Anyone worried about teacher shortages?

[blackcatbabe]

Schools are struggling to recruit at the moment, particularly in the South East. Anyone particularly worried about this in their kids' schools?

Interesting read.
I have been teaching 11 years now so I'm well qualified and experienced. It counts for alot.

Experience is key. I learned more on the job than in my PGCE.

I'm sure there are many decent unqualified teachers out there who can control a class and teach well enough, but the value of a qualified, experienced teacher is ten times more in my opinion.

Children deserve this, and the teachers deserve to be valued for it as well.

I'm sure there are many decent unqualified teachers out there who can control a class and teach well enough

Wouldn't it be great if they could go through some sort of process that supported them in learning both pedagogy and the practical skills of the job with a mentor, training sessions and regular evaluations rather than just sticking them in front of a class and seeing what happens?

The 2 form entry primary school where I used to work has 8 teachers leaving at the end of this term. Only 2 are moving on to teaching jobs. Two TA s and the main office manager also leaving.

SLT have managed to hock together teaching staff but these are a mixture of newly qualified, unqualified and staff that were previously HLTAs (job sharing with qualified teachers.) It's a total sham but they seem to be making the same decisions that lots of other schools are.

Very relieved I am no longer in teaching and that my DCs are out of the education system...

The greatest percentage of the workforce in teaching is women. Traditionally it was regarded as child friendly. Now with so many work from home jobs on offer women are turning their backs in teaching. The government has invested heavily in Oak Academy, an online learning platform. I think in a few years older students ( secondary) will not be in school every day but studying at home part of the week

The issue I had with GTP (the old on the job training scheme) was that barely any of it was to do with my subject. I wasn't observed by a subject specialist at any point (except one I arranged myself).

I found getting the hang of teaching, assessment, pastoral etc relatively straightforward. I could really have done with help with teaching the actual subject though. In the end I just bought a load of textbooks and sought out help directly from teachers at other schools.

I took over from a fully qualified teacher who'd presided over a crop of Ds, Es and Us. In a superselective grammar...

Mind you, my ITT provider was recently failed by Ofsted so hopefully others' experience will have been better.

I found it a very poor system though and what actually enabled me to succeed was the transferable skills I had from 15 years in the workplace.

GTP v different to PGCE though.

I'm sure there are many decent unqualified teachers out there who can control a class and teach well enough, but the value of a qualified, experienced teacher is ten times more in my opinion.

Children deserve this, and the teachers deserve to be valued for it as well
This, and schools have had some flexibility on appointing exceptional candidates who might not be qualified for some time.
The move to remove the QTS requirements had nothing to do with freeing up schools to employ amazing candidates. It was all about cutting the wage bill.

I know some people who teach in the independent sector in music directors/directors of sport sort of roles. They're excellent in their field, are obviously good at their job and not having QTS wasn't a barrier to them doing the job. They're never going to leave their enjoyable jobs with well behaved and generally engaged students in schools that value enrichment to teach 20 classes of KS3 one hour a week in an underfunded state school.

Exactly this, @LolaSmiles . Quite different to teaching music or cricket to classes of ten.

There are no PGCEs in my subject!

Finally we find where Gillian Keegan has been hiding rather than doing her job.

The head in the sand act only works for so long

Oak academy lessons are bloody awful

Lower birth rate doesn't mean lower population. The only schools with falling rolls are those deemed failing or in certain rural areas.

What @noblegiraffe said.

All of those saying one doesn’t need a teaching qualification to teach - how did lockdown learning work for you? Did you fully understand, without the teacher explaining to you, what their aims for each lesson were? How they’d scaffolded (supported learning so all students, regardless of prior attainment, can achieve these same goals) and extended the learning (challenging and stretching the learning of higher prior attaining students) of those that needed it? Pre-empted any common misunderstandings? Assessed their learning from the previous lesson/prior knowledge and tailored the lesson accordingly? Ensured that suitable literacy was included in every lesson? What considerations they’d made for sequencing (E.g. students won’t be able to learn how to shoot hoops in basketball if they don’t first know how to throw)? Could you tell why than done that specific task and not other? Why was that task designed as such? Did you what topics would be age appropriate for your children at each year of their education? How they’re developing brain impacts on how we teach them at each stage?

