Online lessons because schools can't recruit and retain teachers

[Hayliebells]

A school local to me has written to parents to explain that some science lessons will be via pre-recorded online learning, with students in computer rooms, as they haven't got enough Science teachers to teach all the timetabled lessons. This is where an inability to recruit and retain teachers leads, and it's shameful. We really are a two tier society now, with students in private schools in small classes, taught by specialist teachers, and students in state schools effectively teaching themselves at a computer. Pre-recorded lessons aren't even as good as many schools were offering for online learning during lockdown, it's the opposite of responsive teaching. Where's the opportunity to address misconceptions, to answer the students questions? This is not teaching, and only a minority of students can learn this way. Online lessons are standard in countries like Mexico, for families who cannot afford private schools. They have schools made up of computer suites, with students sat learning via online lessons all day, and staff just there to supervise. This is not just the future of schools in the UK if we carry on as we are, it's happening now. How anyone can think this is OK is beyond me. The government should be ashamed.

Two excellent and experienced colleagues have left teaching recently to set up their own online tutoring businesses. It seems quite easy to do and very lucrative. They are encouraging us to follow suit.

Other good teachers have moved to private schools and lots are close to (early) retirement.

My school is (or has been, genuinely I think) "outstanding" and has been a very popular place to work but now even we are really struggling to recruit.

And yet every second thread about teachers seems to be saying "escalate, raise a complaint, see the head, email the MP, tell the governors, demand an explanation" - Why? because a teacher may or may not have said something the student didn't like.

It's exhausting. It always has to be investigated. It's a horrible feeling if it happens to you, you have to spend more time giving your side of the story.. (I'm not a teacher but I know several)

No room for that with online. You all get the programme - no comments to be misconstrued or accusations of inappropriate conduct. And teachers can do jobs where they don't have to take abuse, violence and complaints on a daily basis.

And it's too easy to say "blame the government" I have no faith it will suddenly be paradise under Labour. It's US, it's OUR insistence that we get exactly what we want, when we want it, perfectly tailored for our situation or we'll make a fuss. And that if we are "paying our taxes" we can do/say what we like. Societies cannot possibly function like that.
Not a popular view though.

Me too.

At secondary school? The schools ‘job’ is education. A parents job is heathy food and exercise, anything that happens in schools should only be an extra to that. I think for a lot of teenagers PE lessons are barely
endured as it is - a focus on team sports which many don’t have any interest in. You can join a sports club or just exercise outside easily but can you say the same for high quality maths tuition?

Dancing, but part of education is a broad curriculum and recognition that purely covering English and Maths makes it purely functional, narrow and that society needs people with more than that.

Sadly, lots of schools are increasingly focusing more heavily on English and Maths only and cutting the other subjects because of funding. They can’t afford to run Art which requires more materials and smaller class sizes, so they offer it to fewer year groups. Is that what we want? If resourcing and teacher wages continue as now, the focus will become narrower and narrower as that’s all that can be afforded. Only subjects which show up in the arbitrary EBACC will be taught, as they affect League tables and therefore admissions and therefore funding.

Is that where the ‘market’ in state education is taking us…..to a very narrow curriculum where students have very little choice and there is a narrow one-size fits all curriculum…which won’t work for many students and won’t supply our society with what’s needed. Reduced funding will make it go that way.

We have the same. Teachers are staying a lot less time. And yet we boast about excellent wellbeing because we are a low turnover school. This does not seem true now. We have cover teachers filing in timetable gaps in core subjects, Geography teachers deserting the school at a pace (note Geography is not supposed to be a problem subject!) , incredible problems recruiting in English, mounting class sizes at A level to paper over the cracks. and maths teachers on a revolving door project of leaving for the private sector or SLT.

OFSTED's latest report into the Arts ironically laments that they note the cutting of curriculum time for arts and sport.

Save the AP schools for children who's behaviour is unmanageable in mainstream due to SEN.

Children whose behaviour is unmanageable in mainstream due to shit parenting - parents will have to take responsibility and home school.

I know that's completely impossible because children with behaviour issues and safeguarding at home frequently go hand in hand, but I really think one of the biggest problems in schools is lack of parental accountability.

I agree with the PP about uk parents taking any comments about parenting as a personal insult. We need to move to a more European culture on parenting to be able sustain society. Shit parenting in the UK is all to common, and I don't just mean substandard parenting - actual damaging parenting.

But for this to improve we need social workers. Social services are just as fucked as education.

Who is going to fix the problems then if it's not the government's responsibility?

Exclusion is always a very last resort.

Safeguarding the child is the priority and often the same child who has behaved badly enough to be excluded is the same child that left out of school is at the most risk.

