The article sums it up towards the end. Finding teachers is hard, meaning more pressure on children in larger classes with less support (who are less likely to be engaged/more likely to act out) and more pressure on remaining teachers (who are more likely to quit, exacerbating the problem).
I know of three schools anecdotally that are in serious trouble, without looking to find any. Frankly I’m not sure they’ll make it to the next election if something doesn’t change quickly, which is obviously unlikely. The system really is that close to total collapse.
This hopeless, incompetent government has so much to answer for. Unfortunately Schoolboy Sunak is hiding away from his former boss, the opposition, the media and the British public. Too scared to answer hard questions or face a General Election. That boy has no spine whatsoever.
Too much responsibility and the pay is tiny. Not worth the effort to become a teacher.
Education isn’t really high on any conservative party’s list.
Ok, I’ll rephrase that – stunting education is high on any conservative party’s list.
It’s simple maths that the more uneducated a population is, the more likely they’ll fall for the conservative’s lies, and vote for them.
I would consider teaching again if the pay was better. Like double maybe.
So, both my parents and both my siblings are teachers so I get to see the what’s going down.
The continuous performance review of both teachers and students is insane. The joke is that government spends so much time weighing the pig that there is no time or money left to feed it.
Most younger teachers also earn less than minimum wage for the hours they actually work.
The one word summaries from ofsted are just ludicrously lacking in nuance or any useful meaning. The inspectorate can chance the goal posts from one inspection to the next. This can change the schools rating without the school ever actually changing.
Also holidays. The teachers don’t actually get the holidays the students get. The time without students is used for planning, making, learning plans for individual students exc…… The only holidays they get to take have already had the dates dictated to them by the school year calender.
This issue cannot be understated. Some schools are already combining classes to 60 or 90 in a school hall as they can’t get enough teachers. This will just get more and more common
Every job has a formula with items like:
* Pay
* Responsibility
* Training required
* Difficulty
* Hours
* Sense of personal/spiritual reward
Personally, I like the concept of being a teacher and I probably wouldn’t be bad at it. My situation is that I have a degree but no technical qualifications, I have a 9-5 work-from-home job that I don’t find particularly stressful and I currently earn a higher-band teacher’s wage. A teaching career would require at least a year of training, longer hours, harder work, far less flexibility, great responsibility, being held to higher professional standards, and exposure to a risk that my failure results in a child coming to harm. All for significantly less pay.
I’m of the education-economic class that is a natural fit to be a teacher. I know half-a-dozen ex-teachers and no current ones.
The government could double the *pay* of teachers and find it hard to recruit me. They could double the *number* of teachers (to halve the workload) and find it hard to recruit me. So what policies can they follow to achieve a change?
We as a society should be spending tens of billions of pounds more per year to ensure good basic education standards from primary to secondary level.
I think it’s abundantly clear that the problem isn’t that the people with the skills are rare but the people willing to do the job as it currently is for the money they are offering is rare.
You have to love teaching enough to do it for pay that’s less than you can get quite easily for the qualifications.
I’m qualified to be a maths or computer sciences teacher and I would find teaching a fulfilling job (in general not into the specifics where you get bad schools / are just baby sitting). The reality however is that I’d be taking a huge pay cut that I just couldn’t justify it no matter how fulfilling it would be.
I’d bet good money that this is another labour shortage with the main driver being pay that has effectively deceased over the years.
My mate is a teacher and he is desperately unhappy. He could walk into a teaching post anywhere but he won’t leave for some reason
I’ll likely be downvoted but here goes:
For context my family members are pretty much all doctors with a handful of teachers.
The view from the doctors (which I agree with) is that to fund the NHS, we have starved every other public service. Public services are now at the mercy of the NHS.
NHS funding is ring fenced so while tax income isn’t going up, the funding for the NHS is pulled out of other budgets and if there is any increase in NHS funding then it’s at the cost of other departments (again).
Worst part is that the NHS still doesn’t function properly. The view here is more to do with the stupid way it’s run (Tories running many services privately but not properly) so it’s a Mish mash service.
