Nearly half of teachers plan to quit in the next 5 years

[freebritknee]

I saw this from a survey carried out by an education union.

Unmanageable workload is a significant factor.

This is madness how have the unions allowed the state of teachers employment to get this far where nearly half of them want out?!

It’s really hard to leave teaching because you have to give a full term’s notice. If you miss that by one day, it doesn’t count and you have to then give a term’s notice PLUS a term’s notice minus the stupid single day. You can only leave at the end of a term, which limits you to three days of the year. Not enough people know this. It makes life very difficult indeed when job hunting as you can only quit and then find a job or find a job and hope the employer will hold the post open for three months or so.

I once missed the deadline to resign on 1st September and resigned on the 3rd. That entire term then did not count. I had to work whole of the next term from 1st Jan to 30th April - a total notice period of eight months. Luckily, I was starting my own business or I’d have lost a job with a new non-teaching employer.

Is it a wonder teachers feel that schools take the piss?

I once

No idea why that end bit appeared twice! ^^

What utter b9llocks @GooodMorning. You think the reason we have a teacher shortage crisis is because of our existing teaching staff's attitude? If only

Well mrshoho - of you were just starting out and contemplating a career in teaching and read this thread, would you Join the profession?

Except group B leaving makes educational reform much more likely.

@Thumpkin

It’s really hard to leave teaching because you have to give a full term’s notice. If you miss that by one day, it doesn’t count and you have to then give a term’s notice PLUS a term’s notice minus the stupid single day. You can only leave at the end of a term, which limits you to three days of the year. Not enough people know this. It makes life very difficult indeed when job hunting as you can only quit and then find a job or find a job and hope the employer will hold the post open for three months or so.

I once missed the deadline to resign on 1st September and resigned on the 3rd. That entire term then did not count. I had to work whole of the next term from 1st Jan to 30th April - a total notice period of eight months. Luckily, I was starting my own business or I’d have lost a job with a new non-teaching employer.

Is it a wonder teachers feel that schools take the piss?

I once

You need to give half a term’s notice so that you can leave at the end of a term. So you should have been able to resign by October 31st, to leave at the Christmas.

@GooodMorning

Well mrshoho - of you were just starting out and contemplating a career in teaching and read this thread, would you Join the profession?

Mumsnet is not part of any recruitment strategy.

This thread is quite a ride. On the one hand we have people insisting that teachers won't quit (despite the actual data showing there's an issue with recruitment and retention) because the pay, holidays and pensions are just fantastic. On the other hand we have people insisting that teachers are quitting the fantastically well paid job with great holidays for something far shitter, because they read on MN that their job is stressful, something that they hadn't noticed up till then.

And in the mad section we have someone comparing educating children to fighting a war....then suggesting that this should make it an attractive prospect to, say, office-workers.

Group A try and recruit other teachers. They tell them the challenges but remind them of the cause. Of the importance of teaching, of how lucky they are to have a job and security

And what we are seeing is that new teachers join the profession and about half of them leave in a few years. Because no one warned them that it was a really hard job.

And this is why there is a recruitment and retention problem in education

So the retention issue isn’t a problem with workload, behaviour or work life balance. It’s whiny teachers.

@noblegiraffe
It’s still a fact that wanting to leave and actually leaving for a better job might be a challenge for some. Art teachers. English teachers etc might find it difficult. With inflation it’s likely staying put offers the best security.

English teachers can just get jobs in publishing. After all, someone suggested that's what we should do first.

[quote TizerorFizz]@noblegiraffe
It’s still a fact that wanting to leave and actually leaving for a better job might be a challenge for some. Art teachers. English teachers etc might find it difficult. With inflation it’s likely staying put offers the best security.[/quote]
What's to keep the maths teachers in post? Or Comp Sci?

Because we need teachers of all subjects. Saying 'well, the Art teachers will have to stay' isn't a good enough reason to not improve working conditions for all teachers.

