Online lessons because schools can't recruit and retain teachers

Shocking!

I agree that while I cannot STAND the current government it is utterly naive to think a Labour government will solve this deep-rooted issue. It’s cultural that teaching is not a respected profession. It’s really bloody shoc

The situation has deteriorated very quickly since the pandemic. I am in an independent and at the minute it is like the football transfer window, with vacancies everywhere and people desperate to hand in their notice by Easter.

Online learning is a joke. We had all fancy live lessons that SLT raved about, and my Y11 have since confessed that they didn't pay any attention and were usually playing computer games. I'm now desperately trying to re-teach topics where they have massive knowledge gaps.

The move towards technology in education is being pushed because the government have no intention of resolving the teacher crisis. It's easier just to stick a kid in front of a laptop and hope for the best. What a sad state of affairs.

Pre-millenium I taught in FE as an unqualified and unexperienced teacher in my subject. My starting salary in 1997 was £25,000 (much less than I was earning in the profession at the time). I took the post as it was less stressful than my professional role and I was still breastfeeding so could fit my feeds around classroom hours (I lived close-by). Salaries have not really moved on in 25+ years!

As a science Head of Department, this sadly does not surprise me.

My current school is fine but we are a new school which helps. That said, I had 6 applications recently, of which only 3 were shortlistable!

A school in our MAT - Ofsted outstanding and fantastic reputation locally are really struggling. They have no science HoD and need a Biology and a Physics teacher as well. Multiple ads but no luck.

Another local school - rated good, good reputation, also has no HoD and two science teachers down.

The school I worked in last year was shocking! In the whole year, I don't think I had a full team on a single day and I am not exaggerating! The timetable was chopped and changed so many times as I desperately tried to make sure every class had at least some lessons with a specialist. We also used our frees/doubled classes up etc. Multiple attempts.to recruit were fruitless.

I left in the end as I was burnt out. It's no better now from what people still there tell me 😔

Some people really don't understand how bad it is!

I think there is a huge difference between identifying an education system that works well in its country of origin and finding one that could provide a model in a different country.

Specific culture and values; the nature of the language; education and employment status of adults (including key sectors and historical and future trends); pay, conditions and status of teachers; immigration / emigration statistics, including proportion of children who have the ‘language of instruction’ as a second or third language; deprivation levels (and gap between poorest and richest); population density; presence and status of private schools; historical tolerance for innovation vs state control etc etc etc.

Having lived through the ‘Shanghai Maths’ craze (who knew that copying a model from a city where poorer children are excluded from the city’s schools; where Maths teachers only teach in the mornings; where after school coaching us so universal that every child can be assumed to have caught up the next day etc might not transfer perfectly into the English primary school setting??) I am sceptical that any single country can be taken as a model.

So which European country has it right in your opinion? I don’t mean just generalised bla about the grass being greener, which actual country? The French have very similar problems in attracting and retaining teachers , so much so that there are comedy videos about getting animals to do the job. I believe that Germany is also facing teacher shortages ( although both these countries have a big difference in teacher numbers and retention between traditional areas and those with many ‘new citizens’) .

When I lived in France, I was struck by how regimented the education system and what was expected of pupils and teachers seemed to be in terms of academic rigour and application, compared to England. They seemed to try to drag the less able up to the level of the most able, but ultimately to cater more for the latter. But that would be impossible to impose in England, it would be against everyone’s ‘rights’.

BTW, many Labour and LibDems MPs send their children to private schools. DianeAbbott actually boasted about how this showed she ‘cared’. I hold no brief for this government, but I think that politicising this discussion is both naive and pointless. We need to examine the system without bias, and try to come up with non political suggestions.

I don’t expect you to agree.

@Hayliebells
>But noone can actually be worse than this lot

Agree. Two more years :-(

Nope - I disagree. Arts and humanities subjects teach skills that are just as important as sciences. Let's have a look at the degree subjects of the last few prime ministers: PPE, PPE, Classics, Geography, PPE, History, Law... You have to go back to Thatcher to find a scientist. Similarly, many of the non-scientists I was at university with have had the most successful careers. In an increasingly automated society, the softer skills are actually among the most valuable and least easy to automate.

As for teaching the least able (or most disadvantaged) children basic Maths and English - yes, of course that's important. But if you strip back the education system to focus on that, then not only do you massively limit your society, but you also reduce still further the incentive for talented graduates to enter teaching.

Dancing, you’re right that far too many students leave without basic skills. However, the cause if that isn’t that a broad curriculum is offered. If many of those kids spent more time on the core subjects, they still wouldn’t do better in them. In many schools, weaker students are given a reduced breadth curriculum and do extra maths and English….with seemingly limited impacts. Plus, they don’t get an opportunity to be developing in other areas which they might have aptitude for.

I think low attainment in core subjects has complex causes. It is linked with socio-economic background, special educational needs, parenting, experiences in primary school, experiences in secondary school and unfortunately always has been a big challenge and continues to be so. The broad curriculum isn’t the cause if this problem and reducing the range of subjects nor giving more time to others isn’t the answer.

At the moment, providing education for all students in all subjects is seriously compromised by a lack of resourcing to education and teachers leaving in all subjects. Attempts to boost recruitment in certain subjects like Maths, Lanhuages and Science have been in place for many years, with very limited success. Big bursaries and higher starting salaries used to draw some people in, but even with the higher salaries, many left within 2 or 5 years. The problem wasn’t just salaries, but the experience of the job too - the fact it’s so demanding and under resourced so it’s almost impossible to do a good job. That’s soul destroying and why people leave.

