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.

If as a supply teacher you perpetuate the pointless marking regimes you make life harder for everyone else - crazy marking regimes should be completely overhaul and abolished, and they never will be if you normalise them. Why not give useful targeted verbal feedback instead? That is what I do, and eg was rewarded a few days ago with a Y10 girl coming into my next day (supply) class telling me excitedly she had looked on youtube - please could she show me what she had learnt). She made progress, and was excited by maths. Not recorded in a marked book any where, but I don't care, I am not there to make myself look good, but to help kids to enjoy learning and make progress.

From what I have gleaned over the years, expectations of supply teachers differ vastly in primary and secondary.

I agree that verbal feedback is some of the most useful and engaging support you can give a child. Likewise answering questions and addressing misunderstandings whilst they are happening.

UnlikelyPilgramage what you describe about the problems of coursework chimes with what we experienced. In my DD1's year an entire year's worth of coursework was lost. A teacher had taken English coursework home then failed to return it.

The result of this was that the entire year had to be recovered. In 2012 just 6% of the students achieved 5 GCSEs A-C including English & Maths.

I agree about coursework. I do work with bright well-motivated kids but still the workload is awful - 50 kids, two drafts required, 3 pieces :(

ChazsBrilliantAttitude I think it's an interesting question and having left teaching ten years ago and working in uni and commercial roles in the interim, I have come back to school management. So I have been thinking on it a lot. What strikes me now is this:

1. The pace of a school day is such that having something to eat or even going to the toilet at times is an issue. It's plate spinning at its most extreme. And as you walk down the corridor there is generally someone that says 'oh I needed to talk to you about...' yet little if any allocated time to iron out such issues.
2. In all other jobs I have done there is a reasonable allowance for the administration of your job. In teaching I would say that there is at least an hour of ' admin' for every hour of teaching at secondary. Planning, report writing, marking, phoning parents, replying to student and parent emails, plus school systems and recording both progress and behaviour issues. However most teachers only have say 3 hours in school a week, if that, when they are not teaching. That's the problem. And having returned, I can see the high hire increase in this problem since ten years ago. Particularly for challenging classes, I have lots of planning to keep them busy and then endless admin when they have not done homework or can't behave, recording it all and then having to give up my own time to instigate detentions to attempt to keep them on track. Basically, I think the job is relatively thankless and the pace is unreasonable for all but the most manic of people and more or less impossible to balance with family life.

The amount of teachers I see referred to mental health services is completely disproportionate to other profession's. There's a serious problem with this job role. I do feel for teachers, we were looking at starting group therapy just for teachers it got so bad.

Having kids sit gcse's early then resit if necessary always particularly dumb to me - surely it meant that children capable of good grades in Y11 were instead getting mediocre ones in Y10 or even 9?

I think coursework can usefully form part of assessment but you need a national curriculum and a nationally accepted set of standards in order to do this fairly (here in France the coursework component of the 15+ exam is simply the average marks for the whole of Y10 - which has its own issues but at least has the merit of being simple).

And in the US every piece of work counts towards their grade point average - and the parents understand that.

AliceScarlett That is an interesting point. I wonder what the national statistics are, or indeed how could you find find it out?

Probably very difficult to find out unfortunately.

I haven't read all 18 pages but have read several and am very supportive of teachers. I wonder whether teachers are more fulfilled on the whole when they work in the private sector? Presumably the pressure to perform is similar, but is discipline less of an issue as not constrained by regulations ie can expel more easily?

MrsUltraCrepedarian I work in a 'local dire comp* in a very challenging area where 66% + of students live in the 3 lowest deciles of postcodes in the country. We are an outstanding school with fantastic results. Entering our students early for GCSE English and Maths built their confidence. THey are scared of exams because they think they can not achieve. That first C grade in the bag, or the first D grade, was a building block and they then began to push themselves higher. We were not manipulating results. We were using a system effectively to build student confidence as stepping stones to higher achievement. We had many students who would get a C or D in Y10 and an A or B in Y11.

Now we are not able to do it because only that first grade can count for the school so we have to be very careful who we do it with. Example, poorly motivated student who should be able to get an A with the wind in the right direction but who has given up and does not believe they can get anything.We would have entered them in Y10 knowing they would get a C but knowing it would give them a safety net and confidence and by Y11 they would get that A. Now we can't do that because a C wil be what counts for the school and our data will be scrutinised and we will be hammered by the DFE and Ofsted will be back. So we have to try to somehow win the student over- it is incredibly hard- and just take the risk they will go straight in an get an A in Y11. Much more unlikely. We have many students like that at A,B and C grades.

Please don't dismiss early entry as some 'settling for less' system. Many 'local dire comps' do not have students brimming with self-confidence and like us, many but not all, used it to build stepping stones to achievement. Of course that did not suit the government because they like people in social class boxes and seeing children from this area doing so well could only be because we were somehow being dishonest.

If schools were allowed to get on and teach and teachers were trusted and their professional opinions valued, results would be better across the country. However, 'dire local comps' can not really be doing well unless teachers are being dishonest in someway- with coursework- so let's get rid of that as well. Then let's build an exam only system that favours children from very middle class backgrounds where they have social and learning capital because of whete they live and their parents' attitudes. Then let's use that to prove that 'local dire comps' were always failing children but cheating to cover it up.

