To wonder why so many teachers want to quit

[ChazsBrilliantAttitude]

Inspired by other threads but I didn't want to derail.

What is going on in education that is making teaching so stressful?

I work in the City and you don't see too many people quitting with stress even though the work can be stressful. Certainly, not the numbers you see in teaching.

'Are they male?"

Do you really thin that gender makes a difference?'

Sadly I do. I was specifically thinking of men in a LT relationship.
Unless he's in a truly equal setup, and 50% of everything else is his responsibility. Most female teachers are also shouldering more than half of the domestic side of things, and it's that juggling that adds to the challenge of teaching FT.

You mean like planning to cook a fabulous Christmas dinner for 30, and then being told that you have 67p a head and the oven is to be shared between 4 other dinners and only works on alternate Thursdays?
And there will be an observer with a clipboard monitoring you at every step to check why your dinner doesn't look like the promotional video?

The Secret Teacher column in the Guardian today has been written by a man who has had to give up full time teaching because he's found it incompatible with parenthood.

Every single one of my group that I graduated with has left teaching except for me.

The grass is definitely greener for me. I wouldn't go back, even if I get to keep my salary. My working conditions are much better and my salary is better too. It took me a long time each holiday to switch off when I taught. I can switch off every evening now.

There is an awful lot more fuss being made about people leaving teaching than almost any other profession (nursing is the only other one I can think of). Lots of people decide that their current career isnt for them. It seem to only be in teaching and nursing that people deciding after a while that it isnt for them is met with so much hand-wringing as though it was a loss of faith or something.

Let's not get into 'my job is more stressful/lower paid/less well paid than teaching'.

The question was about why teachers want to leave the profession. I think that has been answered very clearly.

I have developed my own coping strategies which largely consist of ignoring any work that I can possibly get away with. That's not saying I'm not working bloody hard (I am) but that there are only a certain number of hours in the day that I am prepared to dedicate to my job. I get away with it as I'm a well-regarded and experienced teacher in a good school with good kids and I generally get good results. I don't worry for myself.

I worry about my DCs' school. It's RI and so all the ticky boxy shit is going on in spades. THe governing body was ripped to shreds by the last Ofsted inspeciton mainly on the bsais of performance management of teachers that was not seen as 'robust' enough. The new performance management system is completely unsustainable.

Last year two members of teaching staff received an incremental pay award. This year I'm sure it will be similar. The school year started with two supply teachers, and the only 'outstanding' teacher in the school is leaving the profession entirely at Christmas. I reckon that the only permanent members of teaching staff with more than 3 years' teaching experience are the SLT. The only other really experienced teacher is one of the supply teachers (and she is not great). The other teachers are not going to stay for the long term if they remain on M2 forever.

The school just can't recruit. They are not alone. There is a frightening number of teacher vacancies locally, and they are building a great bng 3-18 school locally. Who are they going to staff it with?

I'm friendly with a group of women - we met on the internet originally about 9 years ago. Most were teachers at that time. About half still are and most of those would leave tomorrow if they could.

GnomeDePlume

Maybe its because its allegedly so easy.

Or maybe its because there is a major recruitment crisis in 90% of all teaching areas.

Thanks for the tips. I'll make sure to say nice things to ds's teacher.

Are there any teachers in Scotland here? Is it any better? Or teachers in private schools? I wish I knew where there were happy teachers so I could send ds there.

Oooh, I dunno GnomeDePlume, maybe because teachers and nurses have a very direct impact on most people's lives?

Nurses & teachers both suffer the same micromanagement from managers without a clue, work in the same bureaucratic blame culture & are a favoured target for govt interference.

But I dont think the fuss is helpful, it adds to the stress. It makes an individual leaving teaching seem like a calamity rather than a career choice.

I think the point of the thread is that it is not an individual leaving, it is many, many individuals.

Which some would say is a calamity as not as many new teachers are being trained and those that are don't stay very long.

And I don't think it's a case of people deciding it's not for them, it's people who love the job leaving because they can't cope or are so fed up of all the nonsense they are being asked to do on top of teaching.

