Staffing crisis in schools - teachers/school staff, what's your school like?

[noblegiraffe]

Discussions with fellow teachers about the current crisis in school staffing has raised the issue of whether parents know how bad it is. I guess they won't know if we don't tell them?

My school - struggling to recruit teachers. There are subjects at A-level where students are currently teaching themselves, and with no prospect of a teacher on the horizon. Last year we had similar issues, pupils went into exams not fully prepared, and coursework was a huge problem. At GCSE where we couldn't recruit, there was a teacher in front of the class, but not qualified in that subject and pupils complained about the syllabus not being taught.

TA provision has been cut to the bone. There is only in class support if a child has an EHCP, this support is then spread to other children who need help. Due to backlogs with EHCP applications, and applications routinely being rejected (the assumption is automatic rejection, then appeal) some very needy children get no additional help in class. In addition, we have bigger classes due to leaving teachers not being replaced, so teachers are spread even more thinly.

There are huge concerns about teacher recruitment for next year as the number of trainees on local PGCE courses has collapsed.

And I know my school is in a relatively good position compared to others.

Also those traditional HOY would have acted as a buffer between parents and classroom teachers, handling parents in their allocated time for doing so. That buffer is now gone as the 15k non teaching pastoral leaders just don't do this they have no answers for parents, they can't tell you why x is suddenly below on all his grades for example - they wouldn't know how to even check if this is true by analysing the data available (no one gets trained in how to do this ime but teachers are very habituated to having to train themselves on complex systems and work out how the hell you do/find out x or y).

With tiny budgets bad decisions get made that are long term disastrous but have short term impacts on balancing the books today. Have 12 years of that and the ramifications are huge and institutions are falling apart.

Sorry bit off topic. But that's what happened to some of our good, reliable TAs - they went for these pastoral jobs, totally unprepared and unsupported and were rapidly broken by them and left.

SwallowedAFly: "With tiny budgets bad decisions get made that are long term disastrous but have short term impacts on balancing the books today. Have 12 years of that and the ramifications are huge and institutions are falling apart."

<--- This.

In Primary, TAs are increasingly used to cover classes - for PPA time, training, staff sickness (sometimes even long term), as school bidgets are too tight for regular ppa cover teachers or supply teachers. Our TAs get paid £1 an hour extra to cover. It's far too much stress for too little pay.

@Diverseopinions - the requirements of the job have increased hugely and the pay has stayed the same. This isnt refelcted in entry criteria by exams but it soft skills and on the job training and what they are expected to do.

The severity of sen in maintained has inceased and the outside support has been stripped away.

Other jobs are more flexible and there is more homeworking so there is more choice Of work

The contracts arent permanent. I dont know any local school that doesnt employ on a fixed term contract. Each year you dont know if you have job until june and they shove you all over the place.

AntlerRose

It sounds awful and stressful.

People outside of education need to know what has changed, and how things are, to inform their voting choices.

@Diverseopinions this is why the OP starts these threads to let people know about the real state of education, and the amount of times she gets slammed by other posters for doing this and gets told to get out of education if she doesn’t like it is unreal

Right? It's utterly bizarre the level of aggression and hate directed towards teachers who speak up about how schools are failing and falling apart at the seams. I don't know if there's an army of tory bots ready to discredit on standby or if it's that people don't want to know the truth and would rather shoot the messenger.

I'm in the yuk position of being both a teacher and a parent at the same school so seeing first hand how shocking things are from all angles.

I have to say, what’s interesting is that if someone asks about private vs state on here the answer is almost always that it makes no difference and bright kids do well anywhere.

Then we have these sorts of threads where the future looks pretty bleak.

I wonder which really is accurate?

Tbh though surely people know what 'small government' means in reality? Unless you are in a position of fairly extreme wealth the shrinking of publicly funded services is going to hit you - whether that's the inability for you to find a care home for your elderly mother with dementia who you can't take care of because you work 50+ hours a week and have dependent children to take care of or whether that's that you'll be homeless because the private rental market has made up rules and barriers that make it impossible to rent and there is no social housing because the government doesn't see housing as it's problem or whether that's that your children will have a shit education and be exposed to pretty horrific behaviour in school.

I don't actually support any political parties btw so this isn't a political statement just an observation that tories traditional bedrock stance is at odds with the idea of properly funded health and education services that are driven by societal need rather than profit.

Both are true Blackcat. It's not a simplistic issue. The reality that perhaps people really don't want to hear is that there are not many 'bright' self motivated hard working kids in schools. So yes those kids will do well anywhere but there are not enough of them to run society for a multitude of reasons be that trauma, poverty, send, lack of intervention etc.

There are a lot of posts on this thread so apologies if I’ve missed something. But - with one obvious exception - I would say most posters have been sympathetic? I haven’t noticed hate and aggression.

I’m a parent and I think it’s terrible what’s happening to schools and I wish there was more I could do.

