Teacher recruitment and retention

[BettySundaes]

I am fairly new to secondary education so trying to gauge whether my experiences are typical of a large, state comprehensive school or whether we have some school-specific issues regarding this. My questions are:

Do your children have one teacher per subject or have multiple teachers per subject over the course of a timetabled week and if so, how many?

How often does your child have a stand in/substitute teacher?

What kind of work do they do when a substitute stands in?

Does the school seem to have a turn over of teachers throughout the school year?

Is this just how it is with regard to teacher recruitment and retention in UK today?

They normally have 1 teacher per subject. Occasionally it might be two but then it would be on an established job share basis e.g one teacher on Mondays and the other on Wednesdays.

They never have stand in or substitute teachers - if a teacher is away, they are allocated work and are supervised by a member of support staff while they do it.

If a teacher was away for an extended period they either merge classes or they cycle round the available teachers (so e.g. 3 teachers cover 4 classes with the 4th class being set work).

The work set is generally whatever they would have done if the teacher were there, or consolidating previous work.

It's rare for a teacher to leave during the year apart from ones going on maternity leave. There is generally quite a few leaving at the end of the year.

Split groups partly depends on the skill of the timetabler, also on the number of part-timers, but is sometimes unavoidable. I worked in a school where the standard allocation of lessons per week for a teacher was 20, or sometimes 19 if they had some responsibility. The number of maths lessons for each group was 3. So almost everyone had at least one split group. We had good systems for doing this, splitting the topics between us, and it was usually only KS3 classes affected. We also had a job-share pair, and their groups were almost always split, but they worked very well as a team.

Part-timers in subjects with multiple lessons per week (maths, English, science) almost always mean split classes - if someone is only in on three days, there will probably be only one or two groups whose lessons fit that.

Sadly, sometimes there aren't enough subject specialists to go round, and rather than some groups not have a trained maths teacher, there might be several groups with a maths teacher doing most lessons and a non-specialist once a week, probably doing the easier topics to teach.

Some timetablers are fantastic at working the timetable to get the optimum fit - they enjoy the puzzle of making sure that year 10/11 maths is on the days when the part-timers are in - but it's something of a challenge if they have to do that for English and science as well.

Staff turnover, particularly during the year, may be a sign of problems. There will always be maternity leaves, but a lot more suggests recruitment difficulties, stress-related illness or competency concerns.

There does seem to have been quite a bit of staff illness at DD's school; covid is still about, and there have been some nasty colds.

Split groups - yes. Especially when there are part time staff. In my experience these are most common in Y8 and 8

As for when staff are off - the classes are taught by whoever we can get. Some classes have not had a specialist since October. I am a core subject specialist but have chosen to teach outside of that - having said that, this year I have subbed for Science, German, French, English, Art, Tech and History. We cannot get supply - it is harder than ever.

Welcome to education under the tories. Or, "why teachers are striking".

If they're leaving at this time of year, they may have been new recruits in September that didn't work out - maybe either they don't like the school and want to leave or the school is managing them out because their performance isn't up to scratch. Sometimes a major change, like a new headteacher, or an unexpectedly poor Ofsted report can drive teachers out on mass (for better or worse, depending on the context).

@redskydelight are you talking about secondary? Your set-up sounds more like primary. Cover work wouldn't be whatever they were supposed to be doing because the cover teacher wouldn't be a subject specialist so wouldn't be expected to teach it. More often we use cover supervisors who babysit while the kids do questions from a textbook (cover lessons are seen as 'doss lessons' by the kids). Job shares are also not common in secondary, but split classes are.

OP, there's a critical shortage of teachers and a massive recruitment and retention crisis, particularly at secondary although also impacting primary. It's not a school specific issue, even schools which previously had v low turnover and found recruitment easy are struggling a lot.

Support the teacher strikes.

