Investigation: Does Chartered College have a future?

Major questions have emerged about the ability of the Chartered College of Teaching to meet its goals and stand on its own two feet, Tes can reveal.

More than two years after it was formed, the teachers’ professional body is now facing serious challenges over its funding, membership, accommodation and support from government.

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One source with knowledge of internal Department for Education discussions said that killing off the college would be a “brave decision” but was not impossible.

 Tes can reveal that:

• With just nine months to go before the date when the college said it would become financially self-sufficient, it is still reliant on DfE funding for 40 per cent of its income.
• Well-placed sources say there is a belief in some quarters of the DfE that the college has not yet proved itself, and that an extra government grant is “not a done deal”.
• The college also has just nine months to increase its members from 26,000 to reach its 40,000 target.
• It insists it will hit the target. But to do so would mean increasing its rate of recruitment by 1,400 per cent compared with the previous nine months.
• The college will have to leave its existing free-of-charge central London offices in less than a year.

Yesterday the DfE’s corporate plan said its support for the college would help “elevate the status of our teaching profession”.  However the jury is said to be out within government about whether the college has met expectations.

Chartered College of Teaching: ‘Not a done deal’

One source familiar with discussions in the department told Tes: “I think there is definitely a constituency within the DfE who will be quite happy to keep giving it money and to keep it existing… I think, however, the bit of the DfE that tends to interact with it a bit more is not quite so happy.

“Their retail offer to teachers just isn’t strong enough to draw people in.

“If the Chartered College doesn’t feel under a lot of scrutiny, I don’t think they’re paying attention. They should be thinking, ‘This is not a done deal.’”

Another source familiar with discussions in the DfE, said: “There are different voices in the department.”

“The original hypothesis, and it was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, was that you could fund this organisation on the fees of members… that’s turned out not to be as true as we thought it would be.”

The source said the college should look for an “alternative revenue model”. They suggested it could become the formal holder of the teaching standards, which it could then licence to training providers to deliver.

But to do this, the source said the college would have to convince the DfE that it is “sufficiently credible” and “can do the job”. They also said there were still lingering fears within the DfE that it could be subject to “capture” by forces ideologically opposed to the government’s view of education.

The Chartered College of Teaching formally opened its doors to members in January 2017 after a troubled birth - which included a failed crowdfunding campaign.

The DfE gave the college a £5 million grant from 2016-17 to 2019-20 to get it off the ground.

Self-sufficiency goal

Dame Alison Peacock, the College’s chief executive, has said she wanted the organisation to be self-sufficient by the end of the grant period.

In an interview with Tes in January 2017, she said: “The funding that’s been provided is clearly over four years, and so we have to be in a position where we can stand on our own two feet by then.”

That self-sufficiency deadline is now just nine months away. However, figures supplied by the college to Tes this week show that in the past 12 months, 40 per cent of its revenue still came from the DfE (£1 million) with the remainder (just under £1.5 million) derived from membership, CPD work and other activity.

To wean itself off the DfE funding the college has to grow its membership. The target in its original grant agreement was to hit 40,000 members by March 2020.

With membership currently standing at 26,000, this will require recruiting 14,000 new members over the next nine months.

‘No groundswell of support’ 

The NASUWT teaching union warns that there is “no still no groundswell of support for a college from teachers”. The union has never been its biggest supporter - however, the numbers do appear to back up its analysis.

The college has only put on an extra 1,000 members in the past nine months - it announced that it passed the 25,000 membership mark in October 2018. So it will have to increase its rate of recruitment by 1,400 per cent to hit the target.

A boost at the start of the next school year might be expected when another cohort of new teachers joins the profession. But it still appears a tall order. 

And at almost the same time as the financial self-sufficiency funding and membership target dates, the college will have to vacate the accommodation it now gets for free. 

The college’s most recent annual accounts show that it paid nothing for offices a few minutes’ walk from Euston station in London, in a building belonging to the UCL Institute of Education.

Searching for premises

A spokeswoman for UCL told Tes: “The Chartered College of Teaching is due to move out of its current offices, located within the UCL Institute of Education, in spring 2020. 

“There are works that need to be completed as part of UCL’s building and refurbishment programme which the [college] were aware of when they moved in and so have planned accordingly.”

Tes understands that in recent months the college has made unsuccessful overtures to at least one other education organisation about whether it can share their offices.

The NASUWT said that it believed the college “could have a useful role to play”. But added that it had always been concerned that the government’s “deregulation of the teaching profession” and its “lack of clarity” about the college’s aims and objectives “posed serious barriers to its success”.

‘Unrealistic expectations’

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said the expectations placed on the college had been “unrealistic”.

“I’ve always thought it was a very big ask to get the Chartered College of Teaching up and running with the grant it had,” she told Tes.

“I think it’s a huge ask to get the membership up, when you consider the demands on teachers’ wages, particularly beginning teachers… it’s hard to establish benefits which are indisputable quite quickly.

“I’m quite impressed by what they’ve managed to do in the time available, but I think the expectations of them, that they would be self-sufficient in such a short period of time, are unrealistic.”

A spokesperson for the College told Tes that it had “consistently achieved above” its membership targets to date, and is “on track” to achieve its 40,000 target.

On the recruitment rate uplift required to hit this number, they said that “because of the shape of the school year” and “the scheduling of our recruitment campaigns, membership growth is not linear”.

Growth ‘on track’

Asked whether the college would be self-sufficient by March 2020, they said: “Our core membership activities, including our termly peer-reviewed journal, networks, online platform and research, are all on track to be self-sustaining within our initial grant funding period.”

The spokesperson said that, since launching, the college had undertaken a “variety of other activities to support teachers… in addition to our core membership activities funded by the start-up grant”, such as supporting the DfE’s edtech strategy.

“We are pleased that DfE see us as having an important role to play in supporting their commitment to strengthen evidence-informed practice, reduce teacher workload and drive teacher recruitment and retention,” the spokesperson said.

“Of course, we will continue to seek opportunities for additional funding from a range of sources to further enhance our core membership offer and support the widest number of teachers possible.”

Regarding the Institute of Education accommodation, the spokesperson said the college had “budgeted for the costs of a London office” and set this funding aside “regardless of the level of rent paid for our current accommodation”.

They said the college had made “great strides” in the past two years, and listed achievements such as launching its Impact journal, developing chartered teacher status, and “contributing to important policy and strategy including teacher induction, CPD, character education, early career, curriculum and the arts”.

“The Chartered College of Teaching is now clearly part of the education landscape,” they added. “All of this has contributed to building a professional body that is financially sustainable both now and in the long term.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We support the work of the Chartered College of Teaching and know the value they add as an independent voice in the education sector and their contribution to wider work including our recruitment and retention strategy. 

 “We continue to work with the College on the funding arrangements for after March 2020.”