>Badly behaved pupils are forcing teachers out of the profession as a report finds three quarters would quit if they could find a new job with a better work-life balance.
>A “crisis in staff room morale” has been fuelled by soaring apathy and aggression among students, helping to push tens of thousands of teachers prematurely out of their careers, according to the Commission on Teacher Retention, conducted by Public First, a think tank.
>This “worsening” behaviour and “decline in respect for teachers”, which experts believe has been sparked by long periods away from the classroom during the pandemic, has heightened the “intensity and pressure” of teachers’ workload. Female teachers said they felt “threatened” by “misogyny from male pupils influenced by toxic role models on social media such as Andrew Tate, an “ultra-masculine” influencer who is being investigated for people trafficking in Romania.
>Two thirds of teachers in schools in the worst-performing areas said bad behaviour was “an issue, if not the biggest”, and that it was “hampering” their enjoyment of the job “and driving them out altogether”, the commission’s report said.
>Teachers also reported they were the first port of call for problems that they were not equipped or resourced to deal with, such as serious mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts, or financial difficulties, such as turning up to school hungry or without uniform.
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>Among secondary teachers 78 per cent said they would leave teaching if offered a job in a different sector that offered a better work-life balance, according to a survey of 1,004 staff. This was higher than the proportion, 64 per cent, who said they would move for better pay. A fifth of secondary school teachers said they were unlikely to be in the profession in five years’ time.
>Evelyn Forde, head teacher of Copthall School, a girls’ secondary in Barnet, north London, said she is “packing up my desk and taking a much needed break” because “this is not the profession I entered”.
>She said: “I’ve just got to a point where I need to step back to look after me. The scale of the challenges school and college leaders are facing, we’ve never seen before. We never had that level of defiance from students, for example walking out of classrooms, and the level of apathy that we’re facing now. We didn’t have that before Covid, and I think other school leaders are saying the same.
>“I’m not leaving the sector, but I’m leaving headship. There’s high stakes accountability, a lack of funding and the legacy of Covid on our young people and the schools not having the resources to deal with this.”
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>Younger staff mirrored her sentiments in focus groups, quoted in the commission’s report, which is titled “1970s working conditions in the 2020s”.
>“My main challenge, and probably a lot of my colleagues at the minute, is just really extreme, challenging behaviour,” one early career teacher said. “We’ve recently had a senior leadership member in charge of behaviour resign because of stress.”
>A female teacher working in Oldham, Greater Manchester, said: “At the moment [there] is a lot of aggression, a lot of flat-out refusal to do basic things, and massive lack of respect. It’s anger and fear and frustration. With my Year 10 group, and my colleague with her Year 11 group [those taking GCSEs], there’s like a complete sense of apathy. They just don’t care.”
>Sinéad McBrearty, chief executive of Education Support, a charity offering health and wellbeing help for teachers, said: “Some noticed an increase in aggressiveness, and there is a more disrespectful edge, others spoke about a real strong sense of apathy in their pupil group, and these are exam year groups.
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>“It really felt as if we were talking about young people who are a little bit hopeless, or lack that belief that education matters in any way . . . This is connected to the pandemic, it is a post-Covid phenomenon.”
>Official data shows that while 4,200 teachers retired in 2020-21, a further 32,000 left the sector for “other reasons”, a cohort that would require £640 million in training costs to replace.
>Teachers also reported taking on extra non-academic work since the pandemic, with more than seven in ten reporting they had given time over to helping pupils with mental health and cost of living issues. More than 30 per cent of secondary school teachers said their work-life balance was either “bad” or “very bad”. Data from the Department of Education revealed that more than half believed their workload was unacceptable.
>Sir Trevor Pears, executive chairman of the Pears Foundation, a philanthropic body, said: “Committed and talented teachers are being lost from our schools every term. This is a tragedy in its own right.”
Perhaps they see older people having worked hard, passed their exams and still unable to afford a reasonable standard of living and think “why bother?”
As a secondary school teacher myself (of eleven years), I’d agree that behaviour has *significantly* worsened since Covid.
At my school, we’ve had tons of staff leave and it’s been incredibly disruptive.