I'm from Scotland. Teaching is hard work everywhere. We have workload pressures:

There is no money for resources. I have had to buy tons this year or i cant do my job.
The curriculum is geared towards a child centred approach to learning. However, the Curriculum has now become quite vague so we have had to spend endless hours in each school making sure it is moderated to show children progressing.
Children's learning is expected to focus on active lessons. In reality managment have decided that its a good idea to rid the school of programmes of work and children are expected to learn without textbooks or workbooks. In reality you have teachers scrabbling around the internet for resources however there is also limits on photocopying.
More and more we have children with additional support needs. We have classes of around 30 children. Some classes can have multiple children with needs. There is no money to employ additional help. The door is basically closed on help or it is severly limited. You have to cope with children who cannot cope in a classroom setting while teaching the rest of the class. Its a nightmare. These are just a few of the issues. There are many, many more.
We are inspected by the LEA and the HMIE. Managers come in to observe us but thankfully we dont get rated. Just a list of things to try to make our teaching better. It is meant to be supportive. You cannot get sacked for having a poor result. Just action points. In that way, its not like England, thankfully.

On a parenting site where many parents have children of school-age, of course a fuss should be made about the fact that teachers are leaving in droves.

It will impact your kids. It's already impacting your kids.

Every child who has a stressed-out teacher in front of them, every child whose teacher who has been signed off with stress/long term sick, every child who has an unqualified teacher, every child who has a parade of supply teachers, every child who has an incompetent teacher that the school can't afford to get rid of because it's that or nothing, every child who has a series of inexperienced teachers because all that experience is being lost.

I don't think it's often a "career choice". Lots of people feel forced out. As I said upthread, I love my job and feel respected and important at my school. I've been there 11 years, but am one of only 3 teachers in that position. Obviously some left to go different schools but I can think of at least 10 in the last four years who have left teaching altogether. In my first school, in 1997, about 3/4 of the staff had been there 10+ years.

I've worked in other stressful jobs before I became a teacher. The difference also was that I've never shed tears/had bad dreams/worried myself sick about any previous clients. My pupils took up so much of my emotional thinking time outside of school, I spent hours and hours daily puzzling about how I could teach this one better, help that one deal with their anger, talk (again) to HT about another one re child protection concerns. You don't 'leave' your pupils at work, because you want to do your best for every one of them and it's impossible.

I think that the career structure of teaching does need to be completely re-examined.

Many people on this thread have raised the issue of trying to combine lesson planning with teaching and with setting & marking homework. However do these all in reality need to sit with one person? They are separate skills.

If you had a career where people could move in and out of different roles: lesson planning, teaching, assessing you would retain far more people within a broader education career.

What you have now is a career where the teacher is supposed to take on all the educational roles plus extra-curricular activities plus pastoral care. Many find they simply cant manage this. They leave. Then there is lots of fuss about people leaving rather than sitting down and really looking at the whole educational process, keeping what works and rebuilding what doesnt.

Teachers are leaving in Scotland primarily due to workload, no support by SMT regarding behaviour, children with needs and no support in the class, no resources and hours and hours of paperwork, planning and that its all the teachers fault if children dont learn.

Not really. An individual teacher leaving the profession might be a tragedy to the teacher themselves (in that many of us felt we had a 'calling' to the profession and are very sad to find that it is no longer a job we can bear to do - I am very willing to admit that this sounds like a dramatic fuss , but it's a job that many of us feel, or have felt, very passionate about).

However, when employees are quitting, in their droves, a profession which is essential to society, I think it is probably worth making a fuss about.

Yes Gnome, teachers have asked for things to change just like you suggest but no one has listened. This is why so many people are leaving.

The problem isn't having to lesson plan, teach, assess. I need to know my class to plan the lesson and my assessment informs my teaching so it makes no sense to have different people do different parts of that job.

The problem is not having enough time to do it all in. If we look to Shanghai where they get awesome PISA results, they have something like 40% of their school hours are spent stood in front of a class, the rest is spent planning and assessing. In the UK 90% of a full time teacher's school hours are spent teaching. The other stuff gets pushed into evenings and weekends.

Nothing new to add. Things that really dont hep me is the no textbooks at all and no money to photocopy anything. It is like going back to victorian times with chalk and talk, but with badly behaved children (and parents who fully support them) im not allowed to cane, or death by powerpoint.

Children with low literacy levels, and a serious inability to grasp the difficult subject matter, who i knew 12 months ago would be lucky to get a G, with unrealistic targets of C grades, which my pay depends on.