This is my
last fortnight as a teacher. I’ve been doing this job for just over ten years
but at Christmas, I will leave the profession to take up a job with an exam
board. But what’s this to you? What difference does it make to your life if one
more teacher jumps ship? Why should you care?
If you’ve
read articles like this before, the reason behind my decision will not be new
to you: the unsustainable workload that the job now demands of you. I am the Head
of English at a mixed comprehensive school and an Associate Member of the
school’s Senior Leadership Team. I line manage a team of 15 and am responsible
for the progress and achievement of more than 1200 students.
Not only
are more and more of these students expected to ‘achieve’ and ‘progress’, there
are now many more yardsticks against which they (and therefore, you) are
measured: A*-C (soon to become 1-9), 3 Levels of Progress, 4 Levels of
Progress, Achievement 8, Progress 8, EBacc, ALPS for Key Stage 5. There is
hardly a child left in British education that isn’t significant in one or more of
these measurements, meaning that everyone’s results are now critical and
appropriate interventions need to be planned, implemented and tracked. And
that’s before we even think about closing the Pupil Premium gap, the Special
Educational Needs gap, the English as an Additional Language gap, the gender
gap – all of which has to be done with less support as there is no money to
recruit TAs. I once looked at the Pupil Achievement targets in my workplace’s
School Improvement Plan and realised that of the eight ‘top priorities’, three
had a bearing on my department, but all three referenced different measurement
targets and therefore related to three different cohorts of students. When I
asked which of these three targets was my main priority, I was simply told,
‘All of them’.
The squeeze
on budgets has seen my teaching hours increased by 20% from last year, which
means 20% more planning, marking, tracking and reporting, and 20% less time to
do it in. The high turnover of staff has also meant that there are seven new
starters in my team this year, all of whom need support and guidance while they
find their feet. There is no longer any admin support within my department,
meaning that, on top of my existing workload, I am responsible for all
departmental logistics and tracking systems, communication with parents, stocktaking,
ordering and resource allocation. At the end of the last academic year, I was
also told that I was to be given the school’s ICT support network to line
manage.
I work past
midnight three or four times a week, in a way that has become completely
normalised to me. Except that it isn’t normal. It can’t be considered standard working
practice to leave the house at 6:30am and still be working in the early hours
of the following morning.
I have
three young children and I am no longer prepared to miss them growing up.
Right, so
far, so predictable. You’ve heard this all before. Oh, poor lamb…are the 13
weeks of paid holiday a year not enough for you? Fine. Move over. We’ll get
someone else. Someone with more stamina, more dedication, someone who really
cares about this job.
Will you?
Really? Are you sure?
There has
been plenty written about the recruitment and retention crisis (and that’s not
a word I use lightly) in the teaching profession at the moment. You’ve heard
how the government has missed its recruitment targets by a country mile, how
people are leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers. So, if all these
people are leaving, who is teaching
students these days?
The answer
to that question will be depressingly familiar to teachers, school leaders,
parents and students alike.
First up
are supply teachers, now found en masse in nearly every school in the country,
either plugging gaps left by long-term staff absence (stress, mainly) or where
schools have failed to recruit a suitable candidate for a job. These teachers
have no long-term contract, nothing invested in the school they work for or the
students they teach. More often than not, they are not contractually obliged to
prepare resources, plan lessons, mark books or assessments, report on student
progress, liaise with parents, manage behavioural issues or be in any way
accountable for the performance or progress of students in their care. If too
much is asked of them, they can leave without giving notice, safe in the
knowledge that some other school will happily take them fill a hole of their
own. (This happened recently at my daughter’s primary school: a teacher jacked
it in on Friday, leaving the school to find someone by Monday. Any takers?)
