to think there is something seriously wrong with our education system..

[TwinkleToes101]

when teachers are leaving in droves?

Just recently reading about record numbers of newly trained teachers giving up within 5 years (that was me 14 years ago), then on MN today partners having depression/breakdowns and all the posters who teach knew the person in question was a teacher...what the F is going so badly wrong with teaching??

I thought my reasons for leaving were personal: too little me time, too much low-level classroom disruption. Other postgrads I know left as I did because of work load. But don't other professions have high workloads/stresses?

Yanbu. My daughter's high school have cover teachers in far too often and some lessons are taught on a fortnightly basis. It worries me.
I fully appreciate what teachers do and am aware that my dd would not receive an academic education without them.
However, I'm always arguing with my partner who says teachers have an easy life, 830 till 330, all the holidays, easy job, great pay, retire early. So i say why not teach then?
He's dyslexic (diagnosed late high school) so thinks teachers are lazy particularly with kids who under perform. He says they don't bother investigating any underlying causes and just lump them all in a low set and leave them to rot.
I don't fully agree but there is a small element of teachers who are lazy.
I could not be a teacher as I reckon the pay is not sufficient for that job and without the holidays, you'd ALL leave!

My DC primary school, like many, has lost LSAs. Falling roll, budget cuts etc. Children with SEN are barely managed, and it's had and Inadequate Ofsted followed by RI. Lots of changing to teaching staff.

But both my DC school and its "sister" school 10 miles away (it's in a MAT, has been for several years) have bought a minibus each and have taken on drivers. The advert I saw was for 1 driver/site supervisor 20 hours pw - not sure if they have halved the role or just taken on another driver.

I get the minibuses will be from a different budget. But I'm assuming the drivers wages come from staffing budget. It seems a very odd choice, given the challenges in both schools.

I haven't read all of the posts but here is my experience: been in teaching for 12 years and for 5 of those I have been a deputy head (I don't now have a full class but do teach cover etc). It is utterly exhausting and consumes your life. I have remained in teaching to date because I have been fortunate enough to be at a school for several years with a reasonable headteacher and in a supportive team overall. However, the head is due to retire in a few months, and to be honest, I will probably look into pursuing a different career. I work in a school in a very deprived area and the reasons it is so hard include:

• having to jump through hoops with constantly changing goalposts dictated from the government and.being under constant scrutiny (with sometimes, conflicting expectations from those 'above'). These changes encompass all areas such as the curriculum, assessment etc.
• having to provide care in all aspects of a child's life including social care, mental health, housing and parental support (the services around schools have been massively cut which has made the workload in these areas much, much bigger in the last five years)

-the profession in general, being seen as not worthy of respect from the public -parents who see their role as literally dropping their kids off at school and picking them up again -schools having to provide wraparound care . This should not in itself cause a problem but it does mean that the school building is very busy from 7 am to 6 pm and teachers are often caught up in issues before and after school

• the paper trails that have to be in place; I am a 'paper' person but even I find the amount of recording over the top

-the changing dynamics of school without any support put in. For example, we have had a massive rise in the amount of children with English as an additional language in the last few months. However, there are not the resources funded/provided to support this such as translators/interpreters etc. The same goes for SEN: the needs that mainstream schools are expected to accommodate have grown, but the funding/support to enable this to happen is not available. -even without all of the above the actual workload of the job is massive and the actual element of 'teaching' is minimal. It is sucked up in record keeping, dealing with extreme behaviour issues, supporting parents, supporting/running extra curricular activities, responding to governmental changes etc (and we are a school that is actively trying to reduce teacher workload).

Sorry to be so negative - I am passionate about education, but plan to go abroad to teach in the few years.

Oliversmumsarmy and mortifiedmama

I do agree about special schools, inclusion has been a failed experiment to bring down costs. But I can't see any government putting the money in place to put them back into the system and their are many people that are against them.

With regard to lack of vocational areas again you are correct, but teachers have pointed this out again and again, The last time they got called "the blob" for their troubles.

Someone brought up Finnish schools as they always do on threads like these but they always forget to mention how well respected teachers are in Finland.

Maybe its time to actually look at all of the services that schools are being forced to provide and take a step towards actually letting do what they were meant to do.

People also forget to mention that Finland has one of the highest teenage suicide rates.

I think there is a culture of fear in many schools, and I'm not sure it's necessary from the slt.
Ours has got the right balance, and new teachers who've joined us this term have told me this week, with some incredulity, that they haven't gone home and cried once this term! Yet we still have other teachers on the team, who've never taught anywhere else, who whinge and moan about their workload, when they have no IDEA what it's like in other schools. I should maybe point them to this thread.
That said, I've been teaching over 30 years, and I can't tell you how glad I am that I'm nearing the end of my career. I'm also thankful that my own two kids are through the system.
Let's hope that the pendulum swings back soon. This current mess is unsustainable.

