The allocation of teachers to primary and secondary schools involves a wide range of important issues: the attractiveness of the profession, geographical inequalities, pupil attainment, and so on. Striking a balance between these different factors is a delicate task: ensuring a high level of teacher mobility can lead to increased inequalities between school districts in terms of the experience of the teachers assigned, thereby undermining pupil achievement in the least attractive school districts. In this context, the computerised procedure used in France to assign teachers represents a key lever for striking a balance between meeting transfer requests and ensuring regional equity. Based on the observation that the current procedure tends to limit teacher mobility, in this paper we propose an alternative allocation procedure that would increase the movement of permanent teachers by more than 30 per cent, whilst taking into account the specific characteristics of the least attractive school districts. For these education authorities, we provide a management tool that enables simulations to be carried out and different human resources management strategies to be tested – increasing, maintaining or reducing teacher mobility within these authorities. Although the final decision depends on consultation between the various stakeholders regarding the objectives to be achieved, our work highlights the significant positive impact that a change to the current teacher allocation system could have.
How can we improve teachers’ mobility without penalising the least attractive school districts?
This study shows that it is possible to improve the current teacher allocation system: a simple change to the automated procedure – also known as an algorithm – could thus significantly increase the rate at which teachers’ requests for a transfer are granted.
Reference IPP Policy Brief No. 24
Presentation
Key Results
- The computerised system used in France to allocate teachers suffers from a problem that severely restricts teacher mobility each year: in 2013, the inter-academy transfer rate for secondary education could have been 40 per cent higher at national level, and up to nearly 150 per cent for certain academies, had a more efficient algorithm been used.
- An increase in teacher mobility – without additional safeguards – may exacerbate the over-representation of young teachers in the most disadvantaged school districts and, more generally, widen inequalities between different school districts in terms of the experience of the teachers assigned to them.
- We provide a management tool that enables simulations to be carried out and different human resources management strategies – increasing, maintaining or reducing teacher mobility – specific to each school district to be tested.
- By way of example, we show that an alternative allocation procedure would make it possible to increase the number of teachers obtaining a new post by more than 30 per cent whilst keeping teacher mobility in disadvantaged school districts constant. In this scenario, teacher mobility in certain school districts would double.
