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 I know left teaching and trained to be a train driver. She wishes she’d done it earlier. There is far more to it than meets the eye. Yes there are shifts to negotiate and with children that’s hard but the pay and prospects for development are good and she loves the fact that when her shift finishes that’s it for the day.
I can’t remember how many were in her cohort when she trained but I do know she was one of 3 ex teachers on her course.
There are plenty of options for ex teachers that wouldn’t necessarily come to mind.

My dsis was teaching in an English primary school when one of the fathers got in to the school and pinned her to a wall by her throat. It took five other staff to drag him off.

The reason - she had told a 9yo he could not wear his new football strip to class.

It was the final straw for her, she resigned after 22 years, leaving her school without a deputy head and a safeguarding lead.

Some parents are nothing more than animals, raising their children to be just as bad.

All of this. The monetisation of phonics is horrifying; people making obscene money out of one of the very basic education entitlements.

I’m leaving this year after a decade teaching. It’s either find something else or have a full breakdown. I don’t want a job that’s actually 5 jobs in one where you’re only paid for a fraction of what you actually do.

The state of funding for SEND children is another reason schools are quite literally drowning. I spend hours on referral forms, for the parents to then be told to go on another parenting course or suck it up and wait years for alternative help.

Our school systems desperately needs more funding, more qualified staff and less pointless ofsted hoops to jump through.

So sorry this happened to your DH. Hope he is able to retrain in another career ( think there are specialists who support ex teachers, at least seen a website/agency mentioned). Really hope he can get some counselling to deal with what has happened to-date.

Labour will never recruit 6500 teachers - few uk grads can afford those starter salaries with the debt they leave uni with and they won’t cope in these schools either. They’ll have to look overseas, and they (from the Aussies, S Africans etc that I know who did it) will leave after 2 years. The teachers in independent schools will not join the state sector - they’ll get overseas postings or retrain.

It’s disaster waiting to happen. This is not down to funding - it’s down to social attitudes, parents who do not value education and who believe that no-one has a right to discipline their child, and weak leadership in schools.

He should take a break and then get a job in a good private school.

I'm very lucky to have never experience violence or that level of disrespect from students... maybe because I am a female teacher in a boys school. But what I cannot tolerate anymore is the bully culture rife in schools amongst staff. I am sick of it and looking to end my almost 20 year career because of it

IKR.

The job has changed, I say this as someone who has been doing it for almost 30 years.
When I started in the late 90s we had 2 children in the whole school who needed additional support. It would be unusual to have a class with only 2 now. Last year I had 6 children diagnosed with neuro-diversity and 2 on the waiting list (3 required full time 1:1, 2 of them even needed support at breaks and lunchtime). We also have an increase in anxiety/mental health and almost no support from outside agencies. I also see increasing parents with poor mental health.
There is also a greater expectation of schools taking on the parenting role. We have 4 children coming into one of our Reception classes who are not toilet trained. That used to be very rare. We have more children with speech delays, unable to put on coats/shoes, unable to use cutlery.
We are now educators / SEN specialists / social workers / counsellors/ parents / S&L therapists.
Whilst demands on teachers have gone up, pay and support has gone down.
No wonder staff are leaving.

This.

Schools need to start showing some backbone and kicking the misbehaving kids out of school. Let their parents deal with them.

I taught for years in private and state schools, and the private schools are the place to go if you want decent behaviour and respect. Not all the kids in state schools were awful, by any stretch, but certainly a large enough proportion to make the job miserable.

The key difference is quite simple: private schools can bin any/all miscreants for any reason they like. If state schools could simply expel all the miscreants they would be very different schools. But where would you send all the kids excluded from mainstream?

Yes, no idea what’s happened with parents. If I had a letter sent home to my parents I’d have not been able to sit down for a week (not advocating this approach of course, but the point is that there were clear, punitive consequences).

The reason private school kids do better is because behaviour is better - and that is because parents pay. Whether that comes easy to those parents or whether they have sacrificed, borrowed and taken on extra jobs to fund it, the parents are 100% engaged and poor behaviour reports are actioned and supported by parents/school working together.

Yes, I agree.
The system is well and truly broken.

Really sorry to hear this OP. All teachers and school staff are heroes in my opinion.

I can’t blame anyone for wanting to leave (I left for health reasons 10 years ago from a support role, it wasn’t too bad then, although the head wasn’t at all supportive of my cancer diagnosis).

im sure he will be great in an industry role and wonder why on earth he bothered. The school system is broken. 💐💐💐

Schools have moved beyond just Education and we have the back-door ‘privatisation’ through the introduction of MATs.

This has devalued teachers and devalued education.

I don’t blame him, I’m a TA, sometimes I get hurt daily, I’ve been bitten, punched, kicked, pulled to the ground etc, it’s endless and exhausting.

Precisely! Was so disappointed when I saw that policy by Labour because it just says to me they have no clue about the issues in teaching! The teacher retention is the issue, no point hiring more when they’re just all going to leave, waste of everyone’s time and money!

broken for a long time

In 30 years time, when the current generation of school kids are grown up, I hope they study what the fuck went wrong in the parenting of their generation and what caused it. Or maybe they’ll actually agree that it was the system, and not them/their parents?

I think the pendulum swung too far. A few generations ago, parents were strict and often emotionally disconnected from their kids. Smacking was the norm. The next generation, born into the age of consumerism and individualism, were much more liberal with their kids, and more child focussed. As a result, their kids grew up thinking they were the centre of the universe, and insisted everyone regard their own children as perfection walking the earth. God knows how we claw our way back from that.

I fully support teachers and schools being harder on students. By that I mean excluding and sending them home. It will annoy the parents and hopefully it could make them care more about their kids attitudes?

I don’t know how to make some parents care more, I don’t blame the kids per say, if the parents are enforcing rules / respect there’s no hope

I quit half way through my NQT and never looked back!
Only good thing to come out of my time at uni was meeting DH

I don’t know how teachers do it, I wouldn’t last a week.
I hope your husband recovers quickly and finds a good job where he is appreciated..

Yes. That is why my sister left. And took a pay cut. Increasing pay would not attract her back.

I'd be interested to know from the teachers saying they've been attacked etc why do you think things have got so bad? Are schools still excluding pupils if they misbehave? It's just absolutely shocking. If you punched a pregnant woman twice outside of school surely you'd be arrested?!? This sounds so different to my school experience and just wouldn't happen at my kids school (private) the kids are scared of the headmaster and definitely don't want to get called into his office. I'm really pleased they are strict with discipline, this just sounds awful and completely unacceptable

This sort of behaviour doesn't seem to happen in the schools run by people like Katharine Birbalsingh. But all the liberals seem to hate her and what she stands for.

Schools are already run by those of a liberal-left persuasion. So Labour aren't going to change anything. Except to worsen things by their levelling down agenda of attacking private education and selective state schools.