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?

I would expect the issue will worsen given an expected 20% will quit the independent sector

I don’t think this is the expected figure at all. Max Marlow of the Adam Smith Institute who are very opposed to this policy puts his best guess at 10%:

Have you got a link for state schools getting £300k from rich parents? This going into a central pot for local schools would be great but I’m not sure they would donate so much if it wasn’t going to their own child’s school?

the reality is there is a lot maybe even too many ideas of how the state system could be improved (along with teacher training and retention).
which makes it difficult to effectively promote anything.
as mentioned above if education could be simplified (curriculum) and if disruptive students (regardless of cause) could be redirected from inappropriate setting things would work better.
as for money i think the struggles with behavior/sen/mh cost the system a lot of money.
a blitz on rapid assessments, a blitz on reconfiguring school composition might be cost neutral.
is it the governments idea of increasing nurseries to get more people in the workforce, despite a decreasing birth rate. maybe any spare rooms/portables should be for special needs small cluster teaching vs nurseries, allowing a different group of parents back into the workforce vs new moms . rather than large schools go back to more smaller settings to foster more parental involvement, governments often have many disused buildings and sites and there's no reason a back to school class for those who avoid traditional school can't be set up in a mall or downtown in a disused shop. i've seen both, taking a class to where the street kids are vs expecting the street kids to go to a class.
the nhs needs to be forced in (maybe using jr doctors in training or university grads) to get the backlog of assessments completed.
training for those children who will never meet english or math baselines could their educational needs be met in a care type setting with some daily instruction vs mainstream?
i'm neither from the uk and my background is health care.
but i'm aware that too many good ideas means nothing will be done to any satisfaction.

My well being and others, along with the usual issues.

Interesting how someone can write so much and say so little.

There are things that can be done to improve teachers/schools/pupils situation.
Reducing the curriculum content back to what it was so that it can be fit into school hours would be a start.
And bringing back more vocational options for those that are less academic.

Treating members of staff properly and stop loading more and more work on them would be another.
Actually do something about the increasingly bad behaviour of pupils.

Neither of these would touch class sizes, SEND issues etc. but it would be a start. and the rest would cost money.

As for the holidays. Teachers in England have the shortest in Europe, and the most face to face time.

You ask what qualifications are needed to become a teacher these days?
That would be a degree.

well I think I'd rather have an unqualified but pleasant human being to be honest.

I haven't met a teacher yet that didn't go in to the profession with high hopes and determination thinking that they would make a difference. That should make you wonder what happens to them (us) that makes them change so drastically.
And many teachers are taking your advice to leave. 40,000 last year, the turnover is unsustainable.

There is no way teachers performance can be measured and it influence pay rises

I don't think anyone has said there is "no way". What we have said - because it's true - is that teacher performance is actually not just ours. If I teach the group of recalcitrant boys one lesson a week p6 on a Friday in a subject they hate, they're almost certainly going to get worse results than the lovely top set kids who have 4 lessons a week spread out nicely. Should I not get a pay rise? Should the timetabler not got a pay rise? Because you can bet your bottom dollar that their timetable has PPA that period.

centralised lesson plan materials are no use (because reasons)

Sure there's some benefit. But bought in packages are expensive. And Mrs Thing who made the ones for the department loves "dual coding" (but actually it's just clip art), and she's written them with her nice able class in mind, so they need a lot of adapting by everyone else in order to work. And also, most of us actually like planning lessons for the students we teach. One size doesn't fit all.

constant references to workload despite the 13 weeks holidays per year which apparently don't count.

Well I can't exactly save up my marking and do it in the holidays, can I?

glorifying never marking homework

SOME schools have a no marking homework
policy. Mine doesn't.
SOME schools have a no marking classwork policy. Mine doesn't.

Will these parents still donate if the money is pooled centrally? You may be surprised at how focused most of us are on our own children.....

