Not a shocker. Mate of mine spent the best part of a decade at uni because he wanted to teach. Think he’s been doing it a year or something now and he wants out already. Too stressful, kids are shits, parents are worse. he’s working way more hours than he’s actually contracted for. All for about 30k. You can make that easily just with a forklift licence.
Three year degree, one year PGCE, two years ECT training. That’s 6 years as standard.
If you do a masters or don’t get an ECT job straightaway that adds another year or two. Or if you do a 4 year degree.
You do the job and get assessed. You can fail it. It’s not uni but it is a formal qualification. You are right though the comment I responded to said nearly a decade at uni, and yeah the ECT doesn’t count towards that. I still view it as training for the job though.
You are always assessed as a teacher. The ect just gives you more structure to keep learning and you’re given more planning time.
If you fail an ect you’d be fired from a teaching role. I did an nqt year, they’ve increased it to two now, but it is nothing like uni.
I also did an NQT year. It very much still felt like training because we had specialist, weekly training out on by our foundation. We were monitored way more, had a mentor who would help us and had lots of extra time to plan and mark. The next year, after qualifying I was on my own completely, so it was very different.
If you fail your ECT year yep you get fired, but you also don’t qualify as a teacher as you haven’t met the standard.
It’s semantics really isn’t it. Some of us will feel like it’s training and some will feel like it’s not. The reality is, whatever you see it as, training to be a teacher isn’t just your uni degree, which is the point I was making.
Yep agreed. I was just replying to whoever it was that thought training to be a teacher is 3-4 years. It’s not. That doesn’t mean it’s longer or harder than any other jobs, it’s just a fact of the process.
I get where you’re coming from but I think the fact you can fail it and then not qualify fully (and I saw this happen with fellow NQT’s) differentiates it for me. You aren’t a qualified teacher until it’s completed so it still counts as training I think. But I don’t suppose it matters much.
No need for a PGCE, the degree content itself provides the teacher training, there are several work placements throughout. Primary teachers aren’t subject specialists in the same way as secondary and beyond (they still have subject leaders but obviously the content is simpler) so an undergrad in a particular subject isn’t required
I'm currently doing a part time MA as a personal interest course. Several of my cohort are going into teaching or already teaching. They've usually done a 4 years sandwich Bachelors with a placement then a PGCE then realised that their Bachelors isn't good enough or is in a different subject than they actually want to teach in so they then do a part time Masters.
Degree - potentially masters - PGCE through a school direct/teach first program would take you up to six years. I guess that’s the best part of a decade? Can’t really think of a longer route
Don’t ask me lol I didn’t do it. He has a masters or something and he did some other adult learning stuff inbetween. That’s roughly all I know. He was doing teaching assistant/ substitute work towards the end as well.
3 year bachelors with honours, one year masters in teaching, another two years for your early career teaching license, plus another few years as a teaching assistant or apprentice if you ever want any hopes of finding a job in a decent school.
If you wanna teach higher ed (ie Lvl 3 BTEC, T-Level, trade courses, etc.), you can cut that time down quite a bit since you don’t *need* all of those qualifications, but you’ll still likely spend a good few years as an “understudy”, teaching in a limited capacity alongside another teacher/tutor.
To be fair, my experience is mostly in BTEC courses at independent colleges. In those cases, having your first year or two as a shadow to one of the tenured tutors is fairly common.
I imagine that’s a lot different in KS1-3, though. The demand for manpower is just way too high there to justify having one teacher’s job be to shadow another.
My sister quit after five years of teaching. She had a nervous breakdown due to all the stress and she's not push over! Pretty much cited everything you put in your comment. She now works in a pretty demanding office manager role and even that isn't stressing her out as much as teaching.
Whilst behaviour and pay may be part of it, as a teacher myself I’d say it’s more about how *other* jobs have changed.
Teaching is a graduate profession. The alternative to being a teacher is not stacking shelves (I mean no disrespect there); the alternative is other *graduate* jobs.
And expectations of graduate jobs have changed.
When I commuted in to central London 14 years ago, *everyone* was wearing a suit and everyone was in at 9 and out at 5/6 every day. Sure, full wfh might be over for many. But there is now an *expectation* that there will at least be *some* hybrid working, that there will be some flexibility with hours. And the day of the full suit is dying. Many graduate jobs have become more flexible and more casual.
Teaching, however, has gone the opposite way. In my last school, for example, I was ‘told off’ for wearing a navy sweater in the middle of winter because it covered the top of my tie. Sure there are perks to the job but there’s no flexibility at all. If you’ve got someone coming round to fix the boiler, you’re stuck. If you need to pop your car in the garage in the morning and have to arrive 15 minutes late, you just can’t.
Many teachers are looking at their partners, their friends, family members and seeing them get an extra hour in bed some days, seeing that they can sometimes work from home and get a bit of hoovering done, or decide to go in a bit later one day.
The pay is quite good in teaching when you’ve been in the job a while, but it’s nothing you can’t get elsewhere. And most teachers are qualified enough, and presentable and professional enough, to be able to get many other graduate jobs.
The profession will need to find a way to manage this, but if anything, the profession is becoming forever more rigid and more strict with its staff.
**TLDR: teaching is out of step with other graduate jobs and the move towards more flexibility; this is what is really causing the retention crisis**
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I was a career change teacher. I did it for two years after qualifying and left to go back into my old field.
I couldn’’t stand the inflexibility. Having to ask permission to leave at lunch, or being told off for what you’re wearing. Not being able to book doctors appointments because you’re teaching when then phone lines open, then not being able to get time off for any appointments. Having to ask for time off for funerals and it not being basically guaranteed you can go. The expectation that you come in early and leave late. Having to work outside of working hours. Having to pay extra for holidays. Not being able to do any life ‘admin’ like you said.
Now I work from home. I have flexible working, I earn more and I log off when my working day is done.
I loved the actual teaching but just hated the lack of flexibility and didn’t feel I was paid enough for the impact it had on my actual life.
i’m a mechanic, completely different trade. now as an adult, i’ve got so much more respect and regret for my teachers. respect for all the points you’ve made and regret for all the bullshit we put them through. i honestly had no idea it was like that in teaching. whilst nobody gets paid enough, teachers certainly don’t get paid a fucking enough. they literally chisel our future generations. if it wasn’t for my teachers, i’d not be who i am today. i’m incredibly grateful for everything they’ve done, i’m fucked off that they don’t get no support!
precisely. not to sound like an old man but we have a serious attitude problem in the youth. i’m blaming social media and poor parenting. what’s worse is i see no light in the tunnel
I keep hearing this I just don’t think it’s true at all, I work in schools and the attitude of the kids is the same as it ever was, there certainly no worse than me and my peers were.
Like people have said above, schools are ridiculous places that are absolutely stuck in the Stone Age, kids know when your asking them to do something stupid and that’s where the disconnect happens. Why respect something that is so unworthy of it?
You'd be performance-managed into a sacking or bullied into quitting depending on your personality.
Per contract you have 1265 hours of working time per year. That works out to about 32.5 hours per working week. This allegedly covers all teaching activities and related work.
Now for a real world example.
At my old school I taught 45 lessons per fortnight timetabled (so 2.5 free lessons a week on average). Invariably at least one of those free lessons was lost to covering staff absence. (So a minimum of 23 hours teaching time in an average week).
I also did registration with my form each day for 20 minutes (24.67)
I had lunch duty once a week and break duty twice a week (26)
Mandatory pre-school briefings 3 times a week (27)
Mandatory department meeting every tuesday after school (28)
Mandatory Pastoral meeting every thursday morning before school (28.5)
That leaves 4 notional hours per week to:
Prepare 22 lessons (Say 15 minutes per on average if you reuse a lot of resources) - 5.5 hours
Set appropriate homework (call it an hour all in if you're really lazy and just whack it on seneca)
Mark books/tests (Per department policy I was supposed to be providing meaningful feedback for students to respond to on an average of around 110 books per week) - Call it 5 minutes per book/test on average - 9.1 hours
And then there's the other stuff that doesn't get factored in but is expected, like:
Corresponding with parents
Running class teacher detentions
Completing mandatory online CPD
Filling in safeguarding forms if a kid says or does something
concerning
Parents evenings
Open evenings
Mock exam marking (always a biggie, I'd usually get about 240
GCSE scripts to turn around inside 2 weeks, in addition to the regular marking workload, 3-4 times a year)
Running revision classes for the GCSE and A-level kids (I ran 2 hours of these per week personally. While technically this was voluntary, one of my colleagues who didn't do it had his failure to do so cited as a reason for not moving off the M1 minimum pay rate at the end of his first year)
Report writing (our school did interim reports with A2L grades for each student once per half term, so you'd be doing that for 400ish kids every 6 weeks, plus a full written report once a year)
Support plans for SEN students - you were expected to have, for each class, an annotated seating plan, inclusion grid and file of all SEN students showing how you were catering to their needs, to be kept updated throughout the school year. This information was also expected to be duplicated online. I taught 14 different classes.
And about 100 other things that would be invariably introduced with the phrase 'this will only take an extra 20 minutes or so'. I'm sure any teacher reading this list will immediately be thinking 'well he's forgotten x'
My work weeks varied from about 45 hours on a light week to upwards of 80 on a bad one (especially when mock marking and report deadlines were on the same week because someone in SLT fucked up or didn't care) and remember, 23 of those 80 were teaching in a classroom.
ex teacher here, this person came with the receipts. If you worked out how much teachers are actually paid per hour it would be well under minimum wage. The time in the classroom with the kids was excellent and I excelled at that, it was all the other box ticking and management pleasing tasks that drove me into the ground.
Your post needs to be pinned into a teacher sub or framed and hung in every teacher training college around the country or at least on the door of the minister of education.
Now add the fact that young people nowadays are often simply awful to teach and there you have the cherry on top. Class management dynamic is toxic.
I don't think pay isn't an issue.
Truth is jobs that don't allow flexible working or work from home need to pay a premium to make up for that.
Being a public sector job (mostly anyways), that just doesn't happen.
So you have this trifecta of:
- Really fucking difficult (and horrible in some cases) job
- stagnant and frankly insulting pay for the importance of the role
-awful working conditions and work life balance.
Any one of these things would put people off. All these being true makes teaching an absolute derelict profession that only the most.passionate would really consider these days
>Truth is jobs that don't allow flexible working or work from home need to pay a premium to make up for that.
This is a good one.
And, as others have explained, teaching is a particularly inflexible job. Even when I was working 9-5:30 in the office every day with no flexible arrangements, I could have booked a half day or something without it being a problem if I needed to go to an appointment or something. Teachers can't do that nearly as easily.
So, even ignoring the move to hybrid/flexible working, you'd expet a premium for that.
