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?

History tends to repeat itself. I’m appalled that the only viable option for change is Labour. They should be nowhere near government.

They will get voted in on the basis that many believe that any change must be a good thing, not because people really want Labour.

It’s a really depressing state of affairs.

No one can 'create' respect for anything. It's earned.

Why do we keep going down as a society all the time why are parents and children more abusive?
They would soon change if you told the parents they would have to teach their own kids.
To think in some counties some people are desperté for an educación and here it's just abused. Sad.

To be fair, that's what got me into the profession 20 years ago. Got taxed to fuck on it though.

I have a love/ hate relationship with it. I'm not sure what else I could actually do, to be honest. I can talk about books and poems all day long. I can do spreadsheets and excel bollocks all night. But not sure what I can do with that outside teaching. The only other people I know with the same feelings about their jobs, are midwives and paramedics. Everyone else I know appears to earn more than me and have better work life balance.

I really want Labour. I was a teacher under the last Labour government - it was amazing.

Agreed.

Their budget keeps being shot to pieces daily as the real costs are made clear.

They're slowing rowing back on everything they promised.

R Reeves gave an interview where she cocked up tax avoidance and tax evasion.

Didn't know which was which.

God help us.

Wes Streeting wants the NHS to work at weekends. Great, they should.
But given the doctors striking and the shortage or nurses, as well as scanners and all sorts of things needed to make it happen- another pie in the sky fantasy.

That's only because Blair threw everything at it.

And the reality is that we have better literacy and numeracy skills now than before.

What party do you think should be in charge then? I'm always genuinely fascinated by people who think that Labour would be worse than the tories. In what way?

Ex HOD here, left last year. Things that would need to happen to make me go back:

Make the job doable in a working week of 40hrs. So that means more adults in schools so that teachers get the time they need to prep/mark etc.

School/home contracts that are enforced. You signed to say your kid won't do x/y/z. They did it, here's the consequences and no arguments. The consequences need to be super clear. Any abusive parents are banned from site immediately and police involved (required police investment here too!)

More adults in classrooms for SEND support

More different spaces/schools for SEND pupils

Culture change in schools. I've worked in and out of schools, the work culture is ridiculous and based on guilt, "doing it for the kids" and martyrdom. It leads to burnout and people leaving. Which leads to ...

SLT need to go and work in non school environments for a while.... So many are miniature dictators, or simply incompetent and promoted way above their ability and need to sort out the way they treat their people. I have been go smacked by my new role and the fact I am treated so differently than when I was a teacher by my own managers. The way teachers are spoken to by their own bosses can be appalling. The "SLT Newbie" parody account on SM is very close to the truth.

Remove league tables, they help nobody and tell you almost nothing about a school.

Remove Ofsted inspections as they are and put in place the old style HMI visits which were longer term relationships and more supportive and less instantaneous judgement based on snapshots and data.

One exam board per subject. Stop reinventing the wheel.

Pay rises to put all public sector workers back to 2009 levels.

Performance management to be less about criticism and far more about personal and career development. Lesson observations must be supportive of development, not not picking for the sake of it.

Re-establish pay superiority for experienced, long service teachers. Needs to be value placed on great teachers in staying in the classroom and not climbing the greasy pole.

There's loads more but I can't think of them right now.....

Based on what? Not on the kids I've seen. Especially those who came through the Gove years. They've lost their imagination; their stamina and their ability to think for themselves. They might be able to stay every bsstard sentence with a pointless adverbial, but their general writing and comprehension skills are shit.

And respect is certainly is earned by teachers.

But run down by the media and blamed by ineffective parents.
Scrutinised for declining standards, when there is a continued battle to support children in a system which ignores the vulnerable.

Playing catch up with ill thought out, underfunded and short notice Department For Education policy and then blamed again for not achieving what was never going to work in the first place.

Teachers are not able to right the dire straights our society is in, the poor standards accepted in communities, the lack of accountability and a race to the bottom.

I’m not sure what you mean about history repeating itself, or about Labour and government.
I think most people do think almost any change would be an improvement though, because this Tory government is appalling.

It doesn't matter how many new teachers are recruited. The working conditions and pupil behaviour are just terrible. You need to fix those first so the new teachers actually stay more than a year!!

Under the last labour government I worked as a specialist maths teacher in a primary school. It was a separately funded post. I would take the children who had the lowest score on the year 2 maths SATS and work 1:1 with them for 20 minutes. I’d find their gaps and weaknesses and we’d work on them.

Not only did this mean they those children get extra maths tuition but they also had some 1:1 time.

When that year group took their year 6 SATS every single child passed their maths.

The funding stopped and so did the scores.

Things will only change when retention is addressed. But I doubt that will happen!

