Okay, about teachers...

[KitKat1985]

Okay I'm being brave here. I know a few people who happen to be teachers. Whenever they talk about their jobs, there's a real 'no other profession has to work as hard as us' vibe to their speech. I am fully aware and in agreement that it's a stressful job with long hours and ridiculous amount of pressure if you don't count the long holidays but it's hardly the only profession that has these issues. I myself am a nurse, and 14 hour shifts on an under-staffed ward with no breaks and several severely ill / abusive patient to look after are hardly a picnic either. But whenever I discuss work with teacher friends there's a definite 'if you want to talk about stress you should try being a teacher' element to the conversation, and it's starting to really get on my nerves. Lots of jobs are stressful, teaching isn't the only one! And it's only teachers I know that seem to have this general attitude about their profession. AIBU? Is it really more stressful than any other profession out there?

I do understand that but if you’re working in a sector that has hundreds of vacancies who wouldn’t you at least move to one of the better organisations (schools) who don’t make their teachers work 50 hour weeks?

I'd think if there are hundreds of vacancies, then a hefty proportion will be making ridiculous demands of their teaching staff. Then there's accessibility. There are good schools out there, teachers on these boards say they work at them. Once you've factored in where the jobs actually are the choices aren't necessarily wide. I'm sure an element of better the devil you know is part of this.

A change of HT can radically alter a school. This happened in the last UK school I taught it went from tough but do-able to an absolute zoo. And all down to the HT.

What I don't understand is if teaching is as awful as people say it is, why don't they leave and do something else? No one is forced to do a job they hate forever.

Plenty of people do. This isn't a teaching forum, but even on here there are threads each year asking what Ex teachers do now, and looking for advice on how to leave. However, leaving a job is a big step for most people.

Why are you comparing your job to that of your friends OP?
Is it not possible for both jobs to be very stressful in different ways?
I am a teacher and my job is stressful.
I have several friends who are nurses. They often share posts (via FB) letting everyone know how stressful their job is.
Why would I doubt them?

The latest post shared by them from 'The barefoot nurse':

I suspect it is hard to love a nurse. We get up early and don't have time to drink coffee over the newspaper. We come home late and are too tired to cook. We work extra because we know there are sick people who need us. We miss weekend events, holidays, birthdays. We don't get too excited over your minor "boo-boo". We have seen far worse.

We don't want to talk when we come home. We have talked all day. We don't want to move when we come home. We have moved all day.

It may seem that we have left all our caring, our heart, and our love at work, then have come home to you empty. We probably have. But we don't tell you that many times at work that we are mired by anxiety, we are scared. Scared we are missing something. Scared we will let our patient down or worse. Scared that we'll have to deal with angry or violent patients and families. We don't tell you how the staffing crisis makes us cry on the way to work, to do a job we love, but now we are terrified to do because it is breaking us down while putting the most vulnerable at risk.

I suspect it is hard to love a nurse, but know this: Your nurse needs your love. Needs your understanding. Needs to know that you "get it". Needs to be the one taken care of every once and a while. Needs someone else to take charge of the details because doing it themselves constantly is exhausting. Needs their feet rubbed. (Hint hint) Needs a shoulder to cry on when they can't even tell you why they're grieving. Needs you to do the hardest work you may ever do, which is to love a nurse.

I would like to thank those of you out there who love us and let us do this work, this calling, this life: Nursing.❤️❤️❤️

I am teacher married to a nurse. He would be the first to say that teaching is much more stressful than nursing. Yes, he works long shifts but only 3 or 4 a week. The rest of the time is his own. In 25years together, he has never brought any work home - I work most nights! He finds it difficult to understand why I'm doing paperwork at home, as time would be allocated in the working day in his role. However, I do earn more money than he does - nursing is underpaid more than teaching.

Therefore you can perform as poorly as you want and be save in the knowledge you be fired .

That's just not true. I was a school number for many years. During that time I was aware of a number of teachers who were put through capability. Some were justifiable, but they all left before they were sacked. At least 4 others were basically being bullied out for various reasons - they were too expensive, they were challenging to a weak head.

If any of those had gone to an ET I would have supported them but none did. They secured a reference and then moved on, away from the toxic environment.

