Education On the Brink – Teachers and support staff are leaving education in droves. There’s one way for the government to stem the flow: reverse twelve years of cuts, abandon austerity 2.0, and pay education workers properly.
Education On the Brink – Teachers and support staff are leaving education in droves. There’s one way for the government to stem the flow: reverse twelve years of cuts, abandon austerity 2.0, and pay education workers properly.
45 comments
Let’s be honest here, the whole country is on the edge of a cliff. The NHS, police service, the energy crisis, cost of living, pretty much every section of our economy is looking bleak. And the tories response is to keep banging on about the fucking vaccine rollout and how we’re helping Ukraine so much. That recession is zooming towards us .
I’m trying to hold out until Christmas before I leave. It’s becoming more difficult by the day though.
I was told in all honesty by my teaching union two things. “This is the weakest the government have been in years. Now is the time for us to strike!” And “we are only going to demand a pay rise in line with inflation even though we understand that that is far far below what you actually deserve.”
It’s time for stuff to get brought to a stand still. Kids will gain a lot more from a properly funded education system, enthusiastic, well paid teachers, and proper facilities than they will lose from a month or two of strikes.
I trained as a teacher last year and immediately left the profession; the stress, conditions and working hours just weren’t worth the reward even when I did enjoy it.
I make only slightly less sitting behind a reception desk reading books all day in my new job, how does that make sense to anyone?
I cannae wait for the teachers strike. It’s over due by about 5 years.
The pay is bad, awful even. But the biggest issue is the suffocating amount of beurocracy that just seems to get worse every year.
Well, there is one thing the government is not going to do.
3 teachers left my kids primary school last year, small rural quaint one with only 80 kids across 6 year groups. All left the profession entirely, one became a postman, one an amazon delivery driver and all left because of the demands on them, the stress of the job and poor pay.
At least now we don’t all condescend teachers but realise their worth and how much dedication their job takes. Only a few years ago all anyone said was how lazy they are, don’t have real jobs and are so lucky to get six weeks off.
Also make parents take more responsibility for their children.
My friend is a primary school teacher and you wouldn’t believe the amount of kids who turn up on without basic toilet training.
Parents expect teachers to raise their children.
Teaching at the moment sucks.
Our school is losing another two teachers at Christmas, both completely leaving the profession. Funding is so low that we cannot afford enough teaching assistants to fully support all the SEND kids we have in each year unless they are all put in one or two classes, massively limiting outcomes as well as adding more pressure on teachers.
I also think academisation has fucked us over. My school is a prime example. I’m a head of department for a small department (me and one teacher below me). We have just been taken over by a new multi academy trust, which want a ton of paperwork in their way, not the way we did it before. This means I have to conpletely rewrite schemes of work, rewrite policies, rewrite intent, rewrite all curriculum docs. That is on top of teaching three subjects (the other two are so badly resources that I’m planning and resourcing it all myself). I’ve been working roughly 8-6 every day of the half term just to resource my own subject as I took over from a shite HOD who has left it in shit. I’ve had to meet with the deputy head over half term to explain to her how stressed I am at the moment, and her reply was simply that they might be able to cover one or two lessons this half term to give me an hour or two to do extra paperwork. It’s fucking horrible.
A good education fpr all is how growth happens long term. If the tories want growth this needs to happen.
Yep. I’ve just handed in my notice after 20 years in education. Insulting pay rates, not enough investment in staff, not enough staff to look after the kids that need help the most.
Edit: just accepted a job as a milkman. Fewer hours and more pay!
I would rather be a binman than a teacher. Long hours, low pay and ungrateful, psychopathic children.
Money alone won’t be enough. The whole culture is terrifying. Toxic management, ridiculous testing culture, endless hours.
It’s not even about paying individual teachers more, it’s about funding so schools aren’t ran in a skeleton staff and burnout constantly.
No amount of pay increase is going to change that.
The Tories are just going to do what Tories always do. They’re going to keep underfunding education until schools go bankrupt, then they’ll pay their mates to run the schools as a business.
My wife joined started as a teacher about 4 years ago and has quickly risen up to Head of English at her secondary academy. She’s already thinking of ditching it because of the lack of funding, respect, support. Hopefully she doesn’t but I wouldn’t blame her if she did.
I moved abroad to teach internationally as soon as I finished 2 years in the UK and never looked back.
Education losing teachers and support staff.
