To ask ex teachers why they give up teaching?

[malificent7]

Im hoping to leave education in order go retrain.

For me it's the workload... i dont want to work from 8am to 11pm every day.
I also hate being blamed for student's bad behaviour and being told that if my lessons were x, y ansmd z there would be perfect behaviour.
Also lack of power and toold to dicipline students with.
The realisation that working g in a pricate school was far more difficult tgan working in the state sectir ( parents expect blood/ kids over entitled )
contracts are now mostly fixed term.

I could go on!

Please share!

And as for the NUT. When our BESD unit faced massive redundancies last year, over half of QTS staff were with them. They didn't turn up to represent us for any of the meetings except one. And that wasn't even our rep.

Chocolate fucking teapot union they were for us. 14 years of paying in, supporting industrial action and when the crunch came-nothing.

I was described as a failing teacher. I was an easy target after a poor Ofsted (ironically, I was one of only three teachers at the school to not get an RI or inadequate in their lesson) as I was temporary and new. So I was hounded by the Deputy Head. I lost three stone as I physically couldn't eat at school through anxiety - and of course I was at school most of the time trying to be better at my job - an impossible task given the agenda of SLT.

I too, at this point, knew exactly the place on the motorway which I would drive off. It was a nice, high point, and wouldn't inconvenience too many people. After considering this for a few weeks, I gave my head a wobble and went to the doctor.

I am now in a nice school (I had a 'halfway' school where I went in and volunteered, then did supply and built my confidence back up) where all the things I was told I was terrible at are my areas of strength. There are issues in my new school, of course, but at the moment I feel supported and valuable.

The constant data, form filling, initiative following, marking 90+ books a day, exhausting unrealistic and demanding parents, parents who are dangerous (not just physically, but to your mental health too) are very negative flipsides to the positive sides of this job - the public see long holidays, INSETs and 9-3 hours as signs that teachers whinge and have it easy. I agree that there are definite perks - but I would rather forgo long holidays and have less marking / more respect from parents / more accountability on the children.

I only lasted 1 term into my NQT year. It was horrid.

Lack of support, no TA and a huge range of abilities. It was too difficult to differentiate tasks, let alone teach all these different abilities.

One had autism and one year 5 child could barely do 9-7=
Whereas others could +,-, and X fractions

My headteacher dropped in for suprise observations a few times a week and stand at the back of the class with a note pad and pen! No wonder the children acted up when she walked in unannounced.

I saw my cousin; a secondary school teacher a few months ago. It was the weekend... we were in a in a cafe...she was visibly shaking.
I remember that tremor well.

Kesstrel - "learning styles" has no solid evidence to back its effectiveness either. Just another hoop to jump through.

There's a lot of pseudoscience wafting about in education. I sat through plenty of inset where SLT had got excited about the latest fad - Brain Gym anyone?

Excessive workload, lack of support, no support from a lot of parents, poor behaviour

Yep, learning styles were debunked.
Obvs the failing authority I worked in had already pissed thousands upon thousands of pounds on training, textbooks and other bollocks associated with them though.

Ds's primary school seems well run, and the staff turnover is low but it is only one class per year. They have a retired teacher covering lesson planning etc. He is early 60's.
One of his teenage children started doing teacher training at an RG university, and dropped out during their first year. Dad was delighted.

So glad I left. I taught in the state sector for 6 years and then 2 1/2 independent. The independent school was marginally better than the state schools I had taught at because my colleagues were more supportive - the management was equally vile in both. However, I decided I had had enough when I started to feel like I wouldn't live to see my 35th birthday due to be constantly stressed.
Things that made it impossible were:
Back-stabbing colleagues who wanted to move up the greasy pole and were constantly trying to bring down other teachers who were producing good results.
Never being good enough no matter what you did.
Being spoken to by SLT in an appalling manner - they would NEVER speak to children like that. We have to build their self-esteem and always be positive but we can talk to the teachers as if they are useless, lower life-forms.
The never ending work -working until 1 or 2 am every morning and at the weekends at home but being judged on how long you were at school - presenteeism.
The constant new initiatives which were mostly utter crap - all the training and preparation you had to do in your spare time when you knew whatever it was would be ditched in a couple of years.
Absolutely no freedom to choose what or how you would teach. No room for creativity.
Remember when the QCA units came out and some schools adopted them wholeheartedly. I remember having to do the "Making a photograph frame" on year 3 teaching practice. I had to teach to the letter, no deviation allowed and I remember thinking that this most be hell for the children too - 6 bloody weeks planning and designing and making a photo frame out of cardboard. 6 bloody weeks drawing a self-portrait.
Then I got a job in a school a couple of years later (after a year in the school from hell - a happy family type school where everyone was quietly vile to one another) where they decided to introduce the QCA units for every year group and I was stuck with the year 1 units which were dreadful.
Self-employed now and love it.