Teacher performance can be measured and should influence pay rise. Not by students grades which is influenced by many things but there are many established Metrics of professionalism - time management, 360 feedback etc

People keep saying 40000 left last year. Well 40000 joined. And yes, there is a deficit that needs to be worked on and retention measures need to be devised and promoted but what do you gain by making it seem more dire than it really is? The facts are bad enough

Are you a teacher or do you work in a school?

No - I am a parent with regular interaction with teachers via multiple kids and various schools. I engage with the services so the quality of the service impacts me.

I also work and lead in healthcare (NHS) as well as running my own healthcare charity and expect the users of our service to have a say in how we deliver the service, our performance is measured and rewarded

With all due respect you can’t see how bad the situation is without being in it. I don’t think any teacher is making anything out to be worse than what it is. The situation is at crisis point. Recruitment targets are not being met. Our students don’t have qualified teachers in the room and therefore 40,000 in and 40,000 out is alarming. From the 40,000 in statistics tell us 5,000 will have quit within a year. If we continue in this way there will not be enough teachers to staff schools. I’m not sure how that is making it out to be more dire than what it is, it is dire.

If performance is to measured and rewarded it needs to be standardised and objective. No teacher has said on here it shouldn’t exist, they’re saying the current method of making us accountable for things outside of our control is unfair.

I haven’t read the whole thread but, for me, these would be the priorities:

More money, full stop. £7,000/annum just isn’t enough to meet all the needs of a pupils in the UK today.

More money for experienced teachers. The current salary bands are good for 22 year olds, less good for 40 year olds, and with school budgets so constrained, there is a constant financial pressure to staff schools with ECTs and younger teachers.

Teachers treated like senior professionals and given autonomy over their practice, including lesson planning, behaviour management and marking. If a teacher achieves good results and has happy pupils, SLT shouldn’t be checking books or commenting on the quality of the ‘starter’ (for instance).

Strong behaviour management policies consistently enforced by SLT, including detentions, suspensions and exclusions. Classrooms should be managed for the sake of those who want to learn.

Bring down school leaving age to 16 again. This would increase gdp at the same time as not forcing 16-18 year olds into learning that isn’t suitable for them. Learning on the job would be far more effective for a large chunk of the population. Bring down university access to 20% tops again. If you can’t get decent A levels, you can’t access further education.

By trying to do much for too many, the education system fails everyone.

And I and others are suggesting ways in which performance can be incentivised on a public forum.

And 40k in and out - with poor retention is bad enough - crisis point. But 40k out, without context reads as though there is a 40k deficit - which there isn't.

There might well be, if something doesn't change soon but that is not currently the case.

I’m sure we would all appreciate being measured on time management or feedback from staff. I’d love that. It would mean I don’t have to be held accountable for a student getting a 1 when they have 30% attendance.

I see what you mean now, thanks for explaining. Let’s hope things don’t get any worse!

The whole thing is a bit crazy if you ask me. I grew up abroad and teachers were highly respected, had a very reasonable workload, paid well and had an unbelievable pension. To get into teachers college you needed over 95%. Seriously.

i have two kids in school and for my perspective what’s wrong?

• Too much focus on testing and achievement scores.
• Ofsted - why is there a body that creates additional areas and fear into an overworked area?
• Grammar / Comps - segregation is ridiculous
• Admin/paperwork etc which goes back to point 2
• Rigidity of curriculum
• Lack of parental responsibility at times and/or lack of support for teachers - the amount of parents that will fly into a school in a rage because of something …
• Low pay

Money won’t in my opinion solve all of this or most of it. Other countries do a great job of educating kids and are better in these points I have raised above.

As an example, my home country has the highest university educated population of the western world - but we didn’t have ofsted, or low teacher pay, or constant testing. We need to think differently and not just fix the edges.

We need a good overhaul based on positive outcomes for children and teachers and not just test scores.

If anyone is interested in how wellbeing was improved at our school in a way that didn't involve cake..

The survey highlighted behaviour was a key issue in teacher wellbeing and leavers interviews raised this.