Justice losing barristers and support staff.
Justice losing police and support staff.
Health losing doctors nurses and support staff.
Civil Service losing civil servants and support staff.
It’s happening across all areas of government due to 12 years of Tory austerity, and they are about to double down on Austerity 2.0. They don’t care about the country only how much they can cut tax for their friends and donors, and how much government money they can funnel to their friends and donors.
Add in Brexit, and welcome to financially, morally bankrupt Britain, and say hello to IMF bailout coming soon.
Can we have colleges and schools back? All these academies have done nothing.
Yep I was a teaching assistant and have completely left Education. Worked with SEND children at a secondary school and was bone tired of the physical aggression. Was punched, bitten, pushed, hit, objects launched at me more times than I can remember. The constant stress of not knowing when a child is going to escalate (or knowing full well but parents pushing for things, eg their child must eat in the canteen even though said child has ASD and the busy canteen is a recipe for disaster…). I miss some of the kids but my life is immensely better for not being in a constant state of high alert 5 days a week
My wife left teaching last year after just 5 years in the profession. Waking up at 7am, in school for 8am, full days teaching, back home by 4:30pm, followed by a few hours of marking and planning. Finally done by about 7pm at the earliest followed by more marking at the weekend. This is all without dealing with poorly behaved children that are not held accountable by their parents.
Due to the lack of teachers their free periods which could be used for marking/planning are taken up with covering other classes so the marking/planning piles up even more, it is a never ending cycle.
She now gets paid the same as she did previously for a standard 8 hour day, working from home, analysing data.
This is my fifth year of teaching and I’m planning to leave as soon as I can.
The job is no longer fun, exciting, engaging or interesting. I’m sick of pandering to rude, disrespectful and disorganised parents who’s children are just the same. I’m bored of the ridiculous marking schedules and expectations. I’m tired of the stress and pressure of exams. I’m over being ignored, undervalued and underpaid. I worked on average 47 hours per week from Sept-Oct.
Teaching is a toxic career.
Whilst I wholly agree with the headline, that’s at least 3 things
This is the problem with fundamentally altruistic careers like teaching, healthcare, academic research, etc. They’ve always relied on exploiting people because they have a ‘passion’ or ‘calling’ for the profession, but no amount of passion can compensate for literally not being able to live or maintain a basic standard of mental health.
Teaching is an awful job. The amount of stress dealing with students who have zero accountability is shocking.
Nearly all teachers I know left the profession and breathed a sigh of relief and rapidly greying hair.
I appreciate every job is stressful, but to face learners day in-day out even when they can’t be bothered must be soul destroying. I know a really good teacher who quite after false accusations by some evil students.
Couldn’t think of anything worse.
My wife is a teacher (comprehensive school) she’s currently working every night until midnight trying to put lessons together, mark and provide cover lessons (due to staff shortages). Also we’re having to buy stationary as pupils don’t turn up with pens. We buy paper/ink so she can print lesson resources at home as the school either doesn’t have them or the time to print. It’s getting a bit ridiculous really.
I’m an FE Lecturer and I leave at the end of November to go back into Industry as the pay is just terrible in teaching
Teaching was the worst job I’ve ever done.
Of all the people I trained with, only 2 are still teachers.
I only did it for a year and left. I get paid double what I got as a teacher now and work about half the hours, plus my holidays are actually holidays and not spent planning and marking only for the general public to call me lazy for ‘having so much time off’.
Couldn’t pay me any amount of money to return.
The issue is that they, the tories have fucked all public services and the economy. They is no resilience in the economy anymore and no room for manoeuvre. That is why we need new ideas and a change of government.
I’m a SEND teaching assistant at a secondary school and although I love every minute of it, I simply can’t stay unless I get a decent pay rise. The pay I’m on for what I do is absurd.
There’s no respect for the education profession anymore and parents are worse than the kids. There’s no support from parents or SLT at all. Just last week I had a Year 8 boy’s mum kick off with me because I added 2 behaviour points on Edulink because he was taking the piss out of an autistic lad in the changing rooms. I had to tell her to leave because she was literally in my face yelling. Worse than her own child.
I know it doesn’t sound like I love it but I honestly do deep down. I just want to be paid more.
Maybe the Tories want teachers to leave so they can have a generation of idiots to more easily control…
Teaching sucks right now. Ive been working in schools for nearly 10 years and its changed so much in that time.