And of course schools in a poor financial situation want to get rid of more expensive staff, especially if they are carrying high numbers of vacancies. Get rid of 2 well paid staff and employ 3 NQTS in their place. Now you've filled 3 vacancies for the cost of 2 so solved 2 problems in one - staff shortages plus financial problem.

dorset, there are lots of mainscale vacancies. Lots of more experienced or middle management staff are stuck as moving might mean (certainly in my case) taking a hefty pay cut and losing responsibilities. People ( usually men....) far cheaper than me are gaining these SLT posts.

That said, it is not my hours or pay that stress me out.

Just to add, I have been trying (quite hard!) to leave my particular school for 15 years!!

There might be some people who can move anywhere in the country to take on a new role : middle aged women with children don't often fall into that category.

And, as for doing another job, I have a very talented friend who has just done that and know of many more. Most have had to stomach a pay cut and take non graduate jobs to do this. Again, most people with a family cannot do this.

My DH, an excellent teacher who gets excellent results, has eventually had enough and is going part time next year. After 26 years of full time teaching. And that's a private school, which so many recommend as an easier life!

It really isn't about the hours : that seems to be the only currency people outside teaching understand or can deal in. I definitely do work about 45 hours a week (which I don't think is low working hours, by the way!) but I still feel stress on a daily basis. The accountability and the scrutiny and the constant absence of students and other staff are draining. I like many aspects of the job, not least the subjects I teach and could not do a non people facing job. But it is exhausting.

I have committed the crime of not yet having read the whole thread but just wanted to respond to something a pp has said in the first page.
I am a Nurse and absolutely DO bring work home with me. The expectations are that we now do research and projects alongside our daily work. For example, I was up all night writing a paper on a few clinical case studies.

This work is NOT added to our daytime schedules where I am. It's all home work,.

Are posters actually now questioning, “why teachers don’t leave, if it’s soooo bad?”

?!?!

Umm, we ARE. Have you not read the news over the last several years?! We’ve been leaving in our thousands, most in secondary don’t last beyond 5-10 years in the job now.

The pps asking why teachers don't leave - are you parents?

If so, chances are your children are being taught in one of these schools. Would you rather they were taught by dedicated teachers who are specialists in their subject or by a series of supply teachers who may or may not be subject specialists, who have no loyalty to the school and who have no interest in the progress made by the students because they aren't there long enough?

It odd that parents would encourage staff to leave these schools and the students with no teacher. I guess you are all assuming that your child's school doesn't have this toxic attitude towards its staff.

SachaStark
Yes they are, because every other ridiculous accusation given has been challenged or shown to be goady, so now it's "so why don't you just leave", "we all know people who don't work the hours people on here claim" etc.

It's all rather funny, if it didn't come back to what people have been saying for pages: there is a recruitment and retention crisis, the fact there's lots of vacancies probably tells you that the challenges in education are real.
Of course they couldn't be real challenges, because that would mean acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, if someone speaks about the pressure in their job they might actually know what they're talking about (which would make this whole thread based on monitoring the nature of friends' workplace stress and lots of talk tales about staff as ridiculous as many of us knew it was at the start).

@Piggywaspushed

Just to add, I have been trying (quite hard!) to leave my particular school for 15 years

If you have had no luck in 15 years maybe you are not as good as you think you are. I struggle to believe that there were no suitable commutable schools in all that time.

Unless it’s not quite as bad as you suggest.

*Anyway, on the sacking of teachers: it really is fairly easy, as is breaking a teacher to the point of them quitting.

I refer you to the points many pages ago where we pointed out that the job is never done, no matter how much work we put in. There is always something that won't be done.*

@Atropa you know what else is fun? Finding one or two books that haven't been marked "correctly" (ie to whatever new standard you have decided on re: stickers, colour of pens, level of student response, presentation guidelines etc) or lack the requisite biweekly assessment (despite the fact you have explained that you only see that class once per week and due to a pattern of INSET/open days leading to short afternoons you haven't actually seen them for three weeks so you couldn't have performed an assessment in that two week period because the children did no work in that time) and then demanding every single book from every single child marked and laid out for you to go through with a fine tooth comb, one by one, noting down every single flaw you find on a proforma you have designed specifically for this event. All while the offending member of staff is forced to watch.