I'm a TA and not a hope in hell would I consider teaching after what I've seen these last two years.

@GooodMorning

I think you are really good example of someone who has spectacularly failed to understand the problems.

Where are team c in your analogy? You know the ones who went to college with team a and b, who are on better pay/conditions and watching their friends struggling and say leave?

Or the fact that team a is made up of older colleagues who entered on better conditions and are staying as they are close to their pension? Or have cushy members because someone else in their dept keeps getting assigned the difficult classes?

There are so many problems with teaching that it’s hard to know where to start but you can’t just simplify it to complainers/non complainers. In the schools o have worked in, the complainers strategically push out the young, enthusiastic new teachers and stay the distance - it works for them.

@GooodMorning

Ok, in less metaphorical terms ...

There are two groups of teachers. Both are feeling burnt out. Both are tired. Both are overwhelmed with the paperwork, long hours, overstretched resources, beurocracy, lack of freedom, pay they feel could be better.

Teacher group A says 'we r grateful we have jobs and some security when millions dont'. 'we can remember why we joined this profession and we believe in improving education for our kids'. 'we don't like how things are but we believe it's worth fighting to change things and we have some ideas of how things could be better'. 'we are proud of our profession which offers so much to young people'.

Group A try and recruit other teachers. They tell them the challenges but remind them of the cause. Of the importance of teaching, of how lucky they are to have a job and security. They show others their passion and drive to change and they appeal to others to join them, to bring fresh ideas and solutions for moving education forward. They band together, submit ideas and research to government, tell the department of education what they teach for, what they are proud of and what a good education system might look like. They inspire the next generation of teachers to join them. Young people choosing their career paths are inspired to teach, they like the ideas they hear from group A about job security. They are keen to help make a difference, to help overcome the obstacles and move things forward. They want to be part of a solution. They want to contribute their ideas. They want to join others in overcoming the current obstacles in education

Group B sit down and complain about their plight. They defend their right to complain. They forget why they joined the profession. They are not grateful for their job security. They see others with more pay and wish it was them, instead of seeing others with less pay and feeling grateful for what they have. They see the difficulties and say to others 'this is shit, I might just leave'. Instead of thinking how to improve things, they tell others how bad things are. They ask 'why does know one listen to us'. They see their colleagues leave and say 'i don't blame them'. They see people are not joining the profession and say 'im not surprised it's crap'. When young people contemplating a career in teaching ask about it, they say, 'why would you bother joining'. They don't tell them about the job security, the rewards of seeing young people flourish. They don't tell them how much they need the new ideas new teachers can bring, how much they value hearing their plans, their contributions to make things better. They don't inspire them. The say, 'we need to tell you how bad it is'. Group B are in a difficult situation and they defend their right to complain about that situation.

And this is why there is a recruitment and retention problem in education.

There need to be more 'A' teachers and less 'B'.

What is the equivalent of mansplaining when it is a non-teacher explaining the retention crisis in teaching to a bunch of teachers??

@MrsHamlet

English teachers can just get jobs in publishing. After all, someone suggested that's what we should do first.

No I didn’t. I asked for an example job for an English graduate that wasn’t teaching.

@GooodMorning, With the greatest of respect, stop. Please. Just stop.
You are adding insult to injury.

@Shinyandnew1 It's also a full term's notice in my current school. Everywhere else I've worked has been half a term though. Perhaps this is a sign of some needing more time to recruit?

I love how the non teachers are just doing the adult equivalent of fingers in ears and shouting la la la.

Listen. To. The. Issues.

People aren't leaving in droves despite the apparently cushy hours, salary etc unless there's a bloody great heap of problems.

And there is.

Please, stop telling people with decades experience you know better than them. Are you really so ignorant and arrogant? I wouldn't dream of rocking up to my GP and telling them how to do their job because my relative was once a GP therefore I know what I'm taking about.

It's symptomatic of the exact issue people have been trying to tell you about. The status of teachers and the respect for the job has just gone.