And this is all besides the behaviour management we do in class, which is a big chunk of what we do. In any given lesson I’m reading the room, gently discouraging low level disruption, targeting my questions to individual students. The list goes on.

I learnt all of these on my PGCE and then spent the next 5 years learning, through CPD, own reading, mentorship, professional observations and discussions with more experienced teachers. I’m not sure that sort of learning ever stops but the PGCE gave me the bare necessities, the absolute bare minimum that all students deserve from their teachers.

To suggest we don’t need to be qualified is disgusting.

This is nonsense. Many schools in my area are struggling to fill all their reception places. Five years ago they were mostly oversubscribed.

There is a similar pattern across the country, with schools merging and closing (not just in rural areas).

Obviously this is a general pattern and so it’s not the case for every single area/school.

Not round here - we are commuting distance to London and Cambridge, and 2 excellent local primaries have gone from 1FE to 4 classes in the space of 2 years. Others have lost at least one class - only towns or villages where housing has been built have maintained rolls.

Nobody is suggesting teachers shouldn't be trained and qualified. But at the moment, it's quite possible that a child's percentage of lessons taught by a teacher qualified in their subject is higher in a private school which is allowed to employ unqualified teachers than in a state school which isn't, because of teacher shortages. Which brings us back to what the thread is actually about. And that's before you take into account the point that academies (most secondaries now?) don't have to employ qualified teachers anyway. (NB unqualified isn't the same as untrained. There might be some private schools employing loads of unqualified teachers as glorified childcare with Twinkl sheets, but better ones are more likely to have a quite small number of unqualified teachers and to provide them with lots of CPD, mentoring, observation etc. A friend of ours is the person responsible for that training in her department, both for NQTs and any very occasional unqualified teachers, and she gets a lot of release time to run that programme). I agree that it would be better if all teachers were qualified, but that doesn't mean that all unqualified teachers are awful.

Unusual. Most secondary schools in England are oversubscribed.

No, @assonant . I have no idea if all unqualified teachers are awful.
What it means is that they haven't met clear standards nor had rigour in order to prepare them for the classroom.
The last three unqualified teachers we had crashed out quickly. One after a term. They were potentially good, but had no effective preparation and teaching practice. I thought it was a shame, and actually quite cruel to give them that responsibility with no training.

This year’s y7 was peak birth rate for here, and then it falls off a cliff. Give it 2 years and the secondary picture will look very different.

One village primary has already been closed in Cambridgeshire.

Net migration over the past two years has been 1.1 million. I'm guessing most of them are young and many will have children.
Our city in the north has grown significantly in the last five years and all secondaries are oversubscribed. 30% of housing has been bought by people moving from the South East up to our beautiful (and cheaper area). Maybe the North is booming?

You all should be worried. It’s real and it’s happening.

I know this is generally a uk wide site but tends to be England centric. In NI we have the opposite, not even enough jobs for teachers. My dsis has been qualified for years and can't get a perm any post. I just checked and there are 35 teaching jobs now advertised in the whole of NI. Schools here finish next week for summer, but still even before Easter there weren't loads more. Our education system is far from perfect, especially around SEN and massive cuts to funding, but we don't have a recruitment and retention crisis. No academies either so all teachers need to be qualified and registered with the NI teaching council. Kids here outperform all other parts of the uk every year on gcse/ a levels and primary kids ranked 5th/6th in world for reading.

I know lots of teachers and they do talk about stress but I don't know any that are burnt out or planning to leave. Teachers here are generally well respected and as the cost of living is lower (generally) a teaching job affords a good standard of living. I lived and worked in schools in England for 10 years and the difference in stress/ bureaucracy/ oversight from government is huge.

It’s not unusual at all. Pupil numbers are falling at primary level and in a few years it will hit secondaries too.

Right. Well, as I said, not where I live. Every secondary school is oversubscribed and the population has increased, so it must be regional.

I don’t know where you live but I did say two posts ago:

Obviously this is a general pattern and so it’s not the case for every single area/school.