Teachers : what's the worst thing about the job now?

[Floursacktabletop]

I've name changed , but been here many years and teaching for 22 years.
Dreading going back on Monday. For me , the worst bit is the increasingly poor behaviour of students and the continual parental complaints and allegations.
Anyone else dreading it and fancy a solidarity thread?

None that wouldn't require a lot of money and more people willing to be teachers.
Just for starters...
More PRUs
More special schools
More TLAs
Less contact time
Smaller classes
Some way of tipping the balance of responsibility so that everyone remembers that students are at least as accountable for their results as teachers are

Workload (I feel like I have a full time admin job and the teaching gets in the way of the admin) despite ofsted flagging workload as an issue

SLT - constant criticism and micro managing

Resources - we have no resources and I'm fed up of providing them myself in order to teach effectively

Maybe there needs to be a briefing session for parents whose child is about to start school or change school, setting out expectations on both sides; also a parent/school contract to be signed at the beginning of each school year. If the contract is not signed or the child's or parent's behaviour falls below a minimum standard, the child gets sent home and the parent has to deal with the child all day or find someone else to do it. But I suppose that's really just another way of arguing that schools should be able to exclude disruptive pupils at the drop of a hat. Which they absolutely should.

Is there a country that does education well? Are there any aspects that could easily be put into place here?

How do you have less admin? What admin could be dropped instantly? What is essential?

How do you improve behaviour? If current offerings don't work, what would?

Behaviour - some students seem untouchable.
Workload
Micro-Management by our bloated SLT (Head is part time) It’s all ‘stick with this policy until we say it doesn’t apply to that pupil/situation’ Consistency -bollocks!
Far too much to do with too little time to do it leads to the constant concern you’re not doing your job properly.
Lack of investment - my school hasn’t had proper heating for at least five years! 🥶
I’m planning on seeing my youngest through school and then looking at something else. So three years left.
I changed my career to come into teaching but have been a secondary teacher for 20 years.
Most of my colleagues feel the same. I honestly don’t know who will be left in the profession if it carries on this way.
When it goes well it’s such a brilliant job but that’s rare these days.

Spot on!

School home contracts are already in place.

Is there a country that does education well? Are there any aspects that could easily be put into place here?

To my mind, that is what Bridget Phillipson should be doing. Looking at other countries with a similar infrastructure (ie not just visiting China and saying our teachers could have classes of 60...) and seeing what works well.

What is the mental health of teachers/children like?
What's the recruitment and retention like?
What's the workload like? What are the expectations with planning/marking/assessment/contact expectations with parents?

What's the working day/weeks like?
What about class sizes?
What about term lengths?
What does the breadth of curriculum look like? Do they use things like textbooks?

What's the SEND situation like? Do mainstream class teachers have very high need children in their children without support and still expected for every child to progress despite this?

How are schools inspected? How match stress and workload sore this cause? Do schools/areas have practice inspections to get them ready for the real thing?? Does this get cited as being one of the main reasons for teachers leaving the profession?

If the teachers and pupils are happier-what are they doing that we could copy!?

If I were to do something free that would massively improve things overnight, would be to scrap (or if that's not possible, remove judgements other than 'met/not met expectations' from) Ofsted and cut 1/3 out of the primary curriculum. I'm sure secondary teachers would probably agree!

One overnight change I'd make is that schools can permanently exclude more readily, particularly in cases of consistent defiance. The ofsted metric that reducing exclusions is a good thing, isn't helping anyone.

In the background I'd then need to spend £££ on PRU places. However with more perm exs, parents might start to parent.

I’m sure that happens sometimes. But I work in a related field and the amount of children who were not given a diagnosis in primary because of masking (particularly girls) who then do get a diagnosis down the line when the wheels fall off in teenage years/at Uni….

The parents have known all along but have spent years being gaslit by schools/professionals and being told they’re just not parenting properly... the consequences are devastating.

So are schools, and the people who work in them. Believe me, we get it. Yet we are still trying to provide the education that families expect for their children.