**I’d argue though that an under appreciated factor in this is working from home.**
Teachers are graduates and expectations of graduate workplaces have changed.
Many teachers have partners, or friends or family, who now can work remotely some of the time, who perhaps have increasing flexibility with their hours, who have an extra hour in bed, can do some chores in the week, save a bit on the commute.
Meanwhile teaching has gone the other way, particularly post-academisation, and has become almost a parody of 90s corporate work culture. Of course there’s no wfh, but it’s not just that, it’s the infantilisation. In my last school, for example, I was told off because I wore – on a freezing cold day – a navy sweater that covered the top of my tie.
**Sure, behaviour is a problem, but the profession is going to *have* to find a way to respond to changing expectations of work.** If it can’t do this, if it continues to insist on the – often – *excessive* professional demands on teachers then we’re just going to lose more and more staff. And behaviour will then get worse and worse and worse.
Has it actually got worse? Looking back when I was at school ~15 years ago, we were pretty unpleasant to some of the teaching staff.
We are on a slippery slope at the moment in the profession.
Student behaviour is atrocious -> teacher leaves the profession -> replaced with supply due to lack of teachers -> behaviour becomes worse because of non qualified supply being common -> full time teachers have spillover of the bad behaviour and extra work to resource supply lessons -> teacher leaves -> and so on and so on.
There are also so many things accelerating this, with so many causes.
Personally, two things cause a lot of this. A lack of funding for non-school direct services such as mental health, family care and after school clubs leading to unruly kids and broken homes. A push for schools to be all-inclusive and not punish behaviour. Just a few days ago, our deputy head went on a tirade about how we do not exclude students as it has no benefit to that student’s prospects, without once stopping to consider the prospects of the other 29 students in their classes and their teachers.
There is a college near me with some of the most sullen looking 18 year olds imaginable. And by sullen I mean dead eye stare and could not give a fuck attitude. Why would any teacher want to spend time in such an atmosphere?
Okay let’s face it. It’s not the aggressive students, it’s the laws that protect them.
I think one of the issues these days is there is no support from the parents. The parents also see teachers as the enemy (for some reason) and the attitude is ‘how dare you try to discipline my child). Unfortunately, the kids then grow up to behave in the same way when they become parents.
I was talking with a teacher friend of mine at the weekend.
They pointed out that there are **six** teacher trainees for Art in her county.
And it’s not a small county.
There aren’t teachers coming up the pipeline to replace the ones that are leaving.
And that doesn’t cover the fact that they’re teaching 3-4 other classes in other subjects each week (including maths, when they openly admit to being the sort that can get 23+24 wrong in their head).
When I was at high school, behaviour was absolutely awful. I’m talking fireworks being set off in the classroom, the fire alarm being set off almost daily and a load of other stuff. I once witnessed a girl get her head kicked in during a class. I can still hear the crunch of the boots on her skull and that was 1998. Has behaviour really gotten worse or have teachers been weakened?
That aside, speaking as an educator in the non-formal sector, there is a lot that can be done to support schools in improving behaviour and increasing attainment. The problem is that school and formal education are often seen as the be all and end all of learning and there is a lack of funding in my profession. This is a shame because there is a lot that can be achieved if educational sectors work collaboratively.
This is why you need to separate by ability, *early* and have a multitude of school types to cater by ability and vocation. The shit kids can go to the shithouse.
British kids are the worst. I say it in every thread about teaching, if you care about being able to do your job, you have to move abroad.
International teaching is the last refuge for people who love their subjects and their lessons. Here is just a cesspit of behaviour management issues and idiots who either don’t recognise how bad its gotten or have gimmicky ideas on fixing it.
Good luck dealing with this generation as adults, the slippery slope has a long way to go.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Children these days genuinely see no value in education because they correctly identify that there’s no causative link between effort and success.
They can see played out in front of them time and time again that meritocracy is a complete sham, and that the way to a successful life is not through education and qualification, but is instead a combination of shamelessness, ruthlessness, and simply doubling down on one’s mistakes and ignorance.
There’s very little point continuing this charade of public education if Bradley who bunked off his entire GCSEs walks into a £40K/year job at his dad’s crooked scaffolding firm, or Oli nabs a £80K/year sales job from the guys he knows down the gym, when people like Sarah, or Ben who got 14 A* at GCSE but no personal connections end up langouring in a £19K/year office telephone answering ‘career’ path.
