Secondary school lack of teachers spiralling out of control

[noblegiraffe]

The govt released its targets for PGCE trainees for Sept 23 today and dear god we are in trouble.

The projection is that we will recruit less than half the number of secondary trainees that the sector needs. 47%.

We only recruited 59% of what was needed last year.

Jack Worth of the National Foundation for Education Research tweeted “Without an urgent policy response to make teaching more attractive, schools will face increasingly intense shortages over the next few years, which are likely to impact negatively on the quality of education.”

It looks like all subjects will miss their targets by a lot, except History, Classics (they all head off to private schools) and PE.

And today I hear of PE teachers handing in their notice because they are being expected to teach science instead.

On a thread a poster just commented that their child had to stop learning Spanish partway though the year as there was no teacher.

At my school, A-level students who have lost their teacher have had to continue by teaching themselves the course.

Parents of kids in secondary school, or approaching secondary school age: things are about to get a lot worse than they already are.

And still the government refuse to come to the negotiating table to try to fix this. What exactly is their plan? They don't have one. More and more kids will not have teachers.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-on-course-to-recruit-less-than-half-of-required-secondary-teachers/

Govt involvement in any industry is a bad idea.

Teaching is the most important thing anyone can do. Govt involvement in this sector is disgusting and immoral.

Vouchers probably the least bad solution.

James Tooley “The Beautiful Tree” shows how much better things could be.

But Givt wants to control anything that is important to people for their own power. To the detriment of teachers, pupils and parents.

So the idea would be that better off parents could use their vouchers to part-pay for their children to attend fee paying schools.

And poorer parents would continue to attend state schools.

The end result would be that there would be more social polarisation in our education system - with all the poorest children concentrated in the schools with the least resources, and vastly more middle and upper class children being educated separately in much, much better resourced settings.

And state schools that lost large numbers of their students to heavily subsidised private schools would either close altogether, or have to get rid of many of their staff. Result would be to reduce the options for children being educated in the state sector even further (many state comprehensives and FE colleges already unable to offer full range of A level options for this reason).

Doesn't sound great.