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Mis-sold, expensive and overhyped: why our universities are a con

By Aditya Chakrabortty

Politicians promised that expansion would produce jobs and social mobility. Neither has materialised

In any other area it would be called mis-selling. Given the sheer numbers of those duped, a scandal would erupt and the guilty parties would be forced to make amends. In this case, they’d include some of the most eminent politicians in Britain.

But we don’t call it mis-selling. We refer to it instead as “going to uni”. Over the next few days, about half a million people will start as full-time undergraduates. Perhaps your child will be among them, bearing matching Ikea crockery and a fleeting resolve to call home every week.

They are making one of the biggest purchases of their lives, shelling out more on tuition fees and living expenses than one might on a sleek new Mercedes, or a deposit on a London flat. Many will emerge with a costly degree that fulfils few of the promises made in those glossy prospectuses. If mis-selling is the flogging of a pricey product with not a jot of concern about its suitability for the buyer, then that is how the establishment in politics and in higher education now treat university degrees. The result is that tens of thousands of young graduates begin their careers having already been swindled as soundly as the millions whose credit card companies foisted useless payment protection insurance on them.

Rather than jumping through hoop after hoop of exams and qualifications, they’d have been better off with parents owning a home in London. That way, they’d have had somewhere to stay during internships and then a source of equity with which to buy their first home – because ours is an era that preaches social mobility, even while practising a historic concentration of wealth. Our new graduates will learn that the hard way.

To say as much amounts to whistling in the wind. With an annual income of £33bn, universities in the UK are big business, and a large lobby group. They are perhaps the only industry whose growth has been explicitly mandated by prime ministers of all stripes, from Tony Blair to Theresa May. It was Blair who fed the university sector its first steroids, by pledging that half of all young Britons would go into higher education. That sweeping target was set with little regard for the individual needs of teenagers – how could it be? Sub-prime brokers in Florida were more exacting over their clients’ circumstances. It was based instead on two promises that have turned out to be hollow.

Promise number one was that degrees mean inevitably bigger salaries. This was a way of selling tuition fees to voters. Blair’s education secretary, David Blunkett, asked: “Why should it be the woman getting up at 5 o’clock to do a cleaning job who pays for the privileges of those earning a higher income while they make no contribution towards it?” When David Cameron’s lot wanted to jack up fees, they claimed a degree was a “phenomenal investment”.

Both parties have marketed higher education as if it were some tat on a television shopping channel. Across Europe, from Germany to Greece, including Scotland, university education is considered a public good and is either free or cheap to students. Graduates in England, however, are lumbered with some of the highest student debt in the world.

Yet shove more and more students through university and into the workforce and – hey presto! – the wage premium they command will inevitably drop. Research shows that male graduates of 23 universities still earn less on average than non-graduates a whole decade after going into the workforce.

Britain manufactures graduates by the tonne, but it doesn’t produce nearly enough graduate-level jobs. Nearly half of all graduates languish in jobs that don’t require graduate skills, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. In 1979, only 3.5% of new bank and post office clerks had a degree; today it is 35% – to do a job that often pays little more than the minimum wage.

Promise number two was that expanding higher education would break down class barriers. Wrong again. At the top universities that serve as gatekeepers to the top jobs, Oxbridge, Durham, Imperial and others, private school pupils comprise anywhere up to 40% of the intake. Yet only 7% of children go to private school. Factor in part-time and mature students, and the numbers from disadvantaged backgrounds are actually dropping. Nor does university close the class gap: Institute for Fiscal Studies research shows that even among those doing the same subject at the same university, rich students go on to earn an average of 10% more each year, every year, than those from poor families.

Far from providing opportunity for all, higher education is itself becoming a test lab for Britain’s new inequality. Consider today’s degree factory: a place where students pay dearly to be taught by some lecturer paid by the hour, commuting between three campuses, yet whose annual earnings may not amount to £9,000 a year – while a cadre of university management rake in astronomical sums.

Thus is the template set for the world of work. Can’t find an internship in politics or the media in London that pays a wage? That will cost you more than £1,000 a month in travel and rent. Want to buy your first home? In the mid-80s, 62% of adults under 35 living in the south-east owned their own home. That has now fallen to 32%. Needless to say, the best way to own your own home is to have parents rich enough to help you out.

