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?

25,000 state schools in the UK.
So that's a quarter of a teacher each.
Or, more reasonably, one between four.

That's why I mentioned the local failing comp, not like Blair proudly sending his kids to a state school but a carefully picked high performing school.

Are you serious?...

Are you aware that children eh....ALREADY learn fully online in huge numbers in the USA.

There are fully online school programmes.

The UK is very behind in this regard

Ultimately, Labour need to open up many many more special needs schools and that will hugely help with teacher retention as well as teachers well being. Not to mention improve the welfare of other children.

Teachers need to be allowed to be firmer with parents without repercussions.

Children with consistent bad behaviour need to be placed in behaviour units and not sent back to the classroom to cause violent and or aggressive behaviours.

This is the elephant in the room, that people are just not willing to talk about.

I am serious and I suspect I know more about this than you.

We have online schools in England too.

Students who have elected to sign up to an online school are a very different kettle of fish to the general student population.

We did mass scale online learning during Covid and it was a failure. Swathes of kids just didn’t engage.

Yes, all this. The reinventing of the wheel - as I only found out fairly recently from talking to friends who are teachers - is bonkers!

What other work place starts everything from scratch each time? Total time wasting!

It is an absolute fire hole. One colleague crying about her upper KS2 class recently saying I just want to tech inspiring lessons and all I do is behaviour manage. She has an idea it’s different in KS1 where I am. It’s not. Things are bad and ai don’t think people realise how bad.

Let's not make our policy decisions based on science fiction. 10 years ago the same sort of people were telling us advances in AI meant driverless cars for everyone were just around the corner!

Can you list all of the things the current government has done over the last 14 years to improve education for every child?
What do you think the tories would do if they got in again to continue this improvement?
Education is one of the areas that could swing my vote but I haven't seen anything the tories have done or are planning that would make me trust them with this for another term.

I think I fall into the group you call "too dense to realise this" so I wonder if you can explain.

Edit: sorry, you were calling the government dense, I'm one of those voters who have no real appreciation of the economic fall out they’ll cause.

😵‍💫

The rise in hybrid working - which I massively appreciate - makes teaching look less attractive. But if we are to raise all teaching salaries to what they deserve ie in my head 50-75k pa for non SLT, that would mean a massive tax hike on top of already ludicrous sums (like 60% marginal rates for those judging six figures).

Controversial and the unions will kick off but could they not start new teachers on much higher pay but pay for it by scrapping the unfunded Teacher Pension Scheme for new entrants? The civil service did something similar with final salary schemes. An employer contribution of over 28% for each teacher a year seems totally out of whack with nearly all other schemes. You could still protect it for those who are in the system but pay new teachers more up front as they’re more likely to be driven by high salaries in their 20s than high pension contributions.

You could also target teachers from Australia, New Zealand and Canada with a 5 year visa regardless of their age. That way you’re not taking teachers from destitute countries and also offering jobs to teachers whose standards, methods and language are similar to ours.

I'm all for inclusivity and diversity but in some situations it just doesn't work. When you have children with needs, whether through SEND or physical disability they will unfortunately detract attention away from the classes as a whole.
Some children but not all children need specialist attention and one to one teaching or monitoring by people who are specialised enough to deal with these issues.
My DDs mother in law has been SEND qualified plus a few other qualifications for many years and has on occasion been attacked or assaulted by very young children - she even had wrist fractured and nose broken on separate occasions. If a teacher or TA had to face that potentially everyday - I don't blame them for leaving the teaching profession.

I went back to teaching secondary after being self employed for a year (way too stressful!). Teaching works well with having school aged children (no childcare needed in holidays etc) but it's exhausting!

I'm a massive believer that the likes of tik tok and social media in general is having a huge affect, their brains are becoming used to watching short bits of information and if it doesn't capture them they move on.....we then need them to focus for 5 hour long lessons a day at school and many of them can't do it. I feel I'm working harder than most of the students in lessons and surely that's not right?! I put in the hours to plan and evaluate lessons, what's the point if it has no impact 😔

Wycombe Abbey, one of the most expensive girls' private schools in the country.

So where is his incentive to make sure his local comp is outstanding? Get the people with power to send to the local school and standards will improve. Same with the NHS, if he knew he'd be on a trolley in A&E for 48 hrs when he was seriously ill it might concentrate his mind a bit.