A new behaviour policy was introduced and it puts a lot of the burden on SLT. The pupil is sent out and its SLTs problem from then on. There was also quite a flurry of exclusions.

And now staff responding to surveys report much better wellbeing.

Attendance is another issue which was pushed on to tutors to sort. Now it's actually gone to a paid for service plus a new pastoral role. This cost money but cheaper than trying to get supply cover for burnt out teachers.

The school day was also restructured so it finished early one day a week and staff meeting and cpd takes place on the early finish day. It's still in the early stages. Not sure of its helping part time staff yet..

Is it perfect. Of course not. Do staff still look very overworked. Yes. Will many still leave due to burn out. Probably.
Has it helped a bit. Yes a little bit more than cake.

Claiming that, as you're a parent, you know what being a teacher is like, is like me saying that I had to go to hospital so I know what it's like to be a nurse.

As PPs have said, the government needs to address the retention crisis of experienced teachers, rather than thinking they're going to recruit 6500 new teachers (who would probably leave within 5 years as, unless you've worked as a teacher, you have no idea what it's like).

Most hilarious comment - constant references to workload despite the 13 weeks holidays per year which apparently don't count.
This absolutely sums up the total lack of understanding of what teaching is actually like.

When I retired, I'd intended returning to do some supply but haven't set foot in a school since.

That just goes to show the general contempt with which the teaching profession and learning itself is viewed imho. That if you have a teaching qualification you can teach anything, even if you don't know anything about the subject. And that children don't deserve to be taught by a specialist.

i cannot understand why some private sector parents don't feel that the state education sector warrants interest. Having a well educated (and by that I mean academically or vocationally) population is in everyone's best interests, no matter how you choose to educate your own child. Poor schools let everyone down , all across society.

I would protest if it achieved anything and if there was one, even though I have no skin in the game whatsoever having been privately educated myself and educating Dd privately.

One of the 44k of last year’s leavers here. That was the number excluding retirees I believe just to correct a misconception some made on the thread. Is that correct Noble?

What would make me consider returning would be the acknowledgment that I also have a HE qualification in counselling and experience working with adolescents with mental health and behaviour problems and letting me branch out my role given the mental health crisis. Maybe a 50% teaching timetable and the other half doing targeted mental health and behaviour interventions. Huge amounts of expertise and talent among teaching staff are wasted.

Not possible though because every single teaching slot has to be taken and they’ll pay someone with no qualifications or experience to allegedly do that work at 16k a year. It’s all about ticking boxes not tackling issues effectively.

A guarantee of being treated with a modicum of respect and decency by slt and for disability accommodations as per ignored legislation.

A return to some trust in teachers professional judgement and skill instead of applying ridiculous micromanagement and dictates to highly experienced teachers who they know have no issues with performance, results or classroom management.

Maybe trust us to know the best way and frequency of marking for our classes instead of a crap new whole school marking policy every 2 years. Maybe acknowledge the difference between experienced, solid teachers and newly qualified ones and give the latter some room to get on with their jobs and make decisions.

A workload that doesn’t crush even the most experienced staff, mostly with unnecessary tick box work that adds nothing of value for teaching and learning and often prevents you from doing the things you know are of value.

Increased non contact time.

None of this is on the horizon so I’ll be staying away from the whole toxic culture and working for a lower hourly rate than I could earn in a minimum wage job that gives 5-6 weeks holiday anyway and allows you to pick when you take it and other bits of flexibility.

💪🏼 Kudos to those still ploughing on in schools and sorry for baling and making it worse but I’m totally done in.

And little to none of this requires funding. From what I can see funding won't solve the teacher recruitment and retention crisis.

Not on its own maybe @StiffyByngsDogBartholomew bit it is needed to increase staffing numbers to allow a bit more vice in the system. That’s the only way to really reduce workload.

Yes definitely, I could have worded that better. "Funding alone" would have been better

Also I don’t want vice in the system. What is autocorrect on? Should be give.

I dunno. An occasional vice isn’t all bad…

I felt squeezed in one before I got out, mind, @Werecat