@Arianya

The mad thing about schools in the UK, is that there are no set lessons. So every Teacher is making up their own content for everything. What a waste of time. There should be pull off the shelf lessons for every year. My friend works in an FE college and they actually did this. They designated several staff members to produce the resources and dish them out to everyone else. Then everyone else was told “you’re only delivering lessons not creating them, it’s a less specialist job so your salaries will be reduced - oh and also you will be in the classroom full time because you no longer need prep time, which means we don’t need all of you any more and will be making some redundant”.

To add insult to injury, my friend said she still had to create a lot of her own resources despite not being paid to do so, because the provided resources were crap and she didn’t feel comfortable standing in front of a class with those woeful materials. There were times when she was chasing the “creator” staff on a Sunday night for materials she needed to teach on Monday morning, and she would end up having to cobble something together because the materials weren’t provided in time.

As time has gone on and staff have left, they’ve been replaced with unqualified teachers, because the college felt that only the staff who created materials needed to be qualified teachers, the rest could just be TAs on term time only contracts. It’s a slippery slope to de-professionalisation of teaching.

Whilst that sounds like a crap situation for your friend, I still think that millions of hours are being wasted creating material, when you could have a library of lessons to access.

There are over 32,000 schools in the UK. Let's say each school had an average of 30 teachers (I've no idea), then that would be 960,000 teachers creating fresh material every day, instead of teaching from an approved lesson bank.

When I was a trainer in a Bank, I took many hours to create one lesson, which would then be available for others to use. Some trainers hardly planned at all, and flew by the seat of their pants. There must be lots of badly designed lessons by Teachers who perhaps can't be bothered to put in hours of Prep, or who maybe can't because they have kids and full lives.

Either way, what a massive waste of human hours - probably over 1 Million teachers, all preparing the same thing from scratch every year - talk about a waste of human resources.

If I was the Minister for Education, I would get in a team of brilliant teachers and get them to write every single lesson needed for every year of school. It could be proof read a hundred times and tweaked until it was 100% perfection. Then upload them all to a central database, for every teacher in the land to teach from. No more Prep required (apart from maybe gathering some materials). Children would be taught in a consistent fashion. And children moving from one school to another, would not miss material, they would slot in right where they had left off.

Teachers would be able to go home at 4pm, and actually have a life!

if you were a classroom teacher on average salary of £38k who wanted to leave the public sector, to make up for the extra weeks you’d have to work (at the same level of pay) and the pension contributions you’d be losing, you’d need to find a job of around £55k gross

We wouldn't @SonicBroom. Your logic and calculations make no sense. We already work through our holidays, so a job that gives us five weeks holiday and at the same salary that we're earning now would be fine and dandy, thanks.

I really wish that people would try to understand that our work doesn't all take place on the school site. You'd think that now that lots of people WFH, that they'd get that teachers always have done for a fair proportion of their working day/week/year.

@noblegiraffe

I don’t necessarily see that the PGCE or equivalent is gold standard. I’m quite happy for someone to do a degree and then learn on the job

Do you think a PGCE or SCITT training isn’t learning on the job?

They involve some element of learning on the job, but they aren’t the only way people learn on the job. I have no issue with Teach First. I don’t particularly care if unqualified teachers with degrees in the relevant subject are recruited and train on the job. I don’t see ‘unqualified’ teachers in these contexts as any better or worse than I probably was as an NQT.

Where it clearly is an issue is when people who don’t and never will have the necessary qualifications to teach (ie a degree) are substituted in front of a class. I think that’s less common generally in secondary.

I think that’s less common generally in secondary.

Not according to the figures.

www.nasbtt.org.uk/john-howson-how-many-unqualified-teachers-are-there/

Hate to break it to you tortuga but that would make me leave teaching.

If I was the Minister for Education, I would get in a team of brilliant teachers and get them to write every single lesson needed for every year of school. It could be proof read a hundred times and tweaked until it was 100% perfection.

Said no teacher ever.