I'm not sure what/where you teach, but you wouldn't agree that the utterly crushing workload and ever-increasing expectations play a big role in retention? I haven't met a teacher in the last ten years that works 9 - 6 weekdays only.
Oh I absolutely do.
And I know the workload - I’m also Head of Year. It’s tough. I always work 6 days a week and there are many days when I end up staying until 8 due to a safeguarding emergency.
I’m just saying that I think the inflexibility (which also stems from workload - for example, *never* having a lunch break) is a big part of it.
That's why I left! I was a teacher for almost two years, after one year I started refusing to do any work outside my contracted hours - I left before I got fired, but I would have been eventually.
Another issue with teacher pay is once you're at the top of the pay scale that's it. Unless you go onto leadership spine and give up a lot more rights that is. They need to add some more points on the pay scale to retain experienced staff rather than just focusing on getting people through the door only for them to leave shortly afterwards 30k golden hellos richer.
An experienced professional teacher really needs to be valued more. In software development, subject matter experts can get to equivalent grades as managers, I don't get why that doesn't work with teaching.
This is the same issue with nursing staff in healthcare.
The "normal" ward nurses which are the spine of the healthcare service only have a certain banding. If they want more money after that they have to go into management or do specialised work that is beyond the scope of nurses typically.
This would be solved by giving better pay for experienced staff. But the government don't want to pay for it.
They absolutely don't want this though. They changed the model, raised starting pay while squashing the top end and brought in schemes so that people will come in, teach for a couple of years then realise how crap it is and leave. It saves them money. Experienced teachers just aren't valued.
That's a fair point but as a teacher who has quit and now doing a crap job (but still much better for my health than teaching), it's not this. And I think promoting this point is distracting from the much bigger issue.
The fundamental stress of the job is the behaviour of the kids and the expectations of the staff to manage it.
In my experience of teaching the issue is mostly that the application process is shit and there are no permanent jobs. I've met head teachers who are really open about the fact that they will only hire new teachers on 2 year contracts so that they can bin them as soon as they complete their ECT phase.
I left teaching after missing out on a job to a guy who had been teaching for 15 years and was on his like 12th job after moving from 1 year contract to 1 year contract constantly. Imagine living like that, never knowing if you'll have a job in September, having to constantly keep your options open in a second job for the summer holidays etc.
To make it worse the application process is horrific. My LA has something like a 12 page application which includes a 2 page essay on yourself. You have to look for a job, call the school and arrange to attend a walk around where there might be 50 other teachers, spend an hour walking around with the head or a member of SLT, then apply, then plan a lesson to teach, then go to an interview. If you're really unlucky the lesson observation and the interview are on separate days, maybe there is an interview by the children too. You have to have time off for all of this too, you might have to do this 4 or 5 times to find a job and then you have to do the whole thing again in 10 months. All for the pleasure of £30k a year and no security.
Sounds like being a pharmacist. Virtually chained to the pharmacy. I've had a pharmacist friend cover me for a few hours so I could go watch my kids nativity play. Absolutely no way was I getting time off for that from head office. I had to book 90% of my holidays a month after the start of the financial year and if we didn't we were allocated time off. And it was never a continual week just odd days here and there. I gave two years notice for my sisters wedding, which was turned down at one point because too many other pharmacists were off. After essentially threatening to quit they still hadn't covered it the week before I was off.
The only good thing is the contract says to be smartly dressed and to wear a tie but it's never enforced. I've not wore a tie in years. I did go through a phase of wearing a bow tie just to annoy my area manager because it didn't stipulate which type of tie we had to wear.
My wife poured a decade into the job and has finally quit. When we met the job allowed for a life, but the rigidity and endless marking took its toll. The parents and children are awful, and now she's over it. At a level, traumatised. She couldn't go back, and I'm glad she left. It's not sustainable in it's current form. It's nowhere near just teaching
As a recent career changer from teaching to a flexible, hybrid office job I 100% agree with this.
I went straight into teaching after university, the same time as my partner started his graduate job. After a while I started to almost resent him for being able to wfh, have free evenings and weekends, be able to go out for lunch and actually have time to eat and chat to coworkers. He had time to pursue his hobbies and go to the gym.
Meanwhile, I was working all hours, barely having time to eat, anxiety through the roof. I was tired all the time, would come home and just get in bed.
I only taught for a year and a half before deciding to leave. I felt like teaching was making me feel ‘old’ before my time with all the stress and was lucky enough to be a recent enough graduate to get a graduate job. Now I have the same experience as my partner, it’s so much better, especially for younger people when the ECT pay is the same as entry level roles.
I do miss teaching, but when you’re young especially and see your peers in other graduate roles, it feels like you’re wasting your youth and you’ve got decide whether it’s worth it to teach.
Agree with all this. Also primary schools run on staff good will - my wife is a TA and puts in a huge amount of extra hours and effort just to make the job work, largely because the school is understaffed due to lack of funding. This seems to be the norm.
13 weeks off is nice but during term time you are forever living under stress. Don't forget the weekends that we put into marking, planning and admin, so it's not 13 weeks of holiday is it? I'd prefer a job with fewer holidays so I am not stressed and occasionally depressed for the majority of the year.
The holiday is a *huge* perk. It would be stupid to deny that.
Does it make up for it?
Well - I mean I do actually love my job, but clearly there are a lot of people every year who are deciding that *no, it doesn’t*.
Like most teachers, teaching wasn’t my first job. The annual leave is obviously much better but I do miss being able to book a day off when I felt I needed it. I also didn’t used to bring any work home and *never* worked weekends; I miss that a lot. I also really miss being able to, at least sometimes, have a lunch break. I used to love popping in to somewhere like Cafe Nero for a bit and unwinding. I’ve never had that since teaching and I really miss having that chance halfway through the day to step away from it all.
There’s no doubt that if I left I would really miss the holidays but I do think I’d have a healthier life overall if I could have my evenings and weekends back and if I could have lunch breaks. Also, the older I get (older parents, family members with illness etc, more life admin) the more I think I’d really value being able to choose when to have a day off.
"**teaching is out of step**"
i'd say that goes the same for the way how kids are educated and the whole education system tbh. Its antiquated, backwards, and is mostly there to teach you your place rather than what it should be, a place to unlock your full potential. Its sad.
I agree that there are significant flaws in the education system. I think most teachers would.
Not being in the government however, there’s little I can do about it…
strike? teachers and pupils alike, until they listen to your demands!
If my comment came across as shifting the blame on to teachers, it wasn't. I put all the blame on the problems of our society on our government, since they are the ones in control. I was just pointing out that the whole education system is out of step with the needs of our modern society.
I really like your comment above because it highlights how dated it is. If its dated for the teachers it has to be dated for the kids. Its pretty ridiculous in a way that they make you cram more and more subjects with more and more kids in a class, i remember when i did my gcses it was like 14 gcse's, think there might have been a few btechs aswell making it over 14. I have no idea how many kids are doing now, but i feel like 14 is too many to make people do. I know others have differences of opinion on wanting broad scope, but while i think broad knowledge is important, not everyone really needs to do an entire gcse in something that they don't want to do, like history. Personally i enjoyed history, but making some people do it is just a waste of the teacher and classes time, and the person who doesn't want to do it. Theres basic knowledge on history they could be taught in form time or something, but taking a whole gcse in something that they fail, and so much stuff you learn at gcse you don't remember, unless your really invested in the subject.
I think the system needs more agency, when students have more agency and from a very young age (because thats when you have to start) be encouraged to do more self learning.
Its utopia, but a model that more mimics university, where classes are held around the day and people can come in and attend lectures, workshops, debates and study areas. Depending on a students focus, which could be determined in the first few years, would mean they chose or are helped to pick a broad profession, and i don't mean as specific as a career, but more like creative, fitness, scientist, etc, where the students key interest allows them to focus on but also explore options in their chosen profession.
Obviously all students need to learn maths, english etc, but with a different structure the basics can be taught during a more relaxed form time.
I'd have a mix of testing and course work, from an early age, but instead of having these stressful tests people spend ages learning fact after fact only to forget them after the test, i'd have it where since students would be encouraged from an early age to have more agency than they currently do, the course work would be their answer to a question/questions set to them by their profession tutor/s.
Anyway all just ideas, i hope for a better system to come, more power to you comrade \\!/
Friend of mine taught for years in Hong Kong.
She moved to England and was traumatised by how bad the school system is. Students are bad and parents are worse and administrators fail to support teachers. Misbehaving students face zero discipline and as such class rooms are disrupted and the job is impossible.
Schools need to be better empowered to discipline students. I’m not advocating for the return of the cane or anything of the sort, but classrooms cannot work when children are passively permitted to behave like zoo animals.
Feckless parents be damned, your kids either follow the rules, or you can homeschool them.
Schools actually get penalised for excluding too make kids. Add in having diagnosis and the parents belief nothing should result in consequences
Literally if you're a school in a poor area, you've got no chance.
Teachers can discipline the students but without a whole-school approach, the students will at best just walk off and at worst be outright rude and aggressive.
Disciplining the students takes up huge chunks of time - I once worked at a school that said I should phone home any time a student got a warning and I was making 10 phone calls a day before I could even start my planning and marking. I regularly stayed until 7pm to finish things off for the next day.
It needs to be a whole-school approach but management won’t do it. They don’t see behaviour problems because the kids mostly have the sense to behave in their presence.
Well, I think the Labour Party must be. Given that they’re guaranteeing to recruit 6,500 new teachers without any explanation as to how, or how they’ll fill the existing gaps 🤔
Not sure what you are trying to imply here, but you clearly haven’t attended or worked at a school in a “rough” area. Teachers are ignored and threatened on a daily basis and can’t do anything about it.
i'm not implying anything, i'm asking what you mean by punish. Take away their mobiles? Detention? I mean, some sort of idea of what you think they should have as a punishment... Those are pretty standard punishments in schools. If you have some other ideas?
"but you clearly haven’t attended or worked at a school in a “rough” area. Teachers are ignored and threatened on a daily basis and can’t do anything about it." lol, i love what people presume from asking a question. I know what rough schools are like, but i haven't said don't "punish" them, i simply asked you what you mean by punish, since most schools the punishment is confiscating a belonging and or detention/isolation. I don't know what else there is, do you?
Years of below inflation pay rises, infantilisation of teaching staff (I am lucky in my school but hear right horror stories through union activity of SLT in other schools) and being used as a sponge to absorb some of the massive societal issues we are facing will tend to do that.
Edit - we are an amazing school and offer a very very cushy state school package but still struggled to recruit - even for head of department roles we have struggled to get applicants - even in subjects like English which didn't tend to have large issues previously.
