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/

I saw something on Twitter few weeks ago (I can’t remember exactly who from) saying that ITT needed to offer more flexibility for trainees to encourage them to sign up as the PGCE was too hard for people to commit to all day every day.

Lots of the comments underneath were saying it was pretty pointless though, as if flexibility was what people wanted in their working life, then offering it to them for just the training year, but not the rest of their working life in a classroom wasn’t going to work!

Oh my word yes. The last student I had was dire. Passed with outstanding. If have failed him. Absolutely useless.

I've left after 18 years. Life after teaching, in my new job is a breeze. It's like I've been in prison or something, the feeling of freedom!

I'd have to be getting more money and more non contact time to even vaguely consider going back now.

The work ethic of some trainees we have is really bad.
When teacher's have said time and time again that the workload is onerous and the hours outside school are long, why on earth would you enter the profession if your default is laziness?!

God help the kids, something is going to have to give.

We're too expensive, that's why.

What I don’t understand, is that if recruitment is so bad, and vacancies are being left unfilled for years, and students are just being given an endless stream of supply teachers (and omg we had a terrible one the other month - had only landed in the UK the week beforehand, never been in an English school and couldn’t even work out how to log on to a laptop!), why is the Facebook group (life after teacher) full
of daily posts from very experienced teachers, suddenly finding themselves on a support plan and being managed out? If you are struggling to recruit, why then force what you’ve already got to quit?
it makes absolutely no sense

Another issue is that schools have so many shortages they aren’t wanting the NQT’s, they don’t have the time or resources for them.
So the new teachers that are coming through struggle to get a job, most schools seem to choose an experienced supply teacher in my area.

I started teaching under a Labour government-it almost feel like a different job when I look back.

Small class sizes, full time TAs, no bonkers target setting or half termly data drops, no learning objectives or success criteria, no learning walks or book scrutinies by management, the curriculum was manageable and relevant to the children, the QCA produced free topic resources, planning was much less paperwork. Statements were simpler to apply for, referrals for support were easy to make and external professionals offered timely and useful help to pupils.

There was no PPA at all when I started (apart from the NQT year) and it was STILL better than now!

why then force what you’ve already got to quit?

It’s cheaper to pay cover supervisors from an agency to teach classes than an UPS3 teacher. If you have no budget left-that’s the sort of choice heads are making.

If you are struggling to recruit, why then force what you’ve already got to quit?

Because staffing costs make up the vast majority of school budgets and experienced teachers are expensive.

Schools do not have enough funds to run in an even remotely functional manner.

I heard about a school that was looking to make redundancies and suddenly the most expensive teacher was on a support plan.

If a teacher leaves, you don’t need to go through the redundancy process and you don’t need to pay redundancy money.

Teachers aren’t being made redundant because they’re not needed either, but because schools can’t afford them.

I totally agree. I observed a trainee today (not usually in that dept but ended up sat with them due to the strike) and was amazed that a person who is totally struggling with being in a classroom has managed to get this far on the course. Years ago they would have been failed by now I'm sure. I'm at a grammar school where the behaviour is usually very good, and there aren't many issues. So to be struggling with teaching in that atmosphere - they are going to be beyond hopeless in a comp, they'll be eaten alive! They'll be snapped up somewhere though due to lack of applicants.

When I trained in 2010, my PGCE was government funded. Now they’re not. Go figure.

One school I worked at used to advertise for PE teachers then just put them in geography because they couldn’t recruit.

I’m prob being stupid, but when I was in secondary school late 80s to mid 90s teachers stayed in the profession, there was a good standard of teaching, kids learned important things, there was much better discipline and children’s mental health was substantial better. There was no agenda pushing on kids, no this month or that month, no repeated testing, reports were just a few lines, no statistics.

We have been through multiple colours of government but things have just got progressively worse. What has happened??

@tratravelmad Would they have failed years ago though? Or would they have been exposed to a much greater calibre of partner teacher/mentor to guide them through?

I'm an ECT mentor. I also act as an extra body when needed for PGCE obs. The students are placed with teachers with little experience themselves. Not enough to guide others at least. When I qualified 10+ years ago my partner teacher had 10+ years experience and my mentor was SLT. There isn't enough experience in schools nowadays to give trainees the same experience.

I teach in the North East where historically
there's less of an issue with teacher shortages as it is still considered relatively well paid. We have lost so many staff this year and are really struggling to recruit decent teachers. We have put the same advert out 4 times for a science teacher and a local school held an open evening for prospective staff as they have so many vacancies.

I was in school in 80s and 90s. I'm not sure there was better discipline. There were more special schools though. There were also fewer behaviour issues of the sort we're seeing now. Mind you, i didn't see this many kids with this many issues 10 years ago.

I don't actually think the teaching was better; kids certainly didn't get the help we give them now. No mark schemes, revision tips, past essays, guidance to do better... and you certainly never went and asked a teacher for extra help/intervention etc.

I think what many of us had, were parents who wanted us to do better than they had. But I get so many kids whose aunty/ uncle/ mum/ dad did just fine without gcses. Or whose parents think we're all twats and johnee was perfectly within her rights to tell me to fuck off, because she was on her period (3rd time this month) and it was her human right to go to the toilet straight after break, in my lesson.

OMG this thread has made me so sad and angry. :-( (and so glad my youngest is finishing secondary this summer)

How have the government let things get this bad?

No, I definitely reckon they would have failed. The teacher they are with is very experienced (15+ years) and is, in my opinion, an excellent teacher. The trainee genuinely looked like it was their first day ever in a classroom, not midway through their second placement. Total rabbit in headlights situation going on, and that's with kids who were sat there quietly waiting for instructions.

I’m a qualified Maths teacher currently on a break from teaching because it got too much. I had a look on TES and eteach yesterday just out of interest to see what was out there, and in my local area (South Wales) there were actually hardly any Maths vacancies?! I keep hearing that nowhere can find Maths teachers, yet there’s currently next to nothing to apply for here even if I wanted to? Can someone explain that? Is it just that schools have given up advertising and are filling roles with non-specialists?

Try England. I'm a border teacher. It's going to be quite galling when my neighbours are paid more than me for the same job.

Yes, the 'My child can do no wrong and it's the teacher/school's fault' parents are very much in the way up. The local authority I work in, like most LAs, has significantly increasing rates of Permanent Exclusions and there is, in about 95% of cases, a long-standing pattern of poor behaviour with lots of evidence from the school involved, and of attempts by the school to address it, lots of evidence of a repeated lack of parental support for the school and of a lack of appropriate boundaries in the parent/child relationship. Even when one serious, dangerous event has resulted in the Px, the pattern is there in secondary schools- disaffected, disengaged teenagers whose parents will not accept any responsibility for the situation falls on their child or them as parents.

Behaviour is a really big issue in secondary schools. There is much more low level poor behaviour, tipping into more serious issues as it increases. It causes persistent disruption in lessons - often those taken by supply staff, TAs or inexperienced staff. Some students sit through whole days of these lessons because of staffing difficulties like recruitment issues or long-term absence.

A major problem is teachers' inability to discipline and exclude troublesome pupils. Teachers with transferable skills like maths and physics go elsewhere.

@Appuskidu i also became a teacher under the Blair government - it was amazing. I’m not sure Starmer will have the same success - it’s a very different world now sadly.

You know there is a recruitment crisis across all sectors and not just teachers.

basically some schools already run adverts and no-one applies. Schools with high staff turnover which are less appealing to applicants have been in crisis for a while the problems are filtering up the food chain and moving through from being one or two subjects only to more and more of them.