Kids can and do see someone like Mizzy making money hand over fist from quite literally recording themselves committing crimes and seemingly getting away with it. They see cronies of politicians being paid literal billions of pounds to merely exist and be drinking buddies with MPs. Yet conversely they also see their friends and family members who did exactly what they were told and strived as hard as possible to become as educated as possible being shoved straight back into menial, degrading, low paid work.
I am a great believer in education, but purely in the abstract sense; The notion that it is virtuous to learn and that knowledge by itself and for itself is a good thing, but as a path to success? Clearly that is not the case, and has not been for some time, and it really irks me that we as a society must constantly pretend that it is whilst chastising kids for pointing out that the Emperor has, in fact, no clothes.
What child would respect or willingly participate in such an obviously fake system? At that point they’re being held against their will to engage in a system that everyone knows is completely fraudulent, but must pretend is authentic merely to soothe their own egos and survivorship bias.
My wife was a teacher until fairly recently (July last year she stopped) “the straw that broke the camels back” as the saying goes, was when she was head butted by an 11 year old (not year 11) student. Next to no support from the school.
She wrote her notice that evening and hasn’t looked back since, on top of everything else like head teachers on power trips, it was the last straw
When iwas a lad in high school we had a rock hard bastard of a PE teacher and if you got in bother you got sent to him. He had me against a wall once saying “go on then say what you said in class and see what happens you little shit”.
I was better behaved after that.
Kids have no respect anymore I know a few folk who quit teaching because the kids a little shits.
There are no logical consequences for teenagers’ behaviour, good or bad.
Work hard? Won’t guarantee life success in a cost of living crisis post-covid world. Why work to saddle yourself with uni debt for potentially no reason? Breeds apathy. Behave badly? No real repercussions, some are rewarded! (Andrew Tate, mizzy, etc). Breeds aggression and antisocial-ness.
Behaviour in freefall, with no structure of boundaries.
The kids play up because they can they have 0 consequences. Give them detention they don’t go what happens they’re given another detention which they won’t attend . Finally they get suspended which is what they wanted all along . Teachers can’t do a damn thing if they dare to have a go at one of the little darlings then mum and dad who can’t be bothered to parent suddenly become all defensive . If I played up at school I got the cane if I moaned about getting the cane I’d get a clip round the earhole for doing something wrong in the first place .
The world is far to woke to do anything now teaching is absolutely done for
Teachers are quitting cus of insane workloads. Every single person I know who’s quit the profession recently has done so because of this.
But sure, the torygraph blaming hyperaggressive young people works. Kids were just as nasty when I was at school 15 years ago.
I worked as a teacher. The behaviour of some classes was abysmal but ultimately I left as a result of a few things. I was sick and tired of working every evening when I got home and every weekend and then going into work and not being able to teach anything that I spent hours planning as a result of behaviour. I loved the job and there were many students that wanted so badly to learn but 99% of the time was spent on behaviour management and unfortunately not challenging those that wanted and needed it. It was absolutely heartbreaking.
As I’ve said on the same post in the teaching Reddit.
Many parents just aren’t parenting their children.
If the schools aren’t having support from parents to enact consequences, then it’s unlikely kids who are disruptive, rude and disconnected will change.
This seems to be a universal problem caused by lackluster discipline and bad parenting. I sure hope the world would actually pay more attention to the youth.
The issue is pay, you could put up with rude knobheads if you were on £60k a year.
Unfortunately teaching is a joke of a career these days and the people who do it are by extension treated as a joke.
It should be a valued, respected job and instead it’s almost looked down upon like if you told people you’re a teacher they’d say; “oh that’s so good what a great thing to do”, like you’re mental or not cut out for the real world.
Hard to fix when that’s the attitude of the schools as well as the students/parents
As someone who studied to be a teacher during covid and left after my ECT years I can say behaviour was a contribution after working at several schools.
I’ve seen aggressive behaviour towards me and other pupils in and out the classroom but there is also so much apathy amongst the young.
