to think we're heading for another teacher recruitment crisis?

[KeepCalmAndLOLKittens]

I don't deny that I'm speaking from purely personal experience here, but after a brief increase in the number of teachers joining the profession during the recession, I am seeing evidence of another shortage.

I thought I'd have difficulty getting back into FT work at the top of the upper pay scale, but not only was I offered a post with protected pay; shortly afterwards I was asked to fill another by a local school.

My current post is proving difficult to appoint. Only one candidate came to interview and had previously been unsuccessful. It has been readvertised with very little interest. This is a good school; a pleasant working environment in a large town, accessible from a major city.

Angered by the latest bullshit plans to bring retired engineers and mathematicians into the profession I'm considering leaving altogether. I just searched my local newspaper's job site and found that I could earn nearly as much working a HGV driver. Not to dismiss the responsibility and skill that driving a HGV demands, it does make me wonder why I kill myself to try to achieve targets I know to be impossible while managing behaviour of the more challenging kids and having to be constantly prepared for Ofsted scrutiny.

What is to be done to address this when teachers are vilified for their holidays, for enforcing dress code, for being seen to impose fines for term time holidays and for just not being superhuman enough? Where will the teachers come from?

The point about young teachers entering the profession is interesting - but to refer back to Teach First, for example, the often quoted statistic of 40% leave within x time isn't accurate. It's about 10%. Of them actually still in teaching after 5 years. The burn out rate is massive.

As to the hours, I think it is more useful to look at it the other way round. There are 120 hours in a 5 day week. (24x5) An ordinary classroom teacher is in front of the class for 21 hours. (99). Lesson planning, for those 21 lessons - well, let's say 10 minutes a lesson (those of us who do it know that it is far, far more than that, but for the sake of argument, let's say 10 mins) about 3 and a half hours (95.5).

Marking - two kinds, book marking - say 5 mins per book per week (lets say 5 classes, 25 students in each) about 10 and a half hours (85) and then marking of homework, assessments, GCSE Controlled Assessments, spelling tests etc (again, a guesstimate - obviously GCSE marking takes longer, there are 'heavy' marking periods round exam and assessment time - my school has 6 assessment periods a year for major pieces of work plus a piece of homework every fortnight) so maybe 10 minutes per student per week - 21 hours (64). (Supposedly) only 1 meeting a week - (63) - paperwork; IEP reviews, reports, data input, positive and negative incident record keeping, awarding housepoints, exam entries, etc etc - maybe 2 hours (61) tutorial/registration time (in my school, 20 minutes a day) so another hour and 40 minutes (59 hours 20 minutes)

Actually talking to students - detentions, break lunch and after school, listening to problems, mentoring, 121 intervention, answering questions about homework, answering emails from students resolving difficulties, etc etc, GCSE after school sessions - let's say 4 hours (55 hrs 20 minutes) duty (55 hours) travel to work; for me 30 mins each way (50 hours) communicating with parents - meetings, phonecalls, emails, postcards (48 hours) tidying up and maintaining the classroom environment, (47)...and that is without parents evening, drama performances, planning trips, performance reviews, chasing homework and permission slips, and perhaps most significantly, trying to retrain myself constantly for the next round of changes to the exam criteria -

So I have less than 9 and a half hours a day left to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, shower, dress, shop, play with my own DC's, cook, clean...clearly not do-able but each hour I spend on anything else is another hour of the weekend and holidays.

Changebags - secondary teachers typically get 2-3 hours non-contact time for all that marking and planning.

In reality, you would probably get cover for at least one of those periods, you'll spend a ridiculous amount of time chasing down textbooks and equipment, you might be asked to look after a pupil who is having trouble cooperating in lessons for one reason or another, if oyu have a regular classroom, another teacher may be allocated it for that period so you can't even do anything to keep your room organised.

And you may have 300 kids pass through your hands in a particular week. Just marking a fraction of all of that is a gargantuan task.

The hardest thing I found about teaching was the emotional resilience you need when you are exhausted from the job. I left in April after 5 years. A sympathetic GP saved me.

Hmmm but it'd be great to teach maths and physics. But the job sounds horrendous

The hardest thing I found about teaching was the emotional resilience you need when you are exhausted from the job. I left in April after 5 years. A sympathetic GP saved me.

