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

Someone upthread mentioned false allegations from pupils; this is yet another factor in staff leaving. The threat of being filmed or audio recorded whilst you are teaching or interacting with pupils is unreal.

I would hazard a guess that 100% of my male colleagues have been called a "paedo" at least once, many if not most of them more than once. Female colleagues occasionally get called it, too, though not at the same rate.

It's a mug's game.

I never minded doing anything that was beneficial to my teaching or the education of my pupils.
What I did object to was the amount of time spent reinventing the wheel. After 30 years I'd seen and done it all before.

It was shite the first time around, it wasn't going to be any different the second or third time

There is constant fights and disruption at my child's secondary. She is quite timid and absolutely hates it/feels constantly anxious. I feel so awful that she has to go there and desperately trying to move to a different area. Last week 2 girls (year 7) came into one of her lessons and started throwing chairs around, flipping tables over and drawing on the walls. The teacher was pretty powerless to stop it and the kids were really scared, some crying. Staff were alerted quickly but 4 of them were unable to physically stop these girls. Any time the male teacher tried he was called a paedo.

These girls are regularly excluded from school but as someone said before it is a very long process to get them permanently excluded so the school is stuck with kids like these. I feel so sorry for the kids that do want to learn and not have the constant threat of violence hanging over them. The local police have said countless times that they'd be patrolling after school but so far I've not seen any, just regular fights.

It was one of the “Educating” programmes but I can’t now remember which one it was. The female pupil accused the male teacher of touching her inappropriately when all he had done was asked her to take her coat off and hang it up. Thankfully the school had cameras in the corridors and they showed everything the teacher had done. I’m sure it ended with the girls mum being called and the girl being suspended after the headteacher with mum present tried to impress upon her the seriousness of the allegation she had made and what the outcome for the innocent teacher could have been if the cameras hadn’t caught it. Who would want to be a teacher now with potential threats like that every day just because a pupil takes umbrage at what a teacher has asked them to do.

Actually many people know this happens in London and then is also exacerbated by uneven development from the 90s to present.

It's odd that teachers are leaving in droves in England creating loads of jobs but in Scotland I know of teachers who did their NQT several years ago and there have been no full time permanent jobs for them.
That said, the conditions up here are only marginally less shite.

Teachers in Scotland teach a max off 22.5 hours a week which is a lot less than in England.
The curriculum is tons better.
The pay is better.
The focus isn't on constant targets

Although admittedly, I've only taught in England and not Scotland so my knowledge of Scottish education is through reading not direct experience.

The curriculum is tons better 😂😂

The Scottish curriculum is a disaster, worse than in England. It reportedly prioritizes skills over knowledge and has meant Scotland falling from its high PISA levels to below England. It's Labour's curriculum bought off the peg by the SNP, and likely what will happen in England with a Labour government.

The workforce is lacking skills so I'd go for those above knowledge.

Skills are not transferable but are attached to a body of knowledge. E.g. skill in how to make a cake (a skill related to knowledge of cooking) is not going to transfer to roasting a rib of beef (different bit of knowledge). I will stick with knowledge, which is needed for reading (decoding + knowledge = understanding the text), needed for thinking (how much can you think about string theory unless you know about string theory?), needed for recognising specious arguments (how do you recognise 'begging the question' unless you know it means assuming the answer to the question within the question itself?).
When you speak of 'skills' you may mean 'knowledge' i.e. he is a skilled craftsman in wood means he knows all there is to know about carving wood, treating it etc - his skills are entirely related to that knowledge (and will not transfer to carving stone).
NB The workforce is lacking in knowledge so it cannot acquire skills which require that knowledge.
The Scottish curriculum is called 'curriculum for excellence', however, it is anything but.

Many of us referred to it as the Curriculum for Excrement as it was such a heap of shite.

OK there isn't stuff like SATS in Scotland but it's way too much the other way.

Skills are definitely transferable. That's how people are able to change jobs, change sectors etc in the world of work.

I promise you: the previous curriculum was better. I wouldn't even say that the Curriculum for Excellence is skills based. It's a hodge-podge.

Labour introduced it, but the SNP ran with it because of (in my opinion) the sunk cost fallacy.

I was a Head of Dept when CfE was introduced. Staff were asked for their opinions...and then ignored. It is atrocious.

Skills are not transferable. People use their knowledge to change jobs - either innate knowledge such as the ability to network (first order knowledge we are born with) or the knowledge they have gained in the previous job e.g. not many people go from being a historian to being an astro-physicist because they do not have the knowledge to be an astro-phycist (works the other way round, too). My skill in jointing chickens will not help me be a surgeon, I do not have the knowledge that job requires.
People often says 'skills' when they are talking about knowledge. She's a skilled dressmaker - this comes down to knowing about making and cutting patterns, how to sew etc, which are knowledge-based. You cannot become an invisible hemmer if you do not know what invisible hemming is. You won't become a good reader if you cannot decode the letters on the page and match the words to knowledge about the world that you already have, or use that knowledge to find out what the words mean (e.g. use of context (i.e. knowledge) and awareness of dictionaries and how to use them etc).
The skills I use in historical research are useless when it comes to scientific research except in the most basic way of saying 'I know you look things up and you test a hypothesis to destruction' - but even then that is not a skill, that's knowledge of the basic tenets of doing research.
Second order knowledge - the things we must teach people - is needed in order to use first order knowledge: critical thinking, networking, problem solving - things we do not have to teach but do have to practice. When people talk of a 'skills curriculum' they are often talking about teaching critical thinking etc, which cannot be taught, and cannot be used without knowledge.
Do a thought experiment. Try critically thinking about black holes. Unless you are an astro-physicist you won't be able to because you do not have the knowledge base that would allow you to critically think about them. Now try critically thinking about something you do know about - and you will be able to because you have the knowledge base.
It's knowledge that needs to be taught. The things called 'skills' are innate and do not need teaching.

