Third of England’s teachers who qualified in last decade ‘have left profession’: DfE data

[sunnydaytoday0]

www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jan/09/third-of-englands-teachers-who-qualified-in-last-decade-have-left-profession

Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have since left the profession, according to Labour analysis that has been released as the party attempts to shift the political focus on to education.

With the results of strike ballots by teaching unions due in the coming days, Labour intends to use a Commons vote this week to push their plan to impose VAT on private school fees, which they say would help pay for new teachers in the state sector.

According to a Labour analysis of Department for Education statistics, of just under 270,000 teachers who qualified in England between 2011 and 2020, more than 81,000 have since left the profession, or three in 10 of the total.

Why didn't Sunak make sorting out the absolute crisis in staffing in education one of his New Year promises?

From memory the sheer amount of marking for one thing with lengthy comments on each piece of work
The data analysis, the book scrutiny, the planner scrutiny. The writing up of behavioural incidents.
Can you maybe give us an example of what your marking policy is for example so that we can see how the staff in your school do it

@SleeplessWB

Several pages of the same data from different angles, comparisons with national data, targets to improve etc for one meeting that took me hours. Had to tell my a-level class I hadn’t marked their essays. Which is more useful?

A thick binder full of paperwork to be continually completed with book looks, student voice, learning walks etc

Departmental ‘Raising Attainment Plan’ with several columns detailing exactly what, when, who, why, outcome. Action etc for three pages of criteria

Performance Management objectives with success criteria, actions, reviewed against data mid-year - another document of data

This is just what I can think of right now.

@SleeplessWB

Not to mention the four different software systems to log every single thing that happens in great detail. Including logging phone calls.

I am secondary SLT and genuinely can't think of paperwork we ask staff to complete which would cause them this stress.

I be interested if your teaching staff felt the same way? Not saying it wouldn't be in your case, but I've known senior management who (genuinely) would've said the same as you and didn't actually realise what they assumed was the case was not actually the reality.

I still remember the data exercise we were asked to do that would "only take about an hour to complete". Ended up taking 5 hours...

Ah yes the SLT "it only takes a few minutes" to add things to x system

Yes, per entry. And I need to do it eleventy billion times a day.

Well meant but so dislocated from reality!

SLT with 'make a phonecall home' for every bloody thing from a kid being late to school to forgetting their homework.

Like, some of us teach? And don't have an office with a phone in?

This!! No teacher I know has ever left the profession due to poor pay. They’ve left due to the ridiculous workload which is almost always driven by the absolute fear of ofsted and / or parents and pupil behavior. The trick that ofsted has also managed is to get teachers to blame ‘useless’ SLT …. we are the same people who used to be teachers. We have no magic to make ofsted/children/parent issues go away and it’s SLT who get the blame (& often lose their job) when ofsted decide a school isn’t good enough based on subjective criteria with no differentiation between schools in areas of the most dire deprivation and those private school by postcode comprehensives surrounded by 500K plus houses. Teachers leave due to workload caused by. ofsted, pupil behaviour, parent behaviour

absolutely this!

I am secondary SLT and genuinely can't think of paperwork we ask staff to complete which would cause them this stress.

it was endless. The marking policy for example - strict policies for triple marking and providing feedback. At one point we were given "verbal feedback given" stamps to 'save us time' when documenting the informal verbal feedback given to students as we went around the classroom. So I couldn't just have a look at a child's work and have a bit of a discussion with them, I had to make sure that chat was documented so that when it came to book scrutiny someone could tell I'd given verbal instead of written feedback. Who exactly is that helping? It just cut down the number of kids I could talk to individually each lesson. Or the assessment policy - stipulating the number of assessment points we needed to give each term. Each assessment would use up a lesson, then we'd need to mark the assessment, spend another lesson reviewing and providing feedback and making sure the kids produced evidence in their books of acting upon their individual feedback. I still remember the nightmare trying to make that achievable and, most importantly, documented for book scrutiny. We had to write assessments for each assessment point (and I think for my core subject it was every 2/3 weeks, twice per half term), then some sort of feedback sheet to stick in books, then we tried to make worksheets to cover the most common areas we thought might be in the feedback so we could stick it in their books and get the kids to do them so we could evidence the 'implementing feedback' part of the policy. Then of course we had to mark this new bit of work. Then there was the target setting, the inputting of assessment data and analysing 'flight paths' to identify over/under achievers towards their target. Oh, but not just one target, we had a regular target and aspirational target and we had to report at each assessment point about how the flight path was looking for each child, then do it all again at for each of the progress reports that went home to parents (god knows what they thought about all this data going home - well I do know because they used to call me up and ask what the hell it all meant, why do they have multiple targets (aspirational, normal, end of year, end of key stage etc).