The research says we should just focus on teachers performance and improving that because it's basically the only thing schools can have any control over. So they may know full well that eg. parenting, lack of mental health interventions, failings of SS etc have much bigger impacts on children's outcomes but given they have no power to effect any of that all they can do is ramp up pressure on teachers and expect them to be able to overcome all of that with less resources than ever.

Literally the evidence and research driving education policy and teachers working conditions effectively says we just have to ignore all that and focus on the one thing we can effect and act as if that's the be all and end all and that the buck stops with the teacher. No wonder it feels like unreasonable pressure and ridiculous expectations are made of us. It isn't possible to outdo all of those huge factors that are acknowledged to be far greater indicators of grades than the teacher but the 5% difference the teacher can make in teh face of it all is treated as if it was the entire and only relevant factor on grades and teachers are to take full responsibility despite their tiny slice of influence.

Yes this thread has been unusual. Perhaps because Us4Ourselves have got everything they wanted and the world is pretending covid doesn't exist and schools aren't closing or threatening to in general so the army of haters has stood down.

@isthisamistakeornot it’s a comment that it is normally the way threads like this go. Interestingly this one hasn’t, so maybe more people are believing the message that schools are in crisis. And this is nothing, wait till next year when so many more schools will be in deficit (which they are not allowed to be) as no reserves left to draw on

The recruitment crisis for support staff was an issue waiting to happen. The conversation is always about teaching staff wages, their pay increases, never support staff.

My experience is from a Trust, they have definitely tried keeping support staff wages as low as possible for years. I’ve seen them shave minutes of TAs contracts to save money. All whilst SLT get paid these massive wages. Support staff then being asked to pick up jobs from SLT.
They were the ones in during covid in school looking after children, cleaning bathrooms. Barely a thanks at the end. They’ve always been considered easily replaceable though.

Years ago pastoral roles would be filled by people with some experience of managing children. Now I’ve seen those roles given to 18 year old school leavers, zero experience and expected to ‘manage’. They all leave. The good ones are all waiting to retire.

@isthisamistakeornot I suppose a good few of us on here remember the dark days on here back in lockdown when @noblegiraffe in particular was mercilessly and viciously attacked for her attempts to highlight what was actually going on in schools and actions that could be taken to help mitigate Covid spread within them and therefore remain open more widely.
So it's possible some of us a still a little sensitive when we see familiar posting names popping up or a familiar refrain starting.

@JubileeTrifle Most of us (in schools) are hugely aware of the debt we owe our TAs. I try to ensure I refer to "school staff" on here but there is certainly a lazy stereotype in the wider world of referring to "teachers" when talking about all things education. I mean, we are widely blamed for lockdown and the provisions made for kids when they were decisions made far above our heads.

Someone asked why we couldn't recruit TAs and what has changed. In my primary school it has been due to the increase in personal care ie toileting and changing nappies. This problem has increased enormously in EYFS and increasingly KS1 too. TAs in KS2 get called on to cover this when staff lower down are off sick. We have had quite a few leave because they were recruited as KS2 class TAs and end up being roped into 1 to 1 personal care, which is quite a different job.

This is why education funding is never in the papers:

(Lord Ashcroft poll yesterday)

I've witnessed incredible casual cruelty towards animals in very poor countries. When people are constantly concerned about keeping a roof over their heads and having enough food to eat (and how much longer they can keep the heating off in my case) they seem to be unable to attend to higher level needs or issues eg. whether it is wrong to use a puppy as a football, or torture a kitten for fun or indeed education.

Maybe it's a version of that that we're seeing in that graph Piggy. Beyond sad in a supposed developed nation.

I think it's also a result of a constant state of crisis and the arousal and stress levels that go with that. People are too exhausted to think long term or bigger picture when they're just trying to get through today.

It would be good to be able to believe that the people paid to steer the ship would at least be doing that long term, bigger picture thinking but sadly short term profiteering seems to be the driver.

It may just be me and others like me who have a propensity to exhaustion and anxiety even before you throw in perimenopause and not being able to see a doctor anymore but I feel as if I've been living on 'the edge' for the last few years. I see it in myself, in our services, in social order etc - everything seems stretched to breaking point and I don't know anymore whether it's inevitable and unavoidable or if it's deliberate destruction because we also seem to have lost any trust in the integrity of leaders.

It does feel like we're all being gaslit and tortured in some huge social experiment at times! Meanwhile micro management and endless unreasonable demands keep coming.

We all keep on trying to cope but there must come a point where it snaps.

I can't wait to retire. The expectations are ridiculous and aren't reflected in my salary

Why on earth are staff in schools being expected to change nappies?

Who else will change them if a child comes into school still in nappies?

Some children are sill in nappies when they are in reception (and sometimes into key stage 1) - some have SEND, some don't.

Some children also have accidents (wet and/or soiling) even if not in nappies, some more than others, some not at all. School staff change those children too.

I know I started this thread so really should have been expecting the responses, but fucking hell, it's relentless isn't it? This thread is absolutely horrifying.