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

It's not just times tables. It's being able to analyse the question to recognise that it must be broken into steps, then identify the steps and put them in order. I had to stop to think about it and I'm an adult who writes software every day.

The steps I followed:

1. Read question.
2. Spot immediate simplification trick of knocking the zero off the end of the initial value.
3. Determine remaining steps of: divide 96 by 8 to get X, then multiply X by 7 to get Y, then pop the zero back on the end of Y.
4. Divide 96 by 8.
5. Multiply 12 by 7.
6. Append zero.

Had I mis-sequenced a step, or misinterpreted the question as divided by 7 and mutliply by 8, no amount of times tables could have saved me.

No I neither mentioned nor implied class at all! It's all in your mind!

My point was there are teachers out there still applying for jobs. I do think teaching, in common with many professions is stressful and challenging. I also think standards and expectations for the teaching profession have increased enormously since I was at school over 30 years ago. This is a good thing but inevitably drives some people out of the profession. With reference to Newly qualified teachers- some will not be suited, for 101 reasons. They will leave (this is normal) or will fail and be managed out. Again- normal and happens everywhere not just teaching.

Also, how is a calculator going to help a child do that fraction question? They would still need to understand the steps involved in order to know what to key in.

Well I get furniture thrown at me, get spat at, am sworn at and am hit and kicked regularly in my primary teaching job. As in, one kf the above every other day.
I'm not sure you quite understand how bad all schools are if you think behaviour is better in primaries at the moment.
These behaviours are from SEN children whose needs can never be met in my setting but who will never qualify as "bad enough" for the non-existant special schools or EHCPs.

I have to say, I've been teaching for 20 years, I briefly looked outside of teaching (wanted a new challenge) but the pay cut I would have had to take meant i stopped looking. I'm glad I did though as a new challenge came up within teaching and I'm loving it!

Please read my earlier post pointing out why there are no alternatives. Online teaching or teachers from abroad won't plug this gap. That is my point.
The only way to make change happen is a massive increase in funding for all schools, all young people's services, and specifically more places that are appropriate for SEN children. Also, change the threshold for pupil premium funding in line with inflation and the cost of living crisis
I personally think any government minister with children who are responsible for setting these budgets should be forced to send their own children to state schools. I imagine the uplifts in funding would be pretty quick!

I can’t go back over old threads and copy and paste but the posts saying that the holidays are the reason they went into teaching are there.

No they aren't there. That's why you can't go back over them. You have made them up.

Yes on the face of it. But here's the reality. Within a Year 6 class of 30 maybe half the class will be able to understand, use and retain the lengthy list of grammar terms for their SATs tests, another quarter will be able to get to the required level by scraping through the test - and I'm sure the secondary teachers on here will testify that they won't remember much of it by the time they start Year 7. The other quarter (some new to English, some with SEN and some who just don't give a damn) will just let it all wash over them and probably feel that they have failed when they get their SATs results.

But this isn't even the start of what I hate about teaching this stuff. We have to spend hours cramming it (and yes surprisingly we do make it as interesting and engaging as possible by linking it to their writing and reading, singing silly songs etc etc). At what expense. The curriculum has been narrowed enormously by this unnecessary guff. The things that the children will remember as adults are not the subjunctive mood, relative pronouns, the difference between subordination and coordinating conjunctions, articles and determiners but the creative things that they do.

The current knowledge based curriculum is so huge that the only things that are taught well are those areas that are subject to SATs tests. There is no choice for teachers about this. Targets are set. Targets have to be met. So what happens? Everything else becomes less important. It is wrong and I hate it.

And before anyone says reading, writing and maths have to come first- I completely agree, but not at the expense of everything else.

So many primary teachers want more for the children they teach. There used to be trust, autonomy and creativity in the job. Now we are all robots shoving the children through exam factories with an enormous workload and constant criticism. Every year approximately a quarter of our children are told they have not met the expected standards. These are children who, in the main, have worked hard and tried their best. That's why so many of us want out.

This x 100. You won't get a reply. Sweeping and inaccurate comments made by icehockeyflowers - who then vanishes. They're like buses - just wait for the next one to come along...

I am not lying. It’s in the thread where people are debating whether the school holidays should be shortened.
I have enough dignity not to lower myself to respond to you in kind.

You really are going to give yourself a heart attack with your anger and negativity.
What are you achieving by ranting on the internet to a stranger?
For your own sake and for those actually in your presence, relax.

I’m impressed by the efficient ways to help get the answer, that have been pointed out. I just saw it as 7x960 = 6,720; 6,720/8 = 840.

Two sums.

I was taught to write it out as:

7 x 960
— ——
8 x 1

That’s what I meant by just multiplication and division - which relies on rote-learned times tables.

But I’m in the minority. So I will put away my pencils, get my coat from the peg with my name on, and bunk off.

But replying to these threads isn’t helping anyone. It’s just an echo chamber of people listing issues, knocking down possible solutions. pulling posts apart. So much negativity listing so many issues that cant

You haven't replied to anything yet, nor have you provided any 'solutions'. And some posts don't need pulling apart, they simply fall apart on their own.

Every time you are asked to explain a sweeping statement or provide links to evidence you fail to do so and just say something else which is also unsubstantiated. If, as you say, there are so many threads, then providing evidence should be easy! The conclusion must be that the threads do not exist.

That was where I was getting to - it is an equal partnership between parents and the school and if that breaks down, the child can be as disruptive as they like.

Sadly this is the result of the abdication of parental responsibility onto the school.

Check the thread debating whether school holidays should be shortened.

I realise you're probably embarrassed at being challenged to substantiate your inaccurate comments and failing to do so, but your time would be more profitably spent checking your "facts" before continuing to post ill-informed comments.

So much negativity listing so many issues that cant and won’t be resolved by paying more which seems to be the only acceptable answer to some of the posters here

Who has said that paying more is the only acceptable answer?

At the age of eight, for that question, a calculator will be about as much help as knowing times tables.

One thread? As many as that? 😂

Yes. But I don't know how they would find enough teachers and classrooms to halves class sizes.

Check the thread debating whether school holidays should be shortened.

If you read those posts properly, they are teachers saying that they will leave if the holidays are shortened. One huge reason I stay in teaching is the holidays.

That is a very different statement to 'I've gone into teaching for the holidays'.

What do you mean by " very very good for the country and economy" ?
Ok I get what you mean by good for the economy but a lot of things that are "good for the economy " in the short term are awful for everything else in the long term (I am not calling foreign teachers awful before someone with zero reading comprehension jumps down my throat)

Where I live at least, it's extremely overcrowded with houses being built on every single green space and house prices are still exorbitantly high. The UK is one of the most overcrowded countries on earth I believe (England at least, maybe not so much the rest of the UK). This is demand and supply and really isn't helped by an open door policy

Surely the answer is to pay the teachers more so people actually want to do the job instead of shipping in people from abroad who won't mind being paid little?

A poster just below your post mentioned a birth rate boom in 2012 which has gone down since so what will all the foreign teachers do when there's less demand for secondary school teachers in ten years anyway?

😂

And yet there are various comments on this thread (and there are very many other threads that reference this) where people say, from personal experience, that 20+ years ago the issue of disruptive children was handled very differently and that, in any event, this wasn't such a big issue back then.

What has changed in the last twenty years (or, particularly, in the last five or so years) to make this such a much more challenging issue than it used to be?