Does your child have a teacher to go back to next week?

[fuckityfuckityfuckfuck]

My reception child doesn't.
There are 12 unfilled primary teacher vacancies within a 10mi radius of us. Only 1 of those I could perhaps be reluctant to work in due to reputation. There are also another 16 vacancies with later start dates.

Primary has historically been oversubscribed. I know this has been an ongoing issue for a while in secondary maths/science but now it's seeping into primary which has always been more desirable, I don't see how parents can continue to ignore the issue.

Gillian Keegan has warned the independent advisory board to "consider school budgets" when recommending a pay rise for 24-25 so I would imagine there will be even more classes without teachers next year!

As its AIBU... its time parents started complaining to their MPs to protect state education.

As a secondary teacher, it’s so good to hear a parent being fully aware of their child’s needs. The system is utterly broken. So much of my time is taken up with firefighting and behaviour management (yup, it actually has a formal name) that I am not entirely sure that even my mid level learners are getting what they need to make progress. If I didn’t actually love those moments each day when a child finally gets it, or says thank you (more often for listening to their worries than actually for teaching them), or just offers up a smile; and those moments when a class tells you they missed you when you have been off with the annual teacher virus, I would be looking for a faster exit route.

I work in a secondary school but not as a teacher - I can't see the situation improving, given the poor pay, bad working conditions, awful behaviour by students, terrible treatment by school management & parents, lack of respect, high stress, crazy high expectations etc etc
It will only get worse. Even when positions get filled now, the quality of the teachers is deteriorating (bar some amazing exceptions - and i cant see them lasting long, given the above). Awful situation all round

Massive work load for the pay.

Not enough support for SEN children. Only a TA in the class in a child has an EHCP.

Classes are too big for one adult

Behaviours start to slip

Parents complain CONSTANTLY and demand more and more.

I used to childmind for a TA who works in a tiny rural school 60 pupils and 3 teachers. Part of an academy. One teacher off sick frequently then another long term (was an operation the school had warning). Every time they had a teacher off sick the TA took the class she was doing it 3 days a week minimum by the time her child left me. She also had to supervise breaks and teach PE as part of her job. She was a young inexperienced 21 year old. Lovely lovely woman but she had literally no training and was teaching years 5&6. Even lesson planning.

My neighbour worked for.many years as a qualified teacher but gave that up for all the home life balance reasons cited. She is now a teaching assistant, earning much less but she leaves work behind at the end of the day.

I left after over a decade teaching, when I had a breakdown. That was several years ago.

I've always said - if it was only the bit in the classroom, the actual teaching part, I'd go back in a heartbeat, because I loved all my kids and I honestly believe it was what I was meant to do. But it's not - not even close - so I'll never go back.

That’s a lovely dream!

I'm a teacher and HoD in a secondary school. I leave full time employment on 31st December and will do 3 days a week whilst I retrain for my new career.

Teaching workload is insane and getting worse. It's a spiral because the more teachers leave, the more the workload increases for those left and then they leave too!

Just out of interest, what's your new career going to be?

Realistically it is very hard to be a single parent as a teacher. Both financially and workload are both huge factors.
I could just about afford to live and bring up my children alone but I would have to cook from scratch and use expensive childcare until 6.
I would be exhausted as would my kids and it would be a miserable existence in term time.

I wouldn't want to go in to teaching as a career now, it's changed a lot, especially when MATS took over. Workload, double thinking every word you say, micro management, ridiculous observations criteria, deep dives, never being on top of marking books of huge classes, unnecessary and pointless tick box meetings, pressure for results, no escape from being contacted anytime, often poor and entitled behaviour, so much more...

A big part of my reason for deciding to go private was reading the comments from state school teachers on MN. Of course issues with recruitment will affect the private sector eventually. But for now my kids are at a fab place with lots of fully-qualified permanent teaching staff. It’s terrifying what’s happening.

I'm training to be a driving instructor.

THIS, Dh is a teacher, exactly what he says.
Children aren't a priority if you don't support their education.

Tories don't care, their kids go private.

This is such a great explanation.

The frustrating thing is it SHOULD be the best, most satisfying job in the world! All the ingredients are there. And when teachers love their jobs the benefits for children are off the scale- their experience of school is completely different. Teachers just need to be supported.

There were almost 120k fewer births between 2011 and 2022, surely there will be a point whe, given the falling birth rate, fewer teachers will be required?

@Desecratedcoconut problem is that there aren’t enough teachers now, and schools can’t afford them even if they were available. Although there is a falling birth rate at the moment there is currently a bulge going through Secondary school

Actually it's against the law. It just takes one teacher to tell ofsted, ACAS or their union before your husband faces losing his job.

Eventually, but the government can't fill planned recruitment places for teachers and where children are isn't evenly spread around the country. In the local authority I work within there are children who have moved here and are at home because there is no school place for them. Or siblings at schools a distance apart because there is space for only one child in each school.

And the falling birthrate shouldn't be a way to solve the crisis in education. Teachers are unhappy enough to vote with their feet and leave the profession and that's not a good state for an education system to be in.

