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Secondary education

Connect with other parents whose children are starting secondary school on this forum.

Original poster

Quality of teaching in your grammar school

52 replies

fcsale · 24/06/2023 10:33

With the decline in the number of teachers, I am curious to find out both the quality of and the number of vacancies in your DC's grammar school.

• Selective/super selective
• General area of school (eg South East)
• Are you happy with the quality of teaching?
• Are there are lot of teaching vacancies and if so which subjects?

My DC are upper primary age but I've been searching for schools financial benchmarking and found one of the super-sective schools around my area (SE) spending at the lowest 10% of similar schools (not sure what that truly means) for teaching staff and wondered how other schools are like.

schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk

OP posts:
LetItGoToRuin · 21/02/2024 10:00

@expatinmys this thread is a bit old (the previous comment was July 2023) and is not specific to Kent, so I don't think you're likely to get the responses you are hoping for. You would be better of starting your own thread and putting something like 'Views from Kent grammar school teachers' in the title.

Bear in mind that you are much more likely to get responses from parents than teachers. Also, not all grammar schools (in Kent or elsewhere) are equal, so an opinion about one school won't necessarily apply to others.

Pythag · 21/02/2024 19:52

WombatChocolate · 24/06/2023 17:29

A key Q to ask kids is how many changes of teacher or short term supply teachers they have had. How many non-specialists have they had.

All schools have struggled to recruit. Increasingly they have to take people who are not who would really be their top choice.

By this stage in the year, most vacancies will be filed somehow. Now isn’t the most indicative time to know the problems.

There are big problems recruiting and retaining teachers. Grammars might have managed to avoid the probs for longer than many schools but the problem is acute and all schools including state grammars and independent schools are now being impacted. It’s increasingly untenable as a job and people are leaving and people aren’t training.

Quality of teaching will be significantly impacted by changes of teachers, lack of subjects specialists etc. Luckily for the Grammar kids, most can get by without huge input due to natural intelligence, especially if they’ve got some decent textbooks or online resources. However, it’s not as it should be.

Teaching isn’t untenable. It is fine and I really enjoy being a teacher.

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