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?

Indeed, this has very evidently been the plan. The suggestion to cut more expensive, experienced teachers, and replace them with cheap ECTs is in DofE guidance on cost saving. They haven't even hidden the plan. Yet those ECTs don't exist, so they desperately need a new plan, but the damage will take a long time to unpick.

NOTHING can replace an intelligent, well-qualified teacher who adores their subject, loves their job, loves kids and is paid commensurately well. These people are the future of the country, FFS! How kids learn, in my 65 years in education, woman and girl, is directly related to the quality of the teacher. Not devices, not language labs/smart boards/ and other passing gimmicks. A brilliant teacher, chalk and talk...it works every time. Why is a person whose role is so germinal to a well-informed, well-educated populace treated with such disdain?

Education underpins employment and productivity. The recent benefits bashing crusade to me just highlights this. SEN children marginalised and now demonised as adults. Many have been denied an education.

Hunt, Sunak et al gibbering on about productivity etc without considering the poor quality of our schools and the ultimate effect of this.

Young people of all abilities are being let down.

Right - no offence but they don't even follow the British curriculum and education in South Africa is generally poor in comparison. I'd understand teachers from Zimbabwe or somewhere similar where they do GCSEs and A Levels. We are in for it!

Labour haven't yet agreed to support a teacher pay rise. We are currently being offered 1% - pay has fallen over 25% in real terms. I suspect the 6500 new teachers if they materialise will be poorly trained, poorly motivated and either content to do a poor job - or they will leave the profession.

As usual this country will not pay British teachers a fair salary - the solution is always to take from other countries and pay them a lower wage.

They are already doing all those things

@LittleGlowingOblong there are lots of opportunities to share resources on line, through websites, social media groups etc but a lesson is taught poorly if you just bung on someone else's powerpoint. I use lots of resources someone else has made but I will always tweak them or change them in some way for my classes. It gets far easier when you've been teaching for a while and have a reusable "bank" but new exam syllabi every few years, updated examples, changes in the law (homosexuality was still doing the nature Vs nurture debate when I started) mean you can't just recycle.

And yet, despite the looming crisis I'm on the "leave teaching and thrive" Facebook page and many, many schools continue to treat teachers appallingly.
Bullying out older teachers
Giving no flexibility or professional trust at all
Crazy workload expectations.

What should^^ happen to tackle the crisis?

Fund schools properly, open new special schools and fund every single school to open their own SEND base with high quality training and available.

Bring back good quality early years and Send support services so that children (and their parents) don't get left knocking around the system until they're so challenging that they're impossible to teach.

Pay TAs properly and make there a much better career progression path so it's easier to attract quality professionals.

But, what will probably happen are a series of "band-aid" moves that make the system more shit than it already is with:

Unqualified teachers (IE pretty much anybody can rock up and say they'll give teaching a whirl) standing in front of increasingly large groups of pupils who get their actual teaching via AI.

Exclusions will rocket, they'll lift the current tight restrictions around them and it'll be a case of, if a child doesn't behave in school they're out.

Workloads will increase for those left so we'll be left with a system where people teach for a year or two, get chewed up by the system then spat out once they can't cope.

Or....they'll move all children to a 2.5 day week with 2.5 days accessing nationally set work on the internet from home. That'll instantly halve the number of teachers needed.

As the parent of a child about to start secondary school, the future is a bit of a worry!!

We already do, and they often don’t last

We have a generations old disdain for teachers and learning. There are a few peoplr who can say proudly thst they never wrnt to school or they jever finished school and they did well, and they are held up as a reason why . I wonder whether they have the ' 'Those who can't, teach' "joke" in countries in the far East or even other parts of Europe? We also have a cultural disdain for learning. Lack of respect for teachers from adults leads to poor behaviour from children and a lack of respect for the profession in schools and society as a whole.

Hello, at my college class sizes are increasing - so more work for teachers. Plus we have recruited an ECT, trainee teacher who is not, in my opinion, is not satisfactory - doesn't mark work, doesn't create resources and lies frequent.

There are many ways to deal with this issue, but I fail to see how it is reduced to more pay.

A good start would be for schools to be properly funded.

