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.

£50k per annum spent on training / social welfare personnel/provision funded by an employer or a government would yield a much higher return to taxpayers, and a response to the issues described by dogdays than the salary of any idiot SLT lecturing teachers about 'DIRT' and 'FACE' nonsense, then appraising them as RI, leading them to quit and compounding the problem by wasting the £ spent on their training.

A social worker would be able to remove the target-setting culture? What??

50 k? Try getting the CBI to agree to that, they don't want to train people never mind pay for their education.

lurker in answer to your question, I am opposed to any policy change which further reinforces the ability of individuals above Subject Leader level to use public funding to perpetuate the blatant iniquity of workload-sharing which has led to the current teacher exodus, whatever its provenance.

Thats not really answering my question though is it?

You said you would believe the CBI about education standards and question public spending because of it.

I outlined reasons why you might consider the CBI having specific vested interests in criticising education.

I then asked you if you would believe other stakeholders in the arguments so imlicitly..

Good politicians answer though, you would agree given a specifc set of permaters.....

Its a very long thread but I'm shocked at what I see going on in schools. When my kid is naughty I tell her off and back up the teacher. This year I'm not too impressed with DDs teacher but quite frankly she is qualified and doing her job. She spends hours preparing for each day and is a human who is allowed to be imperfect. I've told DD that her teacher is her boss and is right even if she is wrong.

We also make sure our child goes to school ready for the day. Being late is not acceptable, nor is not working hard during the day. DD is 4 and our ethos and attitude towards education won't be changing.

Its too easy to only blame teachers rather than placing the blame for children doing badly at school firmly at the door of the parents and the child. Each party has a responsibility to ensure the child does well at school yet teachers get the blame when it goes wrong.

I also think class sizes are far too big given all the documentation requirements. If you want this much paperwork you need to cut the class size in half.

It's not the iniquity of workload sharing that has led to the exodus though. It's the workload full stop. You seem to believe that every member of SLT swans about with no teaching or responsibilities. That's so far from the truth it's ridiculous. There are many many areas they need to cover and work at, and most work incredibly long hours. There are unscrupulous heads actively putting staff on the leadership spine with the sole intention of getting many many more hours out of them than they can on normal hours.

If the only members of SLT you have met have been somehow able to have a nice relaxing time of it then I have to say that your experience is not typical. There are people at all levels in every job who are crap at what they do and lazy. Don't tar every single SLT member with the same brush.

Surely you must realise that in order to shoulder all the many other responsibilities that SLT have to do, they cannot also manage a full timetable as well? Non-teachers have been employed to do heads of year type roles in the past as a cost-cutting measure. There are a few who are very good, but in the schools where I have worked this has been a minority and in fact teachers doing those roles as an added responsibility (and with less teaching to give them capacity to intervene/see parents/ investigate issues etc) has worked a lot better. Non-teachers can find it hard to understand the dynamics of a classroom. Not all of them, but in my experience a large majority of them. Should those roles be happening in schools? Maybe if a parent phones to say their child is being bullied we should say how we are all on full teaching loads with no time to do anything about it, and ask them to contact the price if there is a crime? Maybe we should tell teachers that as everyone is on a full teaching load, nobody has been able to create a timetable so just to try and work it out when the kids turn up in September. Maybe if a teacher takes out a grievance against another we tell them to pay for a counselling service.

There are SLT people who are incredibly hard working and are also first in line to be answerable to ofsted as well. They are not responsible for the fact that education is a political football.

It is Wednesday of half term. My legs still ache. I haven't colour coded the 14 groups I teach on the seating plan yet. I still have a load of marking to do because I am the lead teacher. I hope I will take DD swimming tomorrow. Oh and some schemes of work to to be uploaded and verified. I do wish my legs would stop aching.

want - there are still lots of very supportive parents like you. Even when their kids are hard work, you know that they will be ok in the end because the messages they are getting from home are supportive of education. There are also sadly a lot of parents who find it easier to be their child's friend and side with them, than be a parent. Wish more were like you.

Oh gosh that last point iguana, I've sat at meeting after meeting with parents who shrug their shoulders and say: " I just don't know what I'm going to do with them."

I'd really like to be able to say:" Be a parent, not their friend, they have friends already, what they need are parents!"

I think it's because some are frightened of the tantrum their child will throw if they say "you behaved badly and I'm not happy with that". Far easier to find an excuse... Which ones from the list have you heard? I have heard all of them.

"He shouted at his teacher that she was a 'fucking prick'."

Oh I see... it's probably because...

• he's got a new baby sister
• he's always hated maths/geog
• he's no good at French, none of us are
• he's got a personality clash with that teacher
• he's never good in the morning
• he plays on his phone till 4am and I can't get it off him
• he's had headaches this last week
• he asked for help and the teacher ignored him
• the teacher gave him a detention last week and he didn't do anything wrong
• he never said that. I asked my son and he said he didn't say it. My child never lies to me, we don't swear in our house - it was a case of mistaken identity.
• the boy next to him was annoying him
• he hadn't eaten breakfast so he felt a bit tetchy
• he just got a text from a friend that wound him up
• he was too hot sitting by the window
• the teacher told him off about not doing any work and he doesn't like being told off
• he didn't say "fucking prick" to the teacher, with whom he was having the row and who he was looking at at the time. What actually happened was his friend, during that row, made an unrelated comment about his football team losing, and he was in fact swearing at his friend. He has apologised to his friend and his friend is fine with it, so it's not really your business
• he didn't say "fucking prick" he said "ducking trick" and he was talking about something else, to a different friend. Yes the phrase doesn't make sense, they were playing at making up words
• he had a fight with his brother the night before and he still had the 'ump
• he was asked to use a dictionary and he's dyslexic so he snapped and swore but he immediately regretted it
• he remembered he had PE next and had forgotten his kit and so felt annoyed so he swore
• it's the 12th anniversary of his nan dying next week and even though he never met her, we have pictures of her at home and he was aware of it.
• his dog was poorly last week and he felt worried.

