To think droves of teachers will make the decision by husband made today- to leave

[Peakyshelby]

Well after 6 years of teaching my husband has broken down, gone to the doctors, been signed off and says he is done.

he has done 3 years in 2 schools and then done supply for 3 years. There is too much to list but the highlights have been

been told to go and fuck himself and other insults thrown at him by kids with hardly any consequences from parents and schools

having stuff chucked at him

having to appear as a witness in court when a parent beat up his own child at home time in the playground

having parents create a smear group on WhatsApp against him and 2 other newly qualified teachers because the parents said there little darlings behaviour must be down to inexperienced teachers not being able to handle them.

having parents laugh and him and tell him he is picking on their little darlings by trying to sanction them.

have children laughing at him and saying my mum and dad don’t care what I do

hardly any support from above.

There is too much more to write but today he had a 10 year old child walk up to him and pour a water bottle over his head.

he is done. He qualified with a group of 10 others and 8 of them have since quit. 2 did not get through there NQT year.

He says the system is broken

My autistic son is always being rewarded by his alternative provision with an iPad. When he was at school they did the same thing. I've sad so many time not to give it to him!! He struggles to transition off of it and it will overstimulate him. If you give him an iPad you have wiped out the whole day and will likely be dealing with a meltdown that gets him sent home. But will they listen to me?! Absolutely infuriating. I know it does regulate some kids but I think for many it just keeps them entertained so they are not exhibiting the challenging behaviour all day and not needing the higher levels of support while they are on it- but it saves it all up for when they come off and really isn't helping the child. But so many parents and teachers say it helps regulate so my son is given it against my fucking consent then I'm told his behaviour is too challenging to attend a school. Absolute joke

I have huge sympathy for your DH. He shouldn’t have to put up with this. My first school 40 years ago was tough and put me off classroom teaching for life. Fortunately I was able to retrain as a dyslexia specialist and have had a wonderful career teaching one to one. There may be ways your DH can use his talents outside mainstream schools. I wish him good luck.

Actually, I didn’t go in to teaching for the holidays, I went in for the children and the pension. I stayed for the former when the latter went out the window. 20 years ago when I started, students still knew what the words please and thank you meant and how to use them, there was always the odd little sod who would kick off and swear, then get a clip round the ear from dad when the parents get summoned. My most recent convo with parents was to explain that if their child is sending and receiving unfriendly text messages at 3 am, that is not the schools issue to deal with. Perhaps you could take the phone away overnight? The response was that they didn’t think their child would like that. WTaF?!

Very unlikely, most teachers enjoy the holidays too much. U don’t go into teaching thinking it’ll b a breeze, sounds like it just wasn’t the correct job for him as the students didn’t respect him.

Disrespect doesn’t come from students, it comes from parents.

Please go and volunteer for a week and say it’s about the children.

I left, don’t miss the holidays. If fact most are too long, too expensive to go away and I have had more holidays abroad in the last year than I’ve had in the previous 10. Because I can afford them and we go outside school holidays.

Well how lucky for you. I’ll bet the demographic around the school had something to do with it. I’ve been a primary TA for 17 years now. The behaviour has changed so much since I started.

I love my job, but it’s wearing me down. Children have, on the whole, 0 respect for adults, fuelled by parents who have 0 respect for anyone. No matter how much we try, and put things in place, there will be complaints and criticism. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. It’s soul destroying.
And that’s before all the management expectations and paperwork it generates. We are time short as it is, without having to turn our time and attention to tick-box exercises because it looks good for OFSTED.

My daughter is in her 4th year as a teacher, in a secondary school. She is forever having to break up fights. She got hit in the head by a 12 year old a week ago. And she is considered one of the ‘cool’ well liked teachers. She knows it could be different at another school, but feels the children where she is need help, but at the same time she is being exhausted by the relentless bad behaviour, and the lack of parental support / verbal abuse she gets, quite apart from the lack of management back-up. She says the staff turnover in that school is horrendous. Absolutely no continuity.

just because you haven’t experienced it, doesn’t mean it isn’t rife.

No, I’ve lived in some very deprived areas actually.

You’re very angry and not able to accept someone else’s opinion as having any value. Best we don’t discuss it.

Children have, on the whole, 0 respect for adults, fuelled by parents who have 0 respect for anyone.

This is a fact and a very big part of the reason we are in this mess.

Can depend on the demographic of the deprived area, some cultures have a better attitude to education whatever their income.

Pay. Teachers. More.

I don't think pay alone is the issue is it? It's crap government targets, crap management working teachers to death to reach these targets and a generally disintegrating society.

Indeed. Unfortunately, the issue here is the kids behaviour so that will not change unless people are ok with being spat on if the get better pay? I think no

Go for it!

Teaching as a career now is shit. Too many kids with needs in mainstream schools and not enough staff to help them.

I taught for 40 years and have a good qualification in English but never learned all the type of grammar stuff that's part of the English curriculum. I have never needed to now this stuff.

Since I was at school in the 70s, Scottish children used the phonics approach to learn to read and spell. I could never understand why English schools didn't adopt the same method as, when we got pupils in from England, they were very often behind their peers.
then phonics was the magical solution to everything, but instead of just using it simply, they have these awful phonic assessments and whatever.

