In this blog I’ll give my two cents on the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. Part of me wonders who will care what my opinion is, given that I’m a third-year teacher with little (read: no) experience in any leadership capacity, but this is my blog, so I’ll share my opinion anyway.
Workload
One of the biggest drivers out of teaching, as far as I can tell, is the workload. It doesn’t seem reasonable that teachers should be expected to do such a significant portion of their work outside working hours. My school is generally pretty good at this stuff (excepting the whole TAGs thing, but even on that front I’ve not really been impacted too badly, which I feel lucky for).
The huge workload is generally exacerbated by issues like ineffective marking policies, government initiatives (which I’ll talk about later), or initiatives that create additional work for teachers that have no impact. All of these are avoidable. I suppose increasing workload for the sake of something impactful (e.g. dedicating time to individual conversations with students) would be reasonable, but then this has to be made as easy as possible for people to implement.
Of course, there will always be ‘pinch points’ during a year where the high workload is unavoidable. For example, next year I’m likely to have three Year 11 classes again, so the mock period is going to be heavy. But I know that far in advance.
How do we fix this? Realistic policies that don’t create unnecessary work for teachers for low-to-no impact on pupil progress. Warning and mitigation for when workload needs to be higher (for example round mock time).
Government funding
Put very simply, funding training routes properly so that people in the ‘high demand’ subjects (like mine, physics) don’t take a huge pay drop at the end of the training, would be a good start.
Beyond that, generally more money for schools means higher salaries for existing teachers – this can be focused in areas and schools that struggle to recruit in the first instance. Following this, the additional money can pay for more teachers in all departments. This means each teacher has fewer classes on their timetable. Fewer classes means less admin (like marking, planning, contacting parents etc), which means that it’s more realistic to complete the tasks during the working day. More free time where people’s time should be free will reduce the chance of burning out.
How do we fix this? More money for schools. Like, actually more money. Not just with inflation, dressed up as a budgetary dream, but more per-pupil funding. I know it’s probably not that simple, but given that “children are the future” (cringey but 100% true), are they not worth the investment?
Government accountability measures
Things like school league tables, target grades, graded Ofsted inspections. All of it.
That’s not to say that schools shouldn’t be inspected. The point isn’t a ‘screw Ofsted’ one, but rather ‘how can we make this more supportive and less stressful?’. Crucially, I think they’re useful for checking things like effectiveness in dealing with safeguarding issues, and that school policies are being followed etc. The undue stress, observations of random teachers, school gradings for comparative purposes are what need removing.
How do we fix this? I have no idea to be honest. I’m thinking about it.
School leadership
In one of the schools I’ve worked in in particular, SLT didn’t seem to have particularly reasonable expectations of their teaching staff. This came primarily from a crazy marking policy and book scrutinies. Admittedly I was training at this point but this was wholly excessive in my opinion. I couldn’t have maintained any sort of social life if I’d tried to follow those policies whilst teaching a full timetable.
I feel pretty lucky that the expectations in my current school are realistic. The constant stream of SLT through my lessons can be a bit annoying at times, but I know that when I need them they’re there. The SLT in the school from the previous paragraph just didn’t show up when asked on several occasions. This added stress to the day-to-day of my job.
How do we fix this? See ‘workload’ above. In short, leaders need to set realistic policies that aren’t going to infringe on the out-of-school lives teachers have. Of course some work needs doing after the end of the last lesson, but it rarely needs doing beyond 5.30pm. They also need to trust their teachers to do a good job.
Martyr complexes
Martyr complexes can die a fiery death. Some teachers seem to feel they need to make it clear how excessive their workload is, but this perpetuates the idea that all teachers should work this hard. I firmly believe that nobody should work harder than is necessary to get the most out of students.
Of course, if a bit of harder work would get more out of the students, then great. But if these expectations become unrealistic or excessive then the workload policies need reviewing.
Maybe some of the suggestions are a bit simplistic, but I’m not convinced that many would cause any damage. Worth a shot, no?
If someone wants to forward this to Gav, feel free.
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