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.

Gosh, I feel bad now. I was a Head of Department and in my latter years in teaching, sometimes taught a half timetable, sometimes a little more. And I still couldn't get it right! This is the woman told by an advisor she was 'born to teach'! Call me dinosaur. I'll get my hat.

"If we're keeping people back (and I'm only half against it) we must use transparent criteria applied in every case." Agreed---definitely.

"Teaching Shakespeare to children who can't read isn't actually that difficult. They love a story and a bit of acting..."

Sure.... but wouldn't it be better for the kids in question to have got their reading sorted out in the early years?

There just isn't much of a future for illiterate people in modern society, once they are outside the classroom.

I think the pain/embarassment of being left back has to be balanced against the long-term issues which are caused when people don't nail basic skills like reading and numeracy.

And the differentiation which ends up being demanded when nobody can ever be left back a year, just isn't fair on teachers--it's creating an unmanageable workload.

I am sure you were getting it right. My lessons aren't Ofsted ready yet. How could they be? Please don't feel bad. I am sure you were a great teacher.

Devilish - I am not saying the societal problems started 5 years ago. They started a very long time ago. 20 years ago when I went to the village school there were a few children whose families fell into the lower socioeconomic groups. That number has grown rapidly as has the number of children who are being raised by lone parents.

If you go back to the early 90s and compare the economic circumstances of the families in the average classroom compared to today I think you would see a very different picture.

I'm shocked at what teachers have to go through. Right now DDs teacher has 2 kids in class who don't speak a word of English. The teaching assistant speaks Spanish as there used to be lots of spanish speaking kids. Now we have other languages, in DDs case it's French and Hebrew, that teachers are having to cope with. It has taken up a lot of DDs teachers time both in and out of the classroom. It's not right the teacher is put in this position.

The EAL kids will be the least of her problems, trust me. They will be pretty fluent in 6 months.

I had a Romanian girl join my French class 6 weeks ago with no English but very good Italian. Guess who just got the best score for English/French translations, both ways? They are often the most motivated students.

Not quite 6 months Iguana!
We have 80% EAL students in our school (40 languages, and a new arrival most weeks). They're usually motivated learners, and yes, they are often able to communicate socially in about 6-12 months (sometimes after a silent period, when they're listening / soaking it up before talking much.)
Research shows it takes 5-7 years for full fluency to develop. The higher order language features, which we're expected to get primary pupils proficient in now, are much harder for them. E.g. by Y2 apostrophe, Y3 prepositions and subordinate clauses, Y4 determiners and fronted adverbials, Y5 relative clauses and modal verbs, Y6 active/ passive tenses, correct use of colon and semi-colon. And this just a sample! I'm not saying they can't learn this stuff, but that they need discrete teaching and they find it hard because these features often don't exist in their own language. (E.g prepositions, articles, certain tenses).
And some teachers need to brush up on this stuff too!
It's often extremely difficult for class teachers to manage these pupils in all the different subjects, and there is no extra support available suddenly.

Yes but DDs teacher has had to spend time getting extra resources for the class. This lady has a family of her own with 3 young children. I'm not saying these kids are not capable but that they take up more of the teachers time. The teacher isn't compensated for this nor is it taken into consideration when they assess her performance at the end of the academic year.

I am raising a bilingual child in a non-English-speaking country, so bilingualism is something that I am fairly involved in and see all kinds of language acquisition situations every day.

Of course children don't acquire fluency in a language in six months, however generously we want to define fluency!

The ballpark figures that I have most often seen suggest that when a pre-adolescent child is immersed in a new language, it typically takes 2-3 years before their verbal abilities will be fully on track with their peers. And then another 3 or 4 years on top of that (perhaps 5-7 years, in total, then) before their academic skills will be at the same level as the other kids--IF it ever happens.

Depending on the age when children switch and the level of support they are getting, sometimes kids never really catch up and may indeed start to fall further and further behind their peers as time goes on. This is especially the case with kids who have already reached puberty by the time they are exposed to the new language.

The whole "But kids are magic sponges! They are fluent in six months!" myth comes from the casual observers of people who watch kids playing hopscotch in the playground a few months after arrival, and are like "Oh my God! She's fluent! She speaks English as well as the other kids now!!!"

No, she doesn't. The fact that she can keep up during a playground game (for example) does not mean that she would be able to (say) watch a film in English and then describe the details of the plot to you in the way that her peers would be able to. It takes a couple of years, typically, before kids are fluent in producing long, complex sentences, and building up a huge vocabulary simply takes time--there are no obvious short cuts.

Reading a complex text, like a paragraph in a history textbook, requires a very large vocabulary and fast fluent decoding (because if you read below a certain speed, you will be unable to make much sense of what you are reading). Kids do NOT acquire this kind of stuff in a few months. Especially not with English, with its horridly complicated spelling system and massive vocabulary.

