Is teaching really that bad?

[Cremeegg456]

I did a secondary PGCE and gained a pass with Merit, and 'outstanding', that was 6 years ago and I've never completed my nqt year.
I know the PGCE isn't representative of what actual teaching is like though but I remember it being what seemed like a lot of unnecessary paperwork, but we also had the assignments on top.

I've done various work with young and elderly people since which I've enjoyed, but I've never made a lot more than minimum wage. Had zero hours contracts, agency work etc.

I did enjoy teaching but I am just not prepared to work evenings and weekends as well, it's just not worth having no life for me. Not prepared to work more than 45 hours a week.

But truthfully if I want a higher and more stable income I think I would have to go into it, if I'm thinking of buying a house, children etc in the next few years.

Would be interested to hear from people as to what their work life balance really is.

Medicine? Law? Banking? Almost every profession requires you to put in hours of unpaid overtime.

I agree up to a point. I have friends in businesses/law firms who need to work ridiculous hours at times, and have had to cancel holidays due to the demands of the client. The difference is that they earn around 3x as much as a teacher.

I'm not talking about resources, that is the teachers job, but in secondary schools teachers are not writing IEPs and provision maps for Sen students.

@switswoo81

Like pp I'm in Ireland. Teach mixed infants class, am the deputy head and have two very young children of my own. I don't feel a bit overwhelmed. I absolutely love every bit of my job . Two days a week I stay in school until 4 and the other three I leave at 2:30 ( my class go home at 1:30 but I came leave until 2:30) and that is mainly to catch up on my deputy Principal work.

I’m intrigued to know the differences between teaching between England/Ireland-I’ve heard this a lot. What are the marking/planning/assessment/meeting/subject lead expectations?

I feel like I’m England, we have to do massive amounts of hugely time-consuming crap just for the sake of it and all it achieves is burnt out staff and stressed children!

@Shinyandnew1 a huge thing I'm fascinated with is the managing of budgets. Principals don't manage staff pay budgets you get so many teachers based on your numbers. If you need to hire a new one their pay grade is irrelevant. Same with snas ..I don't know if I make myself clear there.
We use textbooks here and they usually provide termly plans so I just adapt them for differentiation. Then at the end of every month we hand up a monthly report, about 13 pages long most of which I can translate from the plans.
Assessment for my class is a folder with some pages for each child .. eg letter sound assessment. Prehandwriting etc and I'll build it over the year . Very simple.
I don't do marking I just date textbooks as I walk around and observe children. I make notes on post it and stick into assessment folder for myself.
Over the year we have 32 hours for staff meetings but 10 of these can be for your own planning.
No subject leads. A couple of people per school will have an extra duties post which is around 3900 extra a year.
Sorry for the essay. I find the differences very interesting. Teachers generally retire out of schools so we retain the experience very few leave the profession.

God, I wish it was like Ireland here. So sensible.

@cansu totally disagree. I don't regularly work evenings and weekends. Parents' evenings, sure, and the very occasional half hour of marking, but my weekends are my own.

@WithRosesAroundTheDoor

A friend of mine was ranting about this the other day and it's just hitting me how right she is. The whole culture around teaching is wrong and really takes advantage of the emotional connection that we have with pupils. In no other job would you be expected to put in so much unpaid overtime. There are no other roles where you would be considered failing and put through capability without hours of unpaid overtime. It's so bloody wrong and is reliant on us being afraid to let the side down.

Law, finance, medicine...

I feel like I’m England, we have to do massive amounts of hugely time-consuming crap just for the sake of it and all it achieves is burnt out staff and stressed children!

I’ve only taught in England too. I think the expectations are just unrealistic - on the one hand it’s good to want the best kind of education for our children but at the same time it’s unrealistic to expect the highest calibre when the time and resources simply aren’t available. I work in primary and the development in recent years of subject leadership roles, with OFSTED conducting ‘deep dives’ is also ridiculous. Yes in in theory it’s great for leaders to take more responsibility for their subjects and improve quality of teaching and learning - but no extra time or resources (or money!) has been given to facilitate this. And it’s like they didn’t even consider that some schools are just one form entry, or very small ones even have only 80 or so children on roll spread across 3 or 4 classes leaving some teachers leading 3+ subjects. It’s insane.
I think in other countries they don’t follow pipe dreams, they work with what is reasonable and manageable rather than what the ‘ideal’ should be, because they know teachers are not wizards who can magic extra hours into the day.

