Fears grow over shortage of qualified teachers

[noblegiraffe]

The Times is a bit behind the times in reporting on the teacher shortage crisis, however new figures show that after a brief respite for recruitment issues due to covid, the situation in schools for September is now looking dire.

"Job adverts for secondary school teachers are up 47 per cent on last year and 14 per cent on 2019, prior to the pandemic, according to SchoolDash, an education data company."

Oh, but we can just recruit fresh, enthusiastic trainees to replace the old, busted teachers who are quitting in droves, some on here would claim. Bad news there too:

"Government figures show fewer than 9,000 of the 20,945 new teachers it hoped to start training from September have been offered a training place.

In physics just 25 have been firmly recruited while a further 283 have a conditional offer to start training — just 12 per cent of the 2,600 target.

In design and technology, only 15 per cent of the required teachers have been recruited, while in maths and English the figure is a little over half."

While I can see the govt is gearing up to once again slate the profession, the question parents need to be asking is "who exactly is left to teach my child?"

And the answer isn't necessarily something you'll want to hear.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cc94af68-eff3-11ec-9bea-abc2bc5953e5?shareToken=9852fc3a725ac809e13b4f5ea234ec8d

I thought it had been scientifically proven by now that kids should have time to play when they go home at the end of the day and they shouldn't spend hours doing homework. I think kids should do most activities at school and correct them while at school, I can't understand a system where teachers have to mark stuff every single day. I thought we should be moving away from grades and towards understanding concepts. How on earth is marking a worksheet every single day supposed to be enough to assess a child instead of doing it over time?
Though I did read recently some kids were going to school wearing nappies, not knowing how to use the bathroom alone and not knowing how to eat food off a plate without using their hands, so it's not just a teaching problem, but in fact, a reflex from society and the way parenting has evolved (or regressed)? On top of managers wanting to have a piece of paper daily with a grade on it so they can collate the data and work out statistics for it.

Exactly, this was the point I was trying to make. Marking of the level that exists in primary is surely not needed.

My secondary school had a ridiculous marking demand involving stickers and green pens and a fortnightly timetable to complete it - it HAD to be done and yet I was not provided with ANY time to do it (well, two-three hours a week). But primary is worse because it is every night with no chance to delay.

And I don't think it gets better after a year, tbh. In fact at my school it started to get a lot worse.

All this marking sounds like the work you'd do if you were doing private 1:1 lessons but you'd get paid a lot more for that. You can't be expected to do that for every single student in a class of 30 and get paid the same! On top of it, you don't get paid for that extra private time spent that goes on this either. At the end of the day, it sounds like the people at the top are managers but without any real knowledge about what teaching entails, hence the need for those graphs? Maybe teachers should go on strike too, what are the unions doing?

Trouble is @Oceanus you are expected to do it. We used to have a book inspection at my school and if they hadn’t been marked, with stickers from me with two good things and a target, with the feedback then actioned by the students in green pen, teachers would be told off by SLT and asked to resubmit the set of books with the correct marking. Sometimes I filled in the green pen response from the student myself, if I just knew that they wouldn’t ever do it. Heaven forbid that I actually try to teach anything.

The "green pen" thing sounds so absurd! Still, I'm crazy because I would still enjoy training for it 😅! Hahah!

It's the political target culture, feeding the data/ mocksted/ micro-management, not helped by academies constantly vying for political survival, and management being lead by people who survive the culture rather than being great teachers/ people people/ extensively experienced. (That doesn't mean that there aren't good people there, just not in the proportions that they once were, and they tend to survive in stable schools that keep OFSTED happy)

The rot set in years and, umpteen governments ago and each government has made it worse. Bonus points to the David Cameron years with Michael Gove.

The best way to make teaching more attractive for retention is to cut the paperwork so that teaching/ planning and functional marking are the core of the job. That's not even raising the meagre budgets.

I left the classroom years ago because I couldn't meet my children's needs and satisfy management's demands. It wasn't intended to be such a long break, but my old agency wanted to pay me less in 2016 than they did in 2010. As full time cover it would have been £10 day/ £50 week/ £200 month less. There wasn't demand for supply to cover childcare because of budget cuts and cover supervisors like there had been pre-2005. When supply teachers are treated like crap for years, don't be surprised when they're not rushing to fill the gap for everyone else's convenience.

This has been brewing for well over a decade, and things do need to hit the fan before any change will be made (whether it's the right change is a whole other subject)

My y6 has to date had one single school year without staffing changes, lockdowns or localised strikes (support staff not teachers). In a system that doesn't give a toss about his additional needs, 6 months of lockdown learning lost and potential industrial action, he needs me in the background for support, not sacrificing us to ineffectively fill one gap in a broken system.

I'm in NI and there's only 30 jobs advertised for the whole of NI. Teachers rarely leave their jobs here. I think the job is much more respected here and the workload isn't as big. A teacher living here can have a lovely life. I come from a family of teachers and they've big houses, nice cars, holidays, eating out often. They genuinely don't seem stressed (certainly don't talk about work much), and they leave school by 4pm most days unless there's a meeting and don't work over the summer (a few have houses/ caravans in Europe) and head off for 2 months.