There’s more stress and a lot less time to work with, pay is not commensurate with the work effort, and communication between management and the teaching staff is inadequate.
My school lost 5 teachers just this month and now we’ve got whole departments that are gutted. The shitty thing is that those of us that stay will have to pick up the pieces and its already a huge strain as it is.
I’ve been looking for other work, but its hard as there aren’t many jobs in my specialism and most of the local jobs are entry level at best. I’m trapped in this job. Luckily the students are the best thing about my job, 99% of them are lovely and really want to learn (I’m lucky enough to teach science and the students all seem to like it).
It’s a bleak future.
To a degree teachers are their own worst enemy – they let the government and senior management walk all over them and their unions are useless.
My wife is a teacher and personally, I wouldn’t stand for half the things her and her colleagues are expected to do or put up with – and often unpaid.
If teachers just plain refused to do after school stuff, not spend entire weekends marking and planning and so on, refused to teach kids that assault them – and were properly backed up by the unions, things would change.
Current teacher pay for outside London and the fringe area with no extra responsibilities (head of department etc) range from £25,714 for first year teachers and 41,604 for top scale pay. There is a pending 5% uplift but this is partly unfunded and comes from current school budgets (another massive issue).
Back of envelope calculations, but..
Between 2008 and 2022, teachers pay has increased 19%, median UK pay has increased 31% and MP pay has increased 36%. That means if teachers had kept pace with MPs, they would be on about £47,700 at the top end and £28,000 in the first year (which the latest pay scales actually hits). However none of this takes into account current inflation. If teacher pay had kept pace with inflation to January 2022, the top end would be £47,600. Taking into account the chaos this year we’re looking at around £51,300 to keep up with inflation.
All of this presumes that teaching was a well paid profession in 2008, which is another debate, but even with the 5% increase experienced teachers are still looking at about 3-8k below a reasonable increase depending on the metric you choose.
Obviously funding for quantity of teachers, facilities, support staff etc has a significant impact on school staff well-being but I just wanted to address the take home pay issue here.
As a Canadian teacher who taught in the UK for two years: the pay is worse, the hours are worse, there are so little resources to draw from, the emphasis on testing is so unnecessarily heavy, and in my opinion, the result of all of that was that British children are about two years behind their Canadian counterparts of the same age in literacy and numeracy.
Unless they want the new batch of kids to be dumb… Dumb people don’t ask questions or use critical thinking and thus become delightful submissive sheep which is how Putin tries to keep his population.
Widens the gap between the privately educated even more, if they are intending to take us back to feudal times as Rees Mug would love. As well as trap people in the UK via lower skillsets, combined with stripping workers rights via their 2,000+ automatic laws deletion in 2023.
Rather than a grand conspiracy, which would require elaborate planning and competence, it’s most likely malicious indifference. Funding schools and teachers costs tax money. Tax money the Tories could be stealing fraudulently… Their kids will be in Private schools which is all that matters to them. “Who cares what education poor peasants get?”.
My mam was a TA in the same school for 25 years, breaks my heart to see her have to leave and go work in a call centre because it’s worth it. She loved that job her entire life and she was basically forced out
This is all part of their plan. If you’re educated you would not vote for them.
I’m in my 6th year teaching now on UPS1 and I want to leave but feel trapped as I’m not going to get that pay anywhere else. Anyone have suggestions?
Support staff are leaving because it’s laughably underpaid. £16k a year to spend all day with the worst kids? Great. Most are lifers now – people who’ve spent 10+ years doing it – and a lot of those are retiring or moving schools as MATs and academisation ruins the job they loved. Younger ones tend to be people who trained to be teachers (a lot of primary trained in personal experience) and simply didn’t want the workload and stress when they passed.
The industry is a mess, across the board. Staff are underpaid, overly stressed and being ran by businesses with zero idea of how to run a school. The exam boards are messing up constantly, the kids are feral post-covid, and it’s just an awful working environment right now.
it’s almost as if a century of capitalism has ruined the planet in every measurable degree
Under THIS government? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Ahahahahahahahahahaha. Aha… ha… god fucking damn it.
Why anyone would teach for less than 250k a year, I have no idea. It’s the shittest job.
* Can’t work remote
* Can’t miss any days
* Work with fucking shitheads every day
I spent some time in a classroom and i came away with a completely new appreciation for teachers. I’m a regular guy but honestly, I am nowhere near equipped to do that job.