Does anyone think there should be a move to a completely different flexible educational model?

Homeschooling used to be something done by people (perceived) as out of the norm, just like WFH.

8-4 in a group of other young people you may or may get on with hardly seems to suit anyone right now. Maybe some corrupt PFIs are profiting?

The argument used to be that "you need to be SOCIALISED" by being at school

A bit like the office working environment - the arguments against WFH/hybrid run fairly thin after a while, especially given all the bullying and awful behaviour.

Agree many parents feel they don't have the capacity, but possibly a mix of remote learning and some interaction in person, and provide spaces for children to work and study in?

Don't many rich parents get in private tutors anyway? Give everyone a budget.

(I'm bright enough on paper - first class degree in tough subject, 4 grade A A-levels.

The time I've wasted in toxic group dynamics with people I would never see again in my life when I could have been doing more useful stuff...)

It's not the wage for most of us, it's the job itself.

Who ever thought it was a good idea to be lax about discipline in schools? Who has it actually helped? Stupid ‘restorative justice’ in many schools - a total insult to the victim in most cases.

Isn’t it common sense that kids and teens need boundaries and consequences? Reaponsibiiities as well as rights? Mental health has nosedived among the young, so all this ‘can’t upset kids by using red pen’ BS has done them so much damage.

The problem with the workload is government(s) have had the teachers shackled to silly paperwork in the name of accounatblity for so long they don't know how to let go. The question would always be how do we know what the teachers, and therefore the schools are doing?

Trust was undermined years ago. Not by teachers going on strike or snow days but systematic white-anting of teachers and schools by OFSTED, supported by government.

In addition, year on year deliberate underfunding so that pay rises were not fully funded, and increased workload, has ground teachers down to the point where some people on this thread and others over the past few months think it's OK to suggest decreased workload v. a pay increase. Whatever happened to both?

Starmer has a colossal problem on his hands and retention is just as important as recruitment and he has not mentioned it, though Labour has had 14 years to think about it.

OTOH he doesn't seem to be the malevolent fucker that Blair was. I'm a lifelong Labour voter and cannot think of anyone I knew in teaching who thought Blair had any good in mind for teachers when he got in. I digress.

That’s when there was oodles of money to spend. Anyone expecting anything like the largesse of the Blair government is in for a terrible shock. It’ll be some moving of the deckchairs at best

My partner is a teacher - has been for 3 years and wants to leave. The pay is OK - not amazing, but the main reason has been the lack of support and behaviour.

A students was 4 months late handing in a piece of work that would contribute towards their final grade (it was GCSE or Alevels) - he told the student that is poor practice and both the parent and SLT made a complaint about it as “he needs to be sensitive about the pupils mental health before telling them off”

Well when I was at school a deadline was a deadline. He has completely lost trust in his superior because of the way they’ve dealt with it - it’s so demotivating. Plus he teaches a core subject.

A students was 4 months late handing in a piece of work that would contribute towards their final grade
I was just told to falsify the submission date. In some cases I was asked to sign to say work had been submitted but I’d lost it, when in fact the student hadn’t done the work at all. Another reason that I left teaching.

I was a HoD in Scotland. We'd set a deadline so that we could check over the coursework for plagiarism, as per our exam board's requirements. (The instruction is not to send in a piece of work that's plagiarised - we can't just submit it with a note to say that it's plagiarised. We either have to send in a replacement piece or no piece.)

I wasted so much providing proof of plagiarism in order to satisfy the SLT. On one memorable occasion, I took the original essay (from a website) to my HT as proof that a certain pupil had cheated.

"Can you be certain that she's plagiarised?"

"Yes. Word for word, it's the same essay."

"Ah, but can you be certain that she didn't upload it?"

"Firstly, the board specifically states that candidates are not allowed to upload any of their work to the internet prior to the results being issued. Secondly, the essay was originally uploaded to the website 9 years ago. I doubt very much that she produced this when she was 7 years old."

In spite of all our travails, the SLT told us that we had to accept work after the deadline. The result, of course, was that a plagiarised piece slipped through the net and we (class teacher and I) got the blame. The board uses Turnitin. We just had to to use our eyes, our knowledge of the kids and Google.

Thereafter, if a child missed the deadline, I told them to take it directly to the Exam Coordinator because I would take no responsibility for it. You can imagine how well this went down.

If only anyone could have seen this coming.

I’m a new TA (been at the school for many years in another capacity) and we seem to have many teachers leaving all of the time. Behaviour and the ever increasing workload seems to be the catalyst for the majority of them. We have 1 class of year 7’s that needs 1 teacher and 2/3 TA’s for behaviour and SEND reasons alone and it’s still a struggle.