Figures show government is well short of 26,360 target amid crisis in teacher recruitment and retention
It’s not just the poor level of pay, it’s also the crippling workload and lack of progression. Beyond a certain point your only way to progress up the pay scale is to move into the middle management of schools, which becomes less and less actual teaching, so to get slightly more reasonable pay you have to sacrifice the reason you got into teaching in the first place. For the teachers I know who’ve quit though, they could never be paid enough to get back into teaching, the workload and stress, the lack of backup with agressive pupils, hostile work environement generally (multiple people have said the kids are bad for bullying, but the staff are worse). We need to look at teaching in other countries and take note, because they way we’ve set it up isn’t working.
I’m not a teacher so I’m just talking out of my arse here:
I think just having smaller class sizes would be a good step forward. Keep it to about 15 students per teacher and that would reduce the workload, reduce disruption from unruly students but it would also help the students by having more teacher time available to them.
It would require a huge investment though as we’d need to double the number of teachers and also infrastructure in order to have more classrooms. And also increase their pay.
If you can’t hire enough teachers, hiring more teachers isn’t going to be viable.
It seems more like they should push for external support like dedicated graders. A grader may be cheaper than a teacher while relieving a teacher’s workload. It will also be good for classes with multiple teachers as they would have consistent grading.
If you can’t hire enough teachers, hiring more teachers isn’t going to be viable.
Yeah I agree. But if conditions start to change then that’ll help with recruitment. Maybe just start off reducing class sizes for specific lessons in high school, or trial it in select primary schools and funnel new teachers into those schools to help with retention. If your experience fresh out of uni is that you’re dealing with only 15 kids then you might be inclined to stay in the profession for longer.
Dedicated graders sounds interesting and would definitely reduce the workload. You might only need one or two per school, depending on the size of the school, but it might make a big difference to how much free time teachers get. I also don’t think primary school kids should get homework, so it would only be necessary for a high school to have dedicated graders.
Also: fuck off with uniforms and policing them. In the time since I wrote my original post to writing this one, we’ve had a communication from school that some kids in my sons class aren’t wearing the correct coloured items for forest school. But in the original letter they sent out regarding what to wear for it, it just states jogging bottoms, long sleave t-shirt - no mention of colours, but now they’re saying that kids must come in wearing the correct colours. Who in the flying fuck cares what colour trousers they’re wearing? They’re making additional work for themselves for no reason. We constantly get updates from school around people not wearing the right stuff. Drives me mad!
Pay them more, entice more people to work, less workload per teacher.
Pay. Them. What. They. Deserve.
Seriously. My buddy doing echo tests of drainpipes a few hours a day for a water company (which took only a few hours of training to start doing) earns double that of a teacher with several years of crippling university debt.
If we want an intelligent, productive workforce in the future, it starts with good teachers being rewarded for taking on the huge amount of stress and time that is teaching. We shouldn’t be relying on the altruism of good teachers putting up with hell for the benefit of our children and leaving only those who don’t aspire to paying their bills or affording a holiday to enter the profession.
How on earth we ended up with teaching being so disgustingly undervalued is beyond me and must change.
productive workforce in the future
ew.
Because that’s exactly how the capitalists that run our governments think - they see kids as future worker drones, not humans with different needs and interests.
Which is also exactly why the education systems are as bad as they are, by design - they don’t want a population that can see through their bullshit.
And you can’t argue against that bullshit, while maintaining their goals.
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I’m not conflating anything.
Education should be about knowledge and interests, not “productivity” no matter how you try to twist the definition of the word.
Politically also a non-brainer, right? I would think the vast majority of voters would be in favour of higher wages for teachers. All over the world teachers don’t get paid enough and I don’t understand what the objections are to paying them more. Sure it costs money, but a highly educated new generation will pay that back manifold. Not to mention it’s obviously the right thing to do to pay people a decent wage.
I don’t understand what the objections are to paying them more.
Because they can get away with paying people less in professions with idealistic world views about their job. That is the reason people in care professions are not paid as much as they should be too.
That’s part of it, but can be applied to all jobs under capitalism, but specifically with education - they don’t want a population that can analyse the bullshit we’re fed, because once you do you can’t help but fight against it.
Our education systems are bad by design because that’s what serves the system and the few benefiting from it.
The objections are from right-wing parties who want to destroy public education and replace it with privatized options that make money for themselves and their cronies. They are also keenly aware that it would be harder to get votes if the populace was not ignorant.
I agree with this. Even more so if you add in that we need to make education cheaper for the younger generations. If you are not investing in the future, then you can really expect to have one.
I agree. Pay them what they deserve.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Only half of the required number of trainee secondary school teachers in England have been recruited as the academic year gets under way, analysis shows.
The NAHT and the NEU will host a joint debate on the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention at the TUC’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday.
Paul Whiteman, the NAHT general secretary, said the shortages meant more children were being taught either by teachers with no qualification in the subject, by teaching assistants or by supply staff.
“The government must rip up its failed recruitment and retention strategy and replace it with a new vision which restores education as a career graduates aspire to,” he said.
“That means at the very least immediate action to tackle crushing workload and fundamentally reform Ofsted, as well as a plan to reverse more than a decade of real-terms pay cuts.”
The unions point out, however, that the number of pupils in state-funded schools in England has risen at almost double the rate of the teaching workforce.
The original article contains 403 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
