It's getting harder to retain teachers

[StealthPolarBear]

here
Well there's a shock. Mn could have told them that three to years ago.
It seems to me that the 'solution' seems to be to up recruitment but if the problem is retention than that is only a temporary problem.

Well yes. And nearly all the staff at my daughters infant school are new door newish teachers now. V few over 35

Argh temp solution to the problem

Are you ashamed that all your bright ideas came to this, Gove and Morgan?

I don't think they care.

Are you ashamed that all your bright ideas came to this, Gove and Morgan? Unfortunately they don't give a shit. I recently heard him talking about the much needed reforms he'd carried out.

I actually wonder if it's a very deliberate long term plan to destroy the profession, the unions and the system.

The teaching qualification will be deemed completely unnecessary and they'll start paying diddly squat for young 'staff' who will work long hours and through the year (when the long holidays are scrapped).

Hope I'm very wrong though!!

A bit like the nhs?

Well fan my brow, whatever next - blocking immigration will screw up the NHS?

I see loads of students who tell me that they want to do a PGCE when they finish their degree. The sad thing is that this isn't because they really want to be teachers but because they cannot think of another job they might do. They know about teaching because they've been to school.

Every year I try to warn them that it's not at all like whatever they're imagining (they seem to have some romantic idea that it's like being a TA in utopia) and that they should not go into it unless they have an incredible desire to do the actual job a teacher now does. They always apply anyway but I don't imagine they last long in teaching.

HOLD PRESS
EARTH NOT FLAT I repeat EARTH NOT FLAT

It's already become the norm to have TAs covering for ppa time, or a teachers absence etc. When I started only a qualified teacher could be in charge of a class.

I dont think it will be long before just graduates can be considered able yo teach (as some do in the private sector but in a completely different set up. And often with older experienced staff around. Not a revolving door of young staff)

The older experienced teaching staff will probably be working as TAs .

MiladyThesaurus

You just described me after my first degree. Thankfully one of my former teachers whom I'd emailed for advice told me to do some volunteering in a school which after 2 weeks told me I'd be a terrible and extremely miserable teacher.

It doesn't make any sense at all that if you want to raise standards you attack the very profession that have the experience and knowledge in how to do that.

We still haven't seen what a generation drilled in fronted adverbials are going to come through doing and thinking.

Rollon - too true. There's already several ex-teacher TAs I know of here. I'm trying to avoid being one.

The other thing is al lk the younger teachers that start to come through will have come through a target driven system, teach by numbers etc and think thats the norm. I for 100 reasons cant/won't homeschool mine but often wish u could send them to an independent where theyre not caught up in all the madness. (Besides disagreeing with them ideologically etc etc.)

Teaching has perhaps always been a profession with a high drop-out rate within five years. Certainly, this was the case when I started in the mid 2000s, in the midst of Blair and "education, education, education." I have always suspected that one reason for this is the high prevalence of young females entering the profession, who begin in their early/mid twenties (as do I) and then have a baby and find it impossible to balance family life and teaching.

I do feel reforms were necessary, and I don't think Gove was as misguided as many believe. What ultimately has failed is the lack of alternatives for those who are never going to achieve academically.

Other matters I have no complaints at all about and in fact welcome.

My experience in a MAT was that they had no interest in experienced older teachers (I was late 30s!) because they cost more and are more likely to voice their opinions. As soon as my school was academised, they treated anyone who'd been teaching more than about 3 years with contempt, even though we had excellent track records and our classes had made more progress than the NQTs they sucked up to. All of us left and were replaced either by NQTs or even worse trainee teachers who had never set foot in a classroom before and whose training was to just stand in front of a class and teach.

It seems like it might be government policy to get young people into the profession to teach for a couple of years, then replace them with a fresh set. Presumably making education a miserable place to work has the effect of encouraging people to only stay in it for a couple of years.

I was lucky to find a job in a school which wanted experience and they value the job I'm doing but these seem harder to find now.

It's all part of their plan, the older, more experienced staff will work as TAs alongside cheap newly qualified teachers and will end up doing teaching. Oh, wait a moment, budgets are being slashed so schools won't be able to afford TAs and so the children will be taught by inexperienced young teachers who haven't got a clue through no fault of their own. Added to which falling standards in education will mean that those new teachers have appalling general knowledge and education themselves.

Grace. It appears exactly the same happened here.

I was started teaching early 2000s and certainly logs of older teachers aeound then. I enjoyed teaching and was enthusiastic, but welcomed the experience of older teachers I'm the department.

I don't think there is any sort of plan other than to implement the changes they felt were needed. In any case, it isn't as simple as 'young teachers = malleable and docile' and ' older teachers = lack of tractability and argumentative.' Apart from anything else, teaching has always been a career attractive to mature students. I was one of the few 22 year olds on my PGCE at the time.

Furthermore, teaching as a profession has always been left leaning and Union led, and has always been subject to the whims of various governments (and has always complained about them, too.)

The slashes to budgets are going to have severe consequences, and one of these is going to undoubtedly be the inability to employ teachers with experience. This is indeed wrong, but I don't think it's a master plan of the government to remove everyone below the age of 35 from the classroom, it's to save money.

But if they can see this is the consequence of cuts, the government needs to take some action, rather than just losing a valuable resource. When Gove took over, he spouted on about the importance of having high-calibre teachers, but the policy of swingeing cuts seems totally at odds with this.

Depressing isn't it? Dh and I have both been teachers for 20 years. We tell our dc not to be teachers. With my Oxbridge degree, PGCE and varied school experience, what am I doing? Ad hoc, non-subject-specific supply teaching, aka babysitting/crowd-control! Loads of good, well qualified teachers are doing the same (or becoming TAs), because the lack of job satisfaction, career progression and decent salary are more than made up for by the lack of the utter bollocks involved in being a proper, permanent classroom teacher. I won't enumerate the many categories of bollocks here, as it would take pages.

Miaw. I echo so much of that :(
It shouldn't be this way.

That can't have come as a shock to Gove and Morgan surely?! I think that education now is in the worst state that I've seen it in the last 20 years. God knows, it was bad enough when I was at school but it's dire now.

Ditto the NHS - I had to raise a wry smile at the headline I saw the other day 'NHS Staff saved my life' - they are getting less and less opportunity to do that nowadays in the same way that education staff are getting less and less opportunity to provide a quality education.