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?

This might happen. It could end up being like GP and housing where some people can't get any and what they can get is substandard and insufficient. If your GP won't take your problems seriously you're supposed to be able to change, but in reality all the other doctor surgeries will say they won't take you.

It'll end up being the same with schools. So pupils getting bullied will have to put up with it and expelled pupils will have to be home schooled. Parents will stop fussing about having their first choice of school and will start hoping their DC is allocated any school at all so they can stop paying for all-day childcare at 5yr old.

Schools will be like the ones my friend worked in where pupils fighting in class, corridors or barging into the room from the corridor is ignored completely and the lesson continues as if they weren't there, because otherwise no teaching would ever get done. Parents would be spoken to by two teachers and always in front of the cameras. This won't be just the bad schools, it'll be the standard procedure in all schools as behaviour continues to deteriorate in society.

On a side note I've never understood why suspension or expulsion is deemed a punishment. Unless the parents punish the DC for the inconvenience of it. The naughty DC doesn't want to be in school anyway so isn't it more of a reward?

All of your suggestions are mere sticky plasters. We are seeing wider societal decline and schools are just micro-climates of this. Unless we can increase parental accountability, encouragement of better manners and respect, raise children to have aspirations, improve attention and work ethic, tackle addiction to screens and social media. Nothing will change. People may qualify as teachers but they will soon leave because all of the above means it is impossible to actually teach.

Teachers just want to be able to teach their subject(s) but instead we are constantly blamed for all of societies ills and expected to fix them.

There are plenty of dick teachers too! DC1 in their 4th year of teaching has encountered many of them! As have I in my profession and as a mother to three. My DC was born to teach, has all the necessary attributes. Relates so well to teens and has multiple extra-curriculars to offer.

There are efforts to recruit teachers. DC1 got a bursary of £26k to do a PGCE in MFL. Was getting more a month for those 10 months than I was in a professional post! Had two one year contracts in the city they studied in and then moved home for a FT permanent contract.

Where I live, there are more teachers than there are posts. I will never understand why young people don't do what my DC1 did and move away, get the experience and come back? I hear of teachers 8 years or more into their career not having permanent contracts while my DC1 achieved that after 2 years of teaching.

SLTs being dicks are also a major issue!

ETA that my MFL child is having to teach RE. WTAF?

@WhatIsThatThumpingInTheGarden
On a side note I've never understood why suspension or expulsion is deemed a punishment. Unless the parents punish the DC for the inconvenience of it. The naughty DC doesn't want to be in school anyway so isn't it more of a reward?

It isn’t really a punishment if the parents don’t care and a lot of them don’t. It is the same students who are constantly suspended over and over again as the process to permanently exclude is pretty much impossible and schools end up “saving” this for the very worst behaviour rather than constant low level. What suspension does do is it allows some learning to take place in the classroom whilst those students are isolated or suspended. It gives the teachers a slight break from the abuse.

Whilst reading your comment, I experienced feelings of anger. It didn't make me angry, I simply experienced it and chose not to act on it. Also my latest counsellor is very good, worth every penny.

For perspective, I spent my childhood in and out of various "care" facilities, "special" schools, and a couple of short lived foster placements, followed by two "short sharp shocks" in rapid succession, three months Borstal then four months. Was a hair's breadth away from going back for a year when I had the fortune to wind up in front of a magistrate who actually gave a crap and saw rehabilitation as being more important than vengeance.

Anyway, listen.. I'm not quite sure what you think Borstal was, what it was like being there, what you think it achieved, or how you think it benefited society as a whole. I don't know what or how many lies you've been told about Borstal, who it is that convinced you it's better than whatever the current youth custody system is, what they've said to trick you in to believing that "bringing back" Borstal would somehow magically be of benefit or make anything at all even the tiniest bit better than the situation we're in now.

I'm not going to sit here and tell horror stories of what it was like, things that happened, things I experienced as a child - there's a plethora of first hand accounts floating around; countless books, documentaries, academic papers, podcasts, and so on. I'd like you to look at some, if you have the time of course.

You're fully entitled to hold whatever opinion you please on the matters of crime, justice, punishment, rehabilitation, youth custody, whatever you please. All I would ask of you - which you are of course free to ignore - is that you try to get even just a simple understanding of what something is before you advocate for it.

There's more I'd like to say, but for civility and decorum I'll keep it to myself.

Frogpole out.

It’s happening in Australia too. In Victoria, the statistics say that Graduate Teachers mostly last 5 years before a career change.

Well, if they want to recruit from abroad, they better change the rules about qualifications needed.

10 years ago I applied for a science PGCE as an EU national and, despite TWO PhDs written and defended in English, was rejected as not having GCSEs in English - my school foreign language was French. 🤷‍♀️

This. It’s unbelievable what the salary arrangement is for TAs versus the expectations around their position.

