Number of graduates in teacher training in England at ‘catastrophic’ level - DfE figures

[sunnydaytoday0]

When is the government going to do something to address this, with more and more leaving and fewer and fewer wanting to enter teaching despite the governments attempts so far at making it "more attractive".

Will there be anyone left in our classrooms? Will parents be thinking of any of these issues and their implications during strikes?

www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/01/number-graduates-teacher-training-england-catastrophic-level

The number of graduates training to be teachers in England has slumped to “catastrophic” levels, with the government missing its own recruitment targets by more than 80% in key subjects such as physics.

The Department for Education’s initial teacher training figures show that just under 29,000 graduates have signed up this year, a 20% fall compared with 36,000 last year, and far below the 40,000 trainees registered during the pandemic in 2020-21.

But the figures are far worse for secondary school recruitment, where they are at just 59% of the DfE’s annual target, well below the 79% reached last year. It means the government has missed its own targets in nine of the past 10 years.

Hadenough2022

Teachers need to be trusted not micro managed.

my DS has just left primary teaching because of this. He told me he is sick of spending weekends and evenings doing extra work to prepare for ofsted and even worse mini mock ofsted! Get rid of ofsted, save millions and trust teachers more to do their jobs without this constant interference and fault finding.

I feel it’s micromanaging, unrealistic expectations from senior management ( due to ofsted worries) and general behaviour with lack of parental support which drives teachers away from the profession much more than financial considerations.

My son is currently at uni doing a geography degree so he can then go on to teach secondary level. He's getting himself into crazy amounts of debt because you cannot enter teaching without a degree. Even nursing now has an apprenticeship route but not teaching. We can't expect young people to want to teach when it costs them so much to get there!

It was this culture (and changes like double marking) that made teaching incompatible with the needs of my family several years ago. I left before being too jaded, but my family would not be ready yet to cope with me returning to the classroom.

Cutting the beaucracy would be a cheap and major policy win to make teaching more attractive.

I have a friend that should have been a teacher this year, but late in the 3rd year of her degree, the DoE did not certify the course as resulting in qualified teacher status, so the cohort at hers and several institutions have had to do an extra year of study/ placements and all the student finance that entails. Many of them had jobs lined up that they were forced to decline.

Most schools seem to prefer young teachers or NQTs as they're cheaper than a teacher of , say, 20 years' experience.
Many teachers are opting for supply or job sharing.

The profession is all but dying on its knees. The work life balance is untenable and the administration/paperwork is onerous. Couple that with a dated , hierarchical structure which still remains in various settings, teaching is no longer a viable or enviable profession.

My teacher friends are on their knees . An NQT friend has gone on long term sick leave after barely 3 months into her NQT year.

Education needs a complete overhaul.

This wouldn’t work. Remote teaching during covid proved that. Learners with additional needs suffered hugely, behaviour would be chronic!!

I am a teacher in Ireland and am starting to hate my job. Students' behaviour is getting worse and more serious with each year group. Lack of respect from students and in some cases their parents is getting worse. Paperwork is increasing. The number of things expected from us is increasing... (how many times have you heard "they should be taught that at school"). The hatred for the profession from those not in it is also growing. Anytime there is a teacher strike in Ireland we get torn to shreds by the media, and by the public. Its becoming unbearable and a lot of people are looking at other potential jobs. So not only are there less people qualifying, those who are qualified are looking for a way out.

The real crisis here is that over 2 hours after posting on a very busy parenting website, this post has attracted less than 30 responses. That parents don’t give a shit is the problem. Parents need to wake up, stop taking teachers for granted and support them so that their children receive the education they deserve.

I am a shortage subject area teacher. I defected to the private sector 6 years ago. We are at the point where the best teachers will have the opportunity to move across, either to independent ps or the schools where behaviour is good and workload management is fair. That means by far the mast majority of children will not be taught by specialists and fewer and fewer will be taught by teachers.

Parents, wake the fuck up before it’s too late.

When is the government going to do something to address this

They'll say that they are - they will point to their manifesto promise to raise NQT salaries to £30k (not yet realised, and totally eaten up by inflation so we're back to square one anyway) and some initiative on workload and flexible working that has, as far as I can see, made no difference to anything.

There are so many reasons this is an issue, some of which have been discussed up thread. It's not just the lack of teachers new to profession, those leaving are taking with them enormous expertise that is often ignored. SLTs are often full of younger teachers who have very little experience and then tell others how they should teach, while refusing to accept that some staff members genuinely do know better - data and attainment and the fucking interactive white board are king and understanding child development, joyful learning experiences and stories, songs, well planned play are out.
Who'd want to teach?

Yet it seems at every turn they are put under more pressure, expected to be part of a culture that deep down they are not comfortable with, are expected to do more with less, and then criticised when anything less than perfection is achieved

and told that that they clearly shouldn’t be working with children and should just leave to make room for someone’s more enthusiastic if they point out any issues!

If I could just arrive at work at 8, teach my class, do my playground duty, have a lunch hour, mark after school (maybe a tick if it’s right and cross if it’s wrong?!), plan my topics and the odd display, then go home at 4.30/5, I would probably stay.

What I object to is getting in at 7.15, doing all of the above, plus…
-Ofsted, mock Ofsted and all associated bollocks that comes with it.
-rewriting the curriculum countless times because of dfe changes.
-Lengthy marking policies.
-lesson objectives, book scrutinies, learning walks.
-performance management targets when there are no pay rises anyway.
-writing curriculum Progression maps, because clearly the NC isn’t good enough?!
-target setting
-Half termly assessments
-having to plan in such detail that every single lesson is a side of A4.
-writing, printing out and sticking in learning objectives that 5 year olds can’t read.
setting and marking homework (pointless in KS1).
and leaving at 6, with another 2 hours to do every evening and the whole of Sunday, feeling close to a breakdown and STILL be told I’m not on top of things.