Over the past four decades, British governments have relentlessly pushed the virtues of skilling up and getting on. Yet today wealth in Britain is so concentrated that the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, believes “inheritance is probably the most crucial factor in determining a person’s overall wealth since Victorian times”.

Margaret Thatcher’s acolytes promised to create a classless society, and they were quite right: Britain is instead becoming a caste society, one in which where you were born determines ever more where you end up.

For two decades, Westminster has used universities as its magic answer for social mobility. Ministers did so with the connivance of highly paid vice-chancellors, and in the process they have trashed much of what was good about British higher education. What should be sites for speculative inquiry and critical thinking have instead turned into businesses that speculate on property deals, criticise academics who aren’t publishing in the right journals – and fail spectacularly to engage with the serious social and economic problems that confront the UK right now. As for the graduates, they largely wind up taking the same place in the queue as their parents – only this time with an expensive certificate detailing their newfound expertise.

For everyone’s sake, let us declare this experiment a failure. It is high time that higher education was treated again as a public good, as Jeremy Corbyn recognises with his pledge to scrap tuition fees. But Labour also needs to expand vocational education. And if it really wants to increase social mobility and reduce unfairness, it will need to come up with tax policies fit for the age of inheritance.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/20/university-factory-failed-tony-blair-social-mobility-jobs

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Concord student showcases original game at learning innovation event

Por: concord.wickedlocal.com/13-02-2019

The following is from a submission by Kerry Crisley for Acera School.

Concord resident Liam Lurker took the stage at LearnLaunch Institute’s 2019 Learning Innovation Showcase at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston on Feb. 1.

The Acera School student and two of his classmates presented “Hail Caesar?” — an online multiplayer game they designed and created using Javascript.

Set in 44 BC, the game enables up to six players to take on the roles of Roman senators at the height of the conspiracies against Caesar. Each player has a unique set of goals that he or she must complete to win. The idea behind the game was to help history come to life for today’s students.

“The game gives us ways to learn creative and technical skills, along with systems thinking, perspective taking, and problem solving,” said Liam.

The Acera team was one of 23 middle and high schools from across New England selected to appear at this education conference showcase. The event is part of an annual national conference where educators, entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers can see a range of edtech tools applied in real learning environments.

“We were very pleased to see the impressed reactions of many attendees who visited our table to play the game demo and learn about its development,” said Danny Fain, the lead educator representing Acera at the showcase. “One conference organizer even suggested these students might soon be ready to launch their own entrepreneurial venture!”

“Hail, Caesar?” was conceived and created by students in Acera’s middle school elective class, “Powerfully Playful Programming.” Acera, a nonprofit STEAM school for kindergarten through eighth grade based in Winchester, features hands-on electives such as science labs, architecture, woodshop and computer science.

For information: aceraschool.org.

*Fuente: https://concord.wickedlocal.com/news/20190212/concord-student-showcases-original-game-at-learning-innovation-event

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New Zealand: On the job learning for new teachers a disservice to them and students

Oceania/ New Zealand/ 12.02.2019/ Source: www.stuff.co.nz.

I was very excited to see the outcomes of Bali Haque’s Tomorrow’s Schools Review. It is insightful, clear, and I think, largely correct. I hope we have the courage to implement the review’s recommendations – all bar one.

I don’t believe that school-based teacher preparation pathways will improve the quality of new teachers, and believe it will have a raft of unfortunate consequences for schools and their learners.

Preparing teachers has always been a tricky business. Between 1920 and 2018 there has been a review, a White Paper, a Green Paper, consultation, an advisory committee or report to government on New Zealand’s teacher education  about every 10 years. This despite the shift of teacher education over this period from school-based preparation to training colleges and colleges of education, to universities and private providers.

These reports have the same themes: selection and recruitment, what the content of teacher education should be, where it should be taught, and what the roles of the providers and the profession are in preparing teachers; all similar concerns to those raised by the Tomorrow’s Schools Review.

