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

If it was online and AI was implemented Louise’s meltdown wouldn’t be your problem, Fred wouldn’t have been excluded, Bob and Bobette would have work ready for them at the levels they are ready for.

Schools have been picking up the pieces of the problems caused by lockdowns for 3 years now, and people are trying to suggest that remote learning is the solution to the problems in schools?

Remote learning was the cause of lots of the issues.

Well, I would know, and that's part of the problem. The quality of teachers.

The top ones will look for positions at private schools, independent schools, high-attaining grade grammar schools.

Any secondary school that has below an Ofsted 'good' rating would raise my suspicions about teaching quality.

Sorry, but that's all nonsense. You clearly don't know nearly as much as you think you do about schools and teachers. Guess what, some of those elite teachers at private and grammar schools are the very same teachers who have taught in bog standard or poor comprehensives. Teachers move to different schools for a variety of reasons. I have known quite a lot of outstanding teachers who have moved to a difficult school for a promotion or a challenge.

I've taught in a wide range of schools, including a grammar school and two highly-regarded private schools. What makes top private schools and selective schools different is mostly their intake. Yes they tend to be able to pick highly qualified teachers, but highly qualified absolutely does not mean 'great teacher'. As for Ofsted - the 'Outstanding' leafy comprehensive I worked in was truly awful.

So much grammar content stifles creativity . Thats what I hate about the current national curriculum. Plus the speed it needs to be introduced and the amount of content that has to be covered means there's no real time for children to explore each aspect properly and begin to use it in their own writing.

What year group do you teach?
@WhatsTheUseOfWorrying?

I don’t teach. I’m a lawyer.

@LolaLouise five classes a day minus 2 frees = 23 lessons a week, or 23 hours of teaching. How much time do you imagine the teacher needs per week to prepare those 23 lessons, marks books and assessments, attend staff meetings, do their share of lunchtime duties, run a club, be head of house, follow up with any classroom behaviour matters, call home to speak to parents, write schemes of work for future lessons?

it is not a moanfest - it is a professional drowning. The workload is insurmountable. Maybe you need to get some humanity or humility.

I’ve name changed for this- sorry it’s long. I trained as a teacher in the early 00’s and then fell into another profession by chance because it was very much connected. We worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and if we stayed late, we came in later the next day. I could got to the loo whenever I liked and it was all a revelation to me!

I felt that I could have worked like that solidly throughout the year; my annual leave felt plenty and I loved that I could choose when I took time off, within reason. I was the fittest I’ve ever been and I wasn’t experiencing the crashing highs and lows of teaching any more. My relationship was great and I felt in control of my life. I had every evening and weekend to do what I liked.

Well, more fool me but I returned to teaching three years later! I missed it! I then worked my way up in state primary, got divorced (partly due to my endless workload) and was given a senior leader role. Behaviour was starting to decline, along with my own wellbeing. My salary was as good as it was going to get in teaching, but I used to dream about my car breaking down on the way to work. I was in a really toxic school (seems to be common now, unfortunately) where SLT were expected to be in by 7 and stay until 7. It was like a game of chicken in the car park. We were physically locked in and life was hell, though I loved the children and my colleagues.

Any time I told anyone I was a teacher, they’d mention THE HOLIDAYS and I’d probably look at them like they had two heads. I usually came down with raging flu each holiday and lived in fear of “going back”.

Fast forward to now, I work in an independent school. Core hours are much longer, but you are actively encouraged to take breaks with colleagues, go for walks and leave on time. Behaviour is great and classes are small. I used to have certain ideas about teachers that went to work in private schools. Wish I’d done it sooner! Even in a less toxic environment, there is a fairly high turnover of teachers. It really is a lifestyle and juggling family life alongside teaching is very hard. Lots of teachers in my school send their children there too- that seems to work well. I don’t know how we get to a place where all schools are great places to be for pupils and staff; everybody deserves it.

Again @noblegiraffe I disagree. The problems within education had been worsening significantly before the pandemic.

Schools are directly impacted by and reflect what's happening in society. Cuts to budgets, rising poverty, disregard of experts by politicians and leaders... I could go on.