Wow, that is massively different!

We have year group planning meeting on a Monday-A4 page for every single literacy lesson and every maths lesson. Separate objectives for starter and main lesson sometimes the TA has to do a separate starter/input with different groups, 4 way differentiation and plenary. Phonics planning for the week fits on one A4 page, as does topic.

Staff meeting very Tuesday-mostly pointless but long.

Marking takes forever-even in Y1 when they can’t read the comments. Deep marking for certain pieces of writing is crazy.

Assessment is endless highlighted sheets (APP type) and data then inputted onto the computer.

Displays changed regularly.

Lesson observations termly. They are often fine if you are cheap. UPS teacher observations can be more suspect and they are often quickly put on capability as they are too expensive.

All staff lead a subject so huge amounts of our time is spent now rewriting the curriculum progression maps as clearly just saying, ‘we follow the NC’ isn’t good enough!

Y1 is mostly phonics, Y2 is prepping for moderation! YR has been messed with a lot this year with baseline and assessment changes.

I want to move to Ireland …!

I am a full time secondary teacher with 2 kids in Year 2 and year 4. I love my job , did my PGCE when they were 3 and 1 years old. I worked as an accountant and this really is my vocation. I work with many others who have kids and work full time so lots of previous posts saying its impossible are rubbish!

I do work evenings once they are in bed but only planning and this is lessening year on year.

I am also a mentor for a PGCE student this year, she has 2 very small children too , nursery age and is enjoying it so far!

I was just about keeping my head above water, and by that I mean I had a snorkel that was slowly beginning to fill with water! To achieve this “glorious” achievement, I worked at least 10 hours at the weekend and numerous evenings. Then my DS came along and my priorities changed and now I don’t want to work 65 hours a week and so I don’t…I do about 48 and am now full on drowning and am so miserable that I can’t keep on top of my workload. Currently pregnant with baby number two but looking for an exit strategy because I know it’s going to be even worse. Such a shame as a love the actual teaching part!

Janey @Shinyandnew1 I am shocked. Everything is simpler here. No lesson observations, you could get an external inspector. I have had two in twenty years. I suppose a principal could .in to observe at any time technically.
The subject lead is just not a thing here. We don't have year heads or anything like that.
Assessment is for yourself and your own information. I am very much in charge of my classroom and if I get a notion to do art all day or follow something topical that they like we go with it..I never plan individual lessons.
We don't have Ta's and don't get planning time in the day you are with your own class all the time . But the day is shorter and we don't have assemblies/get changed for pe etc.
Displays are sticking up their artwork and no one has ever commented on them.
Thanks for the chats..

I think all jobs are getting worse and worse for no work/life balance.

I miss the school holidays massively now I'm in a full time office-based role but I got too drained by the behaviour of the children (and some parents) and vowed never to go back. Now though, I work the same (or more) weekly hours and I don't have the holidays. It felt more balanced with the regular holidays in all honesty but maybe I've just left one shit, demanding profession for another.

I'd give anything to cut my hours down. Still working now! I don't feel like I have a life.

Most teachers I know do work weekends and evenings. Itssquidstella.
If you don't then clearly you don't have a school that is constantly changing the curriculum, asking you to record the outcomes of every lesson you teach, fill in behaviour charts, log behaviour on an online reporting system etc etc. I spend about 7 hours on a Sunday planning and usually do at least an hour on admin, emails and form filling every evening sometimes more. I think it used to be much more manageable.

I have been a teacher for 35 years, first in secondary schools, then FE and now in HE.

I taught in a secondary school for 10 years and always worked most evenings and weekends. I escaped into FE thinking it would be better. There was less lesson prep and marking IN FE but far, far more paperwork. Each course is funded with a different income stream and you have to track the students down to the tiniest detail, plus FE has had massive cuts in the last few years (far worse than any other field of education) so there are virtually no admin staff. Teachers have to do all their own course admin like setting up registers, check fee payments etc. So, no, FE is not easier than school teaching.