The system needs changing, the amount of 16+ kids staying to do A-levels they have no interest in and ruining it for those who are taking it seriously so the school can pocket the money and run.
Schools bending over backwards and lowering expectations for kids with serious SEN and behavioural needs because there is not enough support for them.
Not to mention the various other issues with the profession others have mentioned
The answer to this is so simple it’s ridiculous.
Except they will never fix it because it involves funding after school programs – keeping these kids as far away from their shitty parents as much as possible.
I’ve got a lot to moan about for schools. I’m a teacher of 10 years who has worked the last 2 internationally. What I’ve found is kids are kids, and will push boundaries when they can. In international schools, there is more parental support which makes a huge difference. Also there is support from management.
In the UK, you’re spinning plates with all the expectations. In my school you were expected to plan your own resources not use textbooks, expected to use the lesson formats where you explain the relevance of todays topic, where it applies to real life, how it connects to prior and future learning. Learning objectives had to be clear and read out – also my school expected these to be phrased as an “enquiry question”, showing “progress indicators”, and all the bullshit white noise, doing a starter task for “retrieval practice. Finally 20 minutes in you can start explaining the topic. By which point there’s one or more of 30 pupils stopping you from teaching, where there is 0 consequence (or some bullshit Paul Dix restorative justice nonsense). If you wanted to give a whole school sanction, this was frowned upon by SLT. The expectations of teachers in the UK are a joke. There’s then a SENCO who is making teachers print different coloured paper for different kids (kids likely to have genuine ADHD given a diagnosis of “Irlen’s syndrome” where they can only see tasks clearly on red yellow blue cyan pink paper). Yes the behaviour was challenging but the real issue for me was the management. Teachers are like infants, and micromanaged. Behaviour is blamed on lessons “not being engaging”. Year after year there’s a new member of SLT who implements some bullshit whole school policy and takes this as an opportunity for promotion.
I’m really concerned for the future of schools, fortunately for me I’ve found a job outside of teaching. I’ll miss my summers, but that’s all. It’s a real shame because I always wanted to be a teacher, but the conditions are awful.
25 comments
>Badly behaved pupils are forcing teachers out of the profession as a report finds three quarters would quit if they could find a new job with a better work-life balance.
>A “crisis in staff room morale” has been fuelled by soaring apathy and aggression among students, helping to push tens of thousands of teachers prematurely out of their careers, according to the Commission on Teacher Retention, conducted by Public First, a think tank.
>This “worsening” behaviour and “decline in respect for teachers”, which experts believe has been sparked by long periods away from the classroom during the pandemic, has heightened the “intensity and pressure” of teachers’ workload. Female teachers said they felt “threatened” by “misogyny from male pupils influenced by toxic role models on social media such as Andrew Tate, an “ultra-masculine” influencer who is being investigated for people trafficking in Romania.
>Two thirds of teachers in schools in the worst-performing areas said bad behaviour was “an issue, if not the biggest”, and that it was “hampering” their enjoyment of the job “and driving them out altogether”, the commission’s report said.
>Teachers also reported they were the first port of call for problems that they were not equipped or resourced to deal with, such as serious mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts, or financial difficulties, such as turning up to school hungry or without uniform.
Advertisement
>Among secondary teachers 78 per cent said they would leave teaching if offered a job in a different sector that offered a better work-life balance, according to a survey of 1,004 staff. This was higher than the proportion, 64 per cent, who said they would move for better pay. A fifth of secondary school teachers said they were unlikely to be in the profession in five years’ time.
>Evelyn Forde, head teacher of Copthall School, a girls’ secondary in Barnet, north London, said she is “packing up my desk and taking a much needed break” because “this is not the profession I entered”.
>She said: “I’ve just got to a point where I need to step back to look after me. The scale of the challenges school and college leaders are facing, we’ve never seen before. We never had that level of defiance from students, for example walking out of classrooms, and the level of apathy that we’re facing now. We didn’t have that before Covid, and I think other school leaders are saying the same.
>“I’m not leaving the sector, but I’m leaving headship. There’s high stakes accountability, a lack of funding and the legacy of Covid on our young people and the schools not having the resources to deal with this.”
