Those who think teaching is easy should put their money where their mouth is

[noblegiraffe]

Teacher training applications which rose during the pandemic have now fallen to 15% below pre-pandemic levels when we already had a critical teacher shortage. The government's decision to slash bursaries is now looking completely idiotic.

www.tes.com/news/teacher-training-applications-drop-pre-covid-levels

The only thing that the government has put an appreciable amount of funding into recently related to schools is £24 million to ensure that they will all be Ofsteded within the next 5 years. With inspectors expected to massively reduce the number of outstanding schools, this is a punishing schedule rather than a supportive one.

This is causing Heads to quit, on top of how terribly they were treated during the pandemic (this continued with an email late Friday telling them that they once again have to take on the job of the NHS and set up covid testing centres for January, with orders needing to be in by Tuesday).

We already have a critical shortage of headteachers.

www.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/27/ofsted-inspections-headteachers-quit

I've noticed lots of posts on here from people who think that teaching is easy, that school funding is fine and there are no issues in schools, that you can leave at 3 and get lots of holidays.

So isn't it about time they put their money where their mouth is and trained as teachers? We are in dire need of them, and it's such a doss it should be a pleasure for them. A bit of a holiday even. And as it would be a public service, it would be guilt-free.

getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/

[quote spaceghetto]@Pumperthepumper planning, marking, setting work for online learning, sorting emails, completing various pieces of work for subject lead stuff, always preparing for ofsted by reading. I am new to teaching so think it takes me longer than others, I find it incredibly tough but quite stuck now.[/quote]
What are the various pieces of work for subject lead stuff?

And how do you mark?

I can’t think of many other jobs that put that pressure and accountability on to people without any extra pay or time to do it in!

Sadly there are loads. Care work. Healthcare. Social work. Childcare.

Angeldelight28

This is true. My sibling works in marketing and communications, russell group 2.1 degree, 12 years into career has yet to hit 30k despite promotions etc. By contrast, sibling who went into teaching is on 50k despite going to less prestigious uni, worse a-level grades etc, less well recognised subject. Same length of time working.

I think teachers don't realise pay in most areas except law, finance & senior business management etc can be bloody crap pay.

@Classicblunder @Iheartbaby are their genuinely regular scale workers in these other professions who are held to account for leadership and management responsibilities without the actual role, pay or time? In terms of their inspections? Or is it managers who are actually held accountable and grilled about the policies etc etc. I am SLT so I AM paid for be held accountable but if churns my stomach that mainscale class teachers are being held accountable with these Ofsted deep dives. It never used to happen and it’s unreasonable that it’s happening now. They’re being grilled on policy and practise organisation wide and held accountable for leadership that they are not in a leadership role or paid or even given time to prepare paperwork for. If that is happening in care etc too then it’s an absolute travesty. Only those in management positions should be held accountable to inspectorates for leadership and management roles!

Are ‘there’

@GuyFawkesDay Sure, I can understand that's really tough. But you chose that profession, presumably knowing what the challenges would be. I just don't like the martyr mentality, where people think theirs is the hardest, most underpaid job ever and everyone else has it better (and I'm not just talking about teachers, it applies to other professions too).

I’m so glad l escaped. After 25 years teaching it broke my mental health. I got ill health retirement.

It’s a terrible toxic environment at the moment. Covid just added to it. I loved teaching but that forms about 5% of the job.

I’d hate to be a gp or teacher at the moment.

I think teachers don't realise pay in most areas except law, finance & senior business management etc can be bloody crap pay.

So we have hordes of people currently on bloody crap pay queuing up to be teachers do we?

Why not if the pay is great?

[quote Hercisback]@Pumperthepumper Noble has written a detailed post above with the admin requirements.

Last year the TAG process took hours of my life to ensure students were accurately graded. I did work that I would ordinarily be paid for (by the exam board) for free (and on top of my normal workload).

Monitoring and tracking interventions is majority wasted time. Giving teachers more time to plan effective lessons would have far more impact.[/quote]

I've lost count of how many times we've had to spend PPA doing data/tracking/gradings/subject lead stuff (because I don't get subject release time) so have just taken 5 minutes to edit last year's planning. Shit I know, but I literally wouldn't have time to jazz it up.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but I know from my colleagues it wasn't up to scratch last year so really needs a revamp but there's no time left in the day.

Time to actually use ppa for p & p and less of the a would be gladly welcomed!