The parent is also less likely to be able to sort out the behaviour of this child ( and if course by the point the professionals have struggled).

The police and other services don't want this child out of school either.

There is no or very little other provision. LA’s have to legally provide education after 15 days. Where does this come from?...either expensive private providers ( deficit LA budgets) or pressure on the ‘next door’ HT to admit the child ( and so the cycle continues). I've worked with kids in this situation who are on their 4th school.

At secondary school? The schools ‘job’ is education. A parents job is heathy food and exercise, anything that happens in schools should only be an extra to that.

What about the kids who want to go on to study sports science or physiotherapy or similar?

And then people wonder why there’s a growing mental health crisis in young people. Exercise and creativity are not just luxuries.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks! I remember the GDST strikes from last year, but didn't connect it with their recruitment problems this year (one other GDST school in London I know is facing issues with recruitment).

That's a big loss in competitive advantage, especially with the market conditions now. Feel bad for the head teachers.

Who is going to fix the problems then if it's not the government's responsibility?

Good question. We can start by electing a better government, (but I don't see that likely in the short term). We have to individually take responsibility for how we treat teachers and schools, we have to make every day choices about how we spend our money and what we value. And make our voices heard - just as we are doing here.

It sounds wishy washy but at the moment I don't have a solution.

@DancingOnThinIce73 because one of the most damaging trends in education (along with the others already cited) is the increasing belief that the purpose of education is to get a qualification, get a university place and get a job. And now, that science based jobs are more important than others. Rather than an idea of education as the broader development of a child into an adult, with a broad range of skills, experiences and opinions.

We might have moved on a bit from the idea that wars are won on the playing fields of Eton, but there is an element of truth in that. Sport matters. The arts matter. Humanities matter. Extra curricular clubs matter. Languages matter. If we stop thinking those things matter, then what kind of society are we going to end up with?

(And if you really want to see a riot in a school, try coming into ours and suggesting that the physics department get paid more than the classics department.)

Dancing, yes schools have a purpose of educating children. This is a broad rather than narrow goal. It involves more than the 3 R’s. It does involve a social role too, and all the moreso in some areas and schools.

You say certain things are parental responsibility. I agree to an extent. But the reality is that many people lack parenting ability and the things you think families should do instead if schools don’t happen - so are you suggesting those children are just left to sink and never have access to sporting opportunities or something wider and broader than the 3R’s? Does your idea only work for those with more wealth and parents who are capable and motivated? Are you suggesting a system that only benefits those from more stable homes and plays no role at all in boosting opportunity?

It’s true that in many areas life, opportunities are polarising. I agree that increasingly there will be affluent schools which can offer more - the bigger private schools with good numbers who are still in the Teacher Pension and able to recruit the best teachers, state grammars which can attract good teachers because of course they have the pension and less challenging behaviour to deal with, the good Comps in affluent areas which have similar and motivated parents. But even the good Comps and State Grammars are facing terrible resourcing problems. They can keep going longer without resorting to online recorded lessons, because their cohorts mean they can probably run larger classes more successfully and their staff are more stable. However, there comes a point when the staff leave those schools too (it’s already happening) and they can’t recruit.

And which school struggle most - those that need the resources the most, to cope with the large amounts of special needs both educational and behavioural, and which see the biggest turn over of staff and difficulties recruiting. And they will see it get worse faster.

Yeah you're right, that's completely impossible. There's no way we as a society can on the one hand increase exclusions, and have the result of those exclusions be "home school". @WombatChocolate addressed the problem of behaviour very well. Schools with more resources, more teachers, more support for things like SEM and SEMH, are much better able to deal with behaviour issues. They're much less likely to have them in the first place. Yep, we need more social workers, more family support services, and we need fewer children living in poverty. Children who don't have their basic needs met, cannot learn. We KNOW what the answers are. We can't stop shit parents having children, we're not China. All the supposed solutions, "it's the parents, we need to sort out parenting!", "we need more Grammar schools/Michaela schools, so parents have a choice" are a distraction. We know why our education system is failing. We don't resource our public services properly, from social work, to Health and social care, to education. Inequality is off the scale, too much wealth is in the hands of too few people, with the majority getting poorer, whilst the ludicrously rich get richer. Countries which have less inequality, fairer tax systems and which fund their public services properly, do not have the same problems on the same scale that we do. We could just do what works, admit neoliberalism was a failed experiment, and copy the countries who don't have the problems that we do. But no, we'll continue to vote for whoever is going to offer us the lowest taxes at election time, and complain when society breaks down.

That should have read SEN, not SEM.