EAL is complicated. It is one thing to grow up using two languages, or to start being exposed to English in, say, the early years of primary school. Kids born in the UK who are speaking Polish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hindi as well as English from early on are actually the highest performing of all British kids.

But if we are talking about children coming to English from late primary school onwards, and if those kids are coming into classrooms in large numbers, it is going to make teaching much, much harder work.

I am not a "casual observer" of children "playing hopscotch". How patronising.

EAL is complicated but I would have to disagree with much of what NewStateman says. The disadvantage experienced by bilingual children depends on age, but most of all on the very same factors that determine disadvantage for monolingual children - ie parental education, aspiration and to a lesser extent income levels. The London experience - high levels of multilinguism AND achievement - is good evidence of this.

My children are bilingual and trilingual respectively, both educated in languages other than their native language (DS at a French school, and DD in Spanish-language section at a French school, with a mix of Spanish and French native speakers).

The issue in the UK (and other education systems of course) is that bilingualism is often associated with immigration and high levels of poverty and deprivation. This disadvantage is typically overcome by children in well-resourced schools and those with parents who are educated, or who value education.

tadjenny yes I've seen that quite a bit - fascinating isn't it!

I agree misti. My experience in teaching EAL students of different ages and in different circumstances (and my degree in 2nd language acquisition) also supports what you say. The productive stills follow the receptive skills but the neuro-linguistic compartments aren't set until later in the teen years, making acquisition in an immersion setting very fast for the majority of school age.

Yy also to the comment about parental interest which has been proven to be the single biggest factor in academic success.

I think it is because the EAL kids are having to translate and paraphrase all the time and have much more practice in those skills than native speakers. Not because she is already fluent in English; she isn't. Sorry to derail the thread.

EYFS practitioners will tell you that you can learn a great deal from 'observing children playing'! About their social skills, language, spatial awareness, strategising, preferences, physical skills etc. If only we had the time!

NewStatesman 'basic skills like reading and numeracy'

I agree that standards of achievement in English language and application of number are embarrassingly low in England, and have been in decline for a long time.

Students, parents, employers and taxpayers need and deserve infinitely higher standards, but far too many of the staff being paid to lead schools are themselves incapable of identifying the problems, let alone addressing them or acting as role-models by demonstrating good communication skills.

When Mr Gove visited my friend's flagship academy, he was pictured clutching the hand of a beautiful young NQT whose IWB proudly displayed the (English lesson's) learning objective as 'Can I evaluate how this text makes it's point to the target audiance ?' (sic)

A last-minute decision was made not to externally release this particular photo, which I thought was a shame as it neatly illustrated the problem.

Ah yes, that would be the Secretary of State whose speeches were resplendently full of punctuation and grammar mistakes, not to mention gross factual inaccuracies We did have fun correcting those on Twitter in public.

Let's rush off and find out who the SLT team were at Gove's school, and report them to ofsted and maybe kill them, too!

Who else has ever made a spelling mistake or a grammatical error? Quick, let's name and shame the SLT teams at their schools too! It's all their fault!

Gove = King James Bible

Gove = King James Bible

OOOOH I'd forgotten about that. He really was a grade A cunt wasn't he?

He really is. I wonder how much joy he's getting out of bullying the lawyers. I'm guessing not much.

I feel sorry for you Amanda, whatever has happened to you must have been awful.

I had a pretty terrible time too (of being worked into the ground on SLT) but not enough to have jumped to the conclusion that an entire 'food group' of people must be wicked to the core and hell bent on misappropriating public funds.

Pipbin I'll never forget. not really. He was the means of me leaving teaching and I've got enough self esteem to think that it was a mistake to force me out with his shenanigans.

Yes, I found it very painful indeed, over 27 years, to gradually experience the downward spiral in standards, achievement, student and staff morale in secondary education which led to my decision to quit the losing battle.

As I have explained, I have immense sympathy and respect for school staff up to, but not above, subject leader level.

My experience of those above that level, particularly over my last decade, was that the overwhelming majority of them were entirely unfit for their roles, a drain on the schools' resources both financially and generally, and a major push factor for quitting teachers, through their utter incompetence and the impact of this on the staff they attempted to 'manage'.

I understand that the aspiration to ascend the greasy pole is a feature of many, particularly public-sector, organisations, and the problem of incompetent leadership is not restricted to the teaching profession.

I know the simple fact that many problems in education could be addressed at a stroke by equalising work loading is unpalatable to those who have become accustomed to their easy lives and light timetables. That is completely understandable. Akin to asking a Consultant Physician to return to the duties of a junior houseman, probably.

I am, however, simply addressing the OP's question, as it is one I have been asked many times in real life by people who are working hard to pay these cynical opportunists' salaries.