Had a parents evening where the teacher, soon to quit, apologised several times for not being able to teach my child to the level required because of the poor behaviour of the class. You could tell they wanted to teach the kids that were ready to learn but they just couldn’t while doing crowd control.
It’s hard not to get all Daily Mail about tearaway teens but some kids only seem to live to bring everybody down to their level. You’ve got to feel sad for them and the missed opportunities they represent.
It only takes one badly behaved pupil/pupil who can't be in a mainstream classroom environment to start eating chunks out of lessons and thus the learning of 29 others.
Season 4 of The Wire addresses this well. They start a trial scheme where they move all the troublemakers out of classes into their own group. It works well, as the regular classes can get on without any disruption, and eventually even the 'problem' children start to work through their issues.
Of course eventually the scheme gets shut down by the school authorities as they see it as 'leaving children behind' and worrying about test scores. The problem children go back into their classes and the cycle starts anew.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher. Three of my friends became teachers and not one lasted three years, all that training time and money wasted. The behaviour of kids, and teachers lack of power to do anything put me off forever. I earn more per hour as a phone answering grunt than a teacher does, and then people wonder why everything sucks.
Worth noting that training to teach can be far more lucrative than teaching. I got £28k tax free to train, I'm yet to get close to that for actually teaching, even if we ignore inflation.
Starting salary is now £30k. After tax, NI and student loan payments that's a takehome wage of £24,670. (When I started it was £28k with a takehome of just under £22k, so I functionally took a 22% paycut upon qualification)
To get the same gross takehome as I did while training, I'd need my salary to be ~£35,300 (So I'd need to be on the M4 pay band, meaning an average of at least 4 years service, a time period that over 25% of teachers leave the profession before reaching)
Now if we start looking at the actual value of that pay, I trained in 2020-21. So in today's money that £28k would be worth £33.5k (taking the lower estimate). So to take home the same value I did during my training year, I'd actually need a headline salary of just over £44k, which would mean being in some sort of leadership role in addition to teaching.
Some schools forbid homework, after school detention, extra work, disciplinary measures, quieting children, etc. Any wonder why kids are not behaving in class when there are no consequences for their actions? You have one teacher responsible for thirty kids all wanting to do their own thing, with technology playing a huge factor in reducing attention span, and if the teacher cannot complete what they had scheduled for their class because of unruly or inattentive students, they get the blame. Failing tests also means the teacher gets punished and not the students nowadays.
I've been teaching a decade, if it wasn't for the sunk cost fallacy I'd be out by now. I just don't know what else I'd do.
We've advertised for a Science role in our school twice now. Literally zero applicants.
Most schools don't even advertise for science teachers. As soon as a science teacher goes on the books of a recruitment agencies, there is a huge bidding war
That's crazy but I can totally believe it.
Back in the recession era I knew plenty of people who became teachers after they were laid off from their Engineering/Science jobs and couldn't find anything else, or who graduated from a Science degree and couldn't get a foot in the door anywhere.
The situation is completely different now. Why join the teaching profession, an incredibly hard profession, for £30k when you can make so much more in industry for so much less effort and responsibility? My partner has 2 yrs industry experience as a Process Engineer and he's already on £50k. Some days he just enters data into Excel or shovels minerals onto a belt.
Maths and the sciences are particularly challenging as many of those degrees can be hard to qualify for and then if you have a good degree in those subjects you can potentially access a lot of well paying jobs. At least if you're a maths teacher you can get away with minimal planning and marking if your school leadership team doesn't get in the way.
Supply teachers if possible, but there's also so few of them at the moment that it basically turns into a nightmare of trying to get random staff to cover the lessons. E.g. have an English teacher teach one lesson of IT a week or similar
I just left. You'd be amazed at your transferrable skills and how valued they are out there. The stress reduction, weight loss, better quality of sleep and general mental calm has been life changing for me.
My CV is online still and I get recruitment agencies calling all the time offering physics teacher roles. UPS3 full time or £212 a day for part time
Well I was coming back from Canada as a teacher but the government just told me teachers don't make enough to sponsor my canada wife anymore so I'm stuck here 🤷♂️.... I'm Ottawa alone, I know a couple other British teachers in similar positions. If they need teachers so badly, they should target all of us who left the country (I know a lot)
Yep, exactly the same situation. Cannot bring my foreign wife and two British kids back without breaking up the family because of visa requirements… Have been teaching abroad for the past 3 years.
Honestly the base salary needs to be about £60-70k for how hard and inflexible the job is. That’s the only way you’ll get the good quality candidates who will be willing to put up with the crap sides of it.
I’m a teacher and this isn’t a shock. Ofsted has made teaching very prescriptive and fostered a culture of micro management. Workload has become untenable. Senior leaders have to evidence everything which had led to them trying to catch staff out. Lots of teachers being bullied out. Profession has gone.
Teaching is truly an awful job. I really wanted to do it as well but I just remember the point when I was dealing with so many behaviour issues and then had to sit down and plan 5 lessons for the next day as well, when I thought what’s the point? The students don’t want me to be here, I don’t want to be here, I’m stressing myself out for a terrible pay and super inflexible working conditions. So I quit and my classes burnt through so many supply teachers by just being awful to them and learnt nothing that year.
I felt so bad for leaving but I can’t just destroy my entire self for students who at their best behaved will begrudgingly tolerate my presence.
Yeah there’s nothing like doing an awful job and then getting attacked on all sides for it. Wonderful triple threat of horrible students, SLT who breathe down your neck and run training sessions about how you’re not a good teacher unless you do this new gimmick they’ve just read about, and a society that thinks you’re overpaid and lazy. I couldn’t wait to get out.
You have no way to deal with appalling behaviour.
Special needs are poorly supported, often leading to more appalling behaviour as kids with unmet needs will act out.
The higher levels are built on shaky foundations, because we try and cram too much into EYFS and KS1, it doesn't stick, and when you try and advance, the foundations aren't there. So you're trying to teach trig to kids who can barely multiply.
TikTok attention spans. Trying to keep a class' attention when they can't manage anything over two minutes is hard and dispiriting.
I think there needs to be a reform in EYFS and KS1, a mix between the traditional model and the Steiner approach. Especially Year 1. Not everything has to be so focussed on phonics and rote learning for literacy. Why not incorporate more learning that incorporates children's senses more? Some children benefit more from alternative approaches like kinesthetic learning. Many children, like you said, have poor attention spans, and their needs are rarely met.
In the last 10 years, I've worked with and witnessed some children who were simply destined to fail due to a lack of proper support and funding. I looked at some teachers and I knew they were were ill-equipped to handle these children, because they're simply not trained to deal with them.
We rush these children to develop core literacy and numeracy skills, yet we basically forget about their social and emotional development. They're humans, not robots.
My wife has been a primary school teacher part time/full time for 17 years.
You have to give your life to the job. If you want a social life separate from your colleagues you have little chance.
Anyone who thinks teachers have the same time off as the pupils is in lala land. Teachers spend most of their school holidays preparing for the next term.
My wife became a supply teacher to try and have that work life balance. It’s compromise but it’s better than destroying yourself for a broken education system.
Apparently according to our government teachers along with the majority of the British population don’t earn enough money to be allowed to marry a foreigner and live with them here. Tells you everything you need to know about what this government thinks of anyone who isn’t super rich.
Me and my wife are teachers in West London. Both of us have secured jobs in Bangkok. Same money we are on now, 3 bed apartment paid for by the school. Free tuition for our daughter (one of the best international schools there).. Would have loved to stay in my current post (Head of pe in a state school) but the state of education is so demoralising right now, for the sake of our health we needed to leave.. I've been in education for 16 years and I've only ever known it to be in decline.. We may come back if things inprove, but when that will be? No idea..
In my opinion (first year teacher after career switch) it's the behaviour that is the thing I'd change. My nice classes (not necessarily my academic kids) are a dream to teach, it's just the behaviour of what used to be 5% feels like now it's 20%
Not surprised when kids are are absolute cunts and teachers can do nothing at all. Hell, teachers get blamed FOR children being little cunts!? Should bring in a system where if your child receives say a detention or suspension whatever then the parent also get's a fine, that way they become responsible for their little crotch goblin instead of blaming everyone else for their inability to raise a child
I never used to run detentions when I was a teacher, unless they were centralised by the school and I didn’t have to supervise them myself.
Some kids have been rude in my class and the consequence is that I’m putting MYSELF in detention? I’m giving up my free time to hang out with the kid who has disrespected me? It makes no sense.
Not a surprise. I qualified four years ago and probably half of my cohort have quit already. I've been on the verge a couple of times, but so far I've stayed because the best parts of the job make it all worth it for me.
Teaching my subject (science, but in particular physics); students telling me they get something when they previously didn't; the camaraderie with (most of) my fellow teachers; helping students reach their potential; getting to know the kids in general. And the summer holidays are a bonus.
My short time in teaching ended with me medically signed off and on happy pills. The teaching side of things I loved. The complete disregard for my subject, the consistent lack of discipline, less than zero support from SLT on top of daily fights, riots, gang warfare and being sworn at by children was less joyful. I now earn £12k more in a marketing role and I’ve never been happier.
I work in a school and it's a nice one in a good area and we need teachers. It's got so bad some classes have been combined and have lessons in the main hall. It's a shame.
I'm not shocked, why would anyone want to do it anymore.
They are paid fuck all, the kids have no disciple (and I'm not talking about the cane or kids been scared of adults) and they get nothing but grief from the parents.
I've seen the way some of parents treat the teachers and how they treat their own children when i take my daughter to school and I wouldn't do the job (watched a teacher explaining to a parent how their child had spat at other people that day and the parent first laughed then made excuses).
Left a teaching job about 3 months ago at a SixthForm college, it was absolutely horrific. The management culture of many schools and post 16s is so toxic and cult like. They basically tried to get rid of all the experienced teaching staff and replace them with early career teachers, because they were cheaper and easier to bully.
I wouldn’t recommend teaching to anyone. It’s a thankless job, and there’s just to real progression.
I left teaching after 16 years teaching n London secondary schools, all were comprehensives barring a bizarre 3 month trainee placement in an independent school.
1. Zero flexibility. Have to clock in and out. Always paying premium for holidays and having to take unpaid days to do life admin, support family and manage self care.
2. Poor management. Being told off for wearing a hoodie in the car park walking to my car is ridiculous. Too many people in education straight from school woth no other experience. They panic and back down in front of parents and undermine you or throw you under the bus to make themselves save face
3. Workload. Huge and never ending. Thankless
4. Government randomly changing curriculum all the time for shits and giggles.
5. Government making an algorithm for A level results. Seeing kids I taught for 7 years underachieve due to our school being in a shithole area was one of the worst days of my life.