So is New Zealand particularly bad at teacher preparation? Actually, no. If we look internationally, exactly the same concerns predominate in English-speaking countries around the world. Essentially it comes down to whether you think teaching is a profession or not.

Professions are defined by having an established body of knowledge that is not held by the general population, and therefore require a period of advanced education before they can be practised. Because we’ve all experienced teaching at school in a way that most of us haven’t been exposed to law, accountancy or medicine, some people think there’s not much to it; that it’s basically managing children, a practical «craft» best learned on the job.

If teaching is a profession, advanced preparation is appropriate. If it’s a craft, it could be learned by doing. In practice, of course, it’s both; a highly intellectual activity, characterised by rapid high-stakes decision-making, and a practical task with routines and strategies that need to be mastered.

So which is the right way in: learn the professional knowledge, then practise the strategies, or learn the strategies and then gain the knowledge? I believe it’s a clever combination of the two, and the institutions best placed to develop it are not schools.

But why not? It’s tempting logic, followed by England in  its «School Direct» reform (an employment-based route into teaching). It’s had some successes, but hasn’t solved the variability and supply issues the New Zealand Taskforce highlights.

And a consequence has been the disestablishment of teacher education programmes in higher education, resulting in a loss of expertise in teaching and teacher preparation from the system. Just as the schools discover how hard teacher preparation is, the number of people who could help them diminishes.

Successful schools are good at teaching students. It turns out that teaching adults how to be teachers is actually another task entirely. Putting unprepared people in front of children to «learn as they go» clearly disadvantages those children, and trying to avoid this by preparing, mentoring and evaluating prospective teachers in schools is a serious challenge.

Do we want our schools to be both schools for students and teacher education institutions?

One of the reasons school-based routes appeal is because prospective teachers are paid.

Creating long, unpaid internships as part of teacher preparation reduces the number who can afford to prepare and reduces the diversity of the workforce. Paying people to become teachers is a great idea, we used to do it, but it doesn’t mean that preparation should be led by schools.

I think schools should play a larger role in teacher preparation and be rewarded for doing so. I don’t think, however, that they should be given the whole responsibility because they have another, extremely important, job to do – teaching their students.

In a post-Tomorrow’s School Review system, where supports like advisory services and education hubs are restored, why not retain a highly skilled teacher educator service that is seen as part of the profession, and works closely with schools to provide teacher preparation?

Rather than creating a dual pathway, let’s use all the resources we have to provide quality graduates for New Zealand’s schools.

Source of the notice: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/110510328/on-the-job-learning-for-new-teachers-a-disservice-to-them-and-students

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Dreams of the daughters: how a school in Zambia is tackling education for girls

By: Julia Rampen. 

George Mumbi lives in rural northern Zambia, where umbrella-like trees cast shadows on the red earth and there are few roads. The unusual thing about George is that he sent his daughter to secondary school. In Zambia, high schools charge fees, and in George’s community of subsistence farmers most families plough what money they have into educating their sons. But George’s daughter was among those teenage girls who set off from their homes in the bush and began the long journey to boarding school.

Parents in rural districts often prefer their children to live on campus, rather than walk several hours a day or rent alone near the school. They have less control over the journey to boarding school itself. In Kasama, a city in northern Zambia, trains packed with students can be delayed for hours or even overnight. It was on one of these journeys to school that George’s daughter became pregnant. “That’s why she dropped out of school,” he explained, through a translator.

“If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” In the past two decades, this Ghanaian proverb has become the blueprint for international aid. The commitment to girls’ primary education was enshrined in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The UK’s Department for International Development runs the largest global fund dedicated to girls’ education. The charity Campaign for Female Education has produced research showing that for every year a girl is educated at secondary level, her earnings go up, her chances of contracting HIV go down and she will marry later. And if donors are still not persuaded, there’s the promise that she will “resist gender-based violence and discrimination, and change her community from within”.

The message is an irresistible blend of pragmatism and feminism. But while in Zambia most girls receive a basic education, fewer than half go on to secondary school. The biggest issue is fees. But even when this obstacle is removed, there are still additional challenges for girls.

