Aibu to wonder what will happen to education in the coming years

[Icannystandit]

Teacher shortages are becoming ridiculous. I work in a key dept in secondary and to the best of my memory we haven't been able to be fully staffed for the last 8 years. It's getting worse now though... there seem to be less and less people out there willing to do the job.
The council can't get enough teachers and we are just left to get on as best we can.
I am in Scotland but I understand it's a nationwide issue.
I am currently staring being 3 staff down and no end in sight. We have classes at maximum. Junior classes out to random supply ( no subject specialist supply available) and we are trying to set work for the uncovered classes on top of all our own work and marking.
It can't continue... and yet there is no end in sight.
Today I again had to leave my lovely s2 class to a cover teacher whilst I took the higher class down the hall who haven't now had a teacher since June. My own classes are getting half of me and the other classes are getting half.
parents are complaining but the council literally can't do anything. Other schools have the same issues. It's so depressing.

Thankfully in Scotland the pay scales are determined nationally and there's no opportunity for HTs to just not pay people the right amount.

I don't think reintroducing prescription charges would help- it wouldn't raise nearly as much money as you think - in England over 90% of prescriptions are free of charge anyway due to exemptions, and the money goes to the NHS not Education.

The problem is multifaceted -
Teaching is not an attractive career any more - low pay when you qualify for someone with a degree and post-grad diploma. The working conditions are terrible. Zero respect from pupils or parents a lot of the time, or from the wider public - even though we are expected to be parents/social workers/nurses/childcare/counselors as well as teachers. It's pretty soul destroying to talk to a parent and say 'they just need to come in for one hour to complete this coursework or they can't pass the course' and be told 'I cant make the little fucker get out of bed, what do you want ME to do about it??' and then get slated because said child failed and it's somehow all my fault. Or a child getting sent home because they were ill and the parent throwing a packet of paracetamol out the window and refusing to let them in as 'I don't want to see that little shit til 3:30pm' (that's sadly a true story where the guidance teacher took the child home after the parent refused to collect them, child had a high temperature and had been throwing up. They spent the rest of the day sleeping in the school office.)

Every time there is a budget cut, services like education and social work are easy targets: reduce the number of PSAs, raise the class sizes, close special schools, close SEN/EBD bases, cut the money for things like jotters and folders and printing. Stop maintaining the buildings properly etc etc. They don't have the heart-tugging that jobs like nursing or fire & rescue has (but they save lives!) so people are generally less bothered about education (teaching kids to read and write pfft) and social work (also save lives but are evil according to the press and many of the public) cuts.

The governments need to justify their jobs by rewriting the whole curriculum every few years, usually along whatever 'initiative' is currently the 'in thing'. Then throwing it out (along with thousands of hours of work) and making teachers start from scratch. Those textbooks I bought last year are now useless as they updated the course content yet again (despite government promises not to), and by updated I mean removed huge chunks, added huge chunks of different stuff and totally changed how they were assessing it. It's at the point that the teachers who actually write the textbooks stopped bothering as no one would buy them knowing they would likely be obsolete within a year.
They changed the Higher courses in Scotland this year. The classes start in June. The course specifications were published at the end of September. Up til then we were largely guessing at what we should be teaching! Oh and we're still catching up with all the changes made to N5 last year (classes in June, course spec in October) and on top of that they have actually made some more changes to the N5 this year as well. Oh and they also totally rewrote the BGE benchmarks last year (S1-3 courses). But oddly did not change the N4 at all so now it doesn't actually fit anywhere...the units don't match, the assessments don't fit and many teachers are expected to teach classes that are mixed N4 and N5. I could go on but I'm boring myself now.
No wonder education is in a mess.

Why doesn't the Scottish government want to raise taxes to pay for education. England, Wales & N.I. seem to be doing much better with even less money.

In the schools in my small town the teachers have been dropping like flies. In a friend’s dd’s Class last year (year 1) she had no less than 9 different supply teachers in one year, and no regular teacher.

My teenage dd who has ASD is now home educated because so many SEN staff left that school became unmanageable for her.

But I’m not surprised, my ex dp was a NQT and I wouldn’t want to do the job for all the tea in China. Not on the money they pay. It’s an absolute joke for the hours that are expected.

@Euphemism. Spot on. It’s increfibly demoralising and frustrating to be a teacher in Scotland at the moment.

We can’t get any staff. I work in a school in the central belt within commuting distance of both Glasgow and Edinburgh and we struggle massively to find anyone.

Currently, my department has two teachers off on maternity and one on long-term sick. None of them have been covered. We had two permanent members of the department leave at the beginning of the year who haven’t been replaced. We finally got an applicant for a job but for some reason only gave a temporary contract.

We’re just expected to muddle through. And because we manage, the next time it happens they don’t bother. We’re on draft 6 of the timetable this year with the poor kids being pushed from teacher to teacher, often at very short notice.