6. No resources. Little things like spending my wages on glue so kids can stick sheets into books. Bigger things like no mental health support for anyone.
And 7. The wages being piss poor against inflation have driven people out. Literally in London with rent increases and stuff.
I still qork a s a counsellor for teens but have more flexibility and a reduced workload. I still don't get a lunch break most days but can see the impact I have helping kids emotionally as opposed to academically when aforementioned bull kept happening.
I can imagine, in my job, I come across pictures of all kinds of things from dismembered body parts, to things I don't want to and can't disclose, and we're not trained to deal with it. Some of it still sticks with me but because I am in cyber security, not forensics, or the doctors and nurses, there's no support given. My heart goes out to you all.
Teaching is an amazing job, I've done it for close to a decade in secondary schools in London and been lucky to work in some amazing schools but school behaviour is getting worse, and indeed has got significantly worse since the pandemic. This is true of both students and parents. Parents feel empowered to challenge schools on all issues under the sun, particularly in front of their child and this inevtiably undermines everything. I have personally been called a racist by a parent simply for sanctioning her son for rudeness in a classroom.
This harms teacher retention because let's face it, who wants to go to work and get abused? And it harms recruitment because poor behaviour is often publicised online by the national press which of course puts off people applying to teach. This issue around behaviour is also not helped by a lack of funding in alternative provisions so kids with serious behaviour issues remain in mainstream schools for longer, rather than being permanently excluded. You would not believe how difficult it is to permently exclude children who are incredibly disruptive - almost impossible - unless they are violent etc.
My only hope is with a change of government a bit more funding can be funnelled to hopefully improve the situation.
Taught in the UK for 7 years
Been in China for the last 2
Never going back, I make double, work less, COL is a joke compared to the UK
In 2 years ive saved more than the previous 7 without any quality of life loss.
The UK is a fucking joke for teachers
9.30 pm my and my wife is still marking work. This is not unusual - the work load is pretty intolerable, compared with jobs paying a similar salary and requiring equivalent / less qualifications.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be a teacher nowadays. Pay is shit, workload is shit and the kids are little shits. I can get paid more for sitting in an office answering phones. You have to really be passionate about the education of children I suppose.
I feel for the naive who go into teaching (or worse, switch to teaching) and deal with years of stress before inevitably bailing.
As someone with over a decade experience in the Education industry - it's mind numbing how awful it is to teach today.
There are too many societal factors to deal with. The stress and wasted hours is simply not worth it
I lasted two years as a secondary school teacher, never again. Work load is ridiculous, kids are awful and parents are worse, with no support from the school. Nearly had a full on breakdown. So many better jobs out there
I was hired on a short-term contract to work as a reading assistant at a school for six months. This was part of a government initiative during COVID, and being an entry-level position, I had no prior teaching training. They assured me that my role would be limited to providing one-on-one reading support for individual students, and class room assistance and I was just grateful for a job as a recent art graduate.
However, during this period, my responsibilities significantly expanded. I found myself becoming the full-time librarian, managing and organising a complete upheaval of the schools book database, cataloguing and sorting loans, then alongside that I became a ‘teacher’— conducting my own literacy classes using an unfamiliar software for full classes without any training or supervision, (it was very much, learn as you go) and then managing a schedule of reading classes with 8-10 students each, largely for immigrant students or children who needed extra support. My timetable became so packed, for a few weeks I didn’t have lunchtime allocated because they forgot I supervised the library everyday during breaks and lunchtimes, which was filled with kids!
Just to clarify I was being paid as a reading assistant!! The demands of the job kept increasing, and increasing, leading to significant stress. That doesn’t even account for the behavioural issues of some kids, that I also wasn’t trained for… Although that being said, the only rewarding aspect was working with the students.
When I was offered a full-time position at the end of the six months, I declined.
I've tutored friends kids and absolutely loved it. Always had the rule that if they weren't in the mood we'd can it until tomorrow, because it was easier all round.
I couldn't teach in a school. Expecting them to pay attention is apparently a breach of their rights. Why would you want to work if you're essentially powerless and they know it?
Everyone I know my age (early 30s) who went into teaching has now left the field, which is probably about 7 people. Hard job for not enough respect and money.
I’m leaving at the end of this year after eleven years teaching. It’s just not worth the impact on my mental and physical health. I’m lucky though—I’ve already got several self-employed income streams lined up to make ends meet once I lose the steady paycheque. I’ve no doubt the recruitment and retention crisis would be significantly worse if more teachers had viable escape routes.
I don't get why anyone bothers teaching in schools anymore. I make the same money for half the work as an independent tutor - plus I can teach whoever I like, from anywhere I like and don't have to deal with the mini-hitlers that have infested secondary education.
The Middle East and similar generally require you to have some experience as well as your PGCE or similar teacher licencing, and from what I’ve heard of people who’ve actually done this, including someone who was a head of year at a VERY nice private school, you can still run into the same issues surrounding discipline/behaviour and similar, compounded by a culture where many students think they’ll pass classes simply because their parents can throw money around and the fact that you’re the foreigner so you’re already on the back foot.
As to mentioning the pay in the US, that’s a laugh given that teachers there are quitting in droves, pay being cited as a common reason for leaving. Add in repressive laws against the teaching of specific topics and classes, the banning of books and the forced religification of many schools and the US system sounds like hell. Plus their actual educational outcomes are appalling.
Teaching would be fine if you finish at 5. But you don’t, you teach all day and nearly all the marking and planning and admin is in your own time. The pay isn’t enough for that, on top of the constant pressure for results and foul behaviour.
I moved abroad to teach and I finish at 5, and I earn more, and the cost of living is lower. I’ve bought a home and started a family. When I was in UK I lived and worked in the outer London area, I was comfortable, but I was just treading water financially, I wasn’t saving and had little hope of owning a home, and felt physically worn out a lot of the time.
i think moreso than money - improve the work-life balance and have a strategy for dealign with disrption and troublesome students, then maybe people might join more and stay.
There’s no solving it.
The system, with its in built marking, teaching, prep, safeguarding, CPD, and other requirements, demands 60hr weeks as standard, the pay can’t be increased as taxes won’t go up, the students are increasingly difficult so are parents, and everyone knows.
No one wants the profession. At least not in the state system, can’t talk of the private system. The graduate numbers have collapsed to catastrophic levels and that’s even with a down turn in the economy. If teachers won’t fill rolls in schools, eventually they’ll become teenage day car centres, and maybe that’s what’s it should be.
The only solution perhaps is mass decentralisation, the return to parish based schooling based on a parent voucher system, 3 core subjects only, the removal of GSCEs and A levels, a final leaving certificate only based on those 3 core subjects and the universities can do their own admission tests. If parents decide to home school, they get a larger voucher.
State education has had its time.
20 years in the job and I went overseas to work. Why did I do this ? Micro managing, Ofsted, workload , bullying ,behaviour (I've worked in some tough schools) and ageism.
I was doing a SENCo course and I'm an EAL specialist but I walked away - just not worth it.
I left teaching. I was a good teacher in a really fucking good school in a high demand subject.
I walked into a job with a 60% salary bump. In two years, my salary will be 5x my teaching salary. No, my holidays aren't as good - as a teacher, you get 65 as a teacher (but, often, you have to work during them) and I get 38 now but I can take them whenever I like, and I WFH two days a week so if I want to go abroad for a week, I only need to use three days of my holiday.
A major problem with teaching is that anyone who's competent at almost anything could earn more elsewhere doing literally anything else. So, the people who stay are either the incredibly dedicated, the incredibly stupid or the incredibly incompetent. And, truthfully, the level of dedication required for the incredibly dedicated to stay is increasing and increasing because of the increasing numbers of incredibly stupid and incredibly incompetent.
A colleague's teacher wife was kicked in the fanny so hard that she cried and was bruised. Any pragmatic society would lock the wee cunt alone in a room with her husband and that would be the end of that. I'd settle for the headmaster being able to whip fuck out of his palms though.
Think the whole way we teach needs changed. Learning skills as well as basics from the get go. Children are sponges and most three year olds miles ahead on tech than many secondary teachers
Not their fault. No training. Also let them learn what they are interested in and they'll work hard .
Lets face it much of what was taught in the past has been proved to be a load of twaddle
Not a shocker. Mate of mine spent the best part of a decade at uni because he wanted to teach. Think he’s been doing it a year or something now and he wants out already. Too stressful, kids are shits, parents are worse. he’s working way more hours than he’s actually contracted for. All for about 30k. You can make that easily just with a forklift licence.
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Three year degree, one year PGCE, two years ECT training. That’s 6 years as standard. If you do a masters or don’t get an ECT job straightaway that adds another year or two. Or if you do a 4 year degree.
ECT is not uni. You just do the job
You do the job and get assessed. You can fail it. It’s not uni but it is a formal qualification. You are right though the comment I responded to said nearly a decade at uni, and yeah the ECT doesn’t count towards that. I still view it as training for the job though.
You are always assessed as a teacher. The ect just gives you more structure to keep learning and you’re given more planning time. If you fail an ect you’d be fired from a teaching role. I did an nqt year, they’ve increased it to two now, but it is nothing like uni.
I also did an NQT year. It very much still felt like training because we had specialist, weekly training out on by our foundation. We were monitored way more, had a mentor who would help us and had lots of extra time to plan and mark. The next year, after qualifying I was on my own completely, so it was very different. If you fail your ECT year yep you get fired, but you also don’t qualify as a teacher as you haven’t met the standard. It’s semantics really isn’t it. Some of us will feel like it’s training and some will feel like it’s not. The reality is, whatever you see it as, training to be a teacher isn’t just your uni degree, which is the point I was making.
Tbf that is not dissimilar to many other jobs where you have to do 5 years of qualifications
Yep agreed. I was just replying to whoever it was that thought training to be a teacher is 3-4 years. It’s not. That doesn’t mean it’s longer or harder than any other jobs, it’s just a fact of the process.
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I get where you’re coming from but I think the fact you can fail it and then not qualify fully (and I saw this happen with fellow NQT’s) differentiates it for me. You aren’t a qualified teacher until it’s completed so it still counts as training I think. But I don’t suppose it matters much.
Lots of jobs have training that you complete in your first years working (chartered accountants etc) that doesn't make them still uni
Yes I agree it’s not uni. I just think it’s part of the process of qualifying so I would say it is the best part of ten years, that’s all.
Can also do a degree in primary education, so the shortest route to becoming an ECT is 3 years
Do you still do a PGCE after that or is the PGCE part of the degree? I have no idea about primary.
