Ofsted warning over shortage of computing teachers – Ofsted has warned that an ongoing shortage of “suitably qualified” computing teachers will have a significant impact on the quality of education pupils receive.

18 comments

1. Any IT professional at any level after 3 years can earn more than what they offer for IT teachers salary,

   I watched a junior service desk analyst get promoted and jumped from 18 to 30k in the space of 18 months.

2. I taught my son Python and JavaScript, before secondary school.

   Come school, and the “computing” comprises making PowerPoints and nothing like what I would consider to be an education in IT.

3. My A-level computer science teacher was a business teacher who ‘knew computers’ lol. Taught myself pretty much everything except ethics which we spent months on

4. Very few people with any competence in computing wants to spend their time marking homework and jumping through all the shit teachers have to jump through when there are so many more financially rewarding and less stressful options

5. You will need to up the salary then

6. The thing is people are leaving the teaching profession even if it means taking a paycut.
   I know a guy that was a senior teacher earning 50k+ year and in his 40s. He quit last year to join HMRC as a HEO so 33k a year

7. Because anyone with a CS degree can go get a really nice high paying job, a teacher is not one of them.

8. I’d happily teach IT. Got the qualifications to do it 🙂

   90 grand plus car.

   No?

   Fuck off then

9. I was a Computer Science teacher 2 years ago and it certainly isn’t worth the money. I left teaching, only to get another job 3 weeks later which paid DOUBLE.
   The politics, other teachers, kids, stress and bs workload made me quit. Haven’t looked back ever since, was the best decision I’ve made.

10. Mt IT education in high school was mainly “making” websites using the visual editor of Dream Weaver, so we didn’t even learn basic HTML and my college assignments were report writing instead of actually doing something interesting.

11. Problem is it probably pays awful. Also when I was in high school at least computing was actively discouraged. I was told I shouldn’t take it

12. Why would any software engineer want to teach it? Less money, more hours, ungrateful clients that 90% don’t want to be there and no meaningful way to keep up on modern development practices because the curriculum is at least 10 years out of date. What’s the draw, exactly?

13. Why would you when a graduate in CS can earn far more with better conditions?

    Might go into teaching when im older but i didn’t do a cs degree to get paid shite wages

14. There is no point teaching and IT beyond word in school it all all be out of date.

15. Lots of teachers leaving because the job is untenable for them. Toxic atmosphere which isn’t offset by high wages. A lot of schools also don’t respect Computing and still imagine it’s ICT, which it isn’t. The school I used to teach in had “Digital Literacy” lessons in year 7, which was a mix of ICT and Computer Science, then I wouldn’t see the kids until they were in year 10 and maybe chose Computer Science, which by then they were behind curriculum wise by 2 years as they hadn’t studied CS in years 8 and 9. A lot of schools now are just not offering CS at all.

16. Well duh. What salary can a teacher command? What about someone coding for a job? Which requires more work?

    Tories have shoved this rational actor market ideology down our collective throats and are now confused when people making these rational economic decisions is putting our public services into a state of collapse.

    Are they just stupid or is it a malicious ploy to undermine our country?

17. Its teachers in general that we need. Shit pay, long hours because of the work they do outside their contracted hours, about time they were valued and not shat on by our government and DofE

18. Maybe if OFSTED rated itself inadequate and resigned then more people would consider teaching.