Quite how bad the funding problem is in state school comes out in in a recent report from IFS - ifs.org.uk/articles/growing-gap-between-state-school-and-private-school-spending

It compares state vs private sector school fuding per pupil in England. The gap has widened since last decade from £3,100 to £6,500 per head, per annum (inflation adjusted). As others said - blaming private sector is a red herring, problem is that in the last ten years, government has steadily reduced resources in state schools.

This chart from IFS illustrates this quite neatly -

Maybe a change in government will help, a bit, but given economic conditions and demand on budget from other areas (NHS, elderly care and so on), I don't think there is any quick solution out of this holeunless growth (and tax revenue) picks up.

@WombatChocolate What I really am saying if that a parent is going to make sure their child exercises or eats healthy then I don’t believe that state education system should take over at the expense of functional maths and English skills! Do we start to have the dentist come to school or have the lady from Clark’s coming to school to fit shoes?

I am actually very supportive of a broad education. But we have reached a point in this country where some teenagers cannot write coherently or use basic multiplication when they leave school and sadly I don’t think that PE or art can compensate for that.

@user79620 The classics department at your school are deluding themselves. There is a reason bursaries are offered for some subjects and not others. Some skills are just more in demand and state education is not helping by trying to pretend otherwise. Education, like all things, moves on and I don’t think it helps anyone to bury their head to it.

You are bang on it @PinkySilver
This is shameful that there is not proper funding for schools. Shameful that schools now have so wide a remit shoved on them that they can't possibly cope. And shameful that we as a society tolerate poor behaviour from children. Once upon a time children would be raised by a community. These days if you so much as say boo to a badly behaved child you may have to face the wrath of the parents. It used to be that if you got into trouble at school there would be double trouble when you got home. But these days it is always somebody else's fault I'm afraid.

A different government certainly could not do any worse. The government we have has shown itself to be absolutely incapable of governing. Maybe they're just incompetent, or maybe they' re not interesting in governing in the interests of the majority. They're certainly very good at enriching a very small number of already very wealthy people, but I don't know if that is a byproduct of their incompetence and characters that are entirely unsuited to public service, or if that was the plan all along. But noone can actually be worse than this lot. How much more evidence of their failure to govern do we need? I'm willing to take a punt on pretty much anyone else, rather than giving these absolute grifters and their ilk on the right another term. A party that wasn't set up to protect the interests of the landed gentry would probably be a good start!

That's very interesting to read, I've been thinking about this a lot recently - WHY is behaviour in secondary schools so bad these days? Is it mostly mixed sex schools with the worst behaviour problems or are single sex schools the same? Is it true that behaviour at private schools and Grammar schools is so much better, especially all girls schools? I keep reading and thinking about all this, mostly since dd started secondary in September, I hadn't really thought about it til then, wrapped in a nice little village primary school bubble for 7 years

The irony here being that investment in education and, through that, improving education for all, would be one of the most effective things we could do in order to promote the future growth of our economy.

Education spending isn't a cost: it's an investment. Over time, it pays back much more than was put in.

Dancing, you’re right that far too many students leave without basic skills. However, the cause if that isn’t that a broad curriculum is offered. If many of those kids spent more time on the core subjects, they still wouldn’t do better in them. In many schools, weaker students are given a reduced breadth curriculum and do extra maths and English….with seemingly limited impacts. Plus, they don’t get an opportunity to be developing in other areas which they might have aptitude for.

I think low attainment in core subjects has complex causes. It is linked with socio-economic background, special educational needs, parenting, experiences in primary school, experiences in secondary school and unfortunately always has been a big challenge and continues to be so. The broad curriculum isn’t the cause if this problem and reducing the range of subjects nor giving more time to others isn’t the answer.

At the moment, providing education for all students in all subjects is seriously compromised by a lack of resourcing to education and teachers leaving in all subjects. Attempts to boost recruitment in certain subjects like Maths, Lanhuages and Science have been in place for many years, with very limited success. Big bursaries and higher starting salaries used to draw some people in, but even with the higher salaries, many left within 2 or 5 years. The problem wasn’t just salaries, but the experience of the job too - the fact it’s so demanding and under resourced so it’s almost impossible to do a good job. That’s soul destroying and why people leave.

Sadly, solutions to all this need to be really really significant amounts of money which is well-targeted and it will take years and years to see significant effects because the problem has been growing for many many years and there isn’t a quick fix. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve the problem. And more and more schools will find although they try hard to paper over the cracks and stop children from losing out, the cracks are so big they increasingly have to send emails like the one this thread is about, telling parents that basic service can’t be provided.

I guess it has to get really really bad before the parental population and others see what’s going on and that it isn’t acceptable and demand change.