There was a plan to get teachers from various African countries. Oh wait, that didt pan out.

The last new plan was to get students who completed A Levels do 'apprenticeships' in class. Wonder how that will go down.

You will get more and more classes taught by long term / daily supply, shit results, more pressure from Ofsted, more people leave, big classes, collapsed classes, teachers replaced by randoms reading 'scripts' off the slides. It's already happening.

The biggest problem isnt really getting new peolpe in, but keeping people who are already there. There are so many schemes getting people into teaching, but they come and go, but no incentives for experienced teachers to stay really.

As previously said, I qualified in 97, conditions were far better under a Labour government

I worked in schools for 10 years, left for an office job.

Behaviour has gotten worse in Junior schools. Parents come in demanding their little darling is allowed x y z and we were expected to bend over backwards to accommodate a variety of strange requests.

Good kids get ignored as TAs are trying to keep other safe, whilst being injured themselves.

It’s wasn’t about pay, the job fitted my lifestyle, I was good at it. I wouldn’t go back.

But that has been the government's plan. They've tried to create a high enough level of applicants and trainees that they don't actually need people stay more than 3 or 4 years. Get them in, burn them out, watch them leave. It deals with the staffing issue and actually reduces the cost of running schools.

It just hasn't worked. Plus, it's a shit idea in the first place.

Lots of family members in teaching…. There seems to be endless cover teachers in in some schools.
Behaviour in some schools is simply awful and this seems more the case with the younger years (Years 7 & 8) rather than 9 - 11.
Morale is very very low.

Interesting and eye-opening thread.
I wonder how much education is a symptom of other problems.

Eg - crazy house prices forcing both parents to work long hours, leaving less time and energy for parenting / supervising homework.

And Brexit too.

I’m surprised teachers all need to plan their own lessons - as someone suggested upthread there should be a bank of high quality lesson plans which you can tailor as required.

I need to re-enter the workforce after some time out and have been thinking about teaching but omg this thread is disheartening.

No problems (seemingly) at my child’s primary school so far, but maybe I’m just naive!

Well ofc I was an idiot and thought it would be nice to have experienced teachers on the job 😂

No it isn’t. It’s about being given the time to do the job properly. If this was happening, it would help with retention.

I'm not sure but I'll also add, we have significantly less children starting in reception this year. Leaving a massive funding deficit, meaning a lot of TA's are losing there jobs. So we now have one TA per year group and challenging behaviour at a level I've never seen before. I'm about to have a baby and I'm genuinely worried about sending her to school.

In my experience of where this is already happening, you either get students in computer rooms doing online learning (not live, as that requires a teacher, but prerecorded), or massive classes, whole year groups in some cases, being taught in the hall. This is already a huge issue, it isn't something that might happen, it's happening now in many schools local to me, and other schools in our Trust. It hasn't happened at my school yet, but tbh, we're just one resignation away from this in our Science Department.

Tis a poor idea like so many gov initiatives - a crumbling education system just causes wider societal issues.

See, planning is NOT the problem. People who don't teach do not seem to understand that and think this would magically solve the problem. I love planning my lessons. I dont need someone else's 'high quality' bank of resources. I know my classes, I like doing certain activities that know work. The bank of resources as it exists (The Oak Academy or whatever it was called) was not liked by anyone I have known.
I vastly prefer doing my own powerpoints over using someone else's and would love to have the time to do it, my best lessons were those I planned myself from scratch. Except I dont have time to do this because my time is filled up by 90% of time by bs that ticks boxes of SLTs who come and go and stupid admin tasks that we should not even be doing to begin with and jumping through various hoops.

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.
This.
In fact teachers who have worked outside education are generally better because they don’t fall for all the bullshit.

A problem we are having is that teacher pay goes up but the grants that are supposed to fund it don’t match the actual costs. So we have to cut, so the job gets worse.

If you retain experienced teachers the funding model absolutely shafts you.

You do need more teachers to allow current teachers more time though. If you increase PPA from 10% of the timetable to 30%, who is going to teach the remaining 20% unless there's more teachers? Good schools have already done everything they can to reduce workload in a cost neutral way, e.g. through the use of technology and amending marking policies. There's nothing left to do to free up time but increase PPA, and that needs more teachers, which can only be attracted with more pay.

Two of DH's grandchildren are teachers, both for maths. After a couple of years of the appalling behaviour of pupils, and their parents, one moved to Dubai to teach and has been there some years. The other is signed off long-term sick with stress, again due to the behaviour of the little shits she was trying to teach. This is the issue and it's not the schools, it's the homes and parents who, frankly CBA to bring up their children decently.