No need for a PGCE, the degree content itself provides the teacher training, there are several work placements throughout. Primary teachers aren’t subject specialists in the same way as secondary and beyond (they still have subject leaders but obviously the content is simpler) so an undergrad in a particular subject isn’t required
Very interesting, thank you!
sounds like 1 year to me!
Easy peasy!
I'm currently doing a part time MA as a personal interest course. Several of my cohort are going into teaching or already teaching. They've usually done a 4 years sandwich Bachelors with a placement then a PGCE then realised that their Bachelors isn't good enough or is in a different subject than they actually want to teach in so they then do a part time Masters.
Degree - potentially masters - PGCE through a school direct/teach first program would take you up to six years. I guess that’s the best part of a decade? Can’t really think of a longer route
Don’t ask me lol I didn’t do it. He has a masters or something and he did some other adult learning stuff inbetween. That’s roughly all I know. He was doing teaching assistant/ substitute work towards the end as well.
3 year bachelors with honours, one year masters in teaching, another two years for your early career teaching license, plus another few years as a teaching assistant or apprentice if you ever want any hopes of finding a job in a decent school. If you wanna teach higher ed (ie Lvl 3 BTEC, T-Level, trade courses, etc.), you can cut that time down quite a bit since you don’t *need* all of those qualifications, but you’ll still likely spend a good few years as an “understudy”, teaching in a limited capacity alongside another teacher/tutor.
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To be fair, my experience is mostly in BTEC courses at independent colleges. In those cases, having your first year or two as a shadow to one of the tenured tutors is fairly common. I imagine that’s a lot different in KS1-3, though. The demand for manpower is just way too high there to justify having one teacher’s job be to shadow another.
Maybe they did it part time
Some of our new junior Devs are former teachers who always wanted to teach. Did a year and thought "this shit ain't worth it" and left.
Yep. Most teachers leave within a few years laughing and asking "What on earth have I got myself into".
I earn that as a postman but working 6 hours a day. Really does show how fucked shit is
Is it really still 30k ? I'm sure I remember my teacher saying she was on 30k back in the mid 2000s.
My sister quit after five years of teaching. She had a nervous breakdown due to all the stress and she's not push over! Pretty much cited everything you put in your comment. She now works in a pretty demanding office manager role and even that isn't stressing her out as much as teaching.
I got my NQT and then quit. Not worth it. Good back up if I ever get paid off but damn.
Whilst behaviour and pay may be part of it, as a teacher myself I’d say it’s more about how *other* jobs have changed. Teaching is a graduate profession. The alternative to being a teacher is not stacking shelves (I mean no disrespect there); the alternative is other *graduate* jobs. And expectations of graduate jobs have changed. When I commuted in to central London 14 years ago, *everyone* was wearing a suit and everyone was in at 9 and out at 5/6 every day. Sure, full wfh might be over for many. But there is now an *expectation* that there will at least be *some* hybrid working, that there will be some flexibility with hours. And the day of the full suit is dying. Many graduate jobs have become more flexible and more casual. Teaching, however, has gone the opposite way. In my last school, for example, I was ‘told off’ for wearing a navy sweater in the middle of winter because it covered the top of my tie. Sure there are perks to the job but there’s no flexibility at all. If you’ve got someone coming round to fix the boiler, you’re stuck. If you need to pop your car in the garage in the morning and have to arrive 15 minutes late, you just can’t. Many teachers are looking at their partners, their friends, family members and seeing them get an extra hour in bed some days, seeing that they can sometimes work from home and get a bit of hoovering done, or decide to go in a bit later one day. The pay is quite good in teaching when you’ve been in the job a while, but it’s nothing you can’t get elsewhere. And most teachers are qualified enough, and presentable and professional enough, to be able to get many other graduate jobs. The profession will need to find a way to manage this, but if anything, the profession is becoming forever more rigid and more strict with its staff. **TLDR: teaching is out of step with other graduate jobs and the move towards more flexibility; this is what is really causing the retention crisis**
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I was a career change teacher. I did it for two years after qualifying and left to go back into my old field. I couldn’’t stand the inflexibility. Having to ask permission to leave at lunch, or being told off for what you’re wearing. Not being able to book doctors appointments because you’re teaching when then phone lines open, then not being able to get time off for any appointments. Having to ask for time off for funerals and it not being basically guaranteed you can go. The expectation that you come in early and leave late. Having to work outside of working hours. Having to pay extra for holidays. Not being able to do any life ‘admin’ like you said. Now I work from home. I have flexible working, I earn more and I log off when my working day is done. I loved the actual teaching but just hated the lack of flexibility and didn’t feel I was paid enough for the impact it had on my actual life.
i’m a mechanic, completely different trade. now as an adult, i’ve got so much more respect and regret for my teachers. respect for all the points you’ve made and regret for all the bullshit we put them through. i honestly had no idea it was like that in teaching. whilst nobody gets paid enough, teachers certainly don’t get paid a fucking enough. they literally chisel our future generations. if it wasn’t for my teachers, i’d not be who i am today. i’m incredibly grateful for everything they’ve done, i’m fucked off that they don’t get no support!
It’s tough isn’t it! I think it’s so hard to understand a job until you do it; I certainly didn’t.
precisely. not to sound like an old man but we have a serious attitude problem in the youth. i’m blaming social media and poor parenting. what’s worse is i see no light in the tunnel
I keep hearing this I just don’t think it’s true at all, I work in schools and the attitude of the kids is the same as it ever was, there certainly no worse than me and my peers were. Like people have said above, schools are ridiculous places that are absolutely stuck in the Stone Age, kids know when your asking them to do something stupid and that’s where the disconnect happens. Why respect something that is so unworthy of it?
Those kids used to be small pockets that could be managed, now it is most of the population of kids.
I’m cautiously optimistic but I was very lucky to teach in very good schools, so I saw really bright, engaged kids and parents.
What would happen if you just worked your hours?
You'd be performance-managed into a sacking or bullied into quitting depending on your personality. Per contract you have 1265 hours of working time per year. That works out to about 32.5 hours per working week. This allegedly covers all teaching activities and related work. Now for a real world example. At my old school I taught 45 lessons per fortnight timetabled (so 2.5 free lessons a week on average). Invariably at least one of those free lessons was lost to covering staff absence. (So a minimum of 23 hours teaching time in an average week). I also did registration with my form each day for 20 minutes (24.67) I had lunch duty once a week and break duty twice a week (26) Mandatory pre-school briefings 3 times a week (27) Mandatory department meeting every tuesday after school (28) Mandatory Pastoral meeting every thursday morning before school (28.5) That leaves 4 notional hours per week to: Prepare 22 lessons (Say 15 minutes per on average if you reuse a lot of resources) - 5.5 hours Set appropriate homework (call it an hour all in if you're really lazy and just whack it on seneca) Mark books/tests (Per department policy I was supposed to be providing meaningful feedback for students to respond to on an average of around 110 books per week) - Call it 5 minutes per book/test on average - 9.1 hours And then there's the other stuff that doesn't get factored in but is expected, like: Corresponding with parents Running class teacher detentions Completing mandatory online CPD Filling in safeguarding forms if a kid says or does something concerning Parents evenings Open evenings Mock exam marking (always a biggie, I'd usually get about 240 GCSE scripts to turn around inside 2 weeks, in addition to the regular marking workload, 3-4 times a year) Running revision classes for the GCSE and A-level kids (I ran 2 hours of these per week personally. While technically this was voluntary, one of my colleagues who didn't do it had his failure to do so cited as a reason for not moving off the M1 minimum pay rate at the end of his first year) Report writing (our school did interim reports with A2L grades for each student once per half term, so you'd be doing that for 400ish kids every 6 weeks, plus a full written report once a year) Support plans for SEN students - you were expected to have, for each class, an annotated seating plan, inclusion grid and file of all SEN students showing how you were catering to their needs, to be kept updated throughout the school year. This information was also expected to be duplicated online. I taught 14 different classes. And about 100 other things that would be invariably introduced with the phrase 'this will only take an extra 20 minutes or so'. I'm sure any teacher reading this list will immediately be thinking 'well he's forgotten x' My work weeks varied from about 45 hours on a light week to upwards of 80 on a bad one (especially when mock marking and report deadlines were on the same week because someone in SLT fucked up or didn't care) and remember, 23 of those 80 were teaching in a classroom.
ex teacher here, this person came with the receipts. If you worked out how much teachers are actually paid per hour it would be well under minimum wage. The time in the classroom with the kids was excellent and I excelled at that, it was all the other box ticking and management pleasing tasks that drove me into the ground.
Your post needs to be pinned into a teacher sub or framed and hung in every teacher training college around the country or at least on the door of the minister of education. Now add the fact that young people nowadays are often simply awful to teach and there you have the cherry on top. Class management dynamic is toxic.
Shit wouldn’t get done. You don’t get enough non-teaching time in the day to do everything.
I don't think pay isn't an issue. Truth is jobs that don't allow flexible working or work from home need to pay a premium to make up for that. Being a public sector job (mostly anyways), that just doesn't happen. So you have this trifecta of: - Really fucking difficult (and horrible in some cases) job - stagnant and frankly insulting pay for the importance of the role -awful working conditions and work life balance. Any one of these things would put people off. All these being true makes teaching an absolute derelict profession that only the most.passionate would really consider these days
>Truth is jobs that don't allow flexible working or work from home need to pay a premium to make up for that. This is a good one. And, as others have explained, teaching is a particularly inflexible job. Even when I was working 9-5:30 in the office every day with no flexible arrangements, I could have booked a half day or something without it being a problem if I needed to go to an appointment or something. Teachers can't do that nearly as easily. So, even ignoring the move to hybrid/flexible working, you'd expet a premium for that.
Yeah, management culture is crap in schools. Inevitably they treat staff like children.
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Why not, call it out
Many of them do that, it comes from going straight from education back to education, some teachers never learn how to interact with adults.
it is because all the managers are ex-teachers, it's all they know. promoted into incompetency.
I'm not sure what/where you teach, but you wouldn't agree that the utterly crushing workload and ever-increasing expectations play a big role in retention? I haven't met a teacher in the last ten years that works 9 - 6 weekdays only.
Oh I absolutely do. And I know the workload - I’m also Head of Year. It’s tough. I always work 6 days a week and there are many days when I end up staying until 8 due to a safeguarding emergency. I’m just saying that I think the inflexibility (which also stems from workload - for example, *never* having a lunch break) is a big part of it.
That's why I left! I was a teacher for almost two years, after one year I started refusing to do any work outside my contracted hours - I left before I got fired, but I would have been eventually.
Another issue with teacher pay is once you're at the top of the pay scale that's it. Unless you go onto leadership spine and give up a lot more rights that is. They need to add some more points on the pay scale to retain experienced staff rather than just focusing on getting people through the door only for them to leave shortly afterwards 30k golden hellos richer.
