Older and Wiser, Or Just at the End of the Line?: the Experiences of Mature Trainee Teachers

Older and wiser, or just at the end of the line?:
The experiences of mature trainee teachers.

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, August 27th to August 30th

Abstract:

The situation for ‘mature’ students who are training to teach is contradictory. On the one hand they are sought after as recruits, welcomed onto courses and regarded as able to make a special contribution because of their experience . On the other, during their course and when applying for jobs they may sometimes be seen as potentially disruptive, ‘difficult’ and threatening because of this same life experience, and ultimately as unjustifiably expensive to employ.

This paper draws on the perspectives of a small number of older trainee teachers during and after their training, mostly through a secondary PGCE route. Its intention is to ensure that age is included and not ignored in the dynamics of training teachers and, crucially, that potential dilemmas of age-related employment factors are acknowledged at the onset of training by those involved in the process.

Older and wiser, or just at the end of the line?:
The experiences of mature trainee teachers.

Introduction

Recently public attention has begun to turn to issues of ageism and employment. Magazine articles are suggesting that ‘employers are ceasing to see age as a problem’ (Bella 1992 p 36) and certain national companies like ‘B & Q’, the Do-It-Yourself chain, and ‘Burger King,’ a fast-food restaurant chain, have reportedly started to target older workers in some parts of the country (Hopkins 1998). It has been suggested that older employees are frequently more polite and patient when dealing with the public than younger workers as well as being more reliable and industrious (House of Commons Employment Committee 1989, IPM 1993). ‘In the new decade it may be as cool to be 40 something as it is now to be thirty something’ (Williams 1998 p 20). Older people may well be coming highly desirable as employees.

In fact, reading some accounts of the ‘rediscovered’ older worker, one would be forgiven for thinking that we had entered a period of positive discrimination in favour of middle-aged and older job applicants (Lyon, Coupar and Pollard 1994 p 21).

The situation, in general, for the majority of older workers is less favourable than these signs would suggest. In some retailing and service sectors, older people are employed as a last resort where there is a dearth of younger applicants, rather than for any positive benefit they might bring. Thus, there is no reason to suspect that much fundamental change has occurred in the labour market: ‘Late working life generally brings increased market vulnerability: at worst it might mean enforced early retirement or redundancy’(Lyon, Coupar and Pollard 1994 p 21).

In this paper we want to explore the situation for a specific group of older adults who have taken the decision to train to teach in their mid thirties and early forties. In what follows we want to start to investigate their experiences as well as the vexed and contradictory issue of finding a job. These experiences are set against a national background of panic about a ‘crisis’ in teacher recruitment which is at an all-time high (Pyke 1998 p 1).

Employment Service figures confirm that while the Government laments a shortage of 4,500 teachers, 15,000 are currently claiming jobseekers’ allowance. Of those out of work for six months or more, over two-thirds are 40 and over (Wallace, 1999 p. 5).

Over the last two years, in an atmosphere of rising panic about shortfalls in recruitment, the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) has mounted a costly nation-wide advertising campaign in order to attract recruits to teaching: the ‘No-one forgets a good teacher’ campaign. Yet still, it seems, older trained teachers are finding it harder to gain employment than their younger peers.

Penny: You hear all this government blurb about how they want more people to come into the profession... and you think “Here I am and I haven’t got a job”. So don’t tell me there’s a shortage of teachers, when I’m sitting here unemployed.

Currently teachers’ pay in the state maintained sector is set by schools’ governing bodies along national guidelines. School governors are responsible for recruiting and retaining staff within their budget; they may well have little room for manoeuvre. The salary of newly qualified teachers who move straight from university to train as teachers and who take up their first teaching post straight away is relatively straightforward; they can gain an extra increment if they have a second class honours degree or better but they all start at the bottom of the pay spine. The situation for other newly qualified teachers is more complex; if they are in a shortage subject such as physics, they are more able to ‘name their price.’ In relation to the recruitment of mature teachers, it may well be the case that some tensions have to be worked through; the advantages which a mature, experienced candidate may bring have to be set against the economies of employing a cheaper, younger teacher. The rhetoric which surrounds mature newly qualified teachers is welcoming; the situation in which they sometimes find themselves is more complex. An NUT spokeswoman cited in the TES (1998 p 6) put it like this:

For cash-strapped schools, taking on a mature teacher with a higher salary is an obvious deterrent. But that is the fault of the current salary structure and the financing of schools. The profession needs to attract mature entrants who can bring a wide range of experience into the schools.