I have been teaching in HE since I got my PhD 5 years ago. I have worked in 3 different universities. I can say that working as a university lecturer is FAR less work than school or FE teaching. Lecture planning is onerous for the first two years and after that most lecturers just do the same lectures year after year which was more or less impossible in FE where you had to differentiate and provide evidence of differentiation for every single student in every lesson. There is also hardly any admin to do because there are proper admin staff. Universities are SO well resourced in comparison to FE.

@cansu No, i work in a private school which has its own challenges in the form of extremely high expectations from ST, parents and pupils, but the trade-off is a lot of autonomy and minimal box-ticking paperwork.

I will hold my hands up and say that I am efficient to the point of ruthlessness, though, so I probably do take less home even than other colleagues in my school.

@Cremeegg456

I'm not afraid of work i used to work approx 60 hours a week over 6 days, but at the expense of rarely seeing anyone, no time for hobbies, cooking etc. Life's too short

Well that's teaching. Over 60hours a week, exhausted and too tired for my own family

[quote switswoo81]@Shinyandnew1 a huge thing I'm fascinated with is the managing of budgets. Principals don't manage staff pay budgets you get so many teachers based on your numbers. If you need to hire a new one their pay grade is irrelevant. Same with snas ..I don't know if I make myself clear there.
We use textbooks here and they usually provide termly plans so I just adapt them for differentiation. Then at the end of every month we hand up a monthly report, about 13 pages long most of which I can translate from the plans.
Assessment for my class is a folder with some pages for each child .. eg letter sound assessment. Prehandwriting etc and I'll build it over the year . Very simple.
I don't do marking I just date textbooks as I walk around and observe children. I make notes on post it and stick into assessment folder for myself.
Over the year we have 32 hours for staff meetings but 10 of these can be for your own planning.
No subject leads. A couple of people per school will have an extra duties post which is around 3900 extra a year.
Sorry for the essay. I find the differences very interesting. Teachers generally retire out of schools so we retain the experience very few leave the profession.[/quote]
I think if teaching was more like this in England, there wouldn’t be a retention crisis. The Exit the classroom Facebook page has tens of thousands of members now.

It’s not rocket science. Just sad, because it’s clear it doesn’t have to be like this (I already knew this because I’m old and have been teaching since before a lot of this craziness started).

I can track a lot of it back to the introduction of PPA. When that came in, SLT could say, ‘oh, just do it in your PPA’.

I’d rather have no PPA and no pointless crap!

In no other job would you be expected to put in so much unpaid overtime.

I have every sympathy with teachers, I know plenty, all of whom are overworked and stressed. Listening to them actually stopped me making a move into teaching which had been my long term plan.

However, if you want support and empathy from non-teachers , you have to stop making ridiculous claims like the above. 60+ hour weeks were not unusual in my industry against 37.5 hour contracts, without the long vacations to recover (i appreciate teachers work much of their holidays but I doubt many are working 60 hours during the vacation too? (Apologies if I'm wrong but don't see any of my teacher friends doing that). . It wasn't unusual for people I worked with to not take all their vacation as it simply wasn't worth extra hours before and after as a result.

One of my teacher friends claimed that 'everyone in industry earns a shit load of money for doing nothing' - not true at all and also not a great way to win support and empathy!

Yes but when you work outside teaching you aren't assessed on the performance of people....over whom ultimately you have no control! I have no control if they walk into that GCSE exam and write absolutely nothing. Doesn't matter how well I teach, cajole, nag, detention, do extra classes etc etc etc..... ultimately I have no control.

That's stressful

I used to be the corporate kid, teaching is differently stressful. It's a "performance" for 6 hours a day. That's tiring. The sheer level of responsibility is tiring. Come on you all remember home schooling? Times it by 30 kids, 1/3 of whom have SEN and need extra help.....

I don’t know about support and empathy from non-teachers, but parents should certainly be alarmed at the state of the teaching profession. Not for empathy reasons, but because it is adversely impacting the education of your kids.

I don't disagree with any of these recent comments - my point was about teachers (including on this thread) making factually incorrect claims. Stick to the fact based issues - blimey they are bad enough!

@noblegiraffe

I don’t know about support and empathy from non-teachers, but parents should certainly be alarmed at the state of the teaching profession. Not for empathy reasons, but because it is adversely impacting the education of your kids.

How would parents even know? It's like the best kept secret only known within the inner workings of education.

What’s interesting though is that when the age old state vs private debate comes up, lots of people still insist there no difference at all.