Online lessons because schools can't recruit and retain teachers

One thing that suggestion ignores is that teachers actually get useful information about their class from the process of marking.

If AI engines can now write essays, why shouldn’t be capable of marking essays too?

I'm involved in a trial on this at the moment. I had high hopes but it's not actually going that well at the moment. I do think it may be the future in some form though.

More revelations today in the ongoing released WhatsApp messages that Matt Hancock (allegedly) sent during Covid, this time not about how hospitals willingly sent elderly infected patients back to their care homes, but about what the government actually thinks of teachers. Apparently Gavin Williamson, much esteemed not Education Secretary thought teachers were lazy and trying to get out of working during the pandemic. Really Gavin? Were you being asked to work in small rooms with up to 30 potential virus transmitters? Or being told to work with wide open windows in the middle of winter? Did you spend time packing and distributing care and food packages to shielding families like many teachers did?

I agree, being a parent is now too much of a liability, hardly anyone can afford to move out of their parents home let alone afford a family home, now the education system falling apart

Apparently this was also a bulge year for secondaries. With the way birth rates have dropped in the last 10 years, I have a feeling this will be the peak and numbers of kids will start gradually falling from next year onwards, but I'm not sure.

All those things you've said are already happening.

I cannot see remote learning becoming the norm; we tried it in COVID and it was a disaster for most kids!

Most likely, as PP suggested, there will be attempts to recruit teachers from (perhaps poorer) countries, and have significantly bigger class sizes. Small schools might be closed and the pupils merged with bigger schools. Setting and GCSE/A level options might get cut back. It's not looking great, either way.

I’m also worried. There’s a good chance the Tories could win another election - weirder things have happened - and then I think they’ll hurtle faster and faster towards more online teaching.

My dd is at a girls state comprehensive where behaviour is fine. In Y7 she has patchy quality subs for 80% of her English, IT, history and Spanish classes. I coach her on how to stay motivated but she’s 12 so not easy.. When homework is set it is rarely marked (except maths as majority of homework is a self-marking online portal).

I am terrified that online teaching becomes the default delivery method as it will not be good for the majority of the kids in schools.

However I do wonder if there is an opportunity for technology to support secondary education more than it does today. I’m just thinking off the top of my head but … If AI engines can now write essays, why shouldn’t be capable of marking essays too?

My dd has written termly tests for many subjects which seems to be known weeks in advance … is there a bit of software that would organise teacher/classroom changes so that a class a test is automatically allocated a sub in a “testing room”, maybe school even has a regular sub who becomes expert at delivering tests, will gather the test papers from an online portal where teacher leaves them, print and administer them. You wouldn’t need QTS for that.

It is not sensible to teach via online prerecorded lessons as a stop-gap measure but if this was done REALLY well maybe it would offer something new and useful - for example if it was game-ified. Think of the fabulous quality content on the CBBC website, if that is played repetitively it sinks in. Quizzes, polling, interactive elements, games, sound and video - that is the kind of online learning that is more likely to work (not just a teacher droning at a camera as the Oak National stuff was done). I learned more world geography from playing an online game than I did in 15 years of schooling and the game really wasn’t trying to teach me anything. I played a game that was set in a historical period and I genuinely felt I was living in that period of time for a few weeks as the game-story unfolded. Imagine Roblox style games that actually impart knowledge or skills as you go along. Or online Escape Room type games where the puzzles impart skills and critical thinking. Cooperative games where you meet classmates as an avatar in an online platform or VR environment and have to solve problems together, maybe there is a teacher in there too who can be your guru if you get totally stuck. Many kids simply live online especially post Covid - they’ll chat via text or voice whilst playing for hours on end. Nothing like this existed when I was a child but it is highly addictive and so many kids like to exist this way. For a lot of them their future is going to be virtual. You could also make the game-learning competitive, organising the pupils into small teams so their game results were in league tables. Hell you could compete nationally not just within your own school.

I know it all sounds unlikely but we have to re-imagine how education works for a new era - an era when most adults want to work flexibly from home and are pushing for 4 day weeks. No millennial wants to work 60 hours a week as standard, like I expected to when I started out in my professional career. So our old models of running the professions have to change. And in my profession that change is enabled by technology.

So we need to let go of what we thought worked and try something new?

Online learning requires enormous amounts of self motivation and removes most of the instant feedback that students get in the classroom. Some of the online tutorials are good but they cannot compete with the rich education and social experiences that children get at a good school. Online education is an alternative for children who can’t access school for emotional or distance reasons, but it doesn’t suit the vast majority of children.

cps.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/150410115444-RealFinnishLessonsFULLDRAFTCOVER.pdf

I really recommend this excellent read-online book for anyone who is curious about Finland. It really goes into the historical background of why teaching is such a strongly respected profession in Finland, and why education has been so important to Finns.

www.tes.com/magazine/archive/vocational-education-boosts-job-prospects-and-earnings-finds-new-study

There is a detailed article here, talking about Finland's split into academic and vocational at 15-16. Ostensibly, it is about "choice," but in reality, those who opt for vocational education will be those who are finding the academic classes they have done at school harder, and grades are used to make the final decision. Finnish teachers have traditionally not done much in the way differentiation as they have taught from the front to desks in rows and have the most textbook-centric teaching style of any OECD country. It is of course absolutely true that Finland has started tracking later than many other countries, but realistically, 15-16 is probably the absolute latest that you can keep all students together in any education system; the differences between students in terms of aptitude, knowledge, attitude to school and what they want to do after age 18 are simply too great by that point.

