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

I agree.

Now that I'm doing supply I'm spending most of my time with junior classes.

When I was in my permanent post, it reached the stage that I had to read books with/to senior English classes, because they simply could not/would not read them at home - it was "too hard".

When I said "If you can't read an entire book, then you shouldn't be taking Higher English," I was greeted with shouts of outrage.

Increasingly, pupils are going into the exam having swotted up on only their set text plus a short story or a single poem.

I'd never step foot back in a state run school again. Teaching in private changed my life. I'm free from abuse and have longer holidays.

Those saying the curriculum isn’t too difficult are looking at individual concepts. Each one is probably fine, but it is the vast quantity of what needs to be covered that’s the issue. There is no time to ensure concepts are properly embedded or revisited etc as there is so much to fit it. Children then have gaps in learning.

For example the fractions question, if times table are mastered which is the expectation by the END of year 4 it makes it easier. But children often are still learning them and so applying skills children are still acquiring to achieve a new skill, when you are rushing through anyway, it’s not so simple. Especially with 30 different children with various degrees of understanding of the different parts of the maths required.

Thank you. I even feel awkward writing about it here because it sounds so unbelievable.

You find that women teachers do everything that they can to protect their pregnant colleagues. It's horrendous that we even have to think that way.

£22k is decent. I’d be very surprised if that’s the actual salary as they mostly pro rata it.
This one; high need SEN so also get extra allowance £17k. Others on there were £11-14k. It’s fine to say it’s less hours than a normal working week but 8.30 - 3.30 minus an unpaid break feels like full time when you need a second job to survive. It’s full on, every minute you are under scrutiny.

https://hampshire.education-jobs.org.uk/Vacancy/Details/116524/L1ZhY2FuY3kvU2VhcmNoUmVzdWx0cz9yZXRyaWV2ZUZpbHRlcj10cnVl

You made that more complicated than it is. Children should know their times tables by then. The sum is just two calculations.

You’d make a terrible Maths teacher. There are usually many ways of getting to a correct answer for any “sum”. While it can confuse children to be taught multiple methods, allowing them to use their own methods, if mathematically valid, helps them develop their mathematical thinking.

After I retired from secondary, I taught in FE and I met many students who had been told at school their methods were unacceptable, when in fact they were fine. This was instrumental in making them think they were bad at Maths. If their own methods were clumsy or long-winded, once they understood what was going on, they often refined them.

I was a PTC/faculty head in a Scottish secondary. (Previously was a PT/HoD, but the LA amalgamated departments to save money.)

During the exam diet, I'd be liaising with the Chief Invigilator to check on absent pupils. I then had half an hour to phone round parents of missing pupils from my faculty to get them into the exam hall before they were barred from entering. (Most of our pupils lived near by.)

In some cases, one of our deputes would drive up to the homes to collect missing pupils.

Mind you, there were also times that I'd be berated by angry parents/contacts who seemed to think that their kids could simply sit the exam another day or get a pass for being 'sick'.

Had one mother yelling at me that her child was sick. [No. Really wasn't.] I explained that, in that case, the school would need a medical certificate to present to the exam board. The mother became abusive.

As patiently as I could, I explained that the SQA would not accept our word that the child was sick - we needed to send the certificate in with the mock exam paper for an appeal.

No certificate was forthcoming.

@WhatsTheUseOfWorrying OK, so you, as a presumably intelligent lawyer who hasn't set foot in a Year 4 classroom recently, don't find that question "all that surprising."
How about you take it from me, as a KS2 teacher with nearly 40 years' experience, that it is way beyond the reach of all but the very top end of children?

I’m not arguing with your first-hand, professional experience. I’m saying that I find it surprising that that question is considered obviously beyond 8-year-olds.

Your earlier post about expectation not being the reality says it all, pretty much. If children generally don’t know times tables, multiplication or division by 8 something is badly wrong.

I’m not blaming teachers. I’m blaming parents. WTF are they doing? Has society broken down so much that they can’t sit with a child and read, or go through times tables? That’s not some cosy MC ideal. It used to be routine for parents of all sorts to actually care. I’ll be disagreed with, I’m sure, but I suspect that a belief that ‘the government’ will sort it out is the major problem.

If we’re never going to set standards in the curriculum that - reasonably - push children what’s the point? We’ll just end up with 8-year-olds doing only colouring-in and playing with plasticine.

If children generally don’t know times tables, multiplication or division by 8 something is badly wrong.

And yet the question involves much more than that.

I don’t think you’re capable of assessing the skill level required to answer the question and should probably lay off insulting schools for their failure to get 8 year olds to answer it.