I recently visited Peas Kampinda Secondary School, a short drive outside the sleepy town of Kasama. The school is the result of a partnership between the educational charity Peas (Promoting Equality in African Schools) and the Zambian government. When parents in the local area heard that there was to be a free high school, which would also serve lunch, the prospect sounded so good that they worried there was a catch.

At Peas Kampinda, girls are treated equally. The student body is 51 per cent female, including a cohort who board on campus. But nevertheless, teachers at Peas are aware that expectations are different at home. One girl used to turn up late, while her brother appeared on time. “She was given extra housework compared to the boy,” said Chola Kunda, one of the school’s female teachers, smartly dressed in a black skirt, white blouse and earrings. “After talking to the parents, the situation has changed. That girl is now coming to school on time.” Not only that, but the girl’s parents now ask the brother to clean the house as well. “There’s gender equality in the home,” Chola told me.

Girls who rent rooms nearby face a different kind of challenge: stigma from the locals. “They perceive them as prostitutes,” Chola said. Again, the school intervened, holding meetings with the community to encourage acceptance of the girls.

A girl’s future is even more likely to be set off kilter through teenage pregnancy. At Kampinda, during a student debate, I watched teenage girls stand up in front of a hundred of their peers and argue against sex education in schools. “When a person starts learning about sex, they are going to be concentrating on that subject,” one girl railed. Both sides, though, seemed passionate about the same issue: preventing teenage pregnancies. “No wonder we have poverty in our country,” one defender of sex education lamented. “Because of early marriages and teen pregnancies.”

Zambia is a deeply Christian country, and it is rare to see a school or municipal building that lacks a framed portrait of Jesus. This makes it harder to carry out simple intitiatives such as distributing contraceptives. Legal abortion is difficult to access, and Claire Albrecht, a local aid worker, has encountered many girls who have turned to traditional medicine rather than drop out of school. But such methods are risky. “There was a girl in a village where we stayed. It was her third time, and she died.”

Schools such as Peas Kampinda have had success encouraging young mothers to return to education. But for some girls, dropping out seems the easy option. “I went to school when bullying was at its peak,” Chola recalled. It was an entrenched system that she described as “hell. A lot of people left school because of it.”

But Chola’s older sister was paying for the fees. Having frequently been pulled out of school herself to take care of her siblings, she urged Chola to stick with it. Now 32, Chola is a strong advocate of the Peas child protection policy. “A teacher in this school is very empowered and concerned about protecting children in school,” she said. There is also zero tolerance of corporal punishment.

In the playground at Kampinda, meanwhile, the girls in which so much hope is invested eat their lunch, laugh about boys and ask me questions. “I want to be a surgeon,” one said. “I want to be a lawyer,” another told me. “I want to be a pirate,” a third said with a smile. The girls, mostly boarders, are glad to be at a school where the older years can’t force them to do chores and the teachers won’t beat them up. They have dreams of travelling after school, to neighbouring countries, even to London. “There is a lot of housework [at home], so it’s better we stay here,” said Patience Kabwe, one of the boarders. “We don’t have much time to do that – it’s just half an hour of sweeping. Most of the time we spend studying.”

Source of the notice: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/africa/2019/01/dreams-daughters-how-school-zambia-tackling-education-girls

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How To Improve India’s Education System

Asia/ India/ 12.02.2019/ Source: www.businessworld.in.

In his book Ignited Minds (2002),  A.P.J. Abdul Kalam wrote, “The way to development is through purposeful activity. The young especially have to be guided properly, so that their lives find proper direction and their creativity is allowed to flower. To facilitate this certain educational reforms must be initiated.” It is true, along the years, several changes have been introduced at all levels of education. Yet where does the Indian education system stand today? Has it benefitted, has it regressed and what is the course for the future?

The editors of  Education At The Crossroads’ have presented a varied collection of papers by intellectuals well known in their field, each opening interesting windows. The articles provide a deep insight into the education scenario afflicting institutions today. Any policy maker having an intent to improve the education system or even to understand the realities of it must read the articles presented. The book will also be a good read for anyone interested in the various facets of higher education in terms of policy, implementation, privatization, RTE etc. It initiates the reader who can then advance analyse for themselves. That’s why I use the words ‘windows’. All the authors have been part of esteemed research institution or have headed prominent institutions.