I’m pleased that moves seem to start being made about pay, but what we really need is for teachers to get this annoyed about workload and conditions. But the old mantra of, “think of the weans!” comes out. Teachers are our own worst enemies.

clem you could almost be writing about my school but I suspect we are just a bit further north than you. It's so hard to keep everyone positive when they keep shifting classes about. I feel like I bond with a nice class and then they're given to supply as they are manageable and I get the holy terrors down the corridor who supply won't deal with. Oh and it's March and so far they've not covered anything but if they don't pass the exam it falls on me. Stress stress stress

@Euphemism. Spot on. It’s increfibly demoralising and frustrating to be a teacher in Scotland at the moment.

It’s interesting (and sad) to read that. Over the last few years-I’ve seen lots of fed up teachers in England posting but people who live in Scotland seemed to be saying things weren’t quite as bad there. What’s changed?

England really isn’t doing better. It just seems that way as unqualified people are put in to teach classes under the guise of being cover supervisors and end up covering for weeks or months. Teacher shortages are less noticeable because of this. In Scotland you have to be a qualified teacher to even do cover/supply so if your entire drama/music/whatever department leaves the subject will probably stop running at all and the pupils be shoehorned into other classes. N4 art? Sure you can do lab science instead starting 3 months late...

In England schools also have more control over pay and hiring & firing so you can be refused to go onto upper pay scale or summarily sacked by the HT. In Scotland we are employed by the authority and pay is determined nationally so we can’t be shafted in that way.
The problem is way deeper than throw more money at it. The profession is losing staff every day. It will take a long time and a lot of change to reverse.

Moonlight - totally agree with your DH. I too have taught for 20 years and believe I'm good at my job. Last Ofsted before the summer break the inspectors wanted to know what the teachers on the upper pay scale were doing to justify their wages. Some of us just want to teach, not take on SLT roles. It makes me so sad. As if we don't do enough to justify our wages. What I believe will happen is that more expensive experienced teachers will be managed out on capability, and the profession will be propped up by cheap staff with little experience. Many of whom are disenchanted by the poor conditions. I truly believe our education system is broken. Although I teach full time, 80% of my job seems to be taken up with data/meaningless targets, all of which doesn't benefit the kids or staff. It's just done for the benefit of Ofsted. It would be great to spend my time planning fantastic lessons, but instead I sit for hours at a time entering data and creating targets no-one looks at. The kids suffer because they end up with bog standard lessons as the teachers are too busy doing pointless admin. What a sorry state the profession is in.

I think what is really depressing is that on a website for parents, 24 hours after a thread was started there are only 85mposts the majority of which are from teachers. Why are parents not outraged? The fact that a thread on teacher holidays or allowing a child to go to the toilet can reach a thousand posts in a couple of hours and this has passed by largely without comment is probably everything that is wrong with education. Desperately sad.

I agree it’s depressing there’s so little outrage. It is a symptom of what education has become.
Parents are more outraged if you suggest they toilet train their own child before they start school (discrimination!!!) than whether their child has a teacher that’s actually qualified to teach.
Teachers are seen as responsible for everything from basic skills such as using the toilet and eating with cutlery to child care (In-Service training is so inconvenient)
When was the last time a parent complained that hospital were discharging their child and they’d have to miss work, but god forbid the school tries to send home their puking child early.

The other side of it is that many parents just don’t understand the shifting sand that is education so find it hard to know if they ought to be outraged or not. In the last 20 or so years we’ve had 4 different curriculums and exam systems in Scotland. Sometimes graded A-F, sometimes 1-9, sometimes a mix of both. Sometimes it’s Credit, General, Foundation. Sometimes it’s Intermediate 1 or Intermediate 2. At the moment it’s N5 A-F with bands 1-9 Or N4 Pass or Fail (no grades or bands).
Staff can barely keep up. The system changes massively every 5 years or so, and then changes in smaller ways every 1-2 years.
We’re not allowed to say your child is lovely and hardworking. We have to say they are working at level 4 (a level which can span 3-4 years!!)
Most parents have no idea what that means and their main questions at parents night is ‘are they getting on ok, are they chatty or cheeky, do they get on with others in the class’
If your child comes home with 2 periods of reading, 4 of resilience and 3 of global awareness how do you know whether those are actual proper courses or made up bollocks to fill a staffing gap?

How do you get the governments to sit up and notice the massive problem they are ignoring?

I'd start with local MPs. But you need parents' support to do this. If every parent who threw their hands up at a strike were to write to or meet with their MP then at least a note of frustrations would be taken.

And for a lot of parents, they don't see the problems. The kids accept with a shrug that they have 8 science teachers over 3 years. They don't know any different. Shortages, cuts, staff problems... a lot of this is invisible to parents, who are out working full time with their own job stresses.

And Heads are not likely to go around advertising the problems their schools have. If every head issued a letter to parents outlining with honesty (!) the problems with their school (from no money for supply teachers or basic equipment, to turning the heating off) there would be outrage, not sympathy.

I don't know what the answer is. It's a desperate situation that will only change when the voices at the bottom get listened to.

When the government puts more money aside in the Budget towards potholes than it does on education, it speaks volumes....