I find the 'covid fucked it all' argument to be wanting.

I can assure you that Fred would have been excluded! His behaviour online was appalling - when he bothered to turn up!

And that's more to the point. Many of my students can't reliably get online for a good number of valid reasons. And others would simply choose not to.

Online and AI are not the miracle cure that people think they are.

@WhatsTheUseOfWorrying

Oh ok. So when you said the ks2 grammar content doesn't seem too much and teachers should just make it interesting (as it's our job) you don't actually have any form of reference other than your opinion based on pretty much nothing.

There's a lot of discussion about how covid lockdowns 'broke the social contract' between families and schools regarding the expectation both that kids come into school and that they actually do the work. Absence has become a massive problem in secondary school since covid, external but also internal absence, where kids are in school but wandering around not going to lessons.

In primary, a lot of discussion has been about school readiness, kids coming to school not able to talk properly etc and the finger has been pointed at the lack of socialisation during the pandemic. But also the kids being out of school meant a backlog was generated of SEN needs being identified, having intervention and so on, and schools are still playing catch-up. Then you have the massive increase in mental health issues.

And that's before you even get onto the gaps in the curriculum where kids who were supposed to learn online just....didn't.

There were problems in schools before the pandemic, sure. And I posted about them then. But things have got significantly worse since then.

With respect, that’s just stupid.

If you can’t make classes interesting unless the subject matter suits you, why are you teaching?

And you clearly know nothing about what was taught in the past. See my earlier posts.

It seems to be increased SEN in mainstream schools that is a huge cause of disruption.

Mum years ago taught in Poplar, London.

The children came from disadvantaged families - and yet the children were good at concentrating compared to nowadays.
Almost all behaved well.
Mum remembers a “naughty “ boy and one of the other pupils said “ Send ‘im
to Miss (Name) - She smacks ‘Ard.”

The children’s parents were strict on discipline, too.
I remember looking as a kid as Mum marked the exercise books at home how lovely the handwriting was, and how the children had illustrated their stories

All had made an effort.

A young teacher in her early twenties could actually teach and be more than just a child wrangler.

Something has gone very wrong in society- a general lack of very basic discipline.

I find the 'covid fucked it all' argument to be wanting.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that it's all down to covid. We all know very well that things had already been falling apart for a good while before that. Covid just sped up the decline.

As an aside, I am genuinely astonished at how much traction this thread has had today.

It's clearly something that people want to discuss, which I have not found to be the case before.

@WhatsTheUseOfWorrying

Of course I can make lessons interesting. Thats not my point. I don't agree with the amount of content but I'm amazing at my job.

I'll be reporting your offensive post.

I will also however continue to call out people such as yourself who make comments like 'the ks2 grammar content doesn't seem too much' with absolutely no understanding or real life experience of teaching.

This is another reason teachers are leaving. Idiots who think they know about teaching when all they did was go to school.

My DC are yr 9 and yr 6 and to be Frank I’m just counting the days down till they are done with education, this whole thread scares me.

my kids are good kids they behave and are respectful. Not going to be the top of the class but not the bottom either.

But I worry about the other toxic aspects of schooling - bullies and poor behaviour. There are some pretty nasty kids out there. I can’t imagine being the adult trying to wrangle these kids! I wouldn’t do it and worry for our future (and current!) education.

Sure, report. Please report yours at the same time, plus your last one.

You’re not “calling” anything out. You have a view about what should be taught. I have a different view.

If you were to tell me you thought the law should change, or that the courts are in crisis, or that you encountered a nasty judge or that a solicitor let you down, I wouldn’t be rude to you and tell you that you had no right to an opinion because you’re not a lawyer.

We all have skin in the game in education, most of us directly so, whether in front of children or behind them.

quite a claim, can you back it?

Do you mean the (well documented) serious problems with remote learning? If so, no. I don’t have research to back it but I’ve no doubt you’ll easily be able to find some online, given that this statement is utterly uncontroversial in education.

If you mean the claim that private schools will benefit from state sector going remote, again I have no evidence because it is a conjecture about the future.