Sponsored
>Younger staff mirrored her sentiments in focus groups, quoted in the commission’s report, which is titled “1970s working conditions in the 2020s”.
>“My main challenge, and probably a lot of my colleagues at the minute, is just really extreme, challenging behaviour,” one early career teacher said. “We’ve recently had a senior leadership member in charge of behaviour resign because of stress.”
>A female teacher working in Oldham, Greater Manchester, said: “At the moment [there] is a lot of aggression, a lot of flat-out refusal to do basic things, and massive lack of respect. It’s anger and fear and frustration. With my Year 10 group, and my colleague with her Year 11 group [those taking GCSEs], there’s like a complete sense of apathy. They just don’t care.”
>Sinéad McBrearty, chief executive of Education Support, a charity offering health and wellbeing help for teachers, said: “Some noticed an increase in aggressiveness, and there is a more disrespectful edge, others spoke about a real strong sense of apathy in their pupil group, and these are exam year groups.
Advertisement
>“It really felt as if we were talking about young people who are a little bit hopeless, or lack that belief that education matters in any way . . . This is connected to the pandemic, it is a post-Covid phenomenon.”
>Official data shows that while 4,200 teachers retired in 2020-21, a further 32,000 left the sector for “other reasons”, a cohort that would require £640 million in training costs to replace.
>Teachers also reported taking on extra non-academic work since the pandemic, with more than seven in ten reporting they had given time over to helping pupils with mental health and cost of living issues. More than 30 per cent of secondary school teachers said their work-life balance was either “bad” or “very bad”. Data from the Department of Education revealed that more than half believed their workload was unacceptable.
>Sir Trevor Pears, executive chairman of the Pears Foundation, a philanthropic body, said: “Committed and talented teachers are being lost from our schools every term. This is a tragedy in its own right.”
Perhaps they see older people having worked hard, passed their exams and still unable to afford a reasonable standard of living and think “why bother?”
As a secondary school teacher myself (of eleven years), I’d agree that behaviour has *significantly* worsened since Covid.
At my school, we’ve had tons of staff leave and it’s been incredibly disruptive.
**I’d argue though that an under appreciated factor in this is working from home.**
Teachers are graduates and expectations of graduate workplaces have changed.
Many teachers have partners, or friends or family, who now can work remotely some of the time, who perhaps have increasing flexibility with their hours, who have an extra hour in bed, can do some chores in the week, save a bit on the commute.
Meanwhile teaching has gone the other way, particularly post-academisation, and has become almost a parody of 90s corporate work culture. Of course there’s no wfh, but it’s not just that, it’s the infantilisation. In my last school, for example, I was told off because I wore – on a freezing cold day – a navy sweater that covered the top of my tie.
**Sure, behaviour is a problem, but the profession is going to *have* to find a way to respond to changing expectations of work.** If it can’t do this, if it continues to insist on the – often – *excessive* professional demands on teachers then we’re just going to lose more and more staff. And behaviour will then get worse and worse and worse.
Has it actually got worse? Looking back when I was at school ~15 years ago, we were pretty unpleasant to some of the teaching staff.
We are on a slippery slope at the moment in the profession.
Student behaviour is atrocious -> teacher leaves the profession -> replaced with supply due to lack of teachers -> behaviour becomes worse because of non qualified supply being common -> full time teachers have spillover of the bad behaviour and extra work to resource supply lessons -> teacher leaves -> and so on and so on.
There are also so many things accelerating this, with so many causes.
Personally, two things cause a lot of this. A lack of funding for non-school direct services such as mental health, family care and after school clubs leading to unruly kids and broken homes. A push for schools to be all-inclusive and not punish behaviour. Just a few days ago, our deputy head went on a tirade about how we do not exclude students as it has no benefit to that student’s prospects, without once stopping to consider the prospects of the other 29 students in their classes and their teachers.
There is a college near me with some of the most sullen looking 18 year olds imaginable. And by sullen I mean dead eye stare and could not give a fuck attitude. Why would any teacher want to spend time in such an atmosphere?
Okay let’s face it. It’s not the aggressive students, it’s the laws that protect them.