All of them, and more, but the one that keeps cropping up in more recent times is the personality clash one, got told this last week as to why a child was badly behaved in a younger colleagues lessons.

My response of:" Looking at the behaviour record he has personality clashes with lots of his teachers. Would you say that this is because he has a difficult personality, or just can't follow the behaviour rules or do his work." was not greeted well, mother complained to the head...

I tend to say that if he is working hard and keeping to the rules then personality clashes never happen. Which is true.

VG IguanaTail although I should have written that in green pen but then found some improvement to your post and written it in pink pen. If it is any consolation to you, we have a father of two sons in the school. I have been on the end of his angry phone calls because he refuses to have his child in detention. He even took a child out of school because he didn't think a child should be given a lunch time detention.

We had that too. He would walk into the detention room and remove his son. Happened three times that I recall. I can't remember how it was resolved in the end.

I'm to long in the tooth to pretend to be customer service iguana, the head didn't say anything. It was a fairly good response though, as is yours I might nick it.

Well I keep flagging it up.

I haven't read the whole thread, so this might have been said. Ive read and also become aware of situations in real life, where it becomes apparent that a teachers job is no longer to simply teach Mathematics, Sciene and Literacy... In many cases they need to help parent children because they go into school with manners like they were raised in a barn,
There are also so many children who misbehave, don't get the support from home, aren't at school enough, are at school late, bullying and general friendship problems.
Then the fact that everything seems to be more and more paperwork orientated, then they need to reach targets.
I have the most respect for the teachers of today, because it's certainly not a job I could do, especially as from my understanding actual teaching is about 30% of what they need to do with their day. Most teachers don't get enough credit, especially when sometimes they are the most positive influences children have.

Thank you for your support Unreasonablebetty

Exactly. Teachers are being expected to do more than one job. Of course they are going to fail!

What I observed when picking up my friends kids at the same village school I attended as a child was a much higher proportion of children coming from homes in the lower socioeconomic levels of 4 and 5. The majority of these kids in the lowest grouping are being raised by lone parents who are struggling to parent. They have minimal support and often, in the area I grew up in at least, didn't finish their education so they are frustrated at being stuck in low wage jobs.

I am very lucky that I have the confidence within myself to put a brave face on when figuring out how to parent my dd. I'm also very lucky to have supportive parents who to this day support DH and I parenting our DC. My father especially sees his role as supporting us figure this all out. These parents in the lower socioeconomic groups often don't have this.

Our society has a lot to answer for. Both labour and the Tories have failed the last generation of families and now it's easier to blame teachers than it is to own up to their own failings. The system is crumbling because the family units are crumbling.

I think there need to be some big changes to improve behavior in schools (more disciplinary powers for schools, perhaps some modifications to inclusion policies?).

And big cuts to the workload.

Are OFSTED still grading lessons? I don't think they should be, if they are. I think it's fine for an inspectorate to grade building safety and pastoral care and how good the extra curric. stuff is.... but not lessons.

Too much paperwork and box ticking by half. Get rid of EVERY requirement that is not evidence based.

We need to think about ways to slash marking time. Shifting towards a model of having students revise and practice previous content and then be tested during lessons might work. The Michaela academy in London has apparently massively reduced marking time by doing things like this.

Also, how about some decent textbooks? I find it so odd the way UK teachers have to spend half their lives creating entire curricula from scratch for their students (I am not in the UK. Most high-performing education systems, such as Finland and Singapore, have high-quality, state-authorized textbooks. Makes lesson planning a million times simpler and also makes life easier for parents).

I know this isn't popular, but maybe we do need to consider the idea of keeping students back a year if they don't reach a certain level, to reduce the need for endless differentiation of every damn lesson...? At the moment, there are teachers having to teach kids who might cover a five-year spread in terms of their levels. You might as well teach the whole damn school!

Not saying that "Being kept back" should be used willy-nilly, but I do think there is a time and place. At the moment, I think a lot of kids are muddling through their educations without ever really sorting out fundamental weaknesses, and teachers wind up trying to teach Shakespeare to kids who can't even read! I can't even imagine the stress.

If we're keeping people back (and I'm only half against it) we must use transparent criteria applied in every case. No keeping back the bad boys or truanting girls who can pass standard tests but aren't what the school really wants. No putting up little sweeties who try really hard but need coaching and prompting to make the grade, or those whose parents complain to the governors at the drop of a hat.

Teaching Shakespeare to children who can't read isn't actually that difficult. They love a story and a bit of acting. Use a cartoon film. Use puppet theatre. Dress up, use masks, act bits out in your own words. Assess learning with quick questions and answers at the end of the session. Use flash cards with key words. Build some simple sentences...
sorry... that's what teaching used to be like. Fun.

I don't think you can blame the problems in teaching which have got so much worse over the last what? 5 years (ish) on crumbling society & poor single parents.

I'm not sure the inclusion policy needs rethinking (albeit there are not enough specialist spaces). It does need more money & more training for staff so schools can implement it properly.

I went into teaching a cynical idealist and came out bitter and frustrated. It isn't just the workload and responsibility without power. It's how very wrong it is to treat children that way.

As I packed up my classroom for maternity leave, I found my philosophy of teaching, written during my pgce. As I read it, I felt hollowed out. I still believed what I'd written, but I'd been able to implement so little. I knew I'd been a good teacher on many measures, but I also knew I'd failed ideologically and inevitably - I'd let so many kids down. They had not had the experience of education I'd wanted for them. And I knew there was nothing I could have done about it.

And now I'm homeschooling my own kids.