But is this experience always really so welcome? Beyond official statements and official rhetoric, are older entrants always seen as having a positive contribution to make towards teaching? And to what degree do ageist stereotyping and discrimination play a role in the training experience and employment prospects of older trainees? Finally, is it socially just to recruit older candidates who undertake training, sometimes at great personal and emotional cost, and then fail to obtain jobs? It is important here to note that there is some evidence from admissions data for the academic year 1997-8 (GTTR 1998) that training institutions are exercising a degree of caution in accepting older candidates onto ITT courses. Applicants who were thirty-one and over were less likely to be offered places (51% of applicants accepted) than applicants in the 20 -30 age-range (60% of applicants accepted). There was little difference in the acceptance rates of women and men in either age group. 51% of male and 52% of female applicants of 31 and over were accepted, compared to 59% of male applicants and 60% of female applicants of 30 and under. However, before we start to explore these issues it is important to briefly examine what is meant by ‘ageism’ and consider when age may start to have consequences for employment.

Ageism and being older

Age and being older are ‘transitional statuses’ which operate in a ‘less clear cut’ way than other structural factors such as ‘race’, class or gender (Featherstone and Wernick 1995 p 8).

Ageism creates and fosters prejudice about the nature and experience of old age. These usually project unpleasant images of older people which subtly undermine their personal value and worth. Commonly held ideas restrict the social role and status of older people, structure their expectations of themselves, prevent them achieving their potential and deny them equal opportunities (Scrutton, 1990: 13).

Until recently, the literature on ageing has been dominated by perspectives which regarded ageism in two main ways: either ‘patronising’ older people through excluding them from making decisions about their lives or neglecting those older people who are no longer financially productive and are viewed as a drain on resources. In all this the assumption is that ‘being older’ and ageism are post-retirement phenomena. Recent work on age and occupational exclusion, however, suggests that ageism impacts at a much earlier stage in life (Lyon et al 1994, Lyon et al 1997). Depending on the occupational setting, barriers occur at different ages. For example, in relation to those aspiring to political power and success:

Thinking in terms of beginning anything at 40 is ludicrously hopeful these days. If you aspire to money and status, and you aren’t a roaring success by your late thirties, you may as well forget it, it will be too late (Lacey 1997 p 1 cited in Lyons et al. 1997 p 32).

Is being ‘older’ differently defined and differently valued in different occupations; for example, in film or modelling work contrasted with high court judges and medical consultants? Is ageing equated with being undesirable (where ‘desirability’ and ‘attractiveness’ are heterosexualized constructions with large sections of the patriarchal capitalist economy devoted to their maintenance) or with being wise? Does becoming older have a different impact on women than on men - on their working lives - professional/work experiences?

Any consideration of the mass media will reveal the positive attention given in society to youthfulness and a powerful desire to prolong a youthful appearance. In western societies, now increasingly typified by ageing demographic profiles, much energy and money are expended on attempts to control and reconstruct the body in an age-defying manner (Shilling 1993). Recently these attempts to defy ageing have started to focus on men. There is a burgeoning market in men’s magazines which advertise creams, cleansers, hair colorants and styles which give out some subtle and not so subtle messages about the reduction in value/desirability as men age. Overall then, in western society there is a powerful ‘culture of youth’ which sits alongside a ‘contempt for age’ (Gutman, 1987). Yet until recently in the UK, age factors have been neglected and absent from much labour market related analysis.

Ageing has consequences for men and women and Marshall (1990 p. 8) discovered in the process of her research that,

From the age of about 40, people are increasingly ashamed of their ageing. It is socially very inept to ask someone their age and, if they tell you, it is often in an embarrassed whisper. I have seen people close to tears as they own up to being over 50.

Ageism is as yet a poorly understood phenomenon in educational studies, in part because the published work has concerned itself in the main with those over sixty and has been generated by those working in the fields of gerontology and social policy. This paper considers the way in which discourses of ageism, where utilised in specific circumstances and in particular locales, make it possible to create a climate which marginalises and excludes some older people who (want to) work in education in the UK.

The data

In this paper we discuss the perceptions and experiences of a small number of mature trainee teachers. For some time we have been concerned about the on-course experiences of older trainees as well as their moves into employment ( 3 sources omitted to maintain anonymity for reviewing). One of us has been charting the experiences of older women as they undertake and complete their training courses. In this paper we want to extend this investigation and explore what the situation is like for female and male students.

