6500 extra teachers....

[noblegiraffe]

This was one of Labour's main headline pledges. They were a bit vague on the details - is this 6500 more than the amount of teachers that are currently needed, or 6500 more than the Tories managed to recruit, which was well below the amount currently needed? I don't know.

Anyway, where are we at?
Teachers were awarded a 5.5% pay rise as recommended - good.
Ofsted single word judgements scrapped immediately - good.
PPA can now be taken from home - meh, maybe good for primary
Performance related pay scrapped -good

The situation:
Teacher trainee recruitment targets were massively missed again for this September so schools will continue to have unfilled vacancies next September.

The projected fall in pupil numbers due to decreasing birth rates won't be as big as expected so more primary teachers will be needed (and this will impact school funding as fewer pupils meant there was going to be potentially spare cash in the system).

Potentially more pupils in the state system from private could be balanced out by returning private teachers to state schools. That will take some time to shake out.

PGCE mentors are now expected to do 20 hours of training this year to be a mentor, and lead mentors 30 hours, regardless of how experienced they are. This is putting people off being mentors so PGCE providers are struggling to find placements for what few trainees they have.

Workload for teachers is increasing due to lack of funding, and lack of teachers, so they have less time to devote to training teachers. The lack of experienced teachers available to train them is also a problem. At the same time, the demands of training new teachers on schools has increased (e.g. the NQT year is now two years of support and reduced timetable and schools also need to provide PGCE students with 4 extra weeks of intensive training and practice).

This is an extremely urgent issue, and a key government pledge, so why all the airtime about anything to do with education is being taken up with bloody VAT is beyond me.

The impact of the lack of teachers in the system is huge. Inability to recruit teachers means kids have supply and cover teachers which affects their learning, but also their behaviour across the school as they become disaffected in those subjects. Experienced teachers are not only having to plan lessons for the supply teachers and sometimes mark for them too, they are having to pick up the pieces and fill in the gaps when they teach the classes the next year. Heads of Department are spending huge amounts of time fielding legitimate complaints about the quality of teaching. Advertising for positions that cannot be filled is expensive.

What do Labour need to do to turn this around?

Parents are not able contact us directly. All emails go through the office and principal sends them on if necessary but reads all of them.
(Not in the UK though and it's a small enough school)

That would not work in my school - there are 1400 students.

I don’t think many indie school teachers are in a rush to go (back?) I state schools. I certainly won’t be.

I don’t want to go back to classes of 30+ and dreading particular classes because of their bad behaviour.

I don’t want to go back to printing and copying at home because my faculty doesn’t have the budget for printing.

I did 10 years in state schools and believe the situation is worse now. Nothing this government is doing is going to make the slightest bit of difference to teacher recruitment and retention. They have a blank slate to begin wih and they’ve blown it.

There needs to be more schools for children with special needs with staff who are properly trained. The pressure on pupils results should go back onto pupils and taken off the teachers - this would lead to less stress and reduce workload. Good teachers will continue to work hard but without the fear of being seen as not doing enough when they are.

Experienced teachers should be encouraged to stay in the classroom and not climb the ladder so that children get the benefit of that experience.

Poor behaviour from pupils needs to be dealt with quickly and efficiently without children being given “a good letting off” and returned to a classroom to continue causing chaos. There should be more accountability for parents and the opportunity to exclude pupils without it triggering an inspection.

These are the measures that are needed along with those the government has already put in place. They just haven’t been ambitious enough with their changes to get the 6500 new teachers.

Oh I could definitely see that not working in a big small. My school has only 200 students.

Unfortunately it is often the power grabbers who climb up the ladder and get power, rather than the ones have true talent and care.

You could be me. I agree with everything you said. I taught in a school that went into special measures a couple of years after I left and it hasn’t been out of it since. Something is going so very wrong. I would not go back to that school for triple my salary but there will be many children who are lovely and they are bei ny let down.

I read your post and I have replied to it.
Mine are also real examples of what goes on in a school.
The bits that you know nothing about as you are not aware of them.
As for not knowing the children's names in his class I am assuming that its secondary school and Mr X teaches more than one class. So it is more than possible that he doesn't know all the children's names.
And if you are allowed to give hypothetical scenarios then so am I.
That's how this works.