The issue with the VAT proposal is you can’t make parents stick around for failing schools. If ex-private have money to choose better state, they will. Many already do.

Think our school is very much at crisis point, a long stream of supply teachers and the regular teachers seem to teach about 7 subjects each, there's no consistency at all for DD. I dont blame the teachers at all, I think bad behaviour is out of control for some reason and I wouldnt want to deal with it either.

I fully agree with your second paragraph. Even YouTube kids means children from a young age are not learning to be bored, 1-2 year olds swiping when they have had enough. It must be affecting how they process information surely?

Ofsted have not been fit for purpose for a long time

What will happen will be the same as happens everywhere when the pay and conditions are insufficient to attract and retain optimum people. The quality of candidates and hence those recruited, will fall as they become increasingly desperate to get anyone at all to do the job, and the quality of the service delivered will drop further.

Lucy Kellaway was an inspiring example of a Financial Times journalist turned teacher, she publicised what she did, wrote a book and set up 'Now Teach' which led 1000 executives to retrain as teachers. That's not a huge number but it's 1/6th of what Labour are proposing, in one small organization. The government have just taken away her funding of £1.4 million to support this and she can no longer run that scheme even though it not only offered new teachers, it got the whole issue of swapping to teaching into the mainstream media and encouraged people to retrain.

So, they aren't that fussed then about having new teachers...

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/now-teach-dfe-axes-funding-for-recruitment-programme

Online education is not remotely common in the US. It exists, as it does in the UK, but is largely for families who opt out of the mainstream school system for whatever reason (religious or ideological reasons, SEN or health reasons). There might be a few rural communities using it to bring opportunities that would be difficult to deliver due to limited demand from students (think a small school with only a couple students doing advanced math or physics, for example).

The trend in the US is actually in the opposite direction - making learning much more hands on, especially in STEM subjects, which requires more space and smaller class sizes. Learning isn’t just memorising content for an exam - to internalise learning students need opportunities to put it into practice in a variety of ways. Purely online learning is always going to be limited in what it offers - the trade-off might be acceptable if there are barriers to in-person and the student/family are motivated and engaged, but I cannot see it being a successful replacement across the board.

My daughter (teacher) left Uni about 4 years ago, and had her first year placement in a primary school. She passed all her assessments, but at the end of that first year, there was no job for her. And she was not allowed to apply for teaching posts outside of her Council area. So she was inadvertently "sacked" for want of a better word. How stupid is that? Fully qualified, passed all assessments, but let go. Same happened to a lot of her peers.

That first year teaching was awful. She was working from 7am till 11pm, and working on weekends, in order to create the content for her lessons, because no lessons were ever retained to be used again the next year. And there are no standard "pull of the shelf" lessons available.

There are almost 21,000 Primary schools in the UK. Every year each school writes it's own lesson content. That's hundreds of thousands of teachers, all doing the same thing, with no one sharing resources, and no uniformity across the board. What a monumental waste of time.

Why don't the Government employ a set of Teachers, who are the Creme de la creme in their field, and task them with writing all lesson content, for all pupils, for the whole of their primary education? These could be all cross checked to make sure they are perfect. Then upload them to a central library, that all teachers can access and download. That way we would know that we are teaching the right thing in the right way, and that every school is teaching the same verified content, AND teachers would not have to write any content, just familiarise themselves with the lesson before teaching, thus meaning they can actually have a life!

In the school my daughter worked at, they didn't share any resources at all. So, for example, Mary might be teaching Year 5 this year, and she creates hundreds of lessons from scratch to do this. Next year, she teaches Year 7, and Susan will be taking the new Year 5 class. Mary throws all her documents in the bin and Susan writes new material for Year 5. WHY????

And I say this as someone who used to be a tutor in a business. Guess what - we shared all our materials. So, if Bob created a lesson on X, he stored it, so that if I had to teach X next week, I could get Bob's lesson content and use that. Doh!

I would say we want the exact opposite. There is far too much off the shelf one size fits all teaching and an lack of professionalism for teachers as they are not allowed to put their own spin on things. In some cases I am hearing that there is an actual script for a lesson and teachers get told off if they veer away from it. How utterly boring and demotivating for them and the pupils.