In the account of data collected and discussion which follows we will draw on some perceptions which have been gathered in the earlier work. Some of this data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews in two different Higher Education Institutions (HEI) between 1996 -97 (I source). Here we will also draw on questionnaire data collected from between 1997 and 1998 in one University Department of Education (UDE) which trains secondary school teachers on a nine month Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course (1). In addition, we have also been in correspondence with and have interviewed four mature trainees who have written to the TES over the past two years in their attempts to draw attention to what is frequently a neglected form of discrimination . We have also conducted additional in-depth interviews, to complement interviews conducted in previous years, with two male and three female trainee teachers from different HEI’s. Our sample is opportunistic and fairly small - based on interviews with approximately thirty mature trainees - and a limited number of questionnaire returns. (All the respondants were aged 35 and over). Therefore it is not possible to make any broad generalisations.

Thus, although the data might well be regarded as limited, the points which it illuminates are of some contemporary relevance in relation to current teacher recuitment issues in the UK.

In many ways, this sample presents us with a particular challenge in trying to make some sense out of the disparate experiences of trainee teachers, in different parts of the country, on different courses in different years. It is a weakness - but it is also a strength - for what does come across is the similarity of perceptions and experiences as well as the persistence of exclusion. There are obvious methodological difficulties which we recognise - nevertheless, we believe there is some urgency to ‘air’ these concerns, albeit in a somewhat inchoate, messy and unfinished manner.

It could be suggested that some of those mature trainee teachers who have featured in this work might well be refusing to accept that they are not ‘suitable candidates for teaching’ and are looking to rationalise their lack of success. The evidence which is now being assembled (see ATAA newsletters 1998; TES 1999) indicates that age discrimination is impacting on mature trainees - and they are not getting the jobs which their initial enquiries, their subsequent qualifications and success in teaching practice had led them to expect.

Older trainees: needed and wanted, or too great a risk?

While there is some concern that older teachers, even if they are perceived as having desirable qualities, are too expensive for schools, this is not the only factor operating to diminish their prospects of employment. Williams (1988 p 20) has signalled the ‘general perception that mature entrants are either too expensive or too risky’ (our italics). In the following interview extract, we see just what may be entailed by ‘risk’:

Interviewer: Why do you think he [school job interviewer] mentioned age?

Janet: Well he actually mentioned the fact that I was going to be much more expensive than a young teacher. I’m not too sure if that is the case though because being a newly qualified teacher it still would be quite lowish

Int.: I think that’s to be looked into - is it the age or the money? What do you think?

Janet: You know, first of all he could have asked me if I would have settled for a lower salary. I mean, I may have done. So you know, I did not believe about the money at all and I didn’t feel right, the way ...you know they probably think that it is difficult for an older woman to take orders or do as they’re told. They make too many suggestions.

Ghouri (1998 p 6) reporting in the ‘Times Educational Supplement’ on the recently formed ‘Association of Teachers Against Ageism’ spoke with the national co-ordinator Steve Jackson, who had stated on his application forms that he would “accept the same salary grade as a 22 year old, to no avail”. Two years ago Sue Woods, a mature trained teacher raised the same issue in ‘The Teacher’ and the ‘Times Educational Supplement’ and had over fifty responses. All cited experiences of age discrimination rather than cost alone as factors expressed to them in their unsuccessful attempts to obtain a teaching post, for example: “I have never known a mature entrant make a go of it” and “We’re trying to lower the average age of the staff”.

The experience of ageism does not start with the search for employment; unsurprisingly, it is also a feature in the courses and in-school placements of teacher training. (we say ‘unsurprisingly’, for if, as we argue, ageism is entrenched in society, it would not be surprising to find instances of its occurrence in formal education provision). Janet reported finding the experience of being a ‘mature’ student stressful at times. She found it difficult to establish relationships with some of the other students - many of whom were younger than her. She found the attitudes of some of the ‘boys’ in her seminar group particularly offensive as they sidelined her ‘off time experiences’.

They start to talk quietly to one another if I try to say anything. If I ever mention I have teenagers at home and know what they are like, their friends and things, they start to switch off. They don’t say anything, they just sort of stop. I wonder what they are like to their mothers?

Penny had a similar experience:

I did feel at times as if they weren’t taking any notice because a couple of times like in our seminar group, I spoke up and said “From a mother’s perspective blah, blah, blah” and the glazed look come over all of the younger ones...I don’t honestly think the courses are geared towards it (valuing mature students).

If being an older student in higher education was difficult for Janet who felt ‘out of place’ and believed she had to keep quiet (she had obtained a PhD much earlier in life and was the best qualified student in her group - a fact she kept hidden as much as possible) how must it be for ‘non-traditional’ mature entrants? Penny made the point that she had battled to get an education and now age was holding her back: