AIBU to want to leave teaching?

[Timetochangeisnow]

AIBU to want to leave teaching?

I'm a Primary School teacher. I love working with children, it's incredibly rewarding and no two days are the same. What I don't love however, is the mounting pressure and constant paperwork and pressure. There is barely time for anything outside of teaching and evenings and weekends are taken over with marking, planning, analysing pupil progress etc. the job in the classroom is increasingly difficult too and I think I need to leave before I have a breakdown.
I am finding I am enjoying the things I used to love less and less. I'm even having dreams about school so can't even escape at night.
I think it's particularly pronounced this year and I have some very difficult children that make every single day a battle.
I think I want out of the classroom now but would still like to remain either in a school or in education.

if the pay was better I'd be a TA no question

I'd consider retraining or studying again but I'm the main breadwinner and we have to renew our mortgage next summer!

Has anyone done similar? I don't know what's out there etc and haven't found anything online the last few months.

If anyone can point me I the right direction or has felt similar and stayed in teaching after feeling like this would be good to know!

hatespiders, that would be my experience. our cleaners would see me and some others not just until 7, but until 10 and after, and back again when the doors opened at 6.30 am.

The interesting thing is that the NUT are just waking up to the way older women are treated in schools. They're taking the wrong tack, though.

It isn't personal. The government want schools staffed by young, top-notch graduates, teaching amazing lessons for five years before they retire to a better-paid career in accountancy. Good luck to them all.

One lady of about 50 was actually in tears at her desk.

This sounds like my school. She's probably just been put on a support plan.

In answer to rollonthesummer I did supply for years and never used an agency. I took my CV around to schools and that gave me enough work and led to job shares and PPA time. I can never see why anyone uses an agency, unless they are in an area with no option. By going direct I had control, if I didn't like a school I didn't go back. I also paid into my pension.
I was thinking of tutoring but didn't really want to work outside school hours. I think that word of mouth would keep you going once you started with a few.
The children never stopped me going to a school but the Head and staff sometimes stopped me.

See, this is what worries me. I'm just past 50 (although I look and feel 10 years younger), and am performing well with a HT who values me. But I sometimes look ahead and see that all going to pot, when a new Head comes in and decides that my face (and salary slip) don't fit. I've seen what happened to a colleague from the previous Head a few years back - vile stuff. What a way to pay back years of dedicated service!
I think dh and I will be sufficiently secure financially for me to tell them to shove it and I could walk out. Our mortgage will be paid off soon, and the DCs should be independent. There are a few of us on the staff (similar ages) who are daydreaming about opening a teashop. As I make shit tea and can't bake cakes either, my role is going to be swanning about chatting to people whilst I clear the tables.

Good for you, clam.

Unfortunately, I'm more stuffed as I have longer to go, a crap teacher pension as I've been part time for years, three small children, a mortgage with years to go and a husband who has a crap pension himself. Do I go full time and end up with a nervous breakdown or have to keep working part time until I'm 100. I think death in service (found slumped over a data analysis sheet still clutching a pink highlighter) is looking most likely.

That wasn't sarcastic, Clam-apologies if it read like that. I was being genuine!

It is more worrying going on supply if you can't pay into your pension.

Those young, top notch graduates may be full of excellent ideas and have plenty of energy, but I've always thought that teaching is a vocation, not a 'job'. At my school there were four of us older staff, each of us was a Year Leader with several additional responsibilities. I was Head of Year 4, Geography, History and Religious Education co-ordinator, In charge of the very large library, taught French all over the school as I was the only one who spoke it, and also took on huge fundraising efforts at Christmas and the Summer Term. I was also good at discipline without being over-severe, so struggling younger staff would send me their 'naughty' pupils. I often had a round half-dozen sitting in my classroom with my own lot. I also volunteered to take all the lowest group classes in English and Maths, as I loved them and found ways to get them interested. I took many groups of children to France for a week. Now this isn't just me boasting, I'm saying all this in order to point out that no brilliant graduate rookie can ever in a million years deliver all this. Especially the discipline angle. I was forever helping the younger staff with tips for keeping the pupils in some sort of order. Strangely enough, all four of us 'dinosaurs' (yes, we were called that by one arrogant young male teacher!) left practically simultaneously. I still wonder how the school managed to totter along without us, as we honestly were the pillars of the place. All four of us had good University degrees and PGCE's, and about 30 yrs experience each.