The second
option is to shuffle the staff that you have got, asking effective teachers to
operate outside of their specialism. Drastic teacher shortages across a number
of subjects means it is already totally commonplace to have teachers delivering
subjects they didn’t even take themselves at A-level. This is not a dig at
teachers that do this, quite the reverse: many are chosen precisely because
they are good teachers, are the kind of people that ‘step up’ in a crisis and
know how to handle a classroom. But being a really good History teacher doesn’t
make you a really good Geography teacher, any more than being a good pianist
means that you can paint or sculpt. The Sutton Trust report, an international,
research-based investigation into what factors make effective teaching, listed
subject knowledge as the key determiner in successful teaching. Asking a
teacher to operate outside of their area of expertise not only punishes them
for being good at their job, it also punishes the students who are given a
classroom teacher who is a very good round peg being forcibly hammered into a
square hole.
Whether it's
supply staff or non-specialists, the burden of ‘facilitation’ falls on experienced
teachers and subject leaders. They are asked to ‘support’ by constructing
lesson-by-lesson Schemes of Work that don’t require detailed subject knowledge
to deliver, they co-plan teaching, provide resources, help with marking
assessments, whilst all the while fielding parental complaints about the
education their children are receiving. Most of the time these complaints are
fully justified but what can the person bearing the brunt of the blame do about
it? If they had a teacher that was better suited, they’d be using them!
All of this
massively increases the workload strain and stress level of our most important
asset: experienced, effective teachers. These are the people that are now leaving
the profession. And every time one of them goes, it means one less specialist
in that subject area, and so the vicious circle continues.
And who is
replacing them? The shortfall in teacher recruitment is well publicised but it
isn’t just a question of quantity, there is also a very serious quality issue.
The
standard of teacher training applicants in the last few years has dropped
alarmingly. Training providers are under enormous pressure to fill teacher
training vacancies, which means the vetting process is now less than cursory.
People who wouldn’t have got near a PGCE course five years ago are now being snapped
up before they can change their minds. Or pushed through Teach First or Schools
Direct programmes, designed to get them into classrooms as quickly as possible,
often without the skills and experience they need to survive or do the job
effectively.
It is also
an open secret that nobody fails teacher training anymore. We have regularly
reported serious concerns about the qualifications, subject knowledge,
classroom management and basic professionalism of the interns in our department.
In every case, they were told that they just needed more time, more support.
This was true even as interns approached the end of their final placement.
And don’t
for a second think they won’t get jobs. When I first took over as Head of
Faculty, we would get 20-30 applications for each vacancy, which we would
whittle down to a shortlist of six, and then spend a full day interviewing
them, including a full lesson observation. In recent rounds of recruitment, we
have had fields of two or three, many of whom were simply not employable. The
Maths department at my school recently advertised for a classroom teacher and
didn’t get a single applicant – and we’re a ‘Good’ school in a pleasant
cathedral city. Schools are so desperate that teachers are being employed based
on half-hour Skype interviews. I know one Science teacher who was employed on
her CV alone, without teaching a lesson, having her references checked or speaking
to a single person at her new school – they were simply so desperate to get her
to sign a contract before some other school got her first.
Don’t get
me wrong, I’m not saying for a moment that all new teachers are poor: there are
many highly intelligent, highly professional, highly skilled people becoming
teachers every year, and I am pleased to say that every single member of my
department fits this description. But how many of them will be prepared to
stay? If you’re bright, hard working, dedicated and creative, why would you
stay in a job that obliterates your free time, leaves no space for friends,
family, partners or hobbies, and isn’t even that well paid? And if you’re
really good, you are punished: forced to bail out the system by either covering
for teachers who shouldn’t be there in the first place or teaching a subject
for which you have no relevant skill set. And don’t even think about bringing
up the holiday myth. How much of that time ‘off’ do we spend running extra
revision sessions and coursework catch-up workshops, planning new Schemes of
Work, preparing data analysis overviews to present to Senior Leadership and
governors, responding to parental emails and any number of other
‘responsibilities’ to which there is simply no end?
People are
sick of hearing teachers complaining and I don’t blame them. I’m sick of
hearing me complaining. I want non-teachers to start complaining too. This
isn’t just our fight; this is an issue that affects our entire society. To
compete in the international marketplace, we need young people who are
educated, qualified and can think for themselves. Good teachers are essential
for this to happen. But only if they are willing to do the job.
Why should
you care? Because who do you want teaching your kids?