I've left the classroom, I'm still involved in education but no longer in a school with no threat of Ofsted, I have taken a pay cut, more responsibility, still work longish hours but no stress! I'm sleeping better and former colleagues have commented on how much better I look. I have a better work life balance, because I'm not worrying all of the time. I'm actually trusted to do my job and I don't have to prove it all of the time. I'm not going back to the classroom, and I wouldn't have said that 2 to 3 years ago.

I honestly don't think it is horrendous - the actual teaching/term time bit, that is. Obviously the ongoing Goveshit doesn't help.

You quickly become used to throwing yourself at it in term time & keeling over in a broken gibbering heap in the holidays, that's all - it's always worked for me.

The one thing that's making it less & less sustainable is the erosion of the holidays, IME. Time was you had a couple of days exhausted kip, followed by a week or so of gently pottering about, catching up with marking for that rather neglected group you share with a colleague & see for one lesson a week, planning for the first week of the next term, & maybe bobbing in to school once or twice to sort out the stockroom & put up a snazzy display.

For the past three years or so I've put in at least a half day of paperwork every single day of every single holiday bar the long summer break. Unpaid. It's just getting silly tbh.

I went into teaching mainly because I loved my own school days and was so happy at school-I wanted to be able to create that for my own class. I can't any more. I remember every day working through maths cards/books-independently at our own level and the teacher would explain new or tricky bits, then after play-we'd do handwriting one day, grammar/spelling the next, story writing the next, comprehension the next etc. art/pe/topic every afternoon-it was brilliant! Marking consisted of ticks, crosses and the odd 'Good'!

I honestly can't imagine the teacher had to do very much planning at all? Compare that with now. Are the hours and hours and hours extra of marking/assessing/tracking really worthwhile?

I want to go and get a job in the 1980s ;)

I think it's a great job IF you are in a lovely, supportive school and can work part time which I do and can. If not it is bloody exhausting and stressful.

These are the best parts imho

Being around lovely positive, bouncey young people all day.
Getting the huge satisfaction of seeing them make progress.
Teaching interesting subjects and learning alot from the children too.
Working alongside lovely colleagues.
Getting to know parents and working with them.
The holidays.
The Christmas performance!

The worst parts....

Working at weekends.
Working most evenings.
Being so exhausted such alot of the time.
Sometimes being so busy during a teaching day that you don't have a minute to think.
Feeling as if you will NEVER do enough.
OFSTED
Paperwork in general.

I still love my job but I totally understand why other people in less ideal circumstances can't bear it. I get really pissed off when teachers try to tell others about the issues that are making them want to leave and people just say "if it's that bad why don't you leave?". The fact is that is exactly what loads of people are doing hence the shortage.

These are the reasons why I love my job:

I like my organisation, I like what we do.
Flexible working means I can leave early at 4.30 and I can take time off during term time to go to assemblies etc.
30 days leave during which I do not have to work
At my grade they don't give us mobiles/laptops so I'm not obliged to read emails out of hours (I do tend to though).

Reasons I hate my job:

I personally am not doing things to make thing better. I just help other people do those things more efficiently. If they could work out how to schedule properly and interact with users better then I'd be out of a job.
It's stressful in other ways. Six or seven projects on the go at once all with different requirements. I dispense lots of tissues and break up lots of arguments.
The commute.
Working with so called adults.
People are fed up of me explaining simultaneous equations.

To me teaching is one of the best jobs ever and I wouldn't want to be doing anything else unless of course the West End was to realise the hideous mistake it made in not snapping up

However, I could never do what most of you guys do! At my school we joke that we what we have to do fills full time hours before we even set foot in the classroom - but for a lot of the posters on here that's actually true!

I belong to a drama group and I was sat next to another lady in a rehearsal recently who is also a teacher. We were both marking. After a while I noticed how much more quickly my pile was going down than hers and paid attention to what she was doing. She had a colour coded key handwritten at the bottom of each piece of work with the objectives on and was highlighting areas in the work where the child had met each objective with the relevant colour! In addition to all that she corrected and edited it all and gave it two stars and a wish. I was correcting 3 key spellings, giving the work a target and a comment and that's it!

I think my hours are very long but they are fun and child centred not an endless sea of paperwork. I plan for about 5 hours per class per term and mark each set of books once a week (this is KS2 and KS3). From what I'm hearing and reading about some schools they are planning for about 5 hours per class per week and marking each set of books once a day!

changingbags I know my job is a bit different but I think there are a significant minority of teachers in these schools so I'll answer anyway.