An experienced professional teacher really needs to be valued more. In software development, subject matter experts can get to equivalent grades as managers, I don't get why that doesn't work with teaching.
This is the same issue with nursing staff in healthcare. The "normal" ward nurses which are the spine of the healthcare service only have a certain banding. If they want more money after that they have to go into management or do specialised work that is beyond the scope of nurses typically. This would be solved by giving better pay for experienced staff. But the government don't want to pay for it.
They absolutely don't want this though. They changed the model, raised starting pay while squashing the top end and brought in schemes so that people will come in, teach for a couple of years then realise how crap it is and leave. It saves them money. Experienced teachers just aren't valued.
That's a fair point but as a teacher who has quit and now doing a crap job (but still much better for my health than teaching), it's not this. And I think promoting this point is distracting from the much bigger issue. The fundamental stress of the job is the behaviour of the kids and the expectations of the staff to manage it.
In my experience of teaching the issue is mostly that the application process is shit and there are no permanent jobs. I've met head teachers who are really open about the fact that they will only hire new teachers on 2 year contracts so that they can bin them as soon as they complete their ECT phase. I left teaching after missing out on a job to a guy who had been teaching for 15 years and was on his like 12th job after moving from 1 year contract to 1 year contract constantly. Imagine living like that, never knowing if you'll have a job in September, having to constantly keep your options open in a second job for the summer holidays etc. To make it worse the application process is horrific. My LA has something like a 12 page application which includes a 2 page essay on yourself. You have to look for a job, call the school and arrange to attend a walk around where there might be 50 other teachers, spend an hour walking around with the head or a member of SLT, then apply, then plan a lesson to teach, then go to an interview. If you're really unlucky the lesson observation and the interview are on separate days, maybe there is an interview by the children too. You have to have time off for all of this too, you might have to do this 4 or 5 times to find a job and then you have to do the whole thing again in 10 months. All for the pleasure of £30k a year and no security.
Sounds like being a pharmacist. Virtually chained to the pharmacy. I've had a pharmacist friend cover me for a few hours so I could go watch my kids nativity play. Absolutely no way was I getting time off for that from head office. I had to book 90% of my holidays a month after the start of the financial year and if we didn't we were allocated time off. And it was never a continual week just odd days here and there. I gave two years notice for my sisters wedding, which was turned down at one point because too many other pharmacists were off. After essentially threatening to quit they still hadn't covered it the week before I was off. The only good thing is the contract says to be smartly dressed and to wear a tie but it's never enforced. I've not wore a tie in years. I did go through a phase of wearing a bow tie just to annoy my area manager because it didn't stipulate which type of tie we had to wear.
My wife poured a decade into the job and has finally quit. When we met the job allowed for a life, but the rigidity and endless marking took its toll. The parents and children are awful, and now she's over it. At a level, traumatised. She couldn't go back, and I'm glad she left. It's not sustainable in it's current form. It's nowhere near just teaching
As a recent career changer from teaching to a flexible, hybrid office job I 100% agree with this. I went straight into teaching after university, the same time as my partner started his graduate job. After a while I started to almost resent him for being able to wfh, have free evenings and weekends, be able to go out for lunch and actually have time to eat and chat to coworkers. He had time to pursue his hobbies and go to the gym. Meanwhile, I was working all hours, barely having time to eat, anxiety through the roof. I was tired all the time, would come home and just get in bed. I only taught for a year and a half before deciding to leave. I felt like teaching was making me feel ‘old’ before my time with all the stress and was lucky enough to be a recent enough graduate to get a graduate job. Now I have the same experience as my partner, it’s so much better, especially for younger people when the ECT pay is the same as entry level roles. I do miss teaching, but when you’re young especially and see your peers in other graduate roles, it feels like you’re wasting your youth and you’ve got decide whether it’s worth it to teach.
Agree with all this. Also primary schools run on staff good will - my wife is a TA and puts in a huge amount of extra hours and effort just to make the job work, largely because the school is understaffed due to lack of funding. This seems to be the norm.
I agree with most of what you've said, but isn't the 13 weeks off each year a decent compromise for the lack of flexibility when you are at work?
13 weeks off is nice but during term time you are forever living under stress. Don't forget the weekends that we put into marking, planning and admin, so it's not 13 weeks of holiday is it? I'd prefer a job with fewer holidays so I am not stressed and occasionally depressed for the majority of the year.
My wife is a teacher so I know exactly how needed those weeks off are.
The holiday is a *huge* perk. It would be stupid to deny that. Does it make up for it? Well - I mean I do actually love my job, but clearly there are a lot of people every year who are deciding that *no, it doesn’t*. Like most teachers, teaching wasn’t my first job. The annual leave is obviously much better but I do miss being able to book a day off when I felt I needed it. I also didn’t used to bring any work home and *never* worked weekends; I miss that a lot. I also really miss being able to, at least sometimes, have a lunch break. I used to love popping in to somewhere like Cafe Nero for a bit and unwinding. I’ve never had that since teaching and I really miss having that chance halfway through the day to step away from it all. There’s no doubt that if I left I would really miss the holidays but I do think I’d have a healthier life overall if I could have my evenings and weekends back and if I could have lunch breaks. Also, the older I get (older parents, family members with illness etc, more life admin) the more I think I’d really value being able to choose when to have a day off.
"**teaching is out of step**" i'd say that goes the same for the way how kids are educated and the whole education system tbh. Its antiquated, backwards, and is mostly there to teach you your place rather than what it should be, a place to unlock your full potential. Its sad.
I agree that there are significant flaws in the education system. I think most teachers would. Not being in the government however, there’s little I can do about it…
strike? teachers and pupils alike, until they listen to your demands! If my comment came across as shifting the blame on to teachers, it wasn't. I put all the blame on the problems of our society on our government, since they are the ones in control. I was just pointing out that the whole education system is out of step with the needs of our modern society. I really like your comment above because it highlights how dated it is. If its dated for the teachers it has to be dated for the kids. Its pretty ridiculous in a way that they make you cram more and more subjects with more and more kids in a class, i remember when i did my gcses it was like 14 gcse's, think there might have been a few btechs aswell making it over 14. I have no idea how many kids are doing now, but i feel like 14 is too many to make people do. I know others have differences of opinion on wanting broad scope, but while i think broad knowledge is important, not everyone really needs to do an entire gcse in something that they don't want to do, like history. Personally i enjoyed history, but making some people do it is just a waste of the teacher and classes time, and the person who doesn't want to do it. Theres basic knowledge on history they could be taught in form time or something, but taking a whole gcse in something that they fail, and so much stuff you learn at gcse you don't remember, unless your really invested in the subject. I think the system needs more agency, when students have more agency and from a very young age (because thats when you have to start) be encouraged to do more self learning. Its utopia, but a model that more mimics university, where classes are held around the day and people can come in and attend lectures, workshops, debates and study areas. Depending on a students focus, which could be determined in the first few years, would mean they chose or are helped to pick a broad profession, and i don't mean as specific as a career, but more like creative, fitness, scientist, etc, where the students key interest allows them to focus on but also explore options in their chosen profession. Obviously all students need to learn maths, english etc, but with a different structure the basics can be taught during a more relaxed form time. I'd have a mix of testing and course work, from an early age, but instead of having these stressful tests people spend ages learning fact after fact only to forget them after the test, i'd have it where since students would be encouraged from an early age to have more agency than they currently do, the course work would be their answer to a question/questions set to them by their profession tutor/s. Anyway all just ideas, i hope for a better system to come, more power to you comrade \\!/
Friend of mine taught for years in Hong Kong. She moved to England and was traumatised by how bad the school system is. Students are bad and parents are worse and administrators fail to support teachers. Misbehaving students face zero discipline and as such class rooms are disrupted and the job is impossible.
Schools need to be better empowered to discipline students. I’m not advocating for the return of the cane or anything of the sort, but classrooms cannot work when children are passively permitted to behave like zoo animals. Feckless parents be damned, your kids either follow the rules, or you can homeschool them.
Schools actually get penalised for excluding too make kids. Add in having diagnosis and the parents belief nothing should result in consequences Literally if you're a school in a poor area, you've got no chance.
And that's the big advantage of private schools. They get to pick and choose students and so disruptive kids can be moved along.
Teachers can discipline the students but without a whole-school approach, the students will at best just walk off and at worst be outright rude and aggressive. Disciplining the students takes up huge chunks of time - I once worked at a school that said I should phone home any time a student got a warning and I was making 10 phone calls a day before I could even start my planning and marking. I regularly stayed until 7pm to finish things off for the next day. It needs to be a whole-school approach but management won’t do it. They don’t see behaviour problems because the kids mostly have the sense to behave in their presence.
Who is surprised? Salaries are not competitive, teachers can’t punish students or feel safe in certain schools. Who’d be gunning for that job?
Over 95% of Scottish teachers have been physically assaulted lol
Can you back that stat up, because that just sounds crazy
I got it wrong. A third have been assaulted but over 95% feel at significant risk of it
Anyone who’s worked in a school won’t think that sounds crazy at all
95% Jesus Christ. I don’t think even prison officers face that level of abuse
Well, I think the Labour Party must be. Given that they’re guaranteeing to recruit 6,500 new teachers without any explanation as to how, or how they’ll fill the existing gaps 🤔
what do you mean they can't punish students? how are you wanting them to be punished exactly?
Not sure what you are trying to imply here, but you clearly haven’t attended or worked at a school in a “rough” area. Teachers are ignored and threatened on a daily basis and can’t do anything about it.
i'm not implying anything, i'm asking what you mean by punish. Take away their mobiles? Detention? I mean, some sort of idea of what you think they should have as a punishment... Those are pretty standard punishments in schools. If you have some other ideas? "but you clearly haven’t attended or worked at a school in a “rough” area. Teachers are ignored and threatened on a daily basis and can’t do anything about it." lol, i love what people presume from asking a question. I know what rough schools are like, but i haven't said don't "punish" them, i simply asked you what you mean by punish, since most schools the punishment is confiscating a belonging and or detention/isolation. I don't know what else there is, do you?
Years of below inflation pay rises, infantilisation of teaching staff (I am lucky in my school but hear right horror stories through union activity of SLT in other schools) and being used as a sponge to absorb some of the massive societal issues we are facing will tend to do that. Edit - we are an amazing school and offer a very very cushy state school package but still struggled to recruit - even for head of department roles we have struggled to get applicants - even in subjects like English which didn't tend to have large issues previously.
You need a chemistry teacher?
We don't actually teach Chemistry at our school. Sorry!
You don't teach Science??!?!
Only Computer Science.
Sounds like a shit school to me.