It's not like that in SE England where I used to live where our teachers used to travel for over an hour as they couldn't afford to live in the city the school was.

Hmm, teachers in NI are currently conducting action short of strike action and will probably ballot to strike so I’m not sure it’s that rosy.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-61957916

Teachers when polled would generally prefer a reduction in workload over an increase in pay.

In fact many teachers choose reduced pay in order to reduce their workload and go part time just to make the job doable.

True but they're certainly not leaving the profession. Don't know how successful the strike will be. I don't know anyone striking (I work in education) and my dc schools were unaffected during the last once (last month I think).

Btw I totally support teachers striking and want teachers here to be supported so that it doesn't end up in a situation where they are leaving.

I left teaching at the end of 2020 after 15 years teaching. I just couldn't stand it anymore. Loved teaching - teenagers are amazing funny humans who made each day worth it but the constant criticism from all directions got to much.

Being accused of being lazy etc. after working throughout the pandemic teaching hybrid lessons, looking after kids who were scared that their frontline parents were going to die, that their futures would be screwed by not sitting exams it was just time to stop. For me and my family.

If you think the green "DIRT" pen is absurd wait till you get to the "purple pen of power".

I shit you not.

Our young teachers resign in surrey because they live with their parents til 25 (they financially have to), then rent rooms til they are 30,then realise they can never afford to buy a 1 bed flat on their salary let alone marry and start a family.

At 30, the women in particular are done and looking for a way out. The men left long before and tried something else once they got bored of teaching PE and realised money matters to them.

Our staffroom is mostly 21-27yr olds and a sprinkling of 50+ yr olds who bought in the 90s for 25% what properties sell for now before stamp duty and so on.

Discipline is a real struggle without the experience... It is becoming a real disaster getting staff and we really want to ask at interview "how long do you think your parents will let you stay with tgem in your old childhood bedroom?" (but we can't, more is the pity... Would be damn useful to know and would influence hiring decisions subconsciously).

I can see older kids being tougher to deal with

Hmmm, behaviour in many primary schools is atrocious.

It’s also a notoriously inflexible role. Whilst the holidays are an obvious bonus for women with children, many schools are not open to part time working and it’s not a role in which you can pop out to watch a child’s assembly in the middle of the day or work from home if they are sick

The marking thing is one thing (in primary) that does seem to have changed for the better in recent years - in my school anyway. We have marking ladders and just tick those off then give a sticker. No more writing detailed comments to KS1 pupils then having to spend the next lesson reading the comments to them.

For me the worst part of the job is not the pay or even the planning/marking parts of the workload. It's the ridiculous expectations and criticism of a certain randomly selected proportion of your children don't meet the numerical target set for them at the beginning of the year before you even start teaching them.

I also agree about the inflexibility. My own DC complain that I put other people's children ahead of them because I am never there for school events etc.

In my current job I teach Y1. We have to mark every single piece of work, even in our topic books which are 100% paper based then I stick them in. The children have never even seen their topic book, let alone looked inside and read the comments. Who tf am I marking for?

The times I think fuck it and don't bother, I then get "feedback" from book scrutinies and have to go back and do it...again why? Even if it was a book they used, there is absolutely zero impact in retrospective marking for 5 year olds.

Hmmm, behaviour in many primary schools is atrocious.
I'll accept your point of view but I refuse to believe atrocious behaviour is as pervasive among young kids as it is among teenagers. There will be problems everywhere but surely a primary school teacher doesn't have to worry about kids snogging in a corner, having a smoke, showing up drunk or even hitting them! It could happen, yes, but surely numbers shouldn't be that high! Surely we can expect a graph at some point, hence all the marking?
I also think younger kids are less prone to misbehaving because they're used to seeing their guardians at home as an authority that sets rules and schools/teachers will be seen as extension of that. My parents used to tell me I had to behave as they had told the teacher to pull my ears and ground me if needed... They didn't, obviously, but I believed it!

@Oceanus the snogging/smoking/drinking not so much (although not unheard of) but the hitting absolutely! Add kicking, biting, spitting, swearing, throwing chairs/tables etc.

I will give you that there is not nuch smoking or snogging in primary schools, but there is plenty of throwing chairs at the teacher.

primary school teacher doesn't have to worry about kids snogging in a corner, having a smoke, showing up drunk or even hitting them!

No, but it’s different problems.

We’ve been hit, spat at, scratched, bitten, had chairs, resources and tables thrown at us, then bitten some more. Some might say that’s equally as hard as dealing with teenagers snogging in a corner.

The children have never even seen their topic book, let alone looked inside and read the comments.
Teachers are going to end up having a list of standard comments, then pick and choose a random one and use it just to fill in the gaps without bothering much! At the end of day, even if somebody checks, they won't know the kid, so there's no way of knowing whether the comment's accurate or plain ridiculous.

@Oceanus in my primary school this year I’ve been hit numerous times, kicked in the stomach, had chairs thrown at me, been sworn at and called names, stepped in front of a distressed child attacking another child, split up physical fights….should I go on?

Dont be fooled that primary school children don’t come with plenty of behavioural issues.