Scrap those things, I’m betting the teachers wouldn’t leave, they’d be happy and so would the kids. Hell, I might even run a club.

Do you remember the covid school closures? I think that put this idea to bed.

Well no offense to your son but I absolutely want the people educating my children to be educated to degree level. Do you really think that someone with no more than an A level in geography should be teaching A level geography?

DD has been training through Teach First and is having a good experience at a secondary school placement. All fees paid for, paid as a TA in Year 1 and now as a NQT as she got QTS in the summer. She'll have a PGDE by June, and if she wants to upgrade to a MA, the fees are heavily subsidized.

Straight out of uni - no direct class room experience , but with a bit of sports coaching under her belt.

Secondly for teachers every year you work after the nqt year should result in a student loans credit of £1000, not deductible from salary, so like a bonus. After 15 years teaching in state schools fte all student loans to be wiped.

Like this idea gogohmm, could also work for HCP too

Why do you believe that, when it isn't what teachers themselves say? Those within, leaving and having recently left the teaching profession are perfectly clear about the issues they object to most and what you describe is not generally one of them. Indeed various people have joined this thread to describe why they've left, are thinking of leaving or reconsidering joining teaching. They've given various reasons that are pretty consistent with what one reads and hears elsewhere, and none have mentioned the supposed "child is always right" culture.

Well no offense to your son but I absolutely want the people educating my children to be educated to degree level. Do you really think that someone with no more than an A level in geography should be teaching A level geography?

I completely agree!

No doubt the government will have a little think and then decide that as a response to not meeting their training targets, they will offer a ‘flexible approach’ to ITT and allow non-graduates to become teachers. They’ll spin it in a way to suggest that ‘Dominic would make an excellent French teacher-he has lived and worked in France for 25 years and just happens to not have a degree so all will be fine’ whereas in reality, you’ll get A level leavers with no degree, experience or training teaching your kids because they’re cheap.

I shouldn’t give them ideas really…

You can be a qualified, Registered Mental Health Nurse via degree apprenticeship route, are you suggesting they aren't good enough to care for patients and medicate very ill patients because they got their degree while also working and gaining experience?
I'm not suggesting you don't need the degree to teach, just that there should be other ways to get it than 4 years at uni. I'd much rather our NQTs had a degree AND experience.

I'd much rather our NQTs had a degree AND experience.

You do know that teacher training is on the job, and that it's quite useful to know what you're talking about before you teach it?

I left teaching recently. I was a good primary teacher and I loved teaching. A perfect fit, wouldn’t you think? I miss the classroom but I’m unlikely to go back.

I left because the workload is terrible. I appreciated that I would have to plan and mark outside school hours. But the insane amount of paperwork and meetings relating to special needs, looked after children, behaviour issues and so on was just too much. I have no issue with putting extra effort and time into children who need it but these meetings and the paperwork did not benefit the child at all. Add to that the violence (yes, violence, aggression and assault) I was expected to put up with because the children are primary age was truly unacceptable. I think most parents would be horrified by some of the behaviours their children witness in school.

I was asked what would have kept me in teaching
fixed hours of work (8 to 4 as an example and a big NO to anything outside of that unless paid overtime or time off in lieu)
real support and funding for children with additional needs (not loads of paperwork!)
reasonable pay increases
time allocated during my working day if you want me to attend a meeting or fill out some paperwork

I am a reasonable person! The demands on teachers are not.

And the vitriol towards teachers from the media during the pandemic really was the pits. I have a very good degree, I am an ambitious and hardworking person, I want to have a job that is respected. No high quality graduate is going to see teaching as a desirable profession nowadays.

There's some strong research indicating that one of the most important factors in effective teaching is good subject knowledge, so yes to mandatory degrees, certainly for secondary subject specialists.

Of course we could just solve the problem @POTC raises the way civilised countries do, by not charging crippling levels of fees for higher education.

Do you really think that someone with no more than an A level in geography should be teaching A level geography?

do you really think this isn’t already happening? On an enormous scale? Some of the shortage subject areas have been shortage areas for more than 25 years. There are thousands of children being taught by people who don’t have any formal qualification in the subject whatsoever.

He has to do 3 years of a degree followed by a year of teacher training. His year 4 teacher had a degree completely unrelated to teaching, from 20yrs before she started teaching, and only had to do a year in the classroom. I just don't see why it couldn't be an option to follow the same pathway as nursing where it's a combination rather than having the expense of 3 years before even getting to the training stage.

We need teaching degree apprenticeships/fair training bursaries and proper directed hours as a priority

We've reached a tipping point now that tinkering with bursaries won't fix. Poor conditions for years leading to poor retention, and more importantly newly widespread knowledge of those two things means the quick fixes that have patched things up in the past (bursaries, Teach First) aren't going to help this time. They need to look at the impossible conditions of the job itself (and decimation of related services such as camhs), and to do that accurately they'll need to listen to teachers.
So in short..... we're fucked.

His year 4 teacher had a degree completely unrelated to teaching

But his Y4 teacher wasn't teaching A-level Geography so that is less of a concern.

Primary teachers can do a BEd which fits your bill.

Tinkering with entry requirements falls within the same 'quick fix' category I just mentioned.