Every job is a transaction between work being delivered and pay received.
Looking at teachers, why would anybody do that? Especially in a STEM job you can make so much more money with so much less stress.
Universities has the same problem, but they can still rely on a steady stream of junior academics who want to come here from Asia.
Low pay, long hours, expected to do far more than just teach, blamed for a lot of society’s ills, never-ending performance reviews etc. Teaching is not a valued and respected profession in the UK, despite what people like to say, you have little autonomy and random members of the public think they could do the job with no training. Teaching should be fun and it really can be at times, however they are so few and far between that the rest of the job grinds you down.
A huge amount of responsibility, being at fault for literally everything that goes wrong, no real power despite increasing antisocial behaviour from children, and all for a tiny salary.
Why on earth would anyone become a teacher these days unless they had an undying love for the profession.
I would never become a teacher because I went to school and saw how most of my fellow kids treated teachers, and according to friends who’ve become teachers and since quit its only got worse.
I was thinking of becoming a teacher after uni but they made you do all these essays and shit. My thinking at the time was “why the hell would I jump through 10x the hoops for less pay when I can just get a graduate role in the private sector?”
I do wonder if they made this easier if it would have any effect.
All the teachers are working in University admin from what I can tell. There is at least 5 former teachers I work with anyway – most got the signing on bonus and swiftly left due to stress. Some even quit sooner and didn’t bother waiting for the bonus
Better pay, conditions, work life balance… and that’s considering the issues Universities generally have with pay/strikes recently
Someone I know was physically attacked and spat at by a child on a daily basis, with nothing done about it. One day the child makes a false accusation of being pushed, leading to angry mother storming into school (who couldn’t give a damn when her child is being violent), a suspension and investigation lasting weeks. Teacher was then off sick with stress.
These kind of experiences, that seem to be on the increase, is one of the reasons we are struggling.
This could be unpopular…
There’s also the lack of respect (in all its different guises) and dare I say it reward given to those who can’t work from home.
Teachers, nurses, doctors… the list is long.
Just imagine doing one of those jobs and going out with your friends and Oliver and Olivia are bitching about how unfair it is they have to go into the office a couple of times a week.
Happy to be corrected but why not Increase wages to reasonable levels and bring pensions in line with private sector, which is what a 5%+3% contribution?
Who could have guessed that privatising the entire education system to squeeze as much money out of it as possible would have the exact same effect as every other time we’ve privatised important public services, eh?
Teachers really need to stop being martyrs by working ridiculous hours. Just do what you can in a regular working day and go home. And if you get shit for it, go work at another school.
Pay is crap but the main thing is there’s no real punishment for the shitty teenagers that disrupt the class so they just have to put up with dealing with the dickheads, that’s what’s forcing teachers to quit.
I wonder if there’s a different model while they sort out pay/training/funding?
I’m an ex secondary school English teacher/second in department. I’d happily go in and teach ‘a’ GCSE ‘class’ in a local school, going in for just the lessons, building strong relationships with that group, instilling in them a love of what they are learning about for the two years to get them through to their exams. What would that be, EngLang/EngLit 6 hours a week (3 of each)?
The other stuff and nonesense that goes with teaching in a standard secondary school they can keep, and why I left after 10 years of doing it.
Edit: Should say I’m a self-employed freelance wordsmith who works full time, so not saying this because I ‘need’ a job but I used to really enjoy teaching actually. Would be nice doing it like that!
I understand if you’re an experienced teacher on a reasonable salary if you move schools they are so strapped for cash you either get the NQT salary or minimum wage, particularly if the school is an academy. And the expectations on what you’re supposed to achieve are huge – doing a 60+ hour week but only paid for 32 hours and then also not paid for the holidays so averaged out lower over the year. Why would you take on that shit?
I could probably easily earn about £30k more if I quit teaching.
I don’t know why I don’t. Love (and am good) at the job but boy its hard to keep going.