I disagree. Skills can (and are) taught and many are definitely transferable. For example teamwork is a skill and it can be taught e.g. teaching turn taking, teaching children not to speak over each other, teaching children to plan a task, teaching them to allocate jobs in a group etc.

I also disagree with a lot of what you have said about knowledge vs skills but it's probably irrelevant anyway as the curriculum is the curriculum and it's not changing anytime soon so 🤷

Turn-taking, teaching children not to speak over others etc are innate skills which we bring out - our species would not survive had we not had these social skills and learned where to apply them (it's the application we are teaching, not the skill). Team work is an innate skill of many mammals e.g. no-one teaches a lion pride to hunt together, they practice a skill which is an innate survival tactic. Just so hunters used team work to kill a mammoth. The strategies they used, feint and constant attack, are built on knowledge of how to kill a mammoth, but that one works in a team is a skill we are born with - we wouldn't have survived as a species if that was not so.

I disagree it's a taught skill which some will learn more easily than others.

I agree that skills are more important than knowledge in today's world. We aren't short of people who (think they) know everything. We are short of people who can actually do stuff.

We have to socialize children into the innate skills of our culture, for children are by nature selfish, and have to be in order to survive. But the skills we are teaching are innate in us: critical thinking, use of trial and error, taking turns, working in teams and collaborating - because without these traits which have evolved in us we would not survive. Indeed, those who would not apply these skills to a large extent did not survive.
But skills such as those above are different from the sort of knowledge that qualifies us to be an optician, a historian, a doctor etc. The ability to do those jobs is based on taught knowledge and one of the evolutionary advantages we have is that we can teach our young the things we have learned so that they do not have to discover them for themselves e.g. reading or maths. Neither has been around long enough for us to have evolved the ability to just do them, in the way that we can use trial and error,or take turns or pick up our mother tongue. They must be explicitly taught. The point of all this is that the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland does not do this explicit teaching and this is one of the reasons it has gone down the PISA rankings e.g. for reading (because reading is decoding + comprehension and comprehension requires knowledge in the long-term memory).

Teaching how to plan a task is showing how to do something - it is knowledge that is being taught e.g. how to frame questions, how to open an essay etc, how to plan the cooking of a meal, or run an office. Much of what we think of as skills are innate in us e.g. the lean towards team-work, pattern-making, etc which are part of humanity's make-up. Yes, cake making is a skill - based on knowledge of how you make a cake and knowledge of the chemistry that makes it work e.g. that when you cream (mix to the consistency of think cream using a mixer or a spoon) fat and sugar you are adding a third ingredient to the mix: air.
The point of an educational curriculum is to pass on the knowledge that our society has accumulated over generations to the next generation, so that they to can use it and pass it on. The dead, the living and those who will be born are all part of our society, and we betray the dead if we do not pass on to our children what was given to us. And it is knowledge - of maths, history, physics, sewing, cooking, geography, chemistry, literature, how to paint and draw, how to dance - that we must teach, and teach it explicitly; our ability to make solutions using trial and error (an innate skill) will not help us learn a body of knowledge which we must know to automaticity so that we can draw on it at need.

I don't know where Labour think all these people are coming from who are going to train. They've missed filling all the training places every year I can remember. No wants to do the job. Of those that do train very few make it past their late 40s before leaving to do something else - I left whilst still in my 20s. I have just one friend left in teaching.

Work load, behaviour, pay, behaviour of parents, lack of respect for the role ... why would anyone do it? And before anyone mentions the pension or holidays - they're obviously not enough to keep people in the job are they?

And now we have kids playing identity politics and late guidance for schools on issues like gender.

I do wonder if retention at schools with tough behaviour policies like Katherine Birbalsingh's Michaela is better than at standard schools?

Term has just ended in my part of Scotland. Yesterday, I got a text from a HoD wanting me to take a full timetable in their school for at least the first term of the new academic year. I'm astonished that they need to ask a crone like me.

I've declined. I'm not fit for a full timetable.

Teachers (and potential teachers) - Life is too short to be working in a job where you are not appreciated, let alone physically and verbally abused. Find another career because this isn't going to improve.

No wants to do the job
The thing is, I do want to teach. I loved it so much. It’s absolutely my vocation. But even I can’t possibly do the job in its current format. They were taking the piss out of me, underpaying me, fiddling my contract to take away my entitlement to employment benefits, and I literally had no life because the workload was too heavy. So I left, and it still breaks my heart because I was absolutely born to teach. If even I can’t teach when it was truly the purpose of my existence, then nobody will.