Why do they always miss the point?!

[rollonthesummer]

Yesterday's news was that 50% of teachers wanted to leave the profession within 2 years and today's is saying that with swelling pupil numbers and a recruitment crisis-things are not looking good.

link

Why then, is Nicky Morgan banging on about teaching being as popular as ever and all we need to do is pay a little bursary to encourage the 'brightest and the best graduates' in?!

Did she read any of those thousands of replies to the Teacher Workload survey?? Money has very little to do with it!

Why don't they listen to the complaints about the time consuming nature of the job which actually could be changed? Marking, in particular is what is taking up great wodges of my time at the moment-I write loads, they write back to me and I comment in a different colour. I'm not their pen pal, FFS. Simple changes could very easily be made.

[IguanaTail]

Crisis? What crisis?

The workload survey was dropped into the bin. Not a single thing has been done.

[Pico2]

As a parent, this really concerns me.

I think that the Torys want to deprofessionalise teaching until they can get away with a load of badly paid TAs led by the odd qualified teacher. Even better if you can hound teachers out of the profession by working them into the ground and then re-employ them as TAs, it's a bargain.

[Letseatgrandma]

I do wonder if you're right.

My SIL has just left teaching to be a TA as she was on the brink of a breakdown. She is very happy now-loves her job and I expect she's amazing at it. She works full time school hours (8.45-3.15) and the job was advertised at £15K which was about what she was earning on 2 days a week. Because it's pro rata though, she only takes home about £580 a month!

I bet she'll be taken advantage of as a qualified teacher as a TA as well :(

[IguanaTail]

Yes - quite a few schools would give her a HLTA role and get her to take full classes. Bargain!

[rollonthesummer]

People will only be able to stay in low paid jobs if their partner is earning a decent wage though-with all the tax credit cuts about to come in. I need to earn x amount to pay the mortgage/bills so couldn't switch to a TA role if I wanted.

It's thoroughly depressing!

[Foxyloxy1plus1]

Deprofessionalise! Teaching stopped being a profession some time ago, round about the time when the NC came in!

[DaimYou]

I struggle with this. I know several teachers who have left teaching in the last couple of years. However, apart from one who retired a little bit early, they weren't good teachers. They were teachers who really should have given up soon after they completed their training.

IME good teachers, the kind for whom it's a vocation, whilst still finding things tough at times are still committed to the profession.

[Haggisfish]

Hahaha! Of course, so many top graduates view teaching as a vocation. Not! I view it as a vocation-I love teaching and teenagers, but I am close to leaving. Yet another outstanding colleague (consistently ratrd as so by everyone including pupils) is leaving the profession. I seriously worry for my dcs education.

[noblegiraffe]

I know several excellent teachers who have quit in the last year, all of them in shortage subjects. Nicky will have to pay 25k or whatever the bursary is to replace them, the replacements won't be as good because the teachers who left were very experienced and in fact they might not be able to even find a replacement at all because they're a shortage subject.

But the teachers would have stayed if teaching wasn't so crap and the workload so outrageous right now. Well done Nicky.

[rollonthesummer]

I struggle with this. I know several teachers who have left teaching in the last couple of years. However, apart from one who retired a little bit early, they weren't good teachers. They were teachers who really should have given up soon after they completed their training

Are you a teacher?

I have to say, this is not the case around here. In our school alone, 7 teachers left last summer. They were strong and experienced teachers who offered a lot to the school. All loved by parents and children who had consistently good results. The one thing they had in common was that they were expensive, so SMT decided to give them a little push. It didn't take much-a year or two, but they went-some on supply, some doing 1:1, some taking v early retirement and others finding other jobs. The gulf left is almost destroying the school. There are 5 NQTs-who are bursting into tears a LOT and the NQT mentor is off with stress, 2 teachers from Australia who were interviewed by Skype in July-they will only teach on supply as they want to be flexible so won't take any extras on and the rest of the staff are part time or were NQT last year-there's nobody over 40 there!

There's no choir, no instrument clubs, no sports clubs, no chess club-all the things we used to have.

You have got to have a mix of new teachers and experienced ones or it will all fall apart.

