‘I pull pints at football stadium as there are no teaching jobs’

7 comments

1. Teaching can be quite cyclical in the numbers of posts available

   You get peaks and troughs in the numbers of children due to various reasons , and also in numbers of teaching graduates whenever a government does a recruitment drive.

   Low demand right now, so people decide against teaching as a career, lower number of students in teacher training, lower number of graduates in 5 yrs.

   Then that kicks off a period of high demand.

2. It’s only going to get worse

   > Primary school enrolments are expected to fall by 1.7% on average per year between 2022 and 2035, more prominent than the expected decline in secondary school enrolments, which are projected to fall by 1.2% per year, while special school enrolments are expected to fall by 1.3% per year.

   https://www.gov.scot/publications/pupil-projections-implications-teacher-resourcing-needs-scotland-education-workforce-modelling-research/pages/5/

3. There are loads of teaching jobs going in Scotland, the issue is people don’t want to move to where the jobs are. I know several people who trained and then left because they only wanted a job in a city rather than taking a job in a town or village a half hour away.

4. Scotgov had plans to reduce P1-3 class sizes to 18(ISH?) and managed to get enough teachers trained to cover the extra classes created.

   What they didn’t do was provide enough funding to local authorities to actually pay those teachers which compounded by the (deserved) pay rises in recent years means local authorities/schools don’t have the budget for additional teachers or classroom assistants and support staff.

5. It would actually be great if we over spent on kids; like throw money at it.. get them educated, get them healthy, and then you know what when we are old we wont have to work cuz these smart kids will either bump us off for the good of society or look after us.

6. In the process of leaving teaching (managed to move back into a previous field) so take my opinion (and bitterness) with a pinch of salt:

   Tldr: The systems pretty rotten. Favouritism is rife, toe the line or you’re out. Temporary contracts abound, and the application process is opaque at best. Funding is fucked.

   Here in Fife all applicants for a given August are given a generic interview (the questions for which are shared and never changed year to year) which you simply pass or fail – no idea what the success criteria are. Even when you are successful (as I have been the last three years) there’s then no guarantee of a job, as they’re given out on a fairly arbitrary but utterly untransperent basis to successful applicants.

   Even applying for roles within a year is a joke. My application is pretty set, it goes in for several teaching posts, then it’s down to the whim of a recruitment manager if I’m offered an interview. I get interviews with some roles (usually the same couple of clusters who like my application style) and rejects from others who clearly don’t.

   Then there’s funding. The withdrawal of covid recovery money has left lots of schools stretched, and increasingly heads are using PEF money to backfill what should be core provision (SEND mainstreaming is great but resource it properly for the love of God.. 10% of pupils take up 50% of the time in some settings). The SNP are driving the crisis by forcing council tax freezes, so the same pot has to cover teachers who (rightly) have just received a pay deal. It doesn’t require a pocket calculator to see the numbers aren’t going to add up.

   We spend hundreds of thousands across the country on pedagogy teams when we could centralise, and use similar basic resources across schools in core curricular areas for a majority of pupils to allow economies of scale (at the moment an individual school chooses it’s schemes, so companies can just pick them off and charge inflated fees). I could go on but this alone has made me feel fucking raging. It’s so so broken.

   Annnnnd breathe….

7. Lots of jobs are like this unfortunately. If the number of positions is stagnant then new appointments will equal the number leaving the profession. It’s a demographic problem. If the number of positions are decreasing, say, due to increasing class sizes or lower numbers of children, it’s even worse. The problem we all have is we embark on careers without clear line of sight of future demand. As another poster has indicated, the higher demand locations may not match the local supply availability forcing people to relocate.

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