I think one of the issues these days is there is no support from the parents. The parents also see teachers as the enemy (for some reason) and the attitude is ‘how dare you try to discipline my child). Unfortunately, the kids then grow up to behave in the same way when they become parents.
I was talking with a teacher friend of mine at the weekend.
They pointed out that there are **six** teacher trainees for Art in her county.
And it’s not a small county.
There aren’t teachers coming up the pipeline to replace the ones that are leaving.
And that doesn’t cover the fact that they’re teaching 3-4 other classes in other subjects each week (including maths, when they openly admit to being the sort that can get 23+24 wrong in their head).
When I was at high school, behaviour was absolutely awful. I’m talking fireworks being set off in the classroom, the fire alarm being set off almost daily and a load of other stuff. I once witnessed a girl get her head kicked in during a class. I can still hear the crunch of the boots on her skull and that was 1998. Has behaviour really gotten worse or have teachers been weakened?
That aside, speaking as an educator in the non-formal sector, there is a lot that can be done to support schools in improving behaviour and increasing attainment. The problem is that school and formal education are often seen as the be all and end all of learning and there is a lack of funding in my profession. This is a shame because there is a lot that can be achieved if educational sectors work collaboratively.
This is why you need to separate by ability, *early* and have a multitude of school types to cater by ability and vocation. The shit kids can go to the shithouse.
British kids are the worst. I say it in every thread about teaching, if you care about being able to do your job, you have to move abroad.
International teaching is the last refuge for people who love their subjects and their lessons. Here is just a cesspit of behaviour management issues and idiots who either don’t recognise how bad its gotten or have gimmicky ideas on fixing it.
Good luck dealing with this generation as adults, the slippery slope has a long way to go.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Children these days genuinely see no value in education because they correctly identify that there’s no causative link between effort and success.
They can see played out in front of them time and time again that meritocracy is a complete sham, and that the way to a successful life is not through education and qualification, but is instead a combination of shamelessness, ruthlessness, and simply doubling down on one’s mistakes and ignorance.
There’s very little point continuing this charade of public education if Bradley who bunked off his entire GCSEs walks into a £40K/year job at his dad’s crooked scaffolding firm, or Oli nabs a £80K/year sales job from the guys he knows down the gym, when people like Sarah, or Ben who got 14 A* at GCSE but no personal connections end up langouring in a £19K/year office telephone answering ‘career’ path.
Kids can and do see someone like Mizzy making money hand over fist from quite literally recording themselves committing crimes and seemingly getting away with it. They see cronies of politicians being paid literal billions of pounds to merely exist and be drinking buddies with MPs. Yet conversely they also see their friends and family members who did exactly what they were told and strived as hard as possible to become as educated as possible being shoved straight back into menial, degrading, low paid work.
I am a great believer in education, but purely in the abstract sense; The notion that it is virtuous to learn and that knowledge by itself and for itself is a good thing, but as a path to success? Clearly that is not the case, and has not been for some time, and it really irks me that we as a society must constantly pretend that it is whilst chastising kids for pointing out that the Emperor has, in fact, no clothes.
What child would respect or willingly participate in such an obviously fake system? At that point they’re being held against their will to engage in a system that everyone knows is completely fraudulent, but must pretend is authentic merely to soothe their own egos and survivorship bias.
My wife was a teacher until fairly recently (July last year she stopped) “the straw that broke the camels back” as the saying goes, was when she was head butted by an 11 year old (not year 11) student. Next to no support from the school.
She wrote her notice that evening and hasn’t looked back since, on top of everything else like head teachers on power trips, it was the last straw
When iwas a lad in high school we had a rock hard bastard of a PE teacher and if you got in bother you got sent to him. He had me against a wall once saying “go on then say what you said in class and see what happens you little shit”.
I was better behaved after that.
Kids have no respect anymore I know a few folk who quit teaching because the kids a little shits.
There are no logical consequences for teenagers’ behaviour, good or bad.
Work hard? Won’t guarantee life success in a cost of living crisis post-covid world. Why work to saddle yourself with uni debt for potentially no reason? Breeds apathy. Behave badly? No real repercussions, some are rewarded! (Andrew Tate, mizzy, etc). Breeds aggression and antisocial-ness.
Behaviour in freefall, with no structure of boundaries.