Mine are in KS3 and have two teachers for a few subjects but set days for each teacher. I would say they have a cover teacher at least once a week, one of them has a long term cover as teacher (languages) left at Christmas and hasn't been replaced. They don't really do any work when they have a cover teacher. There is a huge shortage of teachers especially secondary.

At a very good grammar school -

Gcse classes - lots of shared sets. So if 5 periods over 2 weeks could be 3 and 2 for example.

Subs - very common. Most weeks if not every couple of days. Illness, and just covering for long term absence. Since covid it's been a lot worse.

Set work - usually just busy work but ideally subject related.

Teachers leaving during the year - well that's common in any school . How many jobs do you know where you could only leave once a year? With teaching its usually at xmas, Easter or summer. And any number of reasons - babies, moving, better job/promotion elsewhere etc. All the normal things.

Recruitment and retention. - worst its been I think since I started teaching.

Yes secondary.

I'm obviously not a teacher so I can't say that the work is exactly what they would have covered anyway, but it generally seems to be linked to the same topic and/or progressing them anyway. Maybe the teacher goes over it again when they get back.

It reminds me a lot of lockdown learning - they are (e.g.) asked to read things, and then do an exercise based on it.

My DC is KS3 and has had one teacher change this year, but I think they had a substitute originally (proper subject teacher sub, not just cover) so maybe was for maternity leave or long term sick leave.

They occasionally have cover supervisors for sick leave but it's not been too frequent, except right at the beginning when I think one teacher was off a lot. They get worksheets in these lessons and my DC hates it.

Science is taught by two teachers, but they split the curriculum and are both science teachers so it's fine. They aren't trying to pick up from each other, I guess that works better in science because you can split the biology/chemistry/physics stuff.

Knowing how rubbish it is when cover teachers do appear I'm super supportive of the teacher strikes because something has to be done to improve recruitment and retention in the profession. My DC is Y7 and I'm really worried about what things are going to look like in a few years time.

Thank you everyone for your contributions @noblegiraffe I too was a little taken aback by @redskydelight as the first reply, it certainly sounded more like my child's primary school where teaching staffing was very stable only really maternity leavers going mid year and a supply although not ideal could at least pick up the teaching element of the lesson if not know the pupil cohort.

I have no idea how timetablers factor in so many elements and obviously have to constantly juggle these when their are teacher absences.

Split timetabling is probably less of an issue if it is properly planned. I suspect one or two of the teachers who left at Christmas weren't working out and it must be difficult for schools getting rid of them when replacing them is an issue too.

I do find the daily subs very frustrating as "doss lessons" is the perfect description, especially when the teacher lets them go on their mobiles, when school rules ban their use!!!

Despite the further disruption to education it will cause I do support the teacher strikes not that a pay rise on its own is going to do much.

Y9 - very large comprehensive

All teachers are subject specialists. 2 teachers for science (2 lessons each), 2 for English (3 lessons/ 1 lesson), everything else has just 1 teacher per subject.

Subs are very occasional to cover illness, and at one stage to cover a teacher who had left.

Subs seem to be like 'class nannies' rather than attempting to teach anything. To be honest they could just hire someone in to babysit them rather than getting a qualified teacher as zero teaching takes place - they're generally just told to read or play with their phones. The odd one attempts to do quizzes.

This is the first year where DD has had a teacher leave mid-year. There are a few who leave at the end of every year (but it is a massive school and a lot of young staff so unsurprising. The numbers leaving are smaller than I would have expected.)

teachers leaving mid year is not unusual, and is not any indication that they are not successful, quite the reverse, in my school any teacher handing in their notice in summer is begged to remain one more term until Christmas, so we normally have a big exodus then. Similarly, teachers leaving at Easter is better for a school financially than in the summer, so a teacher leaving at Christmas might be encouraged to stay one more term too

Ok, so national issues, schools prioritising consistency for older years and possibly some school-specific issues for us. We've had four teacher changes over Christmas, geography was also split between two teachers. I have no idea whether the school employs subject specialists - I know one teacher has moved from teaching science to maths so obviously he wasn't.