Teaching - aspirational profession

[mids2019]

What are your views on teaching as being a career young people aspire to?

I think it definitely should be but it seems currently going people especially the academically gifted tend to say doctor, lawyer, banker, journalist etc as desirable professions.

Is this because of the working conditions and remuneration within the teaching sector or there other societal.factors at play?
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Young

People will always be interested in it, but it’s certainly less popular for many reasons. Pay, working conditions, teachers being slagged in the media constantly…not to mention jobs with more flexibility are popular and teaching is literally the most inflexible job in the world.

Do we need therefore to look at remuneration to ensure that teaching is a graduate profession views on par with say finance or medicine ?

To be honest the teachers I know (including v senior ones) all got into it fairly accidentally. I don’t know anyone who always wanted to be a teacher. However I’m an accountant and I’d say the same about most of my colleagues. I don’t think there are many professions where people plan to be one for years - most of the time people just end up doing stuff once they’ve graduated and see what fits.

I think it's just as much about how people view teaching and teachers as money - possibly more. Everyone has been to school, many have less-than-positive memories and familiarity can breed contempt in some cases. To be aspirational a profession needs to have more than a good pay packet - though I wouldn't turn down a pay rise!

@mids2019

Do we need therefore to look at remuneration to ensure that teaching is a graduate profession views on par with say finance or medicine ?

It's not just the pay. Teachers these days are given unachievable targets and micromanaged, as well as having to work crazy hours just to do the basics. Until work load and autonomy are sorted, teaching won't be seen as an attractive career

It’s not the pay, I’m actually quite happy with my pay tbh, it’s the workload, lack of resources/money for the children, micromanaging by SLT and Ofsted.

If they removed Ofsted (or drastically changes the way it operated), increased PPA or removed some of the really pointless expectations, I think it would be much easier to retain staff.

In fact, I’m so old that I taught before PPA, and would happily lose it completely IF all the pointless tasks that were implemented when it came in (oh, don’t worry-you can do it in your PPA…), were scrapped.

The media and government despite teachers though, so until that narrative changes, it won’t be an aspirational career.

I'm a teacher. I went into it because I wanted to do something that makes a difference. However, since Michael Gove's time as education minister, teachers have been deliberately slated in the media as lazy, workshy communists so I imagine that takes the idea of aspiration away f I'm the profession.

Not a teacher but have teachers in my family.
Combination of a very well publicised excessive workload, more and more things becoming the responsibility of schools to educate children about and lack of flexibility.

I think too, in common with other public sector roles, there is a pay ceiling of around £40k which most staff will never go over. This is the same in most health professions, social work etc.
The grades required to get into university are so high for these courses now that, if students are driven by being high earners, they are going to take their high grades and go into Law, engineering, IT etc where there is no such ceiling.
But as I say, that is common with other public sector roles.

Interesting points about pay and administration.

I agree the media have a lot to answer for in terms of castigating teachers for any deficiency in the educational system.

Remuneration is poor.
The general public thinking you are workshy trots.
Limited career progression unless you want to go into management (ie. admin city spiced up with lunch duty, meetings meeting meetings and being radioed to deal with wayward pupils).

Entry requirements are also not very high either. It’s competitive but you can get into secondary or primary with UCAS points, and it’s unlimited tries on the skills test now. My parents were bitterly disappointed when I became a teacher, they wanted me to be a lawyer and do a conversion instead of a PGCE. I do Primary, which is is very much seen as the domain of hardworking but average intelligence girls who like young children

It’s not too far from truth though. I have a lot of colleagues who are very good teachers and know their curriculum well- but they are struggling with the new demands of the curriculum which requires a lot of teacher general knowledge about wider reaches of the subject, particularly in history and geography.

I think it's the workload that needs to change. Looking at this as a non-UK teacher, the demands placed on English teachers (the others seem more reasonable) are absolutely insane. Hours and hours wasted on paperwork and tracking, is it any wonder people aren't taking that up?

Pay is something to be tackled as well - as I understand it, pay increases are linked to meeting progress targets, which is absolutely crackers to me - but I feel the workload is a serious issue that a few extra thousand a year won't compensate for.

Limited career progression unless you want to go into management (ie. admin city spiced up with lunch duty, meetings meeting meetings and being radioed to deal with wayward pupils).

Excellent summary.

My last paragraph was a bit ambiguous- but 5 years ago you could get away with doing a history unit on ‘the romans’ and have 6 lessons with some mosaic art and dressing up like Romans and eating ‘Roman food’ cobbled together from the deli section of Tesco, with a nice jazzy report written in the ICT suite at the end.

Now teachers would be expected (and rightfully so) to teach an enquiry question such as ‘what was the Roman impact on Great Britain?’ with careful chronology, sourcework and the expectation that you could answer most questions fired at you.