I agree you would need more staff to cover PPA, but that doesn’t necessarily mean teachers. Like a properly trained SEN specialist or Speech and Language Therapist. Both would benefit children.

To those who say that that if private schools close those teachers would go to the state sector -most wouldn’t! I absolutely would not teach in a state school.

You are right. Most would not and who would blame you. Even most parents would not want to send kids to state there would be so much bullying.

Also it’s because there is a lack of SEN schools specific to their needs. We could not find a school for an intelligence but complex needs person near us. We tried for the local dyslexia school but they could not meet needs and the nearest ASD but hf was about 50 miles away requiring a long taxi journey each day.

I live in a huge city - why are there no schools like this here? My son was miserable in main stream even though they tried their bests it was alien for everyone.

Are they being paid to create resources? At the college I worked at, they specifically tried to save money by saying “someone will give you resources, then we can pay you less because you’re not paid to create resources”.

Marking is another thing they didn’t want to pay for. I used to do as much as possible in the lesson because they wouldn’t pay me to do it outside the lesson. Otherwise the marking didn’t get done. Sorry but I’m not doing work I’m not being paid for.

Bululu · Today 07:16
To those who say that that if private schools close those teachers would go to the state sector -most wouldn’t! I absolutely would not teach in a state school.

You are right. Most would not and who would blame you. Even most parents would not want to send kids to state there would so much bullying. Edited

Believe me, private schools are rife with bullying. Of staff. Especially, IME, preps.

This ^^. They have bled it dry and forced a horribly restrictive academic curriculum on children and schools. They have caused so much chaos in support services in councils and poverty for children that schools in challenging areas are in awful states. Add to that underfunding of issues relating to school buildings, the disgrace that is academisation and it's impact in some areas and the depletion of teacher salaries . It's on the edge and any improvement will take at least a decade.

@llamarammma can you clarify what are you suggesting? So students have some of their lessons in SEN or speech and language therapy? What about the students without SEN needs or speech therapy needs? Do you mean those students with those needs would not get taught the full curriculum? So whilst half the cohort are doing Science, the other half are doing speech therapy? Cab you even do that in a class of 30? Just replacing a few lessons a week with those kinds of sessions for the students who actually need it, isn't going to free up very many hours in many schools. Those sort of interventions require small, focussed groups, almost 1 to 1.

Teaching is no longer attractive. Poor pay, extra demands, bad behaviour. With many other jobs there is an option of working at home now which is really attractive. Schools will ask teachers to teach outside their specialism, put extra burden on TAs, increase class sizes. It’s not like we haven’t seen it coming and it’s a tough one to fix. I’m not sure any retired teachers will be signing back up.

There are a number of issues with a “bank” of resources.

Firstly the resources won’t necessarily fit the specific needs of that class and still need to be adapted.

Secondly the “bank” needs to be kept up to date and it isn’t, because the employer doesn’t give a shit if teachers are being handed outdated resources, and they don’t want to pay someone to update them.

Thirdly the “bank” isn’t used to reduce the workload of teachers - it’s used to de-professionalise the job so the employer can get away with paying them less.

I deal with supply and I’d say 90% of supply teachers are from African countries atm.

in Zimbabwe the behaviour in schools is much much better than in the UK.

There are financial incentives for people to train to teach but I don’t think these work for retention.

There were 20 people in my PGCE class.

About 5 left during the 1 year course.
At least 5 were planning to never go into teaching and were honest about it, they just wanted the bursary.
At least another 5 were planning to just teach temporarily but had other careers lined up.
And there was only a couple of us who actually wanted to get into teaching and planned it as a career (I think 4 of us).

I ended up giving it up 4/5 years later too and I’m not sure about the other 3. I know 2 were planning to leave/saying they wanted to.

A shit teacher with a bank of resources is still a shit teacher.

As a maths teacher, there are tonnes of free resources out there, PowerPoints, worksheets and so on, e.g. Dr Frost, Corbettmaths. Schools also buy in maths resources like mathswatch, Sparx, Mathspad, Goteachmaths. Maths teachers have to do very little planning or even marking.

I've seen perfectly good PowerPoints delivered absolutely terribly leaving kids without a clue as to what is going on.

The idea that all we need to solve the problem is a set of centralised resources and some people to 'deliver' it is just wrong.