And the refusal to pay for trips has been going on a lot longer than the current cost of living crisis.

I’m a teacher too. I do get it. I just don’t think parents’ unwillingness to contribute towards trips is at the top of the list of issues we’re facing right now. There are far more pressing concerns and a part of the problem is the pressure that everyone is under to find the money to simply survive.

Too many parents take in loco parentis to the extreme, the school is not there as a substitute for your failure as parents!

The whole 'safeguarding' is there because parents are dim, they give their sprog the facility, a smart phone, to expose themselves to serious danger and the first response on here is 'tell the school', even though this is happening during the parents' time, eg evenings and weekends. Will these failures buy their dear a 750cc motor bike then complain when the child cannot handle it?
So many children are never exposed to No and are resentful of anyone who tells their dear No. If your child cannot accept discipline because of your failures then keep them at home, home school them, for the sake of all the children whose future is being put at risk by your children and you.

I’m not a UK teacher (have taught abroad) but I have a number of friends who are or were teachers. Most have left in the last 3 years and the one who remains describes it like being in an abusive relationship. She’s hit and assaulted daily, and the parents, when notified, will either accuse her of lying, blame her, or at best tell her it’s her responsibility when the kid is in school, not theirs.

Her SLT always put the blame on her and the kids who do it are regularly given treats and access to things that the well-behaved kids don’t have, as it’s considered that they have unmet needs etc. Most of them don’t have diagnosed SEN nor are they on the diagnosis pathway.

I’ve seen her injuries first hand and am desperate for her to get out of there but she’s single and it’s difficult for her to leave when she has all the financial responsibility at home.

She teaches primary.

Her colleagues and peers have similar experiences. Something has gone horribly wrong but it feels like nobody is prepared to discuss it.

I was a teacher for 20+ years, now retired. Even 25 years ago, there was some horrendously entitled behaviour at the all girls, independent school I worked at. Started and fuelled, I think, by the parent's attitude. In the subsequent years, when I moved to the state system, I saw behaviour worsen (although there were many delightful students, some of them dealing with levels of hardship and deprivation and being carers to their parents and younger siblings - I take my hat off to these students!) I could fill pages with examples, but one thing in particular struck me when doing Supply for a time. Year 8 or 9 students whose attitude, which was echoed by SLT, was: We won't listen to you until you've EARNED our respect!!!!! How was supposed to do that and how long it was supposed to take me??? There needs to be an ethos in school that the teacher is there to do a job and wants to help them and the students has a vital part to play in this. When the teacher enforces something, they aren't doing it because they're a 'meanie' but because it's the school policy. But also, then a teacher enforces school policy, they need to know SLT will back them up, if necessary. And also the students needs telling that the teacher actually does know more about the subject than they do. Obviously, discussion/opinion/different points of view have their place, but if a Yr 7 science lesson on reproduction for instance is hijacked by a student recounting something they've seen on YouTube, nobody learns very much. Respect for the teacher and the school should begin at home and be reinforced by SLT. Of course teachers can make mistakes and sometime (maybe often) the school's way of doing things isn't optimal, but it shouldn't descend into all-out verbal and often physical warfare.

Parents and currently OFSTED. Were previously outstanding so were well overdue and they need to come to us before the end of this year but the anticipation is just hell!

https://www.oldham.gov.uk/news/article/2777/theoldhamschoolwhererobotssitinforchildrenunabletoattendclasses

Have you seen the robots who "sit in for children unable to attend classes"?

One of the comments within the article is interesting?

Another said: "I've been here since November and it's better than mainstream. The classes are smaller and less rowdy than and there are not at here is lot more help if you need it."

