Guess whether teacher recruitment targets were met this year

[noblegiraffe]

Of course not.

Guess what the DfE had to say about it.

School standards minister Nick Gibb said: “There are now a record number of teachers in our schools – 15,500 more than in 2010 – and the fact that more than 32,000 new trainee teachers have been recruited in a competitive labour market, with historic low unemployment rates and a growing economy, shows that the profession continues to be an attractive career."

It's a good thing that schools are overrun with Physics and Computing teachers, otherwise the fact that they only recruited 2/3 of the numbers they were looking for would be really worrying.

Also, Design and Technology?! So much for schools being all about STEM these days. Not if they can't get the teachers!

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/teacher-training-targets-missed-all-secondary-subjects-except-history

They are offering £25,000 to students who want to train as teachers in these subjects though so I do think that is a start. Some people just will not want to teach. They possibly do not like children that much! We had no teacher shortages when I was at school many moons ago but some of them, despite being Oxford grads, were absolutely not teachers. It is a challenge to get the right people in the classroom and any old bod will not do.

They've been offering £25k to train to teach for years, it's clearly not good enough!

I was a trainee on the 25k bursary I left a few weeks ago. I can honestly say it was the worst 2 1/2 months of my life. I’d come from (and will return too) an exceedingly demanding and stressful job where we are also exceedingly short staffed and work in very difficult circumstances but I found training to be a teacher a total nightmare. The training is tough, the work load enormous but it was the way I was treated by the teachers in my placement school that pushed me over the edge. Im a pretty tough individual and have worked in some pretty tough places with some very diffficult individuals (including secure units and other organisations where I’ve even been threatened with guns knives etc but never have I felt so unsupported and met with such unpleasantness from teachers. The sad thing is that Im not the only one other trainees report similar things many are only staying because of the high bursaries but are not planning to stay in teaching once they’ve finished they don’t care if they pass or fail they’ll still being paid. . Morally I couldn’t do this.
I’m not sure what they way forward is but something has to change if more trainees don’t either leave mid training or opt not to do their NQT year.

Yeah...I looked into it for a bit in my final year. The bursary was attractive. But I think you have to be slighlty insane to be considering teaching right now.

PGCEwoes that's a shame! I had a similar experience in my trainee year, so I insisted I switch schools to a more supportive school and have been fine since.

Some school environments don't fit everyone.

Teaching is bloody hard, money for bursaries doesn't change that, money for more teachers and smaller class sizes and better equipment and less contact time would make it more attractive to new and current teachers.

They should be beating wannabe teachers back with a shitty stick, and those already in teaching should be settling in nicely for life. You get 13 weeks holiday (and I know everyone works during the holidays, but if you have kids it's huge not having to pay that childcare) a year and you get a great pension.

Instead they are having to give financial incentives to train, pay for clichéd adverts to show everyone how 'rewarding' it is, think of increasingly creative ways to get people through the door (Teach First, squaddies, this knew scheme by that lady from the FT) and lots of people who already do it are leaving!

How much longer can the government pretend that everything is peachy?

Sorry that should say new not knew!

I've been teaching for four years and I feel like the job is already unrecognisable to what it was even when I first started. People are leaving the profession in droves (myself soon to be included) and it is very sad.

At my school alone two NQTs who started in September have already given up, and that's in a smallish primary with fewer than 10 teachers. £25,000 wouldn't be worth it to me now (and only a small percentage of applicants even qualify for a bursary of that size, I think I got £4000 for my training).

Haha- the lady from the FT is already saying she had no idea how fucking hard teaching is!

They are offering £25,000 to students who want to train as teachers in these subjects though so I do think that is a start.

Hardly. I know of 2 people who are just doing it to clear some debt. No intention of actually staying in teaching.

The real issue is retaining staff once people find what it is actually like. If they were able to retain people who actually have a passion for teaching, the crisis wouldn't be there and there would be no need to think of ways of tricking enticing people in.

How long do we think it will be before there's no HE fees for anyone training as a teacher?

X-post with back there!
Ok, no HE fees for those training and staying in teaching for five years?

BubblesBuddy
They are offering £25,000 to students who want to train as teachers in these subjects though so I do think that is a start.

They are only offering £25,000 in some areas and it is dependant on degree level.

There is also no requirement to even enter a classroom on finishing the course, so many students are pocketing the cash and walking away.

And this doesn’t even touch the issue of retention of staff once they’ve trained. English is brutal at the moment and schools must be losing English staff at a higher rate than they can be recruited. Anecdotally, the turn over of staff at my place is about a quarter to half the department a year. But that might just be the nature of my school.

They're trialling loan forgiveness for people training to teach MFL in certain areas of the country I think. They've also upped the bursary for maths to £30k but you get some upfront, some after a year and some more after 5 years.

Frankly I couldn’t see a single ‘rewarding’ thing about being a teacher. I hadn’t really taken much interest in cliched ads. As a graduate on a better salary than I would earn for some years as teacher I started off genuinely enthusiastic and with a huge passion for my subject and a delight in telling others all about it. but I was actually told that that passion for my subject was not needed that lessons could be boring as long as the students learnt something and if I was passionate about my subject teaching was the wrong career choice because it was an exercise in getting kids through exams successfully not in inspiring them. Couple this with endless criticism; that was a very good lesson but ....... 20 mins later I quickly realised that what I thought teaching was was far removed from reality.

When I trained you got a bursary, a golden hello and your student loans repaid at 1/10th a year for ten years. You also got payrises and a final salary pension :) They still never got to 100% recruitment for my subject but I think in the current climate you may get people snapping your hand off if you went back to the recruitment and rentention bonuses of the early 2000s.

Haha- the lady from the FT is already saying she had no idea how fucking hard teaching is!

And that's teaching 7 hours a week...

As a SCITT Trainee we were teaching 11 hours a week with little or no support form our placement schools and also having had little or no help before we started from our training providers.
I was talking to one of my fellow trainees (a career change trainee like myself) she feels that the training is expecting too much to soon especially when combined with the course work/assignment requirement for the PGCE and that maybe the whole thing should be spread over 2 years including the NQT year, maybe the course work could be completed during the summer holidays after the first year and then you could do a wider number of placement schools so see different approaches. I know many who I was training with who also had small children were really struggling with the work load we'd lost three after a couple of months for that reason (again all on 25K bursaries) it seems such a waste of money and potentially good teachers.
Not sure f this is the answer but I thought it was an interesting suggestion.

When are they going to realise that the focus needs to be on retention not recruitment?

It’s not rocket science either. Choose a curriculum. Stick with it. No - no tweaking allowed! Let teachers become experts again. Increase PPA time to 15% minimum.

Job done.

I suspect you need to focus on both.

It's the same for all the new GP's the government also promised.
No one wants to be a GP anymore, the NHS is struggling to cope with underfunding and too few staff.

I dare say it's the same for all public services.

Tories have a lot to answer for (I am not a Tory voter) although to be honest I don't trust Labour either.

Strawberry it is the same across the public sector 40 000+ nursing vacancies, at least 1 in 5 children’s SW posts are vacant etc etc.
Yet this government repeatedly tells us everything is ok. You’d think more would be done to ensure trainee teachers, SW’s, nurses etc and those who want to return to these professions following a career break are welcomed and supported.

All those poor PE and history teachers who will end up teaching science, computing , maths, English , DT , MFL etc etc...

What I don't quite understand is why primary is oversubscribed when it's generally recognised that primary teachers work even longer hours and have more ridiculous expectations than secondary. Why is secondary shunned? Is it behaviour? Working with teenagers?