The problem we have now with education is that there is no personal responsibility for anything. Schools are measured on progress and exam results. If the children fail to make progress or achieve exam results it is deemed because of poor teaching. The attitude of the children is not taken into account at all. Children are spoon fed the curriculum and don’t seem to think they have to do anything to help themselves. I work in year 6 as a TA and the number of children who do not know their times tables is astounding. Yet when I tell them to go home and learn them, they tell me they don’t have time. I am targeted to get several children to expected standard in the KS2 SATS, some of them just won’t make it because they are not interested and can’t be bothered. I have a good track record in being able to progress children as long as long as they do there bit. I have seen a massive shift in the attitude of children to learning in the 10 years I have worked in education.

One of mine thinks they're bad at maths because they were taught so many different ways to add up. Why not go with the most common ways and dig down using the other methods if they don't work? Seemed such a waste of time and counterproductive.

Exactly this.

Also, conceptually, the question is abstract. 8 year olds are mostly still in a concrete phase of development. But what do I know? Only been a teacher for 30+ years with Key Stage 1 and 2 and Early Years experience. Only studied child development as part of my education degree. But oh no, a lawyer knows far better!

This is why I carefully said:

While it can confuse children to be taught multiple methods, allowing them to use their own methods, if mathematically valid, helps them develop their mathematical thinking.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend teachers using a Pick ‘n Mix bag of methods - rather, not impose one standard method that doesn’t correlate with a student’s thinking.

You’ve misread my posts.

My point is that the curriculum is not obviously misguided. I may be wrong in assessing the skill level required. But since I know plenty of children, including my own (state primary), who were expected to cope with that standard and did so, I doubt it.

BTW, your accusation about my “insulting” schools is not only wrong but very unattractive. Seems like you’re ‘tone policing’ me. Oops.

What I mean is they have multiple candidates (both young and older age brackets) who apply for jobs and get to the stage of delivering a lesson to the class as part of recruitment. My older son for example just had two of these for one of his A level subjects and said both were good- one actually great- but neither offered the job and they now have a third teacher coming to deliver a lesson. This is not an uncommon occurrence.

Yes, I'd be a shit maths teacher. I'd be a shit teacher in general. I never got maths in school, despite being shown multiple different ways, which did actually make my anxiety worse because it just added to the chaos in my head. Finally got there in my 20s. It just clicked. My brain had matured enough, my anxiety had eased, and the maths teacher wasn't a monster like the one I had in school.

But I'm still traumatised by my mother plucking 1s out of the air to "help" me learn subtraction.

Online learning will have a place in education, now and in the future. It will not replace face-to-face learning as you are not accounting for the diverse range of students we get. What about students from backgrounds where schools are their place of safety? Where the only person who says anything nice to them all day is a teacher? They maybe won’t eat if they are not in school? Students who will have absolutely no chance of clubs or sports or socialising or educational trips because their parents can’t offer them that?

You are approaching it from your own narrow experience of being at school or from your child’s experience who had supportive and keen parents. Not from a teachers perspective who sees all of the above. For those students, online learning at home would be absolutely disastrous.

If a kid isn't being given breakfast it's either because the parents are too poor to afford food or the parents are too shit/lazy to feed their kids.
At my kids school breakfast club is about £4 a day, a whole box of cereal and bottle of milk is half that price so you can cancel out the poor families.
It also starts at 7:45 so you can cancel out the lazy parents too because there is no way they will leave their house that early.

Breakfast club is pretty pointless tbh except as childcare if you need to get to work early

But I'm still traumatised by my mother plucking 1s out of the air to "help" me learn subtraction.

My sympathies. That’s tough.

My similar situation was my father deciding to teach me to drive when I was 12 by explaining first how gears worked (badly). I refused to be taught and in fact didn’t pass a driving test until my late 30s.

I’m an English teacher with over 30 years of experience. I now do supply - I did a 3 day a week cover in a school I like last year. I had 2 KS3 history lessons on the timetable - I did my best, I’m a good teacher, the dept were generous with resources. I was just about adequate - and that’s with an interest in History.

Breakfast club is pretty pointless tbh except as childcare if you need to get to work early

Well, ermm, that's quite a lot of people!!

<sigh> I wasn’t objecting to the tone of your posts but the content, where you repeatedly suggest that that question shouldn’t be difficult for an 8 year student old and that something’s going wrong if they can’t.

Answering it, btw, isn’t simply a matter of knowing your times tables.

On the one hand posters are saying that schooL isn’t a childcare facility and in the other that it is.?

I really hope teachers are sourced from
abroad. It would help with cultural differences and racism and make a positive difference to education.

I see a lot of these lessons as part of my role. Being able to deliver a one off lesson is not the only thing we look for as part of the recruitment process: they might teach a great lesson but be unsuitable for a range of reasons.