@Pumperthepumper
Subject lead in secondary:
Write SOW for each year group.
Mentor new staff.
Fill in curriculum development plan.
Write half termly reports for SLT.
Write assessments for all year groups Inc sixth form.
Monitor internal data and sort interventions.
Marking is acknowledgement marking in books and 3x assessments marked per half term.
Deal with parent phonecalls/emails.
Set moves.
Train staff, particularly pedagogy and if your subject is taught by non specialists.

There's more but that's off the top of my head.

The government will only improve conditions if they have no choice like with lorry drivers. I’d suggest anyone who hates their job to look elsewhere. If numbers fall to low they’ll have no choice. They have been giving visas to well educated Hong Kong nationals though so maybe they might plug the gap?

Do you think any of the extra bureaucracy has improved situation for the pupils? I can’t see the number of mocks helping much.

It generates data, and SLT love data. It means they can update the intervention spreadsheet.

Would you believe me if I said (and this may be a maths thing) that every single score for every single question for every pupil on those three sets of mocks had to be typed into a spreadsheet? This is a massive task for each class.

Then we can generate another spreadsheet and say ‘Johnny didn’t do well on the fractions questions so I need to make sure Johnny does more work on fractions’.

This is probably not as helpful as it sounds.

One thing I do slightly disagree with is the Ofsted pressure. We've recently had ours and it was a breeze compared to previous. We knew which lessons they would visit and when, which staff he'd need to talk to, our head is relatively blasé about ofsted so we don't have the ofsted fear culture so we did more or less carry on as normal. I'm reading lead in primary so was absolutely shitting it when we got the call, but found it so much less stressful this time round.

I think a lot of the ofsted pressure comes from SLT, not ofsted.

Sympathy noble. We have streamlined that slightly by getting students to enter the info. Tbh it is useless information. SLT love data because the government/ofsted love data.

@DeepaBeesKit Yes, exactly, and it's especially bad for younger people. Wages have stagnated in many sectors and it's a crowded market - humanities/arts graduates are competing with hundreds of other similar graduates for every role.

I dont think anyone truly thinks teachers "have it easy". The vast majority agree that teachers do an incredibly important job, work very hard and do so on a pay level that clearly doesnt compete with some professions.

We just don't think they are constantly working much harder/have it loads worse than most other professionals on similar pay etc.

Very few people out there coasting along getting decent pay in easy low stress jobs.

@Hercisback

Sympathy noble. We have streamlined that slightly by getting students to enter the info. Tbh it is useless information. SLT love data because the government/ofsted love data.

Ofsted won't ask for data anymore. If you want to show off your lovely spreadsheets you have to thrust it under their noses.

@Pumperthepumper
Happy to share admin from the last week.

Planning and prep and marking for my lessons - to be expected, not moaning about that.

Updating 8 send support plans and printing them off. Contacting parents to arrange to discuss these and have them sign them. Then having those discussions with 8 sets of parents including one rescheduled meeting because a parent didn’t turn up. Scanning in 8 signed send support plans and uploading to our system so the senco can check them over.

Logging behaviour incidents for a violent and disruptive pupil including completing a restrictive physical intervention form justifying why I had to use reasonable force to hold this child to stop him slapping, kicking, hitting and spitting at other children and staff. Emailing the behaviour crisis team to update them that their nice little interventions didn’t work. Speaking to the three parents of children attacked by this child and basically asking them to be ‘nice’ because the child has needs and their is no money to provide support.

Organising an author visit for my class because I want to do something inspiring and nice for them. I could just not bother but how sad is that if the teacher isn’t doing things like this or organising trips.

Replying to a parent email. A complaint that I haven’t heard their child read this week (sorry but I was restraining a child on Wednesday when I would usually have heard your child read).

Planning and prepping for a TA to cover my class while I attend a looked after child review meeting. TA covering because we don’t have enough money to use a supply teacher. It takes a lot more time to plan and prep for someone else. And as it’s a TA I still have to mark the work after the lesson even though I didn’t teach it.

Organising to subject my fellow teachers to some “learning walks” so I can get “evidence” about the subject I lead in case Ofsted come and choose my subject for a deep dive. It’s music and I don’t have a musical bone in my body but someone has to be the expert. Ofsted expect one. After I’ve done them I’ll have to type them up to go in my file. I’ll also have to email the link subject governor to update them.

This is all outside of my 8-4 when I’m prepping for the day, teaching or marking.

So we have hordes of people currently on bloody crap pay queuing up to be teachers do we? Why not if the pay is great?

Loads of reasons .