The kids play up because they can they have 0 consequences. Give them detention they don’t go what happens they’re given another detention which they won’t attend . Finally they get suspended which is what they wanted all along . Teachers can’t do a damn thing if they dare to have a go at one of the little darlings then mum and dad who can’t be bothered to parent suddenly become all defensive . If I played up at school I got the cane if I moaned about getting the cane I’d get a clip round the earhole for doing something wrong in the first place .
The world is far to woke to do anything now teaching is absolutely done for
Teachers are quitting cus of insane workloads. Every single person I know who’s quit the profession recently has done so because of this.
But sure, the torygraph blaming hyperaggressive young people works. Kids were just as nasty when I was at school 15 years ago.
I worked as a teacher. The behaviour of some classes was abysmal but ultimately I left as a result of a few things. I was sick and tired of working every evening when I got home and every weekend and then going into work and not being able to teach anything that I spent hours planning as a result of behaviour. I loved the job and there were many students that wanted so badly to learn but 99% of the time was spent on behaviour management and unfortunately not challenging those that wanted and needed it. It was absolutely heartbreaking.
As I’ve said on the same post in the teaching Reddit.
Many parents just aren’t parenting their children.
If the schools aren’t having support from parents to enact consequences, then it’s unlikely kids who are disruptive, rude and disconnected will change.
This seems to be a universal problem caused by lackluster discipline and bad parenting. I sure hope the world would actually pay more attention to the youth.
The issue is pay, you could put up with rude knobheads if you were on £60k a year.
Unfortunately teaching is a joke of a career these days and the people who do it are by extension treated as a joke.
It should be a valued, respected job and instead it’s almost looked down upon like if you told people you’re a teacher they’d say; “oh that’s so good what a great thing to do”, like you’re mental or not cut out for the real world.
Hard to fix when that’s the attitude of the schools as well as the students/parents
As someone who studied to be a teacher during covid and left after my ECT years I can say behaviour was a contribution after working at several schools.
I’ve seen aggressive behaviour towards me and other pupils in and out the classroom but there is also so much apathy amongst the young.
The system needs changing, the amount of 16+ kids staying to do A-levels they have no interest in and ruining it for those who are taking it seriously so the school can pocket the money and run.
Schools bending over backwards and lowering expectations for kids with serious SEN and behavioural needs because there is not enough support for them.
Not to mention the various other issues with the profession others have mentioned
The answer to this is so simple it’s ridiculous.
Except they will never fix it because it involves funding after school programs – keeping these kids as far away from their shitty parents as much as possible.
I’ve got a lot to moan about for schools. I’m a teacher of 10 years who has worked the last 2 internationally. What I’ve found is kids are kids, and will push boundaries when they can. In international schools, there is more parental support which makes a huge difference. Also there is support from management.
In the UK, you’re spinning plates with all the expectations. In my school you were expected to plan your own resources not use textbooks, expected to use the lesson formats where you explain the relevance of todays topic, where it applies to real life, how it connects to prior and future learning. Learning objectives had to be clear and read out – also my school expected these to be phrased as an “enquiry question”, showing “progress indicators”, and all the bullshit white noise, doing a starter task for “retrieval practice. Finally 20 minutes in you can start explaining the topic. By which point there’s one or more of 30 pupils stopping you from teaching, where there is 0 consequence (or some bullshit Paul Dix restorative justice nonsense). If you wanted to give a whole school sanction, this was frowned upon by SLT. The expectations of teachers in the UK are a joke. There’s then a SENCO who is making teachers print different coloured paper for different kids (kids likely to have genuine ADHD given a diagnosis of “Irlen’s syndrome” where they can only see tasks clearly on red yellow blue cyan pink paper). Yes the behaviour was challenging but the real issue for me was the management. Teachers are like infants, and micromanaged. Behaviour is blamed on lessons “not being engaging”. Year after year there’s a new member of SLT who implements some bullshit whole school policy and takes this as an opportunity for promotion.
I’m really concerned for the future of schools, fortunately for me I’ve found a job outside of teaching. I’ll miss my summers, but that’s all. It’s a real shame because I always wanted to be a teacher, but the conditions are awful.