The PM spoke about recruiting these additional teachers like he had to just go on Amazon, select what he wanted and arrange a Prime delivery. Clueless and sadly un achievable

I know that its a different government but its the same playbook as 'we will just get retired teachers back in to the classroom'.

They have absolutely no idea.

There's never any intention to understand and fix the reasons teachers are leaving or not training in the first place.

Same.

I work in pastoral. The amount of kids who say exactly those things and have no intention of learning is unreal. They take no responsibility for their own learning, it's not easy and they want it handed on a plate. They also tend to say "I didn't do anything" when sent out of a lesson.

I know that its a different government but its the same playbook as 'we will just get retired teachers back in to the classroom'.

and troops to teachers.

Wasn't there a ‘mums’ army’ plan once as well?

If they just made the workload manageable, the curriculum reasonable and the inspectorate fair, they wouldn’t have to resort to all those bullshit sound bites solutions and teachers could just teach.

We can but dream…

I've told this story before.

For a number of years, we used to get someone from the DfE "delivery unit" "embedded" in our school for a week. Since I was, and still am, responsible for teacher training, they always spent a significant of time with me. We'd meet trainees, they'd come to watch lessons with me, watch me teach, and we'd talk about recruitment, training and retention.

Without fail, they were well educated nice young men with zero interest in actually teaching, and no experience in state education. The final one was off to Harvard the following week to start his MBA.

It was entirely about ticking boxes for someone. They really were not at all interested in listening to anything we had to say.

@cardibach , @FrippEnos , @LizzieVereker

Many thanks for your detail replies (sorry if I missed someone), it does help a lot to understand the issue

Or a kid who got 7,8,9s in GCSE doesn't get predicted A levels because SEN, moving house, death in the family, poor mental health because of the pressure, etc.

That is precisely what I think should happen. Or your loan is paid for you all the time you are employed by the public sector.

Yes, SEN and alarmingly increasing behavioural issues too make it very difficult to teach. I have little chance of targeting my SEN students in a mainstream, mixed ability setting when I’m also firefighting often dangerous behavioural situations with an SLT that is overwhelmed and often doesn’t respond to call-out. I worry about the younger, inexperienced teachers in these situations.

Agreed.

All children have the right to feel successful at school, to see their hard work pay out into results. I feel it's no wonder we have so many people unable to motivate themselves to work when they have had years of feeling dejected at school - never having a sense of achievement.

Good to see another 'right' being made up.

Part of the problem is that children are not allowed to fail, from starting primary to their GCSE results no child 'fails', there is always an excuse as to why they didn't make the grade and its often the teachers that are made the scapegoats for it.

Yes the system that we have is wrong and its failing children, but children need to be able to fail so that they can understand that there is a consequence to their actions or lack of them.

I will add that good children that work hard are praised.

I read about an interesting potential issue with this - it would be less of a financial perk to women, who are more likely to go on maternity leave and work part time, and be less likely to be promoted. The amount of loan that would be repaid on their behalf in a given time period would therefore be lower than that of someone (more likely male) who worked full time the whole time, with potential promotions, as loan repayments are linked to salary

So it should be a flat percentage of your loan that is paid off for each year of service rather than your loan repayments being made for you.

I confused by your response. Do you work in a school?

Shouldn't we have enough options as every student isn't exactly the same? Then everyone can feel that the work they put it leads to a something? Then failure is part of learning not just their current experience which is that school is way too hard.

You are right some students put in zero effort but I see more who struggle to do the very packed curriculum which moves at an incredible pace and uses complex grammar and reasoning problems.

If you're going to argue for a grammar system you'd need to explain why that sort of system always ends up overwhelmingly selecting the children of the well-off for the academic stream and children of the less well-off for the 'vocational' stream regardless of ability.

I can promise you that child with SEN know the feeing of failure. By Year 4, many children understand that there is no point trying to understand because they aren't going to get it, because the one size fits all curriculum is just too hard for them, even when their teachers try to adapt it to their level. I've seen it again and again.

There are plenty of bright kids with SEN who are able to manage the curriculum but struggle in other ways.

Support for children with SEN is totally inadequate and the elephant in the room seems to be the explosion in the number of children who have them.

And I don't think this is down to 'more people seeking diagnoses' as it is harder now than ever to even get on the waiting list for a diagnosis