25 comments
The article sums it up towards the end. Finding teachers is hard, meaning more pressure on children in larger classes with less support (who are less likely to be engaged/more likely to act out) and more pressure on remaining teachers (who are more likely to quit, exacerbating the problem).
I know of three schools anecdotally that are in serious trouble, without looking to find any. Frankly I’m not sure they’ll make it to the next election if something doesn’t change quickly, which is obviously unlikely. The system really is that close to total collapse.
This hopeless, incompetent government has so much to answer for. Unfortunately Schoolboy Sunak is hiding away from his former boss, the opposition, the media and the British public. Too scared to answer hard questions or face a General Election. That boy has no spine whatsoever.
Too much responsibility and the pay is tiny. Not worth the effort to become a teacher.
Education isn’t really high on any conservative party’s list.
Ok, I’ll rephrase that – stunting education is high on any conservative party’s list.
It’s simple maths that the more uneducated a population is, the more likely they’ll fall for the conservative’s lies, and vote for them.
I would consider teaching again if the pay was better. Like double maybe.
So, both my parents and both my siblings are teachers so I get to see the what’s going down.
The continuous performance review of both teachers and students is insane. The joke is that government spends so much time weighing the pig that there is no time or money left to feed it.
Most younger teachers also earn less than minimum wage for the hours they actually work.
The one word summaries from ofsted are just ludicrously lacking in nuance or any useful meaning. The inspectorate can chance the goal posts from one inspection to the next. This can change the schools rating without the school ever actually changing.
Also holidays. The teachers don’t actually get the holidays the students get. The time without students is used for planning, making, learning plans for individual students exc…… The only holidays they get to take have already had the dates dictated to them by the school year calender.
This issue cannot be understated. Some schools are already combining classes to 60 or 90 in a school hall as they can’t get enough teachers. This will just get more and more common
Every job has a formula with items like:
* Pay
* Responsibility
* Training required
* Difficulty
* Hours
* Sense of personal/spiritual reward
Personally, I like the concept of being a teacher and I probably wouldn’t be bad at it. My situation is that I have a degree but no technical qualifications, I have a 9-5 work-from-home job that I don’t find particularly stressful and I currently earn a higher-band teacher’s wage. A teaching career would require at least a year of training, longer hours, harder work, far less flexibility, great responsibility, being held to higher professional standards, and exposure to a risk that my failure results in a child coming to harm. All for significantly less pay.
I’m of the education-economic class that is a natural fit to be a teacher. I know half-a-dozen ex-teachers and no current ones.
The government could double the *pay* of teachers and find it hard to recruit me. They could double the *number* of teachers (to halve the workload) and find it hard to recruit me. So what policies can they follow to achieve a change?
We as a society should be spending tens of billions of pounds more per year to ensure good basic education standards from primary to secondary level.
I think it’s abundantly clear that the problem isn’t that the people with the skills are rare but the people willing to do the job as it currently is for the money they are offering is rare.
You have to love teaching enough to do it for pay that’s less than you can get quite easily for the qualifications.
I’m qualified to be a maths or computer sciences teacher and I would find teaching a fulfilling job (in general not into the specifics where you get bad schools / are just baby sitting). The reality however is that I’d be taking a huge pay cut that I just couldn’t justify it no matter how fulfilling it would be.
I’d bet good money that this is another labour shortage with the main driver being pay that has effectively deceased over the years.
My mate is a teacher and he is desperately unhappy. He could walk into a teaching post anywhere but he won’t leave for some reason
I’ll likely be downvoted but here goes:
For context my family members are pretty much all doctors with a handful of teachers.
The view from the doctors (which I agree with) is that to fund the NHS, we have starved every other public service. Public services are now at the mercy of the NHS.
NHS funding is ring fenced so while tax income isn’t going up, the funding for the NHS is pulled out of other budgets and if there is any increase in NHS funding then it’s at the cost of other departments (again).