If you studied BTEC health and social care and then went on to do a BA in ‘early childhood studies’ and your hobbies are watching Married at First Sight- the new expectations become a lot more demanding with a lot of self study. This is a pretty judgemental statement, but it’s based in what is around me and some staff are really struggling with this.

Unfortunately the general public don’t fully understand the rigour that goes into lesson planning and curriculum crafting nowadays.

Just because you’re academically gifted, it doesn’t mean you can handle a class of 30 teenagers.

@Suprima, I never thought I would say this, but I actually think many curriculum issues in primary could be solved with some good quality, centrally imposed text books. Then the nuts and bolts would be covered and teachers could focus on delivering good lessons around it.

[quote 2reefsin30knots]@Suprima, I never thought I would say this, but I actually think many curriculum issues in primary could be solved with some good quality, centrally imposed text books. Then the nuts and bolts would be covered and teachers could focus on delivering good lessons around it.[/quote]
I agree with this for maths, as there is a set curriculum, a lot of providers who do great text books well (power maths for example) but not for anything else, I’m afraid.

Quality lesson planning should be what we are spending our time doing. Teachers in other parts of the world get an enhanced PPA allowance to craft the best lessons possible for their subject, within working hours.

Imparting knowledge in a way that promotes thought and enquiry and creativity is literally our job. I don’t want to farm that out to a textbook, and primary should not be watered down.

My lessons include a lot of physical timelining and mapping, research, debate, note-taking, sorting and retrieval tasks- you can’t get that from a text book.

Probably not a popular view but I’d say it’s not an aspirational profession because lots of people who do it are awful at it!

Of course there are many, many amazing teachers but because there’s a shortage of teachers and it’s very hard/rare for a teacher to be sacked a lot of less good candidates work as teachers.

As I result I don’t respect teachers as a group - obviously I have massive respect for individual excellent teachers - and tend to think it’s a job that’s not hard to get, probably a flaw with me but I wouldn’t “aspire” to a job that’s not sufficiently competitive to get into.

I listen to a lot of careers interviews with young people. Teaching is mentioned frequently by young people - it's definitely still a popular career aspiration.

Teaching courses at university are very competitive and oversubscribed.

on par with say finance or medicine ?

But the whole point about teaching is that you are working with much younger people. There is an element of flexibility and child centred ness, not to mention crowd control, required in teaching which lawyers and doctors only rarely have to consider.

The disconnect between operations is teaching and revenue generation is much bigger in teacher than anywhere else.

It's tough. I only wish we could find a government and society which could value teaching. Good, well funded teaching could be the answer to society's woes, when it tends to be made the reason for many woes.

I think the majority of kids I interact with (and by kids I mean Ks4/5 mainly) if you asked them if they fancied teaching they would say why on earth would I consider that?

They know how it is, they know what the classroom can be like, they have a good idea of the workload. Plus a career in teaching, as something they are familiar with, is never going to be as 'sexy' as say medicine or finance which they generally only have vague knowledge of and has the novelty factor. Going into teaching is more of the same as what they've always known and isn't therefore as interesting as something new. The fact that all those 'sexy' jobs are likely just as hard to get established in, and have their own challenges, is kind of acknowledged.

But I've rarely taught young people that want to do teaching and if they do they are more likely to say they want to do primary. Some have surprised me and one or two work in neighbouring schools which is actually really nice. One in particular was a bloody nightmare in sixth form and was lucky to be allowed to stay, and is now a very well-regarded head of department in one of the best schools in the city, but if we'd talked about it back then it would definitely have been a 'no way' from both of us!

Tbh I don't know how English primary teachers manage without textbooks. Well, ok I do know but all I can see is it adding hours to their workload.

I have a book for Maths, Irish and English (a comprehension/reader kind of thing). They're not perfect by any means and I regularly go off piste with my plans - but by God, am I glad of having the structure to fall back on. Why reinvent the wheel?

I know a teacher who came to it as a second career, after having children. She has BEd. MEd and her PHD. She earns about £40k as a deputy head, and has a good pension compared to private sector. She estimates she does 60 hours a week.

She says a lot of her colleagues teach because they don't particularly know what else to do, but don't like the hours or the politics, then have babies, drop back to part time and eventually give up. It seems to be a 'default' career.

I will never ever teach again in an English state school.

If she's in Scotland or abroad then go for it

My lessons include a lot of physical timelining and mapping, research, debate, note-taking, sorting and retrieval tasks- you can’t get that from a text book.

No, but you could still do all that with a text book.

Personally, I would not want to teach maths from a text book- because I know I am great at teaching maths. I have ways of getting complex concepts across that I could never get from a text book and I have a bank of favoured resources.

But, nobody is an expert at everything. If we had good quality standardised ( and subsidised) text books, at least the NC content would be available in a solid format to support teachers in subjects they are not expert in. Secondary schools use them (if they can afford them) and nobody says they are not doing their job properly.