[Haggisfish]

Gosh that is awful. We have had teachers leave who, I agree, were not cut out for teaching. These are not the ones that concern me-it is much easier to get rid of not so great teachers now. It is, as others say, the very experienced and excellent teachers leaving that concerns me. It should concern everyone with dc in education. My head is outstanding and recognises and rewards her excellent and experienced staff, even with an exceptionally crap budget. Very few heads are like that.

[Keeptrudging]

Part of the problem in my last school, which contributed to me leaving, is that there was very little respect for older teachers. Younger/brand new teachers very quickly dominated in a school which had established (and excellent) older teachers. Management were keen to be seen to be doing whatever the latest 'in thing' was, whereas experienced teachers knew what actually worked (not just 'looked pretty'). Older staff were talked over in meetings/views not taken into account/downright disrespected at times.

Advice was not sought, nor listened to if offered. When observations/management are being carried out on teachers with 20+ years solid experience by teachers with 2 years experience, it creates resentments. Yes, respect should be earned, but when teachers have a proven track record it should be valued. Older teachers are leaving the profession because it's like once you hit 30 you're a dinosaur and past it!

[Pico2]

If we had a surfeit of teachers with a real vocation, then it would be fine for us to lose those who are only ok. But we don't. And many good teachers are capable people who will be successful in other careers, so may be more able to leave than most.

[echt]

OP, they miss the point because they want to.

They do not want to address oppressive accountability/documentation/observations.

I've been teaching in Au for ten years. No-one has ever asked for a lesson plan or looked at my chronicle (the clue is the name; it's an account of what actually happened). I am trusted to do my job.

By the way, the reason there is not an OFSTED is the union - note the singular noun - saw them off years ago.

What do I see, as someone who has been in a UK school in special measures, etc. All the scrutiny amounts to fuck all. The students emerge at least as well, certainly no worse than the over-examined UK ones.

[Keeptrudging]

Exactly - the excessive monitoring/paperwork/need to prove and evidence everything sucks the joy our of teaching. When I started teaching, I spent my spare time looking for/making nice resources that the children would enjoy. It wasn't a hardship, I didn't grudge the time, it was part of my 'vocation', and I was rewarded for time spent by seeing the children making good progress and enjoying learning.

Now spare time is spent doing enforced paperwork, providing 'evidence' and writing out learning intentions/success criteria and exhaustive plans for monitoring. None of this benefits the children, and takes away time from preparing high quality resources. It leads to people grabbing a worksheet off the Internet, and boring teaching which is easily assessed.

[rollonthesummer]

Now spare time is spent doing enforced paperwork, providing 'evidence' and writing out learning intentions/success criteria and exhaustive plans for monitoring. None of this benefits the children, and takes away time from preparing high quality resources. It leads to people grabbing a worksheet off the Internet, and boring teaching which is easily assessed.

Yes, yes, yes! All this claptrap has made lessons worse! I used to lay in the bath thinking about lovely resources I could make for my lessons, now I just lay there numb worrying that I haven't done x, y and z.

X, y and z didn't even exist when I first started teaching, and guess what... children still learnt! We didn't even have to level or track progress, or write LO. Success Criteria hadn't been invented, nor had 3 part, 5 part or even 7 part lessons. Mini plenaries, uplevelling, data analysis, 'measuring impact or interventions, Wave 2, Wave 3, double marking, triple marking, feedback marking, the purple pen of progress, AFL, ALS, PRP-we used to cope without any of those things.

It's total bollcox. Children learnt without it, teachers didn't used to be so miserable, unwell and stressed and I think lessons were far better.

Someone will probably come on here and tell me they had a crap teacher in 1976 so all these changes are for the best. I disagree. There will still be the odd crap teacher, even at the end of time, like there are still a few crap nurses, crap plasterers, crap dentists and just crap people out there. Sadly if you are driving out all the teachers in the name of progress, probably the last ones standing will be crap because all the good ones will have been long gone.

I want my children to go to school and love learning like I did. I want them taught by well-paid, motivated, inspirational teachers who love their subject.