Worst part is that the NHS still doesn’t function properly. The view here is more to do with the stupid way it’s run (Tories running many services privately but not properly) so it’s a Mish mash service.
Every job is a transaction between work being delivered and pay received.
Looking at teachers, why would anybody do that? Especially in a STEM job you can make so much more money with so much less stress.
Universities has the same problem, but they can still rely on a steady stream of junior academics who want to come here from Asia.
Low pay, long hours, expected to do far more than just teach, blamed for a lot of society’s ills, never-ending performance reviews etc. Teaching is not a valued and respected profession in the UK, despite what people like to say, you have little autonomy and random members of the public think they could do the job with no training. Teaching should be fun and it really can be at times, however they are so few and far between that the rest of the job grinds you down.
A huge amount of responsibility, being at fault for literally everything that goes wrong, no real power despite increasing antisocial behaviour from children, and all for a tiny salary.
Why on earth would anyone become a teacher these days unless they had an undying love for the profession.
I would never become a teacher because I went to school and saw how most of my fellow kids treated teachers, and according to friends who’ve become teachers and since quit its only got worse.
I was thinking of becoming a teacher after uni but they made you do all these essays and shit. My thinking at the time was “why the hell would I jump through 10x the hoops for less pay when I can just get a graduate role in the private sector?”
I do wonder if they made this easier if it would have any effect.
All the teachers are working in University admin from what I can tell. There is at least 5 former teachers I work with anyway – most got the signing on bonus and swiftly left due to stress. Some even quit sooner and didn’t bother waiting for the bonus
Better pay, conditions, work life balance… and that’s considering the issues Universities generally have with pay/strikes recently
Someone I know was physically attacked and spat at by a child on a daily basis, with nothing done about it. One day the child makes a false accusation of being pushed, leading to angry mother storming into school (who couldn’t give a damn when her child is being violent), a suspension and investigation lasting weeks. Teacher was then off sick with stress.
These kind of experiences, that seem to be on the increase, is one of the reasons we are struggling.
This could be unpopular…
There’s also the lack of respect (in all its different guises) and dare I say it reward given to those who can’t work from home.
Teachers, nurses, doctors… the list is long.
Just imagine doing one of those jobs and going out with your friends and Oliver and Olivia are bitching about how unfair it is they have to go into the office a couple of times a week.
Happy to be corrected but why not Increase wages to reasonable levels and bring pensions in line with private sector, which is what a 5%+3% contribution?
Who could have guessed that privatising the entire education system to squeeze as much money out of it as possible would have the exact same effect as every other time we’ve privatised important public services, eh?
Teachers really need to stop being martyrs by working ridiculous hours. Just do what you can in a regular working day and go home. And if you get shit for it, go work at another school.
Pay is crap but the main thing is there’s no real punishment for the shitty teenagers that disrupt the class so they just have to put up with dealing with the dickheads, that’s what’s forcing teachers to quit.
I wonder if there’s a different model while they sort out pay/training/funding?
I’m an ex secondary school English teacher/second in department. I’d happily go in and teach ‘a’ GCSE ‘class’ in a local school, going in for just the lessons, building strong relationships with that group, instilling in them a love of what they are learning about for the two years to get them through to their exams. What would that be, EngLang/EngLit 6 hours a week (3 of each)?
The other stuff and nonesense that goes with teaching in a standard secondary school they can keep, and why I left after 10 years of doing it.
Edit: Should say I’m a self-employed freelance wordsmith who works full time, so not saying this because I ‘need’ a job but I used to really enjoy teaching actually. Would be nice doing it like that!
I understand if you’re an experienced teacher on a reasonable salary if you move schools they are so strapped for cash you either get the NQT salary or minimum wage, particularly if the school is an academy. And the expectations on what you’re supposed to achieve are huge – doing a 60+ hour week but only paid for 32 hours and then also not paid for the holidays so averaged out lower over the year. Why would you take on that shit?
I could probably easily earn about £30k more if I quit teaching.
I don’t know why I don’t. Love (and am good) at the job but boy its hard to keep going.