Oh get fucked!
I’ve recently left teaching, the real world’ you refer to is 100% less stressful. I can comment on this because I actually have experience of teaching in a school, unless you have taught you don’t have a clue! How lovely and supportive you must be to your teacher family members. 🙄

For me the main reason was behaviour but more importantly it not being dealt with. ‘Every behaviour is communication’ is utter bollocks. It was utterly relentless ‘teaching’ a bunch of disrespectful kids who didn’t give a shit about school. It was soul destroying seeing the few kids who did actually want to learn have every lesson disrupted by unruly louts. It was not like this when I started teaching but since Covid things got much worse. Unsupportive heads of year and SLT were just as bad, not following discipline policies, no consistency and undermining staff in front of kids and parents. The workload didn’t help either. In the end I communicated ‘fuck this shit’ by leaving. My only regret is putting up with it as long as I did. I can confirm that the so called ‘real world’ some have referred to is far less stressful and I don’t miss the holidays because I can actually relax on my holidays these days instead of recovering from illness, exhaustion or having a shit load of work to do!

Trouble with those is if you have an ND child they are very reluctant to use them,’too anxious making.

Mine refused.

I’ve taught in a different country and could provide tons of advice and tips as to what could be learned and applied here, but the biggest problem with that is very simple.

The parents in that country are completely different to (many of) the parents here.

You could make every change going and it’d still fail unless the parents also changed. And I can’t see that happening, because at best UK society doesn’t make that change easy, and at worst many parents are lazy and entitled and changing themselves would require them to be not lazy or entitled.

I work with (well-off, time rich) parents and it makes my blood boil the way they act like schools are actually 100% responsible for raising their children and their only role is to complain incessantly about how they do it. That whole attitude needs a 180 but how?

Lots of you have mentioned SENs and the lack of suitable provision for them as being part of the problem. Do you think that SENs are on the rise in general, or is this just the manifestation of the recent push for inclusivity into mainstream education without there being sufficient support for it? If you do think SENs are becoming more common in children, can you offer any potential reasons for it? I know Autism has been linked with having older parents and that's certainly very much more common than it used to be.

When I was at at school in the middle ages there were very few obviously SEN children in classrooms, but for the undiagnosed dyslexics and ADHD sufferers who may have been frustrated and overwhelmed in the classroom, it was much easier to just play truant if school was too stressful for you. We took ourselves to and from school largely unsupervised, no email, no mobile phones, sometimes no house phone, so a hastily scribbled faked note from 'your mum' explaining sickness a few days later and very few teachers questioned it. The first your parents would know of it was when they saw the number of absences that year on your end of year report.

Those who were known to struggle in the classroom were kept very much separate, in a remedial 'unit' or whatever it was called then. The older kids with serious behavioural issues that spilled over into anti-social behaviour outside of school would end up in 'reform schools' which don't really exist now. Much like 'care in the community' versus locking people up in asylums, it doesn't really solve the problem, it just fails to contain it and makes it everybody's problem.

Many of those children are now either school refusers, or are privately chauffeured in and almost held prisoner for the day, at least that's how it will feel for them. In my day the more easily diagnosed SEN children tended to go straight to special schools, often residential. Whereas there has been a policy of inclusion into mainstream in recent years which I think people now recognise hasn't necessarily worked for all children. It seems to be that in the 18 years or so I've been on MN, parents used to fight to get their SEND children a place in mainstream school for inclusion reasons, they now seem to be fighting to get them places in special schools instead because there is not sufficient support in mainstream school. I can't say I am surprised at this. I think it's a nice idea trying to pretend that everyone can be integrated into mainstream education with the right support, but I think it's naive at best and damaging for that pupil as well as the other pupils in their class, at worst.

OFSTED- not fit for purpose. Entire schools are run on the basis of needing to be seen to pander to OFSTED whims. Needs to be replaced by a genuinely collaborative reporting and improvement system.

Lack of funding. This results in massive class sizes, experienced teachers being forced out, and inadequate facilities in schools.

Lack of SEN funding and provision. Children with needs which leave them unable to cope in mainstream spend much of their time in a state of dysregulation, often without 1:1 support. This has a massive impact on the children themselves and the frequently disrupted education and safety of other children.

Poor behaviour.