The essay ‘Why Educate’ introduces the narration well. The fundamental question raised by Romila Thapar is, ‘Have we seriously addressed the question of what constitutes education and enquires as to what needs to change to ensure its relevance?’ The question leads one to introspect the conditions afflicting our education system. If the educational policy has to get better results, it is the primary and secondary schooling that needs  improvement, writes Romila Thapar.

Jyotsna Jha’s ‘Private Education India Limited’ brings to the fore the plethora of issues affecting private education at the school level. Her statement that education is increasingly becoming like other industries in which production is increasingly deterritorialised, and parts are procured in bits and assembled by a global firm at high cost hits home a hard reality.

Pushpa Sundar’s ‘The Gift of Knowledge Philanthropy and Higher Education’ reminds us of the enormous contribution private philanthropy has made in Indian education. The article traces the change in private philanthropy over the years and how there is ‘trouble in distinguishing real philanthropic activity from masked profit making’.  Majumdar Mukherjee’s article studies the effects of privatisation in terms of the effect on household expenditures.

Articles discussing diverse scenarios like the role of parenting, socio-economic conditions and gender biases on the educational development of children give an understanding of  how deeply all these factors are interrelated.  Where schools and teachers have understood the home situations of the wards and given due flexibility to accommodate it, there has been better retention of the wards. Issues relating to adolescent girls, sexual harassment are put forth well in ‘Drawing Pictures: A review on the policy and action on adolescent girls’ and ‘A Silent Revolution? Gender, Sexual Harassment and the Democratization of Higher Education’.

While a  majority of the essays reflect the poor scenario of India’s education system mainly stemming due to inflexibility in policy, state meddling, dwindling autonomy and sheer apathy that plagues our system, there are some that offer a refreshing insight into certain other aspects. For instance Manoj Kumar emphasises on teaching poetry in schools. His analysis in ‘The Making of the Hindi Literary Canon and Literary Common Sense’ is an eye opener. Similarly, Indira Chowdhary’s discussion ‘How oral histories help us understand institutional memory’, gives a fascinating insight on the importance of oral narratives.

The book makes a thought provoking read not only for the informed but also for those trying to simply understand the relationship between society, government and institutions.

Source of the notice: http://www.businessworld.in/article/How-To-Improve-India-s-Education-System/12-02-2019-167097/

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Humanitarian Action for Children 2019 – Mauritania

By: reliefweb.int. 

Total people in need: 258,978

Total children (<18) in need: 224,978

Total people to be reached: 113,323

Total children to be reached: 77,089

2019 programme targets:

Nutrition

• 26,930 children under 5 years suffering from SAM admitted for treatment

• 16,234 pregnant and lactating women reached with an integrated package of IYCF services

Health

• 2,846 children aged 6 to 59 months with common childhood diseases reached with appropriate and integrated management of childhood illness services

WASH

• 13,465 children under treatment for SAM accessing safe water for drinking, cooking and hygiene through housewater treatment

• 6,500 children accessing and using appropriate sanitation and hygiene facilities in health and nutrition centres and schools in refugee camps, host communities and villages with high SAM burdens

Child protection

• 8,500 refugee and host community children reached with psychosocial support

• 150 survivors of sexual and genderbased violence reached with gender-based violence response interventions

Education

• 17,000 school-aged boys and girls (3 to 17 years) in the refugee camp and host community affected by humanitarian situations receiving learning materials

• 4,950 out-of-school boys and girls aged 3 to 17 years accessing education

Mauritania is experiencing recurrent cycles of drought that are severely affecting the nutritional health of children. For the second year running, irregular rainfall has negatively impacted crops and pastures, eroding household resilience and capacities to absorb shocks. Over 130,000 children, including nearly 32,000 children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM), and 31,000 pregnant and lactating women, will require nutritional care and treatment in 2019. Twenty-three of Mauritania’s 55 districts are currently experiencing a nutrition emergency,2 and account for three quarters of the country’s total SAM caseload. Only 47 per cent of the populations of these districts have access to drinking water, compared with the national average of 64 per cent.4 Poor hygiene and sanitation practices, high levels of diarrhoea and low vaccination rates are aggravating factors. Given the protracted emergency and deteriorating security situation in the Sahel, over 57,000 Malian refugees—a 10 per cent increase from 2017—60 per cent of whom are children, require access to basic services, including safe water, health care, education and protection. Of the 29,485 school-aged refugee children (3 to 17 years) in the M’Berra refugee camp, only 8,217 (6 to 17 years) have access to learning opportunities.7 In host communities, 12,000 children are out of school.