I can not tell you how offensive I find the phrase 'local dire comp'. 'Local dire school' might have been objective but the connotations of 'local dire comp' reek of snobbery and elitism.

Unfortunately Lulu I did not once see an example of students being re-entered after acquiring a 'C' (please understand this is not casting doubt on your account, but stating I feel this was possibly unusual.)

Certainly in English, the "typical" format was to enter in Year 10; those who got Cs then had their attention focused on English Literature.

While I am all for giving students confidence, the flipside to this is that poor results - in entering them for an examination they were not ready for - can have the opposite effect and indeed I feel this potentially prevented some students going onto further study (in that subject at any rate) given that most A level courses ask for a minimum of a B.

If teachers leave in droves I suspect that the government will claim those teachers are not up to the job.

So the solution is to punish all schools and students for the actions of some.
In our LA, the schools behave as our did. The LA is a deprived/disadvantaged NE of England LA which does exceptionally well nationally. We are now further disadvantaged by this policy change.

Lulu I think that is an interesting argument in favour of sitting GCSEs early.

Ultimately, if league tables and pass rates weren't everything, then schools would have much more freedom to make the right decisions about when and how to sit exams for their partivular population, rather than using resits as a way of gaming the league tables.

We don't have league tables at all here. It is possible to find (privately created) rankings, but everyone knows they are bunk - what determines results is mainly the local population plus the school's ability to select or exclude certain pupil groups.

I've taught in challenging schools for 27 years, my current school is the best but it's killingly hard work to stay afloat. To whoever said: 'It gets easier' I would agree to some extent, having taught three subjects up to A2, however I have often been viewed with deep suspicion for the talent of 'pulling off' a good A2 lesson shortly followed by an appropriate all-singing all-dancing KS3 class. That requires really sound subject knowledge, confidence, experience, resilience and resourcefulness ... The very qualities that observations, marking trawls, appraisals etc are designed to hammer out of you. NQTs should be on a vastly-reduced timetable & given genuinely good [hollow laugh emoticon] SLT or HoD practice to learn from. The single biggest elephant in the room is the structure of SLT itself, which enables and encourages the development of a ridiculously-expensive ruling elite drawing at least £250k from the average comp's annual wage bill for doing nothing and/or making things even worse. If we cut this layer out, there would be more money for TAs, SIAs, EAL, ancillary staff etc. who do real and important jobs supporting the students, and much less pointless fiefdom-creation. I liken it to a group of fat lazy holidaymakers on Kos swilling their drinks while watching poor desperate asylum seekers crawl onto the shore ... Just to get kicked in the face because they're trying to better their and their children's lives. That's the level of abdication of responsibility I've experienced from the vast majority of SLT I've worked 'for' in the past. We will never improve morale or enable new entrants to the profession to develop confidence & flourish until we effect the fairer distribution of contact hours & genuinely high-calibre leaders are recruited.

Well said Lulu

I think the problem is that learning is too individual and affected by so many factors that it is impossible to fit into neat little lines of data.
Different things work for different students, different areas have different needs. Schools should have some leeway in deciding what works for their students.

But schools don't have any leeway because the government has decided that its perceived wisdom and edicts are the only way forward.

EUU
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Oops 10 month old DS hit keyboard

Amanda
One issue that does come up in the City is that leadership is not recognised as a separate and distinct skill set. Consequently, people get put in leadership roles because they are good at something else not because they good leaders.

I have just resigned from a primary class teacher position, to leave at Christmas. I have been teaching for over 20 years, never imagined I would do anything else, and am supposedly 'outstanding' but I simply don't want to carry on anymore. I could, but I no longer want to, which makes me very sad.
The reasons are threefold:

1. Workload.

I can't do all the planning, marking, assessing, meetings, IEPs, website, homework, CAF paperwork, interventions, inputting data, working walls, resourcing, clubs etc that it is decreed I need to do in order to not be labelled as 'requiring improvement' and have any semblance of a family life during term time. I can't be an even vaguely decent parent to my 2 secondary aged children or partner because I don't have the time or energy. Something had to give, and it's the job that's going, not my family.

1. Pressure.

Progress, progress, progress. If the children don't keep progressing in a linear, regular fashion then you will be put on capability procedures. I teach Y2 in a socially deprived area of a large city. Have you seen the new tests?! Most of my class are currently working at a Mid Y1 level (which is MASSIVE progress from their Foundation entry levels) but I know now that they will 'fail' to reach the expected standard by May regardless of how hard I work, how hard they work and what interventions are in place. And so I will fail too. We all fail, day in, day out, with no other options despite crushingly hard work and long hours.

1. Lack of autonomy

I can't teach in a way I want to, and in ways which I know would benefit the particular children in my class. The new curriculum means I've been told that the vast majority of my teaching must be basic number, writing and grammar based. I've got to get them up to scratch. Don't worry if I don't teach Art, or DT, or miss some PE lessons, but make sure they can tell the difference between a command and a statement. Joy, passion, awe, fun, spontaneity - I squeeze them in when I can, but the opportunities are getting less and less. . ..They're six, for fuck's sack. I'm fed up to the back teeth of being constrained and judged by the paperwork I have to produce. I feel desperately depressed that an hours actual teaching takes on average two hours to plan and resource, then mark and assess, following the protocols that are laid down for me. It's ridiculous and benefits no one.