This is a huge problem in English schools-which leads to heads being forced to save money by getting rid of expensive/experienced teachers (usually by suddenly declaring their teaching is inadequate). I have heard of a new head locally some years back (who was laughing to one of his SLT and overheard) that there were 4 teachers on UPS at his new school and he’d have them gone by Christmas. Reader: they were! He was vile, but he got what he/the academy wanted-a cheaper staffing bill. This is obviously completely short sighted as there is if there is nobody left to support the new teachers, they often sink, rather than swim-and need replacing. But…as long as it’s cheap, that’s all some heads seems to care about. If you can afford only 8 experienced teachers or 10/11 new ones-they are to go for the most possible. Quality and experience is not only not valued, it is actively targeted for removal.

When did teachers in England used to get paid directly from the LEA? Who changed this!?

It's workload.

Pay is poor compared to equivalent professions but it's not the reason colleagues are leaving.

For me, teaching has been a vocation, I have striven to be the very best I can be for each individual pupil and colleague for 25 years, often at the expense of my own DC and my own health, which I bitterly regret. But teachers' contracts clearly stipulate that you work whatever hours are necessary to discharge your duties. I feel quite queasy when I look back on the opportunities I have missed and turned down because work has demanded my time and energy in order to discharge those duties. No doubt, my pupils and their families have benefited, but I wish teachers weren't contractually bound to be put in situations where it is down to individuals to decide they effectively need to cut corners in order to achieve some semblance of a work life balance. A friend once asked me if I my partner was controlling me as I was always turning down invitations. Of course he isn't, I just know I will need the time for planning, preparation, fulfilling multiple subject leadership roles and there is always some unforeseen issue that needs to be resolved. It's galling.

@Shinyandnew1 problem with schools unlike some organisations you need an adult in the room. In my profession if someone left management would make the decision whether that person needed to be replaced or if the existing team could take on the workload. But if a teacher leaves, especially at Primary school they need an adult in the room, so if they have 7 classes and pupil numbers are such that it is difficult to merge classes they may have to resort to cheapest but not always best staff

Or they put TAs in to teach for a few days - I have done this and whilst I could manage behaviour etc I’m not a teacher!
It’s unfair on the TA who’s job is never permanent and the children who deserve a qualified teacher.

https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&primaryCountry=ENG&treshold=5&topic=TA

I teach in an affluent, rural school. It is one of the best in the area, minus the private and grammar schools, and it used to be an excellent school to work at. Now I am noticing since covid the tides are changing. Workload was always an issue, but we didn't really have behaviour issues so I felt even working 50 hour weeks wasn't too horrendous as I could actually teach and the kids wanted to learn. Parents seemed on side and any behaviour issues could usually be nipped in the bud with a phone call home.

Then covid came along and suddenly we are more accessible. Parents are working from home on their devices and expecting teachers to teach around the work schedule, emails sent at 11pm and a complaint to the headteacher by lunchtime the next day because I haven't responded despite having been teaching all day. Parents using mental health to get their kids out of doing homework and coursework then wondering why I am predicting a low grade. Staff that could retire, did so, and we couldn't afford to replace them, so class sizes grew from 24 to 34. Subjects like music that haven't been able to recruit at all, have got 2 classes together doing silent worksheets because there are too many of them to effectively behaviour manage proper music lessons. More and more SEND in a class so more time needed planning for their needs. X student needs everything printed in orange, Y student in blue, Z student in purple, means I can't prep from home which means I leave school later. More and more needs raise the cognitive load of planning and teaching and I know human error will lead to further complaints from parents rather than any kind of understanding or support. Training needs to be done in our own time. Bigger classes mean more marking.

Our results last year were the worst they've ever been. We are now a poor performing school. But we can't change this from within the classroom because teachers are tired from the workload, the behaviour, the dealing with the constant barrage of emails, those tasks that SLT and parents want that 'just take 5 mins', the endless paperwork for SEND referrals and reviews (and the increase in students with SEND means an increase in this paperwork). There's only so many hours in the day, so it can quite easily get to the end of the day firefighting paperwork and behaviour deadlines and responding to parents and no planning has been done for the next day. So the kids suffer again.

Then my generation of teaches are in a position seeing how friends from uni are massively out-earning us, getting flexible working patterns, fitting their mental load and household responsibilities in their working day, no costs or time spent commuting, being able to work more hours Monday to attend the harvest festival Tuesday afternoon. A proper work-life valance for significantly more money.

To retain teachers now, money alone won't do. Flexible working isn't feasible in our field, and we can accept that, but schools need an overhaul. More money needs to be pumped into school to hire more staff to make class sizes smaller, for less marking time and shorten the cognitive load of mistakes. We need to go back to the days when parents had less access to teachers' inboxes and funding put towards proper SEND schools and children who can't access mainstream education have provision by trained specialists. Get rid of progress 8 and open up choices for less academic qualifications (like when we had ASDAN, NVQ, VGCSE, functional maths and English) and praise the success of all students getting the grades they do rather than what they should be getting based on grades that aren't released until the November time after they've even got their results.