He should have received proper intervention at primary school

This reminded me of one of those “educating somewhere” programmes I saw once. There was a girl, it was GCSE time. It was on the day if one exam when she walked out of the exam room that the teachers realised she couldn’t read. It was a real surprise for them.

Reading above posts indicates how she left primary in that state (following the NC), but I still can’t for the life of me work out how with 5 years of secondary education, being taught by probably 7+ teachers per year, no one saw/recognised/worked it out/had the vaguest inkling earlier.

Which is one reason my kids are going to a private school. The state system is broken. My family and extended family friends were/are all teachers and the stories they tell are horrific.

but I still can’t for the life of me work out how with 5 years of secondary education, being taught by probably 7+ teachers per year, no one saw/recognised/worked it out/had the vaguest inkling earlier.

Up to 36 pupils in a class
no support
Having to provide differentiated lessons for level 1 to level 9
having to provide SEND support with no training
Having to provide SEND differentiated lessons
Multiple SEND in each class
Multiple behavioural issues in each class
Classes with pupils that have are NT but want to disrupt the lesson
Paperwork that actually means nothing
interventions that remove pupils from your class but actually do nothing but disrupt
Interventions that remove pupils from your class week after week after week so that you see very little of them.

Oh and pupils are very good at hiding these sort of issues.

These are just some of the reasons

as for "Which is one reason my kids are going to a private school."

Lets hope that he has no SEND as private schools are notorious for ignoring them, screwing parents for money and then dumping the child back in to the state system.

Best of luck.

Our kids mental health is not much better, with children as young as 5 having mental health problems.

BoneyBack

Well, no they don't have SEND. My friends DS with autism is at the same school and he received support from pre-school and this continues including 1-1 support and some lessons on his own. She is very pleased with support to date, and CAMHS have apparently commented favourably- so whatever the case elsewhere, in this particular private school your concerns are unfounded.

I am aware some private schools aren't wonderful and some aren't good for children with SEND. However, our local state schools are not performing well with both senior schools in particular being utterly dire (one has asked for parents with maths or science skills for help as they cannot recruit maths or science teachers and there are multiple vacancies, for instance). My DCs private school, on the other hand, is excellent and we are very happy with it. Thank you for your (faux?) concern.

We are exceeding SLT heavy in our school including a director for school improvement 🤨 This is purely for an infant and junior school. We have a senco who is three days a week and he doesn’t teach unless he’s covering. Our school is also quite light on kids with Sen.

We do need more special schools but something that also caters for milder Sen needs. I have one dd at a special school but her brother is in mainstream with a ft1:1 and wouldn’t ever be accepted at his sister’s special school as it wouldn’t be the right place for him.

I don’t know what the answer is. I despair of our culture in general. The attitude that people tend to have, social media, entitlement. It all spells disaster especially when the education system is a one size fits all and seems to only be concerned with kids passing tests. Expecting schools to be everything and also not funding schools properly. We’re heading for disaster.

Our school financially does okay. We’re raising money for iPads 🤨, updating our art room and we have a fancy brand new mini bus that doesn’t seem to get used all that much.

@jacks11 same for us. sENDS kids have 1-1 TAs . There are kids with autism, hearing limitations and learning difficulties. They are fully supported. Not all private schools do,!but not all state schools either

jacks11

There is no faux concern. I (and my colleagues) have picked up the pieces too many times for faux concern.

You have made a choice, I hope that the school that you choose does your children proud and that you are not to blinded to see if it goes wrong.

education system has been buggered and flawed for years especially with sen children which im convinced has been covered up as well

its only the last few years its come to light because home ed has become popular

so much energy goes in to trying to mold that child and change them in to what the school thinks a child should be just to tick their boxes(our experience with oldest )

if you dont tick the boxes then your either left to it and not bothered with(our experience with youngest)

thats why millions have turned to home ed

thousands dont even send them to any educational setting to begin with

schools are taking them at 2 here(south wales)which is ridiculous

granted its only nursery hours but still disgusting putting babies in a educational setting so young

Who is the SLT in the UK system and why do they have so much power? The only acronym I can think of that fits is the speech and language therapist, which would be called SALT here in the US. Why would a speech therapist have so much power? Or is the SLT a senior teacher who supervises everyone else and observes classes?

It is precisely these reasons I opted in the Grammar system. No its absolutely not right for social welfare but schools are strapped as it is and spread too thinly that anything other than targeted segmented education just doesn't work in the current state.