Same with maths, wasn't one of Rishi's grand ideas to make every pupil study maths till they were 18? The vast majority of the maths I learned - algebra, geometry, trigonometry etc has been on no use to me whatsoever.

I don't think pay is the complete answer. Personally, I'd have been happy with the same salary but a safe working environment. Why do the rules of society go out the window as soon as people go through a school door? What teachers have to put up with is beyond a joke - it isn't a case of "move to a different school" I live in a rural area with little coastal schools of 20-60 pupils. My friend is a PSA and gets called a c* on a daily basis.

This. Appreciate this may not be the “norm” but there’s enough of it around to understand why parents who are able to cover the fees by any means possible make that choice.

The state spends 7.5k per pupil on education. Hands out 1.2k a year on child benefit. Provides tax credits for those on low incomes. Provides housing benefit to pay rent for families. The state spends about 20% of it's total expenditure on welfare payments. It further hands out loans for university study which never need to be repaid if you don't earn enough and ensures UK students pay 9.5k a year capped versus foreign students who pay the true price of circa 40k a year. It compels universities to prefer students from under privileged backgrounds with weaker education results over higher results from children with better off parents. If you piss your benefits away it provides free food for you to have too. If you don't feed your kids they get free school meals and cover for holiday clubs with free meals out of term time. It provides a free healthcare system (not over the moon about quality of this) and free prescriptions for those on benefits. It mandates discounted lower water bills for low earners, it forces energy companies to pay for insulation and energy saving devices on houses for low earners (paid for by other billpayers paying more). It discounts council tax up to the extent of 100% for low earners and those on benefits.

To do this it taxes some middle class earners at marginal rates of tax of over 60% (in fact over 90% marginal tax between 100k and 120k). The so called austere "tories" borrowed 1.6 trillion pounds to fund this situation.

What exactly was so shitty and unfair that you think people should be paying more towards? Who do you think should be paying for it?

Not once did I say people should be paying more towards anything, but reading that load of bilge you wrote I can see you drank the Tory propaganda koolaid.

I’m going to sound like my mother but people take no responsibility these days, everything is everyone else’s fault.

So if kids are naughty - teachers fault. If they’re failing -teachers fault.

It's all down to how children are being brought up these days. They show no respect for anything and there is little or no discipline used at home. I also think unfettered access to the internet has a big impact on these young minds together with peer pressure.

Without parents support, teachers face an uphill battle to teach as most of the time is spent crowd controlling unruly children.

I'm truly sorry to read your post and your husband has done the best thing for his own sanity and your lives together.

I worked in a few primary schools and thought it was bad when I left 5 years ago and often shuddered to think how difficult it would be to work in Secondary schools.

I just hope your husband makes a full recovery and can find a more fulfilling job.

So if it's bilge tell me what's not true in what I wrote?

Oh you can't because what I have is true and the facts don't suit the narrative you want to present so you dismiss facts as propaganda and bilge.

FYI I am not voting tory and not voting at all.

It’s not a matter of being true or not everything you said as ‘fact’ is a lot more nuanced than that and less black and white.

Not all families who get help are the same, circumstances and parents/children differ greatly; yet you have generalised a lot in your post.

It’s like reading a column in a Tory/benefit Britain type newspaper.

Yup. My parents are Central European, but yes, you’re so correct.

I went to a state school. School and homework weren’t optional at all. I ended up with 13 GCSEs and 4 A-Levels. Parents had high expectations and anything less than excellent behaviour at school (and at home) had me going without any privileges.

That’s no tv, no outings, not allowed to see friends, no treats, nothing. Just schoolbooks. For as long as it took for the message to sink in.

If I struggled with a subject, I would sit and revise until I got it. If I didn’t get it, parents would seek additional help - father would do overtime at work if he needed to pay for additional tutoring. If I did well, I was showered with praise and gifts. But I had to earn them.
My family was far from rich (manual workers), but valued education enough to do anything to give me the opportunities they themselves didn’t have. I think it speaks volumes that when I was born, the first gift my grandfather bought was a stack of encyclopaedias.

My own son is also being raised ‘the immigrant way’ and so far, it’s working very well.

I'm pretty sure almost all the fellow teachers I know would take a workload cut over a pay rise. So, same pay, less contact time (i.e. for secondary teachers fewer classes). Happier teachers, better quality teaching. Unfortunately that can't be achieved unless you can recruit more teachers to teach the other classes...

This sounds very stressful. Has he thought about private tutoring? Our daughter is home educated and we use private tutors once a week for maths and english. We pay approx £40 an hour.

My dcs are almost at the end of their schooling. All went to selective sixth form free schools in the inner city after comprehensive secondary schools. They confirm the behaviour in the sixth forms were fine everyone wanted to be there and there was no bad behaviour. The pupils were competitive with each other but in a nice way and it really helped motivate them all. There are very little turn over of teachers and they have no problems with recruitment even for specialist maths , physics and chemistry teachers who often also have phds. Almost all the pupils went onto RG universities and 1/4 got into Oxbridge. In contrast, at their secondary schools it you didn’t get into the top 2-3 classes behaviour was dire. One of my dcs is thinking of going into teaching but they will only consider doing so in a selective school.