I don't (for example) because I dont really like working with children, I'm not terribly patient, also because my degree and post graduate areas of expertise aren't mainstream school subjects.

Of course there are pros and cons of teaching, as there are in any job. Loads of people are indeed queuing up to become teachers, however we do need bloody loads of teachers so it just isnt enough.

@noblegiraffe that’s madness! Having Read a number of teachers threads (and other organisations that are bureaucratic for the sake of it) I can completely believe it. I take it you already had an inkling of which students are struggling with fractions or algebra from all the marking of normal class work and mocks?

[quote Sparkles715]@Pumperthepumper
Happy to share admin from the last week.

Planning and prep and marking for my lessons - to be expected, not moaning about that.

Updating 8 send support plans and printing them off. Contacting parents to arrange to discuss these and have them sign them. Then having those discussions with 8 sets of parents including one rescheduled meeting because a parent didn’t turn up. Scanning in 8 signed send support plans and uploading to our system so the senco can check them over.

Logging behaviour incidents for a violent and disruptive pupil including completing a restrictive physical intervention form justifying why I had to use reasonable force to hold this child to stop him slapping, kicking, hitting and spitting at other children and staff. Emailing the behaviour crisis team to update them that their nice little interventions didn’t work. Speaking to the three parents of children attacked by this child and basically asking them to be ‘nice’ because the child has needs and their is no money to provide support.

Organising an author visit for my class because I want to do something inspiring and nice for them. I could just not bother but how sad is that if the teacher isn’t doing things like this or organising trips.

Replying to a parent email. A complaint that I haven’t heard their child read this week (sorry but I was restraining a child on Wednesday when I would usually have heard your child read).

Planning and prepping for a TA to cover my class while I attend a looked after child review meeting. TA covering because we don’t have enough money to use a supply teacher. It takes a lot more time to plan and prep for someone else. And as it’s a TA I still have to mark the work after the lesson even though I didn’t teach it.

Organising to subject my fellow teachers to some “learning walks” so I can get “evidence” about the subject I lead in case Ofsted come and choose my subject for a deep dive. It’s music and I don’t have a musical bone in my body but someone has to be the expert. Ofsted expect one. After I’ve done them I’ll have to type them up to go in my file. I’ll also have to email the link subject governor to update them.

This is all outside of my 8-4 when I’m prepping for the day, teaching or marking.[/quote]
Im genuinely open-mouthed at how similar our days are. I have never seen a workable inclusion policy in education, never.

Except for the OFSTED lead stuff, what does ‘typing them up’ look like?

@Bellfor I'd love to believe they won't, however anecdotally they definitely still are asking for data. They also want policies and staff sticking to policies.

There are a lot of ofsted myths out there, but the data pressure has come from the push towards accountability. You can only be accountable for something 'measurable' (at least according to most PM targets I've seen).

Yes to each score from each question being typed into a spreadsheet. And a code for how well each student performed in each AO in each question too in our case.
It’s horrible being in such a hated, ridiculed job whose value is constantly derided and questioned. I love teaching and after 20 years won’t move but I’m sad how ok it seems acceptable to have really weirdly polarised views of it. Either ‘it’s easy, leave at 3, yous all moan a lot, loads of holidays etc’ (inaccurate) or ‘omg you must be a saint, teenagers are all feral’ (they’re not, they’re generally really lovely and fun to work with most of the time).
And again, during lockdown I only heard ‘our school provision was crap, couple of worksheets a week, lazy teachers’ or ‘wow my kids’ teachers are awesome, they taught so amazingly, etc’. The latter was lovely to hear of course but I just seem to remember muddling through like the next person during online teaching, doing my own job while prodding my own kids through their lessons. ‘Ok, 10 minute independent work, questions in the chat, then send it to me’ would have me legging it upstairs to pull out the Xbox cable/yell at my own teens/start lunch/dash back to see if anyone needed help/put dogs out for a wee. I did ok. Not great but alright.
Such extreme responses. Little moderation. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[quote Hercisback]@Bellfor I'd love to believe they won't, however anecdotally they definitely still are asking for data. They also want policies and staff sticking to policies.

There are a lot of ofsted myths out there, but the data pressure has come from the push towards accountability. You can only be accountable for something 'measurable' (at least according to most PM targets I've seen).[/quote]

Policies - yes, he had a good, thorough read of all relevant policies. But did not ask to see a single spreadsheet.

Section 8.

However, last ofsted in previous school in 2017 was all about data and evidence.