2019-HAC-Mauritania

Source of the document: https://reliefweb.int/report/mauritania/humanitarian-action-children-2019-mauritania

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Schools staff crisis looms as austerity hits teachers’ pay

By: Michael Savage. 

Recruitment slumps as figures show a 10% fall in salaries since 2003

Ministers have conceded that teachers’ pay has fallen by thousands of pounds a year since the public spending austerity drive began, amid warnings of a “looming crisis” in attracting and retaining new staff.

Classroom pay has fallen by more than £4,000 a year since 2010 in real terms, according to a government assessment. Damian Hinds, the education secretary, warned that only a 2% increase can be expected for the next academic year.

The admission comes in the Department for Education’s official submission to the School Teachers’ Review Body, which makes recommendations on pay deals. It states that pay is also lower than it was 15 years ago in real terms. “From 2002-03 to 2017-18, classroom teacher median salaries have seen a drop of 10% and overall teacher median salaries of 11% in real terms,” it says. It argues that the fall was smaller than that suffered by private sector graduates.

Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “We welcome the DfE’s admission that teachers’ pay has fallen so far in real terms. It is no good Damian Hinds trying to argue that this is the same for private sector jobs – those figures reflect the many graduates forced into low-paid, part-time, semi-casual jobs, whereas we are talking about the pay rates being offered to those joining a profession.”

The number of secondary school pupils is forecast to rise by 15% during the next decade. However, the government missed its recruitment targets for trainees for the past six years, with the biggest shortfalls in key subjects like maths, modern foreign languages and physics. Ministers have responded with a series of measures designed to ease the pressures with job shares, more support for new staff and a reduction in paperwork.

James Zuccollo, from the Education Policy Institute, said there was evidence that “targeted pay increases” could greatly reduce the looming crisis. “Recent research suggests a 5% pay supplement for early-career science and maths teachers could have avoided the increased shortages since 2010, for instance,” he said.

“The government’s new bursary scheme for early-career teachers may help to tackle acute retention problems in shortage subjects and disadvantaged parts of the country. But, unless it is applied immediately to existing teachers, it is likely to be a few years before we see any improvements to exit rates.”

Hinds has announced that English schools will no longer be punished for failing to meet government standard on tests, in an attempt to release teachers from the stress of results and stop schools with challenging pupils from being punished. He also wants to cut down on marking, data collection and lesson planning.

However, Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said years of cuts had led to teachers being “thousands of pounds a year worse off. Across our schools we are seeing the result in the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. Teacher recruitment targets have been missed year after year, with more teachers leaving the profession than joining. In response to this crisis, the government will give the majority of teachers another real-terms pay cut.”

Labour is pledging to end the public sector pay cap with additional, ring-fenced funding.

School leaders have been angered by a suggestion last week that they will have to fund this year’s pay increase from their existing budget, without extra help from the government. A note from the department warned: “A pay increase for teachers of 2%, in line with forecast inflation, is affordable within the overall funding available to schools for 2019 to 2020, without placing further pressure on school budgets.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Last summer saw the biggest teacher pay rise in almost 10 years, worth between £800 and £1,366 for classroom teachers and supported by a £508m government grant. In addition to an annual pay award, many teachers also receive increases from promotions and responsibility allowances.

“Whilst we know pay is an important issue for teachers, there are also other factors which can affect recruitment and retention. That is why in January we unveiled the first ever integrated recruitment and retention strategy in England, which will provide teachers with more early careers support and opportunities for flexible and part-time working. The strategy also builds on the work we have done to support school leaders to strip away unnecessary workload.”

Source or the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/09/teacher-pay-down-real-terms-since-2003

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