A typical example of one of my longer days:
7.45am - arrive in school, emails, photocopying, chatting etc
8.15am - briefing
8.30am - registration
8.45am - chapel or rehearsal
9.00am - teaching. Most have 5-8 40 minute free periods a week but these are often lost to cover.
11.00am - break or rehearsal
11.30am - teaching
1.00pm - rehearsal
2.00pm - teaching
5.00pm - end of school day
5.00pm - prep or rehearsal
5.45pm- tea
6.30pm - activity or rehearsal
7.30pm - supper
8.15pm - bedtime routines - readers, showers, 'being mum'
10.30pm - lock up
11.00pm - home

Now, granted that is a lot of hours but there is not a single bit of marking or planning in there. It's all time spent with children. If I had to do hours of paperwork every night I'd go mad! I quite frequently plan the next day's lessons in my head as I drift off to sleep. And I genuinely don't think they are any less effective than the lessons I spent 5 hours planning as an NQT (in fact they're more effective because I'm more experienced and they benefit from the spontaneity).

So the free periods being used for cover, do teachers not say anything about this (one off or two off being acceptable and just being flexible)? But every time?

When I have to cover other work, I say to my manager, OK I can cover but x y or z will not be done. Which is more important? Or I say something else will be late. Or in extreme circumstances, I work late.

What are cover supervisors for?

can't answer for state sector changebags but we have no cover supervisor and it's an accepted part of our job that we will cover. Most of us aren't in unions so the 'rarely cover' policy doesn't apply and even those that are in the unions have signed the contracts which includes covering.

A typical Monday in FE
7.45 arrive after dropping ds at nursery
Check emails (I don't work on Fridays ao if I haven't managed to check them over the weekend its 30+)
8.30 breakfast club - help with homework or chat to students
9 am teach first lesson
10.20 finish class 10 minutes early because lesson 2 ia in a different building ten minutes (very fast, uphill) walk away carrying books and equipment
10.30 lesson 2
12 lunch duty (only once a week)
12.30 ram lunch down. Ring parents. Run back to
building 1
1 pm -2.30 lesson 3
2.30 -4 lesson 4
4 -5 course meeting
5-5.30 admin and prep

9 - 10.30 marking and prep.

We've recently had to recruit through agencies, two teachers from abroad for our KS2 vacancies. Our other vacancy was filled by an NQT. there was an article in the ATL magazine a while ago about the average age of staff in schools getting younger and younger. Who ends up supporting these inexperienced teachers? I certainly couldn't have managed without the help and support of older colleagues when I first started out. Think of all the experience and expertise that flows out of the profession as the older teachers leave.........

we aren't supposed to cover in state schools except in unforeseen emergencies - Gove tried to get rid of that & was handed his arse.

However, my school now has lots of things called Timetable Standdowns.

On TS days, the normal timetable is suspended, you see, so if you find your free period is now to be spent teaching a year 8 Science group whilst their teacher is running Rocket Day, this is not cover.

It can't be cover because the science teacher has not been asked to set any cover work, you see...so you'll need to teach them a one off lesson in whatever your subject happens to be.

You can try moaning that this has cost you your first free period of the week, but you will be briskly informed that the Timetable Does Not Exist today - so you never had a free period.

You have also always been at war with Eastasia....

joanofarchitrave i had to repost your comment again as it was so true:

"I'm always a bit confused by posts that compare teaching with other jobs by looking at the hours and saying that other jobs require you to work similar hours and it's tough in commercial jobs. Similar hours but not similar things happening. Other jobs simply don't require you to manage 30+ people every second of the day, 30 people who in many cases cannot get on with anything without input for longer than a few seconds couple of minutes, and who have incredibly differing requirements (in my son's class there have to be 6 levels of differentiation for every activity all day long, which is of course not unusual). Also those 30 people have to be persuaded to want to do whatever is happening, rather than being paid to be there. Teaching is qualitatively different because of all that IMO. I've worked in all sorts of sectors and I have never been as crawling-home exhausted as I was as a teaching ASSISTANT who had shorter hours and far less responsibility than the teachers."

I have a high pressure deadline-driven media job, and spending two days doing an art project in a local school was the most exhausted I have ever been after a day at work! It was amazing fun, but all the kids were gorgeous, but still. Hats off to teachers.