsibilities.

Schools are able to take positive steps in line with available resources and in response to their development priorities. They can also create a staff team that is flexible enough to meet the demands of curriculum development.

Using a range of adults other than teachers

Qualified teachers have responsibility for overall learning outcomes. However this does not mean that they take sole responsibility for all aspects of students’ learning. Adults other than teachers making a direct contribution to students’ learning could include:

further and higher education lecturers
instructors
employers/employees/trainees
business mentors
members of community organisations
technicians/practical assistants
higher-level teaching assistants
learning support/language assistants
artists in residence
sports coaches
parents
youth workers
university students
assessors.

They could:

plan learning activities with teachers
lead learning activities, or particular aspects of them
teach specific skills/concepts
develop/advise on resources
provide technical advice and guidance to students
support students in practical activities
extend or support learning activities for small groups or individuals
observe individual students to monitor behaviour or progress
introduce a ‘world of work’ perspective
provide feedback to students
assess students’ work
enhance the learning environment
extend the range of settings students are able to learn in, for example by organising visits and extra-curricular activities.

In addition, the higher-level teaching assistant (HLTA) role will allow teachers to draw on an enhanced range of support. HLTAs will work with teachers as part of a professional team and will be trained to undertake some teaching and learning activities. National standards for HTLAs are now available.

Responding to the developments

A school’s response to these developments will be determined by identified priorities within learning, teaching and curriculum development.

Some schools may want to focus initially on strengthening their staff resource. The following questions may be helpful:

where are our teachers under pressure? where are our teachers distracted from teaching? what administrative tasks can we take from them?
where is learning weak? what support can we provide? what new input to learning would help?
what is the capacity of our current support staff? are we using their skills? are we matching them well to teaching and learning needs?
how can we better coordinate and focus our input from adults other than teachers – internally and with partners?

Other schools will want to develop their staff resource in the context of the developing curriculum. The following questions may be helpful:

are we offering our students what they need? would new courses, or new opportunities within courses, benefit them?
what are our priorities for development? to what extent are these common to our local partners in education and training? what is our collective resource?
what experience and expertise - and through what range of roles - do we need to offer our students to make these developments successful? how can we access the desired range?
what staffing profile are we working towards? how do we build capacity and manage change?

Separate guidance related to curriculum development is available in the curriculum planning section of this website.

Engineering GCSE - an example of matching staff to learning opportunity

The following example illustrates the contribution a range of different staff can make to vocational learning and confirms that a flexible and diverse curriculum is dependent on a flexible and diverse staff resource. It pre-dates the focus on remodelling. The course was developed to secure distinctive and vocationally-relevant learning within the curriculum.

Engineering GCSE is one of three vocational courses offered at key stage 4. It is an oversubscribed course and students apply formally. 30 are accepted on the course each year. The school has developed secure local progression routes both in engineering and in a range of other advanced and intermediate programmes. The course is a highly valued aspect of students’ experience because of the range of high-level learning skills it develops.

Staff are matched to the learning demands of the course. Students work with one specialist teacher, a varied range of appropriately-skilled support staff and external experts. The teacher is supported by the workshop technician and an IT technician. Students also tackle a project set by an engineering firm, and have extensive contact with an engineer from the firm. In addition they sometimes work with apprentices.

The course is allocated two double lessons per week, one of which is in the afternoon, and one single lesson. The structure of the course is planned over two years. Throughout the two years, one of the double lessons is school based.

In year 10, the second double lesson (the afternoon) includes an FE college programme for half the class for half the year. The other students work with the teacher in school. The two groups swap in February. During one term in year 11, about half the group participates in a programme for higher attainers at the university, developed as part of the local Excellence in Cities programme. The other students stay in school. For the remaining two terms, all students are school based, working with the teacher and supported by the workshop technician and two business mentors.

Throughout the two years, in the single lesson, the teacher works with the full group. Key teaching points are covered, visiting speakers are invited and students make presentations to their peers.

Other web links
> Higher level teaching assistants (HLTA)
> National College for School Leadership - The National Remodelling Team