You know, I've felt a lot of guilt for leaving teaching. I get pangs of it whenever I drive past primary schools or see teaching friends sharing statuses about lovely things the kids have done etc and I wonder whether i wasted my potential or wasted the effort I put into developing as a teacher (because I put no end of effort in) But reading this thread has been therapy! It has brought it all back and reminded me why I left and what life was like. Until someone mentioned crying in the morning upthread, I had forgotten that I had many mornings where I would actually cry in response to the alarm going off at 6am. I literally woke up crying, knowing what lay ahead of me.

It's just not right.

learning styles were debunked
I didn't know that. I've been out of teaching for a few years. I can't help feeling a certain amount of glee...

@chips4teaplease

My friend was attacked by several Y10 boys. She was taken out to the floor and whilst there was repeatedly kicked and punched. She was also PG at the time.

The school (S London Academy) were terrible. Totally un-supportive, wanted her to keep quiet. She had the audacity of going to the police and as a consequence was hounded out of the school. She came out of that with PTSD and hasn't worked as a teacher since that.

Fucking criminal, the HT and the academy chain should have been prosecuted for the way they treated her.

I'm so sorry about your friend, but it is exactly in line with the attitude I have found in schools.

You might want to remove the school's name, 5rivers. I'll report to see if MN can do that.

I'm not a failed teacher. I'm an amazing teacher who chose to leave because I (along with the rest of us) was treated like shit.

Nothing is ever quite good enough. Lesson Observations would have some spurious improvements required. I'd be observed and given feedback by staff who were not as good at the job as I was but were more interested in climbing the management ladder.

My results year in and year out were always good when looked at in any sensible manner with a real baseline for comparison. However every year they made the ridiculous targets even more impossible than usual and anyone mentioning it was told they were sabotaging children's aspirations and not showing a growth mindset and other such bollocks. I would be judged on made up data that proved whatever SLT wanted.

Meanwhile we would placate parents of badly behaved children, whilst ignoring the genuine concerns of the majority of parents, who didn't want their child's learning disrupted.

Safeguarding was not dealt with appropriately in some cases.

I could go on but frankly I just don't want to think about it anymore.

I'm done.

The biggest issue for me over the last few years has been that since we were taken over by an academy chain (in Feb of 2014) and they got rid of the Head the Head retired, there has been no Headteacher, just a series of temporary babysitters on extortionate salaries and so no decisions have been made. I had another thread in Staffroom a while ago about a yr 13 boy who took exception to me telling him off (I was his form tutor) and so told the (current temporary) Head that I have inappropriate images on Twitter. Her way of "dealing" with it was to insist that I apologise to the boy. I refused. She threatened me with policies that, it turned out, she hadn't read. I stood my ground. In the end it all got brushed under the carpet - no action for the 18 yr old who had deliberately tried to ruin my career with his false allegations.

Sorry to hear about your pregnant friend.
When i was pregnant a child wrote on social media that she would kill my baby with a rugby ball.
When i went to the police i was hounded out. Management told me not to go but i did. Didnt want the school to get a bad name! Cannot. Be. Arsed. Anymore!

What does SLT stand for?

SLT is senior leadership team.
When I started over 20 years ago our SLT was our head (with no class responsibility), deputy head (who taught her own class 4 days a week) and 3 other senior teachers who had their own classes the full 5 days.
Now our SLT is head, 2 deputy heads and 2 assistant heads, none of them have a class, instead their job is to tell us how to do ours.
It worked far better when some of them were class based, far less likely to implement crazy marking/ assessment polices when you have to do them yourself!

Evil twins - is the lack of a permanent head a choice or an inability to fill the post. Our head was due to retire this summer but we couldn't recruit a suitable candidate. (Our lovely experienced deputy doesn't want it, and our other deputies/assistants don't have the experience. Our head is staying on for one more year (and hoping they find someone sooner). It's not a good situation when nobody wants the top job.

I hate the work load. I feel like I give my class of 30 9/10 year olds more of my time and attention than my own 3 year old DD. I remind myself that those children get nothing from their parents and need someone to care about them

You martyr 🙄

Because a whole class of 30 kids are ignored, neglected etc

@chips4teaplease not the actual name, just meant it was an academy in south london.

It is terrible to read on here that that isn't really an isolated incident :-(

I have the utmost respect for teachers - the job has never been harder.

@malificent7 so sorry about your experience re being hounded out. I can't believe this is so common.

curtes Not a choice - honestly, it reads like a particularly bad episode of Waterloo Rd... Original head "retired" but with literally no notice - just told us that she was taking early retirement and would be going at the end of the month. Then a temporary head whilst they advertised but no one applied. Then he had to leave as he had a new job, so we got another, advert still out. Then a substantive head was appointed but she lasted about 12 weeks before going off sick, so we had to be babysat whilst they sorted that out. Then another temporary, but unfortunately his DW became very poorly and so, understandably, he left. Then they asked the HT of a neighbouring school (same MAT) to look after us "for 6 weeks" That was in February of this year, and she is still trying to run two schools concurrently. Honestly - you couldn't make it up.