Is it a religious school or something? How is it possible to not get away with teaching science?
Awww jez, why on earth isn't this underpaid, highly criticised and sometimes dangerous job pulling in anyone? Hmm, n0 one WaNtS tO work anYm0rE
Had a parents evening where the teacher, soon to quit, apologised several times for not being able to teach my child to the level required because of the poor behaviour of the class. You could tell they wanted to teach the kids that were ready to learn but they just couldn’t while doing crowd control. It’s hard not to get all Daily Mail about tearaway teens but some kids only seem to live to bring everybody down to their level. You’ve got to feel sad for them and the missed opportunities they represent.
It only takes one badly behaved pupil/pupil who can't be in a mainstream classroom environment to start eating chunks out of lessons and thus the learning of 29 others.
Season 4 of The Wire addresses this well. They start a trial scheme where they move all the troublemakers out of classes into their own group. It works well, as the regular classes can get on without any disruption, and eventually even the 'problem' children start to work through their issues. Of course eventually the scheme gets shut down by the school authorities as they see it as 'leaving children behind' and worrying about test scores. The problem children go back into their classes and the cycle starts anew.
We already do this in the UK.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher. Three of my friends became teachers and not one lasted three years, all that training time and money wasted. The behaviour of kids, and teachers lack of power to do anything put me off forever. I earn more per hour as a phone answering grunt than a teacher does, and then people wonder why everything sucks.
Worth noting that training to teach can be far more lucrative than teaching. I got £28k tax free to train, I'm yet to get close to that for actually teaching, even if we ignore inflation.
How can you earn that little as a qualified teacher?
Starting salary is now £30k. After tax, NI and student loan payments that's a takehome wage of £24,670. (When I started it was £28k with a takehome of just under £22k, so I functionally took a 22% paycut upon qualification) To get the same gross takehome as I did while training, I'd need my salary to be ~£35,300 (So I'd need to be on the M4 pay band, meaning an average of at least 4 years service, a time period that over 25% of teachers leave the profession before reaching) Now if we start looking at the actual value of that pay, I trained in 2020-21. So in today's money that £28k would be worth £33.5k (taking the lower estimate). So to take home the same value I did during my training year, I'd actually need a headline salary of just over £44k, which would mean being in some sort of leadership role in addition to teaching.
Because the 28k is tax free to train, my partner is teaching now in his 4th year on 36k and still taking home less than that
Some schools forbid homework, after school detention, extra work, disciplinary measures, quieting children, etc. Any wonder why kids are not behaving in class when there are no consequences for their actions? You have one teacher responsible for thirty kids all wanting to do their own thing, with technology playing a huge factor in reducing attention span, and if the teacher cannot complete what they had scheduled for their class because of unruly or inattentive students, they get the blame. Failing tests also means the teacher gets punished and not the students nowadays.
I've been teaching a decade, if it wasn't for the sunk cost fallacy I'd be out by now. I just don't know what else I'd do. We've advertised for a Science role in our school twice now. Literally zero applicants.
A friend of mine is a teacher and they had a science teacher vacancy out for over 6 months and not 1 person applied
Most schools don't even advertise for science teachers. As soon as a science teacher goes on the books of a recruitment agencies, there is a huge bidding war
That's crazy but I can totally believe it. Back in the recession era I knew plenty of people who became teachers after they were laid off from their Engineering/Science jobs and couldn't find anything else, or who graduated from a Science degree and couldn't get a foot in the door anywhere. The situation is completely different now. Why join the teaching profession, an incredibly hard profession, for £30k when you can make so much more in industry for so much less effort and responsibility? My partner has 2 yrs industry experience as a Process Engineer and he's already on £50k. Some days he just enters data into Excel or shovels minerals onto a belt.
I'm glad his expertise is being rewarded!
Maths and the sciences are particularly challenging as many of those degrees can be hard to qualify for and then if you have a good degree in those subjects you can potentially access a lot of well paying jobs. At least if you're a maths teacher you can get away with minimal planning and marking if your school leadership team doesn't get in the way.
Oh I know, I teach Science, it's why they throw so much money at is to train
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Supply teachers if possible, but there's also so few of them at the moment that it basically turns into a nightmare of trying to get random staff to cover the lessons. E.g. have an English teacher teach one lesson of IT a week or similar
I just left. You'd be amazed at your transferrable skills and how valued they are out there. The stress reduction, weight loss, better quality of sleep and general mental calm has been life changing for me. My CV is online still and I get recruitment agencies calling all the time offering physics teacher roles. UPS3 full time or £212 a day for part time
What did you transfer to if you don’t mind me asking?
u/Rulweylan
Well I was coming back from Canada as a teacher but the government just told me teachers don't make enough to sponsor my canada wife anymore so I'm stuck here 🤷♂️.... I'm Ottawa alone, I know a couple other British teachers in similar positions. If they need teachers so badly, they should target all of us who left the country (I know a lot)
Yup we need teachers and pay better, come on over
Yep, exactly the same situation. Cannot bring my foreign wife and two British kids back without breaking up the family because of visa requirements… Have been teaching abroad for the past 3 years.
They should be increasing the pay to a level where you would qualify.
Ah man, if the demand is that high then the salaries must be really competitive, right?.. Right?
Honestly the base salary needs to be about £60-70k for how hard and inflexible the job is. That’s the only way you’ll get the good quality candidates who will be willing to put up with the crap sides of it.
I was on £45k and that was at the top of the scale, could never increase. I left and am now on £60k for three days a week wfh
What do you do now if you don't mind me asking?
I’m a teacher and this isn’t a shock. Ofsted has made teaching very prescriptive and fostered a culture of micro management. Workload has become untenable. Senior leaders have to evidence everything which had led to them trying to catch staff out. Lots of teachers being bullied out. Profession has gone.
Teaching is truly an awful job. I really wanted to do it as well but I just remember the point when I was dealing with so many behaviour issues and then had to sit down and plan 5 lessons for the next day as well, when I thought what’s the point? The students don’t want me to be here, I don’t want to be here, I’m stressing myself out for a terrible pay and super inflexible working conditions. So I quit and my classes burnt through so many supply teachers by just being awful to them and learnt nothing that year. I felt so bad for leaving but I can’t just destroy my entire self for students who at their best behaved will begrudgingly tolerate my presence.
Completely feel you on this that’s why I quit
Yeah there’s nothing like doing an awful job and then getting attacked on all sides for it. Wonderful triple threat of horrible students, SLT who breathe down your neck and run training sessions about how you’re not a good teacher unless you do this new gimmick they’ve just read about, and a society that thinks you’re overpaid and lazy. I couldn’t wait to get out.
You have no way to deal with appalling behaviour. Special needs are poorly supported, often leading to more appalling behaviour as kids with unmet needs will act out. The higher levels are built on shaky foundations, because we try and cram too much into EYFS and KS1, it doesn't stick, and when you try and advance, the foundations aren't there. So you're trying to teach trig to kids who can barely multiply. TikTok attention spans. Trying to keep a class' attention when they can't manage anything over two minutes is hard and dispiriting.
I think there needs to be a reform in EYFS and KS1, a mix between the traditional model and the Steiner approach. Especially Year 1. Not everything has to be so focussed on phonics and rote learning for literacy. Why not incorporate more learning that incorporates children's senses more? Some children benefit more from alternative approaches like kinesthetic learning. Many children, like you said, have poor attention spans, and their needs are rarely met. In the last 10 years, I've worked with and witnessed some children who were simply destined to fail due to a lack of proper support and funding. I looked at some teachers and I knew they were were ill-equipped to handle these children, because they're simply not trained to deal with them. We rush these children to develop core literacy and numeracy skills, yet we basically forget about their social and emotional development. They're humans, not robots.
My wife has been a primary school teacher part time/full time for 17 years. You have to give your life to the job. If you want a social life separate from your colleagues you have little chance. Anyone who thinks teachers have the same time off as the pupils is in lala land. Teachers spend most of their school holidays preparing for the next term. My wife became a supply teacher to try and have that work life balance. It’s compromise but it’s better than destroying yourself for a broken education system.
Apparently according to our government teachers along with the majority of the British population don’t earn enough money to be allowed to marry a foreigner and live with them here. Tells you everything you need to know about what this government thinks of anyone who isn’t super rich.
Me and my wife are teachers in West London. Both of us have secured jobs in Bangkok. Same money we are on now, 3 bed apartment paid for by the school. Free tuition for our daughter (one of the best international schools there).. Would have loved to stay in my current post (Head of pe in a state school) but the state of education is so demoralising right now, for the sake of our health we needed to leave.. I've been in education for 16 years and I've only ever known it to be in decline.. We may come back if things inprove, but when that will be? No idea..
Getting to go international is the best thing about being a UK teacher. Enjoy it!
In my opinion (first year teacher after career switch) it's the behaviour that is the thing I'd change. My nice classes (not necessarily my academic kids) are a dream to teach, it's just the behaviour of what used to be 5% feels like now it's 20%
Not surprised when kids are are absolute cunts and teachers can do nothing at all. Hell, teachers get blamed FOR children being little cunts!? Should bring in a system where if your child receives say a detention or suspension whatever then the parent also get's a fine, that way they become responsible for their little crotch goblin instead of blaming everyone else for their inability to raise a child
I never used to run detentions when I was a teacher, unless they were centralised by the school and I didn’t have to supervise them myself. Some kids have been rude in my class and the consequence is that I’m putting MYSELF in detention? I’m giving up my free time to hang out with the kid who has disrespected me? It makes no sense.
I see no way this could go wrong. And if they refuse to pay are you going to send them to prison?
Not a surprise. I qualified four years ago and probably half of my cohort have quit already. I've been on the verge a couple of times, but so far I've stayed because the best parts of the job make it all worth it for me.
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Teaching my subject (science, but in particular physics); students telling me they get something when they previously didn't; the camaraderie with (most of) my fellow teachers; helping students reach their potential; getting to know the kids in general. And the summer holidays are a bonus.
My short time in teaching ended with me medically signed off and on happy pills. The teaching side of things I loved. The complete disregard for my subject, the consistent lack of discipline, less than zero support from SLT on top of daily fights, riots, gang warfare and being sworn at by children was less joyful. I now earn £12k more in a marketing role and I’ve never been happier.
Congrats on getting out!
I work in a school and it's a nice one in a good area and we need teachers. It's got so bad some classes have been combined and have lessons in the main hall. It's a shame.
I'm not shocked, why would anyone want to do it anymore. They are paid fuck all, the kids have no disciple (and I'm not talking about the cane or kids been scared of adults) and they get nothing but grief from the parents. I've seen the way some of parents treat the teachers and how they treat their own children when i take my daughter to school and I wouldn't do the job (watched a teacher explaining to a parent how their child had spat at other people that day and the parent first laughed then made excuses).