Sadly, solutions to all this need to be really really significant amounts of money which is well-targeted and it will take years and years to see significant effects because the problem has been growing for many many years and there isn’t a quick fix. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve the problem. And more and more schools will find although they try hard to paper over the cracks and stop children from losing out, the cracks are so big they increasingly have to send emails like the one this thread is about, telling parents that basic service can’t be provided.

I guess it has to get really really bad before the parental population and others see what’s going on and that it isn’t acceptable and demand change.

The irony here being that investment in education and, through that, improving education for all, would be one of the most effective things we could do in order to promote the future growth of our economy.

Education spending isn't a cost: it's an investment. Over time, it pays back much more than was put in.

That's very interesting to read, I've been thinking about this a lot recently - WHY is behaviour in secondary schools so bad these days? Is it mostly mixed sex schools with the worst behaviour problems or are single sex schools the same? Is it true that behaviour at private schools and Grammar schools is so much better, especially all girls schools? I keep reading and thinking about all this, mostly since dd started secondary in September, I hadn't really thought about it til then, wrapped in a nice little village primary school bubble for 7 years

You are bang on it @PinkySilver
This is shameful that there is not proper funding for schools. Shameful that schools now have so wide a remit shoved on them that they can't possibly cope. And shameful that we as a society tolerate poor behaviour from children. Once upon a time children would be raised by a community. These days if you so much as say boo to a badly behaved child you may have to face the wrath of the parents. It used to be that if you got into trouble at school there would be double trouble when you got home. But these days it is always somebody else's fault I'm afraid.

@WombatChocolate What I really am saying if that a parent is going to make sure their child exercises or eats healthy then I don’t believe that state education system should take over at the expense of functional maths and English skills! Do we start to have the dentist come to school or have the lady from Clark’s coming to school to fit shoes?

I am actually very supportive of a broad education. But we have reached a point in this country where some teenagers cannot write coherently or use basic multiplication when they leave school and sadly I don’t think that PE or art can compensate for that.

@user79620 The classics department at your school are deluding themselves. There is a reason bursaries are offered for some subjects and not others. Some skills are just more in demand and state education is not helping by trying to pretend otherwise. Education, like all things, moves on and I don’t think it helps anyone to bury their head to it.

Quite how bad the funding problem is in state school comes out in in a recent report from IFS - ifs.org.uk/articles/growing-gap-between-state-school-and-private-school-spending

It compares state vs private sector school fuding per pupil in England. The gap has widened since last decade from £3,100 to £6,500 per head, per annum (inflation adjusted). As others said - blaming private sector is a red herring, problem is that in the last ten years, government has steadily reduced resources in state schools.

This chart from IFS illustrates this quite neatly -

Maybe a change in government will help, a bit, but given economic conditions and demand on budget from other areas (NHS, elderly care and so on), I don't think there is any quick solution out of this holeunless growth (and tax revenue) picks up.

Dancing, yes schools have a purpose of educating children. This is a broad rather than narrow goal. It involves more than the 3 R’s. It does involve a social role too, and all the moreso in some areas and schools.

You say certain things are parental responsibility. I agree to an extent. But the reality is that many people lack parenting ability and the things you think families should do instead if schools don’t happen - so are you suggesting those children are just left to sink and never have access to sporting opportunities or something wider and broader than the 3R’s? Does your idea only work for those with more wealth and parents who are capable and motivated? Are you suggesting a system that only benefits those from more stable homes and plays no role at all in boosting opportunity?

It’s true that in many areas life, opportunities are polarising. I agree that increasingly there will be affluent schools which can offer more - the bigger private schools with good numbers who are still in the Teacher Pension and able to recruit the best teachers, state grammars which can attract good teachers because of course they have the pension and less challenging behaviour to deal with, the good Comps in affluent areas which have similar and motivated parents. But even the good Comps and State Grammars are facing terrible resourcing problems. They can keep going longer without resorting to online recorded lessons, because their cohorts mean they can probably run larger classes more successfully and their staff are more stable. However, there comes a point when the staff leave those schools too (it’s already happening) and they can’t recruit.

And which school struggle most - those that need the resources the most, to cope with the large amounts of special needs both educational and behavioural, and which see the biggest turn over of staff and difficulties recruiting. And they will see it get worse faster.

@DancingOnThinIce73 because one of the most damaging trends in education (along with the others already cited) is the increasing belief that the purpose of education is to get a qualification, get a university place and get a job. And now, that science based jobs are more important than others. Rather than an idea of education as the broader development of a child into an adult, with a broad range of skills, experiences and opinions.

We might have moved on a bit from the idea that wars are won on the playing fields of Eton, but there is an element of truth in that. Sport matters. The arts matter. Humanities matter. Extra curricular clubs matter. Languages matter. If we stop thinking those things matter, then what kind of society are we going to end up with?

(And if you really want to see a riot in a school, try coming into ours and suggesting that the physics department get paid more than the classics department.)

Who is going to fix the problems then if it's not the government's responsibility?

Good question. We can start by electing a better government, (but I don't see that likely in the short term). We have to individually take responsibility for how we treat teachers and schools, we have to make every day choices about how we spend our money and what we value. And make our voices heard - just as we are doing here.

It sounds wishy washy but at the moment I don't have a solution.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks! I remember the GDST strikes from last year, but didn't connect it with their recruitment problems this year (one other GDST school in London I know is facing issues with recruitment).

That's a big loss in competitive advantage, especially with the market conditions now. Feel bad for the head teachers.