While marking and assessment is useful, the formalising and inflexible prescriptiveness of the policies, and the demand to make everything evidenced for book scrutinies, was not helpful to learning at all, and it took me away from proper teaching.

In primary - making sure there is evidebce of every single activity the children have done in their books, which means taking photos of children doing drama, measuring the playground, going on a visit, etc, transferring from the ipad to the school computer, compiling a montage document, printing, copying, sticking in books... so even if you manage to do a lesson that avoids marking, you have to do this shite instead. And don't get me started on the environmental mpact of sticking pointless paper in books...

That would be you and your school.

I'm not in the UK yet have seen year on year on year on year of posts on MN and in The Guardian Education pages that show the crippling burden of bumf on teachers.

How have you not seen this, assuming you are, er..real?

I often see these posts on mn but they rarely say what the actual paperwork and bureaucracy which is causing the issue, hence the question.

To reply about my school -

One assessment marked per half term plus hwk marking. No marking of notes.
No written lesson plans.
Data on one system entered per term. Analysis only done by hods and SLT.

I am reasonably confident that staff at my school would say the same - we have very high retention but now struggling to recruit new staff as the school expands.

I have noticed this is my own children's primary school books - I agree, totally pointless.

On top.of all of the above:
Constant requests for to fill out forms for information about children on behaviour plans (obviously adds up to a lot if you teach up to 300 different children a wk).
Constant requests for same for children with SEND.
Log each time a child leaves your room.
Make lots of phone calls home and log them.
Constant requests from parents for information on how their child is doing (outside of the 6 reports a year cycle).
Attending training on things we already know about.
Logging behaviour in every lesson, holding detentions and logging them.

That's on top of normal planning and marking (neither of which have onerous requirements at my school, but the above all do.)

Isn’t it also about workload vs salary ie all my friends who work the kind of hours I do, with the levels of responsibility I have, are paid an awful lot more. The workload is unreasonable given the level of remuneration.

And everything @Shinyandnew1 says about deep dives & current ofsted expectations. They are utterly unreasonable.

Ex teacher here...i never understood why we had to create ALL our lessons from scratch . Why couldn't the department have a stock of lessons with differentiated materials which you could adapt if you want? Why did i have to be an entertainer rather than an. educator? Why couldnt i let kids go to the toilet? What is wrong with working from text books occassionally? Why is it that if kids misbehave it's all my fault?

No wonder I left!

One assessment marked per half term plus hwk marking.

Please bin homework marking, Sleepless, it is an utterly pointless waste of time. Only get teachers to mark work that you know was produced by the kid.

I was stunned at the omission of education by Rishi Sunak from his priorities.

He seems to have this bizarre idea that it’s enough to talk about growth but have nothing to say beyond that. Especially as growth comes from both private and government investment.

The government only put in 1/10th of what is needed to catch our kids up after covid, school buildings are at massive risk of collapsing, there’s a huge problem with under funding and they cannot recruit let alone retain teachers.

Like the NHS, the government have completely fucked over education. They can bleat about how they have put in funding now, but how does that make up for the years of shortfalls and cocking about?

This is not new, I'm actually surprised the numbers aren't higher. I qualified nearly 20 years ago, and we were told then that half of newly qualified teachers quit within 3 years.

Or will they just import educated youngsters from other countries?

Sounds like a plan. Added advantage being they can't vote and can be deported if they cause trouble. What's not to like ?

Yes, personally I would rather not bother!

You're SLT, can't you change the policy?

@SleeplessWB

You may be an amazing SLT. In my place, as nice as they are, asking us about workload etc, they are just so detached from what the daily life of a full-time teacher and HoD is. They seem genuinely confused at why some of the paperwork gets us so upset. Surprised when I say I have two days running that are five periods, lunch duty, then meeting. Then, you know, actually see my own children for a bit in the evening. Plan and mark A-level (which there is a push to improve). So that data sheet you need for tomorrow may not by possible!

I was HOD at my previous school, but the school was so bad I ditched it to be just a teacher at a diff school.

When I was HOD I was constantly asked to fill out data sheets that nobody even looked at! The data was readily available to look at on excel documents, but I had to literally copy and paste it onto a word document ready for RAB meetings when I could just regurgitate it from the spreadsheet.

My line manager would ask me to do things last minute, or push things onto me that she couldn't be bothered to do herself.

So much of my PPAs were spent doing data analysis and admin that I hardly had time to do learning walks, work with teachers (specifically ECTs) or plan my own lessons!

Not to mention the behaviour of the pupils at my school was appalling. It didn't help that it's an inner city school whose students had parents on benefits and the idea that the state will just fund your life if you can't find a job. There was a behaviour policy but SLT were constantly letting students off and pandering to their wants. So I spent majority of my frees clearing students from the corridors, or going into lessons where students were refusing to leave as per the policy.