Senior Leadership Team : so the headteacher and his/her deputies. Lose sight of what it is like to teach a full timetable upon promotion. Often heard to say 'how high would you like us to jump?' to Ofsted, government etc. Known to ignore behaviour issues and blame classroom teachers. Often scared of parents.

Aha, thanks Piggy. That makes sense. So they should be on the side of their fellow teachers but they've become professional administrators instead.

I guess it is the luck of the draw on where you work, like every job. Some companies have horrible cultures of bullying and stress while others are known to be more positive and it can vary from team to team within companies too. With teaching, I suppose the problem is that you have multiple variables - parents, administration and students, not just one boss / management.

On the one hand you have the variability of your class and what levels of SN you have and disruptive pupils but then you also have the variability of school management. A teaching job with some very challenging students and an unsupportive administration would be horrible but equally if you got a reasonable batch of students and you had supportive administrators to back you up, you can just focus and get on with your job as teacher.

Who is the SLT in the UK system and why do they have so much power?
Head teacher, deputy Head, assistant heads & in some schools an ever expanding circle of aimless careerists who don't do very much.

They have power because they run the school. How they use the power is up to them.

Ours use their power to shield us from some of the DfE nonsense, ensure we feel valued, and generally seem to do their best to create a nice environment for staff and students. I dont always agree with them and sometimes I don't like how things are handled, but I'm under no illusions they care about our school community.

Other places they look at spreadsheet and hammer teachers witj them, bring out 30,000 new initiatives a week to justify their salary and generally pass the workload down.

As in any line of work there are external and internal pressures. SLT (and any leader in a school to be honest) tends to get a fair amount of crap thrown towards them by virtue of being a leader (E.g. someone with an easier timetable, 1 exam class and is under allocation so has extra time had the nerve to suggest that it's not fair I have my PPA time because I don't know how hard it is)

Some leaders are poor leaders. Some teachers love to complain about the leadership boogyman because they like having something to moan about.

You know all this data and tracking that teachers are spending so much time on?

[[https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/3457511-Ofsted-announce-school-report-grades-are-bollocks-and-to-be-ignored]

Light at the end of the tunnel?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/3457511-Ofsted-announce-school-report-grades-are-bollocks-and-to-be-ignored

Working link

Regarding the girl who managed to get through school unable to read.

In years gone by primary school was there to get children to a place where they can all read, write and do basic maths.

Secondary school was to build on that.

Now your reception child age 4-5 is expected to read and write
From the early years framework for reception children

Literacy
Reading: children read and understand simple sentences. They use phonic knowledge to decode regular words and read them aloud accurately. They also read some common irregular words. They demonstrate understanding when talking with others about what they have read.
Writing: children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible

There is even a bit where it states that disabilities and SENs are to be tested at 2 years old.

Most 2 year olds are not in nursery and something like dyslexia it isn’t tested for until 7 years old anyway.

There is so many holes I cannot believe they actually put pen to paper so to speak

BoneyBack

It seems, from the tone of your posts, that you do not approve of private schools. Or have some issues with them at the very least, because you seem to assume that as it is a private school that there is likely to be problems along the way. That may be borne of experience or an ideological stand point, I don't know.

I hope that the school that you choose does your children proud and that you are not to blinded to see if it goes wrong

I hope that I would recognise the fact my child was struggling in some way with school and that I would do so long before it "all went wrong"- although like most parents I am not perfect and do get it wrong sometimes. However, I don't see that as only a problem for parents who chose a private education for their children. I am somewhat bemused as to the reason behind your assumption that it is more likely that we would be neglectful of our DC's well-being/ likely to be wilfully ignorant or "blind" to a problem our DC were having because we have chosen the private route. I am genuinely surprised that you'd make such as assumption and (though I'm not sure why) a little saddened.

As I said, I have no doubt that many private schools are not the right place for SEND children. Very many state schools aren't so wonderful for SEND children either though (and some are downright awful), so it is not as though state schools are universally excellent in that respect either.

I am also more than aware that not all private schools are better than state schools. Some are positively mediocre whilst some state schools are excellent. However, many private schools are also excellent and provide a wonderful education for their pupils.

But you are right in that I have made a choice. A choice that I believe to be right choice for my DC, who appear to be thriving thus far and have been given some amazing opportunities. It is, of course, possible (likely even) that this school would not be the right school for every single child. However, I know that our other options in terms of state schools would have been inferior. If we had excellent state schools local to us, we may have made a different choice.

I totally agree with that Oliversmummy, when tgey start school kids are expected to be able to read, or pick it up quickly, same with writing and maths, time isent taken to teach these things properly, and for individual differences in children.

Three words: Multi academy trusts. They are the problem as take so much money from the schools. The average secondary school could employ about 10-15 extra teachers for the amount which they pay to be part of mats.
The lack of money impacts on everything else.