[Keeptrudging]

Yes, I used to always be thinking of ways to engage them - it might be something in the garden, or a piece of material in a charity shop, a photo or picture. I lived for teaching, and loved it, my pupils were happy AND learning. I could sidetrack because the pupils asked about something related to what I was teaching and we're interested. Plans were a rough overview, not the be - all and end - all. My teaching was monitored (and rightly so), not my paperwork.

Young teachers in my school (and nd I certainly don't mean all, there are some excellent ones) were excellent at paperwork/displays and using fancy-schmancy strategies involving lots of group work/carousels/rotations where pupils were largely unsupervised.

When tracking data was analysed at the end of the year, those were the classes where progress was poorest. Of course, this was then blamed on the tracking system/poor class/previous (old) teacher inflating results.

Active learning and group work can be great, but for children who struggle, or aren't motivated, they are a licence to do nothing/copy off their neighbour.

[Keeptrudging]

• were

[HopeClearwater]

There are too many deputies / headteachers who are in their late twenties/ early thirties. They've hardly spent any time in the classroom. They were desperate to get out of it and climb the greasy pole to the position where they can load paperwork on to long-serving, dedicated teachers and justify their post on SLT that way. They tend to want to work with other people like themselves, fill up the staffroom with young, impressionable and cheap NQTs and they fail to see the value in the experience many staff have built up over the years.

[rollonthesummer]

bbc

Parents in England are to be given the right to request schools provide childcare for the full working day during term time and in the holidays.

And now THIS!

[albertcamus]

In my experience of 27 years, the conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and the 'perfect storm' is indeed brewing. I am convinced that if parents knew the full facts, there would be much more outcry and demands for accurate quality evaluation. My top 10 suggestions for Nicky Morgan to address, to improve the lot of the average classroom teacher would be :

1 Increase SLT teaching loads in order to decrease class sizes & provide genuine demonstration of good/outstanding practice
2 Give SLT SMART targets and closely monitor their achievement, or lack thereof
3 Improve the quality of pastoral leadership with a consistent UK-wide model
4 Streamline to one examining board
5 Amalgamate all Unions into one strong & consistent body, working
co-operatively & transparently with LAs/Academy owners
6 Ensure that every class has a qualified teacher
7 Standardise the usage of SEN/PP/FSM/EAL etc. funding & audit it closely
8 Stop profiteering from school food provision
9 LAs to listen to students & parents across the age & ability spectrum and demonstrate actions in response to their feedback
10 Outsource school HRM within schools, to avoid favouritism/persecution of UPS staff

Idealistic I know ... I won't hold my breath

[rollonthesummer]

I agree with lots of those!


I think the first two are very important. Many schools have a management team with lots of very highly paid people who haven't actually taught their own class for years. Yes, they might do the odd cover lesson or have a hand-picked group of top set maths once a week for the term before SATs, but no consistent class. They are not, IMO an SLT as they don't lead anyone-they are SMT and just manage. If they were in the classroom-doing the very same things that the rest of us do-whilst demonstrating to us that it is possible and they truly are outstanding, it would give us hope that it can be done!

As it stands, they just pile on tonnes of work on top of the existing workload that none of them have ever done and won't be doing themselves, and tell us it's easy and non-negotiable otherwise we don't care about the children. Lead by example-show us how it's done, otherwise I'm afraid it's all bullshit.

At my DD's primary school (3 form intake), there is a head, a deputy, 4 assistant heads and 2 SENCos-none of them do any class teaching at all. My friend works there and told me they were going to get rid of TAs to save money. It just makes me wonder what all those managers are getting paid-do they really need so many!?

[albertcamus]

That's ridiculous rollon how on Earth can that be afforded ?
No wonder the front line teachers in Primary are dropping like flies :(

[TheFallenMadonna]

Is that common? In my DC's primary the DHT and AHTs were class teachers. The Head taught my son Maths every morning in year 6. I am a secondary AHT and teach across the school. We can't afford non-teaching teaching staff.

[TheFallenMadonna]

I would also add that unlike the teachers I line manage, I have numerical targets to meet as part of my performance management. I am held to account for results across the school, not just my own classes. I cannot imagine why a Headteacher, who is accountable for school's results, would get rid of someone who has consistently good results, as suggested below. They live or die by results.