I'm actually feeling sick thinking about it and it didn't even happen to me. But it was made clear that it could have done. To any of us. If they felt like it. And I was in management. Shudder.

It still doesn't make it the most stressful job in the world but as previous posters have pointed out I don't think many teachers actually claim it is.

@silly248

Honestly it depends on many factors such as specialism. I have met appalling physics teachers who have their pick of schools and excellent art and music teachers who just don't see vacancies come up at all. It also depends on location - there is an over all recruitment crisis but it is most exaggerated in the south east. I would struggle to even get one or two applicants whenever I advertised, not even getting into qualification, whereas I had colleagues in some parts of the south west and in the North east who had double digit applications for any position (I do remember hearing of primary places in the NE with applications in the triple digits but I think that may be a myth). It's not the same everywhere and not everyone can move to London.

Poor management, targets, continual performance assessment, high workloads etc etc aren’t restricted to teaching though. Perhaps that’s why non teachers find it hard to understand, because everyone is under scrutiny in their jobs.

Unfortunately I doubt there are any sectors that don’t have bullying management in some places, that’s why we have employment legislation to try and protect employees. I’m not saying it’s easy to go through those processes but if the alternative is to just roll over nothing ever changes.

In answer to an earlier question about whether I, as a parent, would want the teachers in a poorly performing school to leave. The answer is yes because without that happening, what changes for that school?

Posted before on this thread, but needs to be posted again. ‘Why don’t teachers just leave’.

So dorset your strategy to improve school performance is to increase staff turnover?

In answer to an earlier question about whether I, as a parent, would want the teachers in a poorly performing school to leave. The answer is yes because without that happening, what changes for that school?

But nothing will change in the short time that your child is at school, apart from a succession of supply teachers until an nqt is found but there will be noone senior to mentor them so it will be pit luck as to how good they are. If the culture continues in the school then that nqt will move on after a year or 2 and your child is back to square one.

They are in secondary for 5 years. That doesn't give much time for a school in dire straits to turn around and for your child to catch up to where they should be.

I think that's why good teachers stick it out and put up with more than they should - because they know what the impact on the students will be.

silly, I didn't get the jobs I applied for , because at SLT level there is a lot of competition. And now , I am considered too 'old' having been at the same school too long for their liking. It's a vicious circle!!

Despite your judgement of me from afar, I am considered one of the best classroom teachers in my school and my subject got the best GCSE results in the school last year. So, you can put your assertions about my rubbishness back thanks.

I didn't suggest it was that bad for me. It is very stressful. I know I manage workload very well. I also know that plenty of other teachers are struggling far more than me.

@DecomposingComposers

This is very true. The majority of my students are ones who had supply after supply for year 9 and 10 and now in year 11 are missing huge chunks of knowledge and basic fundamental understanding.

And once a school gets a reputation for high turnover it becomes harder and harder to recruit. I have never worked in a science department with a full complement of specialists, each one has had unqualified, cover teachers with timetables of their own, non specialists (one department felt like it was half DT and half PE). All of which further drives the imbalance between good schools and the poorer ones.

We are currently missing 3 1/2 English teachers in a high performing school in a leafy and affluent semi-urban area.

Again, I know before anyone tells me, that staffing issues are a huge problem in the NHS, too.

Poor management, targets, continual performance assessment, high workloads etc etc aren’t restricted to teaching though.

True. Many people choose to work in professions as you describe and are paid accordingly.

£23,720 (NQT starting salary) to work under poor management, with unrealistic targets, continual performance assessment (based on the unrealistic targets) and ridiculous high workloads with little support is hardly enticing.

@Alittleodd

I honestly understand. I've seen it first hand as a governor trying to recruit in an outer London borough. Cost of living is high here and we couldn't attract staff on the rates that we could afford to pay. We had to have non specialists teaching core subjects. It was awful for the students and stressful for the staff.

I can't believe a parent would choose that for their child.

My son has just inherited a year 11 class. They are 3 or 4 levels below target grades due to several years of staff churn. His performance management for that class is 100% positive value added. A nigh on impossible target for any class let alone a class so far behind. How can targets like that not affect morale?