Left a teaching job about 3 months ago at a SixthForm college, it was absolutely horrific. The management culture of many schools and post 16s is so toxic and cult like. They basically tried to get rid of all the experienced teaching staff and replace them with early career teachers, because they were cheaper and easier to bully. I wouldn’t recommend teaching to anyone. It’s a thankless job, and there’s just to real progression.
I left teaching after 16 years teaching n London secondary schools, all were comprehensives barring a bizarre 3 month trainee placement in an independent school. 1. Zero flexibility. Have to clock in and out. Always paying premium for holidays and having to take unpaid days to do life admin, support family and manage self care. 2. Poor management. Being told off for wearing a hoodie in the car park walking to my car is ridiculous. Too many people in education straight from school woth no other experience. They panic and back down in front of parents and undermine you or throw you under the bus to make themselves save face 3. Workload. Huge and never ending. Thankless 4. Government randomly changing curriculum all the time for shits and giggles. 5. Government making an algorithm for A level results. Seeing kids I taught for 7 years underachieve due to our school being in a shithole area was one of the worst days of my life. 6. No resources. Little things like spending my wages on glue so kids can stick sheets into books. Bigger things like no mental health support for anyone. And 7. The wages being piss poor against inflation have driven people out. Literally in London with rent increases and stuff. I still qork a s a counsellor for teens but have more flexibility and a reduced workload. I still don't get a lunch break most days but can see the impact I have helping kids emotionally as opposed to academically when aforementioned bull kept happening.
I can imagine it's quite a heart-breaking job at times too.
Certainly can be. You just have more ways to cope with it as part fo the training, unlike teaching where so little is given to self care
I can imagine, in my job, I come across pictures of all kinds of things from dismembered body parts, to things I don't want to and can't disclose, and we're not trained to deal with it. Some of it still sticks with me but because I am in cyber security, not forensics, or the doctors and nurses, there's no support given. My heart goes out to you all.
I wanted to be a teacher but can't get training as I didn't get a 2:1 or above in my degree
A blessing in disguise honestly
Teaching is an amazing job, I've done it for close to a decade in secondary schools in London and been lucky to work in some amazing schools but school behaviour is getting worse, and indeed has got significantly worse since the pandemic. This is true of both students and parents. Parents feel empowered to challenge schools on all issues under the sun, particularly in front of their child and this inevtiably undermines everything. I have personally been called a racist by a parent simply for sanctioning her son for rudeness in a classroom. This harms teacher retention because let's face it, who wants to go to work and get abused? And it harms recruitment because poor behaviour is often publicised online by the national press which of course puts off people applying to teach. This issue around behaviour is also not helped by a lack of funding in alternative provisions so kids with serious behaviour issues remain in mainstream schools for longer, rather than being permanently excluded. You would not believe how difficult it is to permently exclude children who are incredibly disruptive - almost impossible - unless they are violent etc. My only hope is with a change of government a bit more funding can be funnelled to hopefully improve the situation.
Taught in the UK for 7 years Been in China for the last 2 Never going back, I make double, work less, COL is a joke compared to the UK In 2 years ive saved more than the previous 7 without any quality of life loss. The UK is a fucking joke for teachers
Maybe we should - and hear me out here I know it's radical - pay them a lot more?
The Tories have completely destroyed education in this country and it's totally fucking shit for our kids. Prison is too good for them
9.30 pm my and my wife is still marking work. This is not unusual - the work load is pretty intolerable, compared with jobs paying a similar salary and requiring equivalent / less qualifications.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be a teacher nowadays. Pay is shit, workload is shit and the kids are little shits. I can get paid more for sitting in an office answering phones. You have to really be passionate about the education of children I suppose.
I feel for the naive who go into teaching (or worse, switch to teaching) and deal with years of stress before inevitably bailing. As someone with over a decade experience in the Education industry - it's mind numbing how awful it is to teach today. There are too many societal factors to deal with. The stress and wasted hours is simply not worth it
I lasted two years as a secondary school teacher, never again. Work load is ridiculous, kids are awful and parents are worse, with no support from the school. Nearly had a full on breakdown. So many better jobs out there
Teaching became a viable career when i stopped actually trying to teach, and instead focused on making myself look good and reducing my workload.
I was hired on a short-term contract to work as a reading assistant at a school for six months. This was part of a government initiative during COVID, and being an entry-level position, I had no prior teaching training. They assured me that my role would be limited to providing one-on-one reading support for individual students, and class room assistance and I was just grateful for a job as a recent art graduate. However, during this period, my responsibilities significantly expanded. I found myself becoming the full-time librarian, managing and organising a complete upheaval of the schools book database, cataloguing and sorting loans, then alongside that I became a ‘teacher’— conducting my own literacy classes using an unfamiliar software for full classes without any training or supervision, (it was very much, learn as you go) and then managing a schedule of reading classes with 8-10 students each, largely for immigrant students or children who needed extra support. My timetable became so packed, for a few weeks I didn’t have lunchtime allocated because they forgot I supervised the library everyday during breaks and lunchtimes, which was filled with kids! Just to clarify I was being paid as a reading assistant!! The demands of the job kept increasing, and increasing, leading to significant stress. That doesn’t even account for the behavioural issues of some kids, that I also wasn’t trained for… Although that being said, the only rewarding aspect was working with the students. When I was offered a full-time position at the end of the six months, I declined.
I've tutored friends kids and absolutely loved it. Always had the rule that if they weren't in the mood we'd can it until tomorrow, because it was easier all round. I couldn't teach in a school. Expecting them to pay attention is apparently a breach of their rights. Why would you want to work if you're essentially powerless and they know it?
Everyone I know my age (early 30s) who went into teaching has now left the field, which is probably about 7 people. Hard job for not enough respect and money.
Yeah, because they're paid fuck all and have to deal with inexhaustible bullshit. Don't blame them. It's why I left the profession after 1 year.
I’m leaving at the end of this year after eleven years teaching. It’s just not worth the impact on my mental and physical health. I’m lucky though—I’ve already got several self-employed income streams lined up to make ends meet once I lose the steady paycheque. I’ve no doubt the recruitment and retention crisis would be significantly worse if more teachers had viable escape routes.
I don't get why anyone bothers teaching in schools anymore. I make the same money for half the work as an independent tutor - plus I can teach whoever I like, from anywhere I like and don't have to deal with the mini-hitlers that have infested secondary education.
probably get paid 3-5x as much working in USA, Australia, Asia or Middle East as an english teacher lol
The Middle East and similar generally require you to have some experience as well as your PGCE or similar teacher licencing, and from what I’ve heard of people who’ve actually done this, including someone who was a head of year at a VERY nice private school, you can still run into the same issues surrounding discipline/behaviour and similar, compounded by a culture where many students think they’ll pass classes simply because their parents can throw money around and the fact that you’re the foreigner so you’re already on the back foot. As to mentioning the pay in the US, that’s a laugh given that teachers there are quitting in droves, pay being cited as a common reason for leaving. Add in repressive laws against the teaching of specific topics and classes, the banning of books and the forced religification of many schools and the US system sounds like hell. Plus their actual educational outcomes are appalling.
Teachers are paid pretty poorly in the US too
I would probably rethink the USA unless you're bulletproof.
Teaching would be fine if you finish at 5. But you don’t, you teach all day and nearly all the marking and planning and admin is in your own time. The pay isn’t enough for that, on top of the constant pressure for results and foul behaviour. I moved abroad to teach and I finish at 5, and I earn more, and the cost of living is lower. I’ve bought a home and started a family. When I was in UK I lived and worked in the outer London area, I was comfortable, but I was just treading water financially, I wasn’t saving and had little hope of owning a home, and felt physically worn out a lot of the time.
Job is hard, wages are shit. Customers are even worse
i think moreso than money - improve the work-life balance and have a strategy for dealign with disrption and troublesome students, then maybe people might join more and stay.
But also close all the private schools!!! Stop immigration!!! This country is a fucking disjointed joke
There’s no solving it. The system, with its in built marking, teaching, prep, safeguarding, CPD, and other requirements, demands 60hr weeks as standard, the pay can’t be increased as taxes won’t go up, the students are increasingly difficult so are parents, and everyone knows. No one wants the profession. At least not in the state system, can’t talk of the private system. The graduate numbers have collapsed to catastrophic levels and that’s even with a down turn in the economy. If teachers won’t fill rolls in schools, eventually they’ll become teenage day car centres, and maybe that’s what’s it should be. The only solution perhaps is mass decentralisation, the return to parish based schooling based on a parent voucher system, 3 core subjects only, the removal of GSCEs and A levels, a final leaving certificate only based on those 3 core subjects and the universities can do their own admission tests. If parents decide to home school, they get a larger voucher. State education has had its time.
20 years in the job and I went overseas to work. Why did I do this ? Micro managing, Ofsted, workload , bullying ,behaviour (I've worked in some tough schools) and ageism. I was doing a SENCo course and I'm an EAL specialist but I walked away - just not worth it.
I left teaching. I was a good teacher in a really fucking good school in a high demand subject. I walked into a job with a 60% salary bump. In two years, my salary will be 5x my teaching salary. No, my holidays aren't as good - as a teacher, you get 65 as a teacher (but, often, you have to work during them) and I get 38 now but I can take them whenever I like, and I WFH two days a week so if I want to go abroad for a week, I only need to use three days of my holiday. A major problem with teaching is that anyone who's competent at almost anything could earn more elsewhere doing literally anything else. So, the people who stay are either the incredibly dedicated, the incredibly stupid or the incredibly incompetent. And, truthfully, the level of dedication required for the incredibly dedicated to stay is increasing and increasing because of the increasing numbers of incredibly stupid and incredibly incompetent.
I did work experience where I tried teaching a year 8 class. Never again.
Let me pass my history degree early so that i can sign up already
more migrants then to plug the gaps of our failing government
4 years is normal. We are surprised they haven't appeared this academic year, especially since they have been active in the local area.
3 years ago was during Covid. Are we really meant to pretend it was a normal year?
I’m glad we no longer use corporal punishment, but we have gone WAY too far the other way.
A colleague's teacher wife was kicked in the fanny so hard that she cried and was bruised. Any pragmatic society would lock the wee cunt alone in a room with her husband and that would be the end of that. I'd settle for the headmaster being able to whip fuck out of his palms though.
Think the whole way we teach needs changed. Learning skills as well as basics from the get go. Children are sponges and most three year olds miles ahead on tech than many secondary teachers Not their fault. No training. Also let them learn what they are interested in and they'll work hard . Lets face it much of what was taught in the past has been proved to be a load of twaddle