England is running out of teachers

[noblegiraffe]

Or, to be clear, people who are willing to teach in schools. It has plenty of ex teachers who have vowed never to set foot in a school again.

While everyone seems to understand that you can't expect to see a doctor or dentist anymore, the message about not being able to expect your child to have a teacher anymore doesn't seem to have filtered through in the same way.

The number of cover lessons that kids are having is going through the roof. Some people think that if a kid has an adult in front of them then they are learning something, where kids know if they have a 'supply' timetabled that afternoon they are in for a doss lesson. Some people think that if a kid has a teacher for their subject that the teacher actually knows the subject being taught, which is increasingly not the case. Some people think that if lessons are being planned for those teachers and the teacher just has to 'deliver' them then that will be good enough, which is often not the case.

Exam classes at least used to be protected and given the 'good teachers', which is increasingly no longer the case, with Y11s reporting that they have a variety of supply teachers, even in core subjects.

There was a thread recently where an A-level student hadn't had a teacher for a year, wondering why the school hadn't done anything about it. We cannot magic up teachers! A-level students at my school are increasingly in the position of not having a teacher and having to teach themselves, and schools are now encouraged to put 'no teacher' on UCAS applications as relevant information for universities.

Recent threads about suggesting teachers need to be paid more to boost recruitment, or given a day off a fortnight to boost recruitment have attracted replies about teachers thinking they are special, or lazy, paid well enough already and having enough time off already.

But the education system is in crisis and something needs to drastically change as it's only getting worse.

The DfE's solution is to hire from abroad, at a time when the rest of government is seeking to reduce immigration.
https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/dfe-mulls-boost-international-recruitment

And why can’t PE teachers teach other subjects? Let’s be fair, KS1-4 isn’t rocket science in any topic. The only one difficult, imo, is languages.

@Smilingbutdying so why isn't that salary attracting more people to be teachers?

Because the parents weren’t able to cope with it?

The ‘one size fits all’ of a video lesson us absurd when we think of the wide range of needs in you average classroom - and the change in those needs each year.

My workload as a ‘live’ teacher is not generated by planning snd delivering the core lesson. It’s generated by thinking about how to engage and adapt fir the child with ADHD; adapt the task fir the child with a condition that means they can’t write or type much without pain; set suitable challenges for the most able while making the key learning accessible to the child who is working at 4 years below their chronological age; enlarging the text for the child with visual difficulties and avoiding any need for non-written interaction from the selective mute with ASD. That’s for every lesson of every day, week in and week out (and that is for my current relatively compliant, just about average -25% ish - on the SEN register class) . Oak Academy isn’t going to deliver any of this.

Because you need subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge and skill.

I couldn't teach PE any more than my PE colleagues can teach English. They are not the same skills.

@karriecreamer - the reason we don't do this is because Ofsted wouldn't like it! A sad state of affairs, but true unfortunately.

Out of interest. What does a PGCE actually accomplish?

This is my point about the problem in moving pupils through school according to age not ability. A pupil with a reading age of 5 shouldn't be in the same class as 17 year olds. It's just setting them up to fail. There should be far better segregation according to ability. I'm not saying your example pupil should be in a class of 5 year olds, but perhaps they should be in a class of struggling 12 or 13 year olds where they're all more of a level and teaching can be geared up to a group with specific issues, not determined at all by their age.

AI is nowhere near sophisticated enough to do marking yet.
And I need to do my marking to see what I need to go over again.

Tell me you have not a clue about being a teacher without telling me....

Standarisation of resources is one of the worst thing that ever happened in teaching. Each person is different, each class is different, you can do an activity in a class and it will be amazing and the same thing in another and it will be dead and no one will participate. Some classes deal well with competitive taks, some with more scaffolding, some need to wheeze through the material faster and some need more time. Some teachers dont feel comfortable with certain type of activities/teaching and nothing should be imposed. There is no one size fits all.

I worked in a school where we could not adapt and bring our own resources and lessons were shit and dry, activities did not suit me, I left after a term. I dont think kids learned more than in a school next door where every teacher had a liberty to teach their own way.
Making new stuff is not reinventing a wheel. But youd have to have a clue about teaching to know that.

Don’t!

Again the misconception that teachers don’t lift a finger in the holidays. Try thinking of it as working from home including taking some holiday time.
Almost all teachers work in the holidays, but the public are so eager to claim that they get 12 weeks. A good chunk of the reason people leave teaching is the devaluation of the profession. It used to be wow, you are a teacher! Now it’s you are only a teacher, the holiday must be nice.

They're not. This is a year 7 class. 11 year olds. And we're expected to do phonics with the weakest ones because ofsted say so, even though the evidence suggests that they need something else.

That isn't classroom teacher pay for someone 5 years in, let alone a part timer. So you can claim that your pay is fine, but you cannot extrapolate that to teacher pay.

But it is a good salary for a new graduate working 40 weeks.

Yet, there is a recruitment and retention crisis suggesting otherwise.

I wasn't blaming teachers for doing it. If it's the system, then the system needs changing.

But saying that, I seem to remember teachers all making their own worksheets back in my school days, 40 years ago, long before Ofsted. They'd write them on the waxed paper and run them through the Gestetner duplicator machine which spewed them out in purple writing.

Was there an equivalent of Ofsted back then doing the same kind of monitoring/checking??

A lot of teachers are doing what you suggest - changing career. That might even be what this thread is about.
Do you think that things will be better because of that? Because I don't. I would prefer if at least some teachers stayed and tried to fight it.

Honestly, don’t

I have a child in my current class who is working at EYFS levels in English, and almost certainly will do so until the end of secondary. They are not ‘bad’ enough for special school under current funding and space constraints . Are you really proposing that an 18 year old - with age appropriate social skills and understanding in many non-academic areas - should be in a class with 5 year olds?

What they need is a specific type of Special School or unit attached to a mainstream school - now no longer available because of cuts. Not a ‘progress by ability not age’ system.

Well my PGCE student is getting me helping them with their planning, feeding back on how to improve it, and then me watching their lessons and feeding back on how to improve their teaching. Setting targets and helping them meet them.

So they get better at teaching before being given their own classes.

So have a lot of non teachers, it's just that teachers have unions and shout about it a lot. In the private sector companies can do what they want and there is little come back. Yes you will hear about some companies that pay a small proportion of their employees big sums, but most people are not in those positions.

Academies have many freedoms, one of which is to pay staff what they like (though obviously they have to be able to afford the salaries they offer).

If I remember rightly from when my daughter was job-hunting, Harris Academy schools pay more than the national pay scales.

And again the graph.

Ofsted wasn't invented until 1992.

@ToryHater how did you get into an 'elite' university with 'non stellar' A Levels?

Re the article. England doesn't have an issue with training enough teachers. The issue is retention. Poor behaviour, tick box exercises and an increase in SEN with a lack of specialist provision and 1 to 1 TAs are reasons why so many teachers are leaving or on sick leave.