Yes of course. King's interhigh. They seem to be going from strength to strength offering more and more subjects and extra curricula activities and the teaching is a very high standard. Cheaper than private schooling, though a similar standard, I would say. They even do choir, drama, art of course and a keep fit class. Not the same as team sports of course, but as I mentioned in a previous post, because she is less tired after school, we partake in after school clubs every day in the local area, where she integrates with lots of other kids and gets to learn a wide range of other activities.

I agree that this is a looming problem. And I don’t know why the government won’t deal with it. Just like the issues in the NHS that everyone could see coming for years and now the system is on its knees. I think teachers are looking at all the people working from home, less stress, earning good money and wondering why they’re going in every day trying to teach kids who don’t want to learn.

I am a qualified teaching on maternity leave at the moment. I can honest say I am looking at options not to return. I love the teaching side of it. I adore turning a child’s life around who is struggling or watching the children happy to learn new things but the other side of teaching is what makes it bad. The long hours when all the children have gone home. Lesson planning. Parents evenings. Meeting with head of this and that. I used to find myself in school from 7:30 am until gone 7 pm some days. Huge pressure from management and LA etc.
if I can I will not go back. Sad really but so many are not returning

@Sherrystrull
"I'm sorry to burst your bubble but many many children with significant needs aren't having their needs met in primary school. We don't have funding, support, or space for them. It's heart breaking but the sad truth."

Please don't worry, there's no bubble.

My mainstream primary school, which usually has some spaces on roll, regularly accepts children with significant SEND (several non-verbal autistic learners with significant cognitive impairment, learners with visual impairment, profoundly deaf learners, pupils with CP and pupils with Down Syndrome etc) placed with us by the local authority while they wait for specialist placements to become available despite our setting not having any kind of physical specialist provision in terms of dedicated spaces, equipment or trained staff. We use the resources and additional spaces we have and find a way for all pupils to be part of our school community as it often takes years for a specialist placement to become available.

Each class has a significant portion of learners on the SEN register, usually 5 or 6, a couple of whom have EHCPs. Some have come to us from neighbouring schools who have felt they lacked capacity to meet need, even for learners with relatively common SEN such as autism, adhd, dyslexia and SEMH needs, encouraging parents to seek us out as we're 'so good with SEN'. We're no different to any other primary school, but our leadership has a strong Christian ethos of inclusion and welcoming everyone. We've had heads calling to give us a heads-up they're sending SEN pupils our way as they feel we're a 'better fit'. Only because we choose to be. It may well be that some schools feel they lack resources and capacity to support learners with SEN, but to a certain extent, it is also a choice.

So it irritates me when I hear about secondary schools in my LA which feel justified in facilitating the 'managing out' of learners with diagnosed moderate SEN or challenging behaviour arising as a result of unmet SEN, some of whom are my former pupils, who were supported to manage well in primary school. Learners with moderate SEN still belong in mainstream and we need to create a culture of inclusion which trumps the pressure schools feel under to produce ever rising academic results.

I find the 'covid fucked it all' argument to be wanting

Pretty sure no-one's said that.

What COVID did do was illustrate the problems of online learning that fans of remote learning and AI seem to ignore. I taught in a very well-resourced school during COVID and it's fair to say there were no surprises at all regarding who did and didn't work, and subsequent level of attainment.

What was unexpected was the degree and widespread nature of development issues that became apparent, more particularly with pupils coming in from primary, when face-to-face schooling began again. These are social development issues, all about not being with peers, encountering the situations where your ideas get adjusted as part of a bigger group. That's a significant part of what schools do.

A very moving part of getting back to school was just how charmingly physical pupils were with their friends, lots of patting, sitting close, some hugging. It was like a bunch of meerkats.

This sums it all up for me too. You haven’t gone into all the details, policies, lack of support, kids in your class who should never have been in mainstream education, the idea that you should run off the fear of inspections, never-ending new initiatives (that make no difference since no one is listening) but you’ve hit the nail on the head.

I’m about to be at the end of mat leave and have no other income lined up but I’m not going back. I made myself so ill last year while pregnant and I just won’t do it again. Life is too short so I’m not going back no matter what