During the one Ofsted inspection I suffered, the Inspection Team would ask the Head the name of the Year 4 Head. Me. Then one would want to visit the Geography co-ordinator. Me. Fundraiser rep? Me. Apparently, the Head told me, they started to laugh and asked if Mrs Spiders did everything in the bloody school? Yes she did. And was literally worked until she collapsed.

Ok spiders, you've passed the interview. You can come and work in our tea shop.

Do you know Clam, the idea really appeals! A nice chintzy tea shop full of gossipy old biddies like myself, home-made scones and china teapots with roses on. When do I start?

I wonder if the NUT would consider a 'lesson plan strike', say for three months and challenge anyone to tell them when it started or finished...

I left the UK before the lesson plan mania kicked in. At the time such plans were solely for OFSTED or schools in special measures. There were SOWS with agreed assessments, but not this lesson by lesson breakdown. Although I do remember a battle against the plenary as indispensable in every lesson.

Here in Australia, no-one has ever asked to see my chronicle, the record of work I do, though it is a legal document, to preserved for five years. No-one has ever watched me teach, except at their request and my invitation. Am I any the worse as teacher for not having to record every jot and tittle of my methods and intentions? No.

I think the detailed plans sprang from a basic lack of trust, how do we know what you're doing, and the endless observations from a desire to check that what was in those plans was being carried out? Now they're tied to individual and tracked progress for pupils, as I understand they are, they are an even bigger stick for the teacher.

Could you ask for some additional training on how to educate the children you find difficult?

Are there no lesson observations on Australia then?! Wow-I can't believe it. What about learning objectives, success criteria, lolly sticks, WILFs etc??

Here, the latest thing is triangulation. SMT look at your teaching and planning/your data/your books and they should all be spot on.

What it really is is checking you've done what you said you'd do. Of course you can deviate from the plan, but then you've got to write about why you changed your plans at great length and then you run the risk of being accused of not knowing your children if you do it too often.

I wonder if any past Education Secretary would be willing to go on record as saying all that stuff is a total waste of time, actively harms teaching and has achieved 0 for children except bring the turnover rate up to 40% in 5 years ? Would have to be someone with some cross-party cred.

I really wish somebody would. Nobody is listening to us :(

Looking at the Wikipedia list, I think it would have to be Kenneth Baker.

Presumably any change in culture would have to come from Ofsted, though.

We're expected to make our lesson objectives clear to the class but not to have to write them in the planner. Staff are encouraged to use data to inform teaching, but don't have to write it down.

Success criteria are determined by the teacher each year, e.g. in VCE, with a difficult group, having them all pass would be a reasonable target. It would not be acceptable with a group of average ability. The case for such a "low" bar target would have to be made, e.g. show prior attainment, for the target to be accepted.

Make no mistake, the government would love to have us jumping through hoops, but frankly, they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

What is lolly stick? I know about WILF, though.

While this ought not determine educational practice, the fact that in Au secondary schools, you move from room to room every lesson, and none of them has storage makes some of the excesses of the UK system laughable. I'm trying to imagine all the stuff we were told had to be written on the board before the class came in in the UK. I don't think so.

Though I am wistful about a room of my own, and every Aussie colleague would love the same.

I've wondered about doing a term/year teacher swap in Australia. It seems a lot more lax/easier to teach in many ways. Not least the lack of external exams.

I often wonder which system I'd rather my children grew up in though and not sure on that one. Also not sure I'd want to take my children away from their peers for an extended period either!

Starlight the issue really isn't children who might be difficult to teach.

I'm somewhat perturbed by the banner ad above this thread exhorting readers to enrol for a PGCE.

I wonder why are there so many Australian teachers over here then? Or is that just in my area? There are 4 in my cousin's primary!

There are loads and loads of Irish teachers in the two secondary schools near me actually, come to think of it. I noticed it when looking round last year.

Mrs Spider is very right.

Don't schools have like team leaders who write the lesson plans based on the outcomes determined by whoever is in power, for teachers to deliver, thus ensuring efficient use of the schools resources (i.e. no two reception classes need to use The Tiger Who Came To Tea) stuff?

Aren't there best practice managers who take responsibility for TA time allocation and training/curriculum development and who create paperwork templates to ensure some level of standardisation and a system of reporting that makes things easy to demonstrate stuff?

Ha ha ha, good one.