So if teachers are leaving in droves

[BlastedPimples]

and recruitment is very low, what is going to happen? It can't continue like this surely and education levels will suffer enormously.

Massive classes for the teachers that remain?

Huge recruitment drive to entice more people into the profession?

Entice teachers out of retirement?

Recruitment from abroad?

Great for mental health - yet more screen time, no socialising, no body language or facial expressions and no reason to leave the house. Not everyone is a misanthropist

Apply to Teach First.

This is already the case, universities are very reluctant to take trainees off placements, even when school staff can see they are not good enough.

Yeh people tried that in the pandemic. It was shit then and many children are impacted by it

Children who want to learn things can learn things online. Children who are unmotivated and have disinterested parents who don't care if their kid is learning or watching YouTube won't. What do we do with them?

I wouldn’t do anything that takes private teachers out of the system and moves private to state for a start

I'm not a teacher but this seems to be a big part of the problem. Doesn't matter how many you attract/recruit if you are haemorrhaging experienced teachers, that is never going to work.

Our school, half the teachers have left. They've been replaced with teachers from Africa. The problem is class sizes. The classes are too big and too many kids have behaviour issues. We've had to pull the fire alarm to break up fights between them. One teacher cannot safely control a class of 40, when half of them have anger issues. Bring back classes of 20, and support staff to help students with needs in secondary schools.

Chucking money at bursaries for shortage subjects isn’t working-they’ve been trying that for ages. Something needs to be done about the actual workload. Why not trying asking some of the thousands of teachers who are leaving every year, why?

AI may well come to the rescue here. There will be a lot of people losing their jobs in the first wave of automation, so retraining as a teacher may become more attractive. At the same time AI will probably be used a lot more in teaching, so we'll need fewer teachers.

A few years ago I worked for a company that approved OTT.

They would come over, teach for a short while then leave. They simply couldn't hack the education system and pupil attitudes. They were used to teaching children that REALLY wanted to learn.

I wonder if things have changed?

Tell me you don't know what an actual teacher does, without telling me you don't know what an actual teacher does.

Who says they have to learn online from home. I didnt say that.

We could have schools without teachers at all for the older children and teenagers.

So they would have rooms with computers in them for teens to use. No teachers there. Similar to a library

The teens would go in and do their study at a computer.

Their would be some adults present for supervision. But they wouldn't be actively teaching, they can do an administration job while supervising,.

Teens can still socialise at break Times.

It would improve a lot of things. Teens like to be independent.

Teens can learn at their own pace. Learning in a large group of different abilities suits no one.
It also takes the pressure off teachers.

It was always a ridiculous idea to have a ratio of 1 teacher to 30 children.

Its not good for the teacher or the children. It becomes crowd control.

The old idea of 'school' needs to be updated, changed and improved

Tell me you have absolutely no clue about AI. It will soon be replacing doctors - you think there's no way teaching will be affected?

It’s revealing that part of the discussion is how much harder it has become, yet newly qualified are being roasted for not being up to scratch.

But that's the whole point isn't it: They themselves are poorly educated , spelling etc as they are also a product of a poor education.

Labour’s new 6500 teachers depends on the extra tax. If students switch to state and there’s little funding how does state cope with the extra numbers?

And are there really 6500 teachers ready to step in?

What happens when the students don't understand something they've just been "taught" in online learning? There's this thing that actual teachers do called "checking for understanding". If students don't understand, they re-explain, go back a step, amend the learning activity etc. What will the computer programme do? Will they respond appropriately? How will the computer programme keep them engaged? What happens when the students just pretend to work, but aren't really? What happens if the students are just randomly clicking answers in online quizzes etc without really reading the questions, just to get though it?

I don't know why no one ever thinks:

The way we have taught children has basically stayed the same for the last hundreds years. It is not working.

The system badly needs an upgrade and an overhaul.

I have taught teenagers a little bit in the past. I subbed for a teacher who had gone off sick.

I stood in front of a class of thirty teenagers, and thought this isthe absolute worse possible way to teach teenagers. For them and for me. I spent motof the class trying to stop the worst behaved students from thing each other.

The best behaved students then lost out, because they barely learnt anything. Because thebadkg behaved students were making so much noise.

It was the exact same when I was in school.

I remember the teacher spending the whole class trying to control the day behaved students, and the rest of us sat there and learnt absolutely nothing

If people with money and influence have to move their kids into state schools I think they will be moving heaven and earth to make sure standards improve. I don't know where Sunak's kids go to school but if they had to attended the local failing comp I bet he'd soon be doing something to improve things.

What happens when the students refuse to interact as they should with the AI? I can see AI replacing doctors for some tasks, but not all surely? So an AI programme asks a patient for a symptom, the patient, will presume answer honestly. They want to be diagnosed and get better, presumably. So you've got an AI programme teaching a class, there's some explanations, then a serious of questions to check for understanding. Yet a number of students have ignored the explanation, and are now just randomly clicking buttons during the check for understanding. What would the AI programme do? Presumably it'll respond with a different explanation, and a different set of questions. But still the students pretend to pay attention to the alternative explanation, and then pretend to answer the questions. What happens then?

I started at an inner city primary school in the 50s. I was in a class of 48, 50% of us went on to grammar schools. We wouldn't have dared to play up in a lesson. A bit of respect for teachers and education would go a long way.

Do you not realise that teenage school students have already been doing fully online school courses, for a long time now, in other countries.

It works completely fine. My friends daughter in the USA does her schooling fully online. I think the UK is very behind other countries in having this available

Have you done online education? There is never just a "computer program".

There is online academic support always available to the students too.

So if they have a question they can contact the academic support function

There are already people with money in state schools. They buy houses to get into the best ones.

That’s all you’ll get more of. But in the meantime higher number of state students and waiting on extra teachers - what happens?

People who go ‘oh the kids can just learn online’ have zero idea what they’re talking about.

A large part of the school system is devoted to getting the kids to do the work. All the routines, the uniform, the sanctions and rewards are around setting the expectation that a teacher tells you to do some work and you do it.

How can an AI get the kid to do the work?

People usually talk about gameification, streaks, etc, like Duolingo, completely ignoring the fact that the people who engage with gameification like Duolingo were already motivated before they started, because they downloaded and opened the app. A kid who doesn’t want to do maths is not going to be motivated by a gold star on a screen. They won’t even get to it.