Finland's late school starting age is nice for Finland, but probably impractical in an English speaking country where the writing system is so hard to learn. Finnish has the most transparent orthography in the whole of Europe; it's so easy to learn that children mostly pick up reading before school by reading TV subtitles and having parents point out letters and sounds in picture books etc; if they haven't, they can learn to read fluently within a couple of weeks of starting school. English has the least transparent orthography in Europe and it is very hard to teach well; a late school starting age would just open up chasms between middle class kids (whose parents would buy phonics schemes and teach them at home anyway) and working class kids who would be far less likely to learn anything but would be bunged in the same classrooms anyway.

See the comments on the Oxbridge thread - "Oxbridge isn't all that my sil went there and she's only a teacher" etc. Which is, yes, the result of a capitalist society valuing high-salary jobs over everything else. The public may respect the idea of teachers but no one wants to do the job. Book sounds interesting, I'll read it.

Also, Finnish culture strongly respects education and teachers, for deeply felt historical reasons.

I'd argue we used to. So what has changed?

Most cultures respect teachers, to be fair. Periodically surveys are done of 'most respected /trusted etc professionals' and teachers always come very near the top. In reality the public respect teachers- the problems lie in government. And possibly Capitalism.

They don't have anything like the same obsession with assessing and tracking.

Can you find me the evidence tat they aren't mixed ability because that contradicts what I read. They start formal schooling later, too.

But, anyway, no point in arguing about what other countries do. We aren't going to change our whole education system. This would require money, organisation, consultation and deep thought - all of which our government does not exhibit.

What is certainly true is that teachers are paid more highly, have fewer classroom hours, greater status and higher entry requirements into the profession in almost every European country and many others across the developed world.

I grew up with having lessons remotely. It did hold me back and it affected my MH more than anything.

My DC are science mad. Both want science careers. So this is heartbreaking....

Traditional, however, doesn't equal completely mixed ability and no terminal exams.

Sorry, not clear what you mean.... you mean Finland is/was "completely mixed ability and no terminal exams"?

Finland definitely does separate students into tracks after a certain age, and they have a lot of very high-stakes terminal exams at the end of their education, which last week.

Kesstrel is correct re Finland. During the period that produced the PISA winning cohorts, it was a pretty traditional system with desks in rows and a textbook for every subject (even quite recently, Finland was shown to have the highest textbook usage rate in the OECD - 93% of lessons were based on textbooks). There was a special ed stream for kids who could not fit into the regular curriculum, because teachers taught to the whole class with very little differentiation. It's true that Finland was not a high-pressure, tutor-mad country like South Korea, but it absolutely was not child-led "beanbag school" or anything like it.

Something Finland has done very well and which continues to this day is that it makes it very hard to qualify as a teacher, but then largely trusts teachers and lets them get on with the job (they have to follow the standard curriculum and textbooks, but there is very little in the way of accountability, paperwork, box-ticking, league tables and so on). This approach is only possible in cultures that make it hard to qualify to teach in the first place, though, so not sure how the UK could shift towards this model when we currently face shortages.... Also, Finnish culture strongly respects education and teachers, for deeply felt historical reasons.

It was also very traditional in its educational approach, with textbooks, little to no group work, desks facing from the front, etc from age 8. This again goes against how most uk schools are run.

Traditional, however, doesn't equal completely mixed ability and no terminal exams.

I can recommend a book called Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan which explores other systems, amongst them Finland , Canada and Japan.

It's still a hell of a lot better than what we have got, especially in terms of funding, payment for and status and professionalism of teachers, PISA outcomes, wellbeing measures for young people.

Would like a bit more elaboration on Finland - lots of studies out there to suggest it isn't as perfect as it may appear.

"Finland". I am not up to date on what Finland is doing now, but during the period of its greatest success, and at least until relatively recently, the Finnish approach to SEN was having a separate SEN nurture-type classroom with qualified special needs teachers, rather than expecting full integration into standard classrooms. Would this approach be acceptable in UK schools?

It was also very traditional in its educational approach, with textbooks, little to no group work, desks facing from the front, etc from age 8. This again goes against how most uk schools are run.

With regard to Mercia School - the ad was for an assistant head. This is a very different job from a classroom teacher. For one thing, SLT [senior leadership team] are usually paid more, but more importantly, we need probably 50 times more secondary teachers than we do SLT. It should be the role of SLT to protect classroom teachers by taking on the burden of setting up and running a high quality discipline system, dealing with abusive parents, etc etc, leaving teachers free to concentrate on teaching, which if done effectively, boosts teacher retention.

That is really sad. I don't knownif the new generation are different, but I personally learn more in person. I don't seem to absorb it the same online. Quite a tragedy.

Had a long chat with our Head of Physics the other day about recruitment and similar. It is indeed hard to recruit Physics teachers, but he also asked how we coped with our huge workload in mock periods (English has 4 papers all consisting of long answers - these take a lot longer to mark than Physics!). There are different issues in different subjects.
English recruitment is increasingly difficult as it happens. This is repeated across the country. I've been teaching since 2002. The number of suitable applicants for roles across all departments has dropped significantly.

We know what doesn't work:

1. Ofsted
2. Government treating the profession with contempt (including over pay, but also in just day-to-day interactions as well as in the press)
3. Insane workload caused by too high a teaching allocation
4. Endless things dumped on schools that aren't actually to do with education from propping up a lack of mental health services to preventing terrorism
5. Starving schools of funding

So if Labour do anything to tackle any of the above that would be a good start.