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Only half of required number of trainee secondary teachers in England recruited
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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It's not just the poor level of pay, it's also the crippling workload and lack of progression. Beyond a certain point your only way to progress up the pay scale is to move into the middle management of schools, which becomes less and less actual teaching, so to get slightly more reasonable pay you have to sacrifice the reason you got into teaching in the first place. For the teachers I know who've quit though, they could never be paid enough to get back into teaching, the workload and stress, the lack of backup with agressive pupils, hostile work environement generally (multiple people have said the kids are bad for bullying, but the staff are worse). We need to look at teaching in other countries and take note, because they way we've set it up isn't working.
I'm not a teacher so I'm just talking out of my arse here:
I think just having smaller class sizes would be a good step forward. Keep it to about 15 students per teacher and that would reduce the workload, reduce disruption from unruly students but it would also help the students by having more teacher time available to them.
It would require a huge investment though as we'd need to double the number of teachers and also infrastructure in order to have more classrooms. And also increase their pay.
If you can't hire enough teachers, hiring more teachers isn't going to be viable.
It seems more like they should push for external support like dedicated graders. A grader may be cheaper than a teacher while relieving a teacher's workload. It will also be good for classes with multiple teachers as they would have consistent grading.
Yeah I agree. But if conditions start to change then that'll help with recruitment. Maybe just start off reducing class sizes for specific lessons in high school, or trial it in select primary schools and funnel new teachers into those schools to help with retention. If your experience fresh out of uni is that you're dealing with only 15 kids then you might be inclined to stay in the profession for longer.
Dedicated graders sounds interesting and would definitely reduce the workload. You might only need one or two per school, depending on the size of the school, but it might make a big difference to how much free time teachers get. I also don't think primary school kids should get homework, so it would only be necessary for a high school to have dedicated graders.
Also: fuck off with uniforms and policing them. In the time since I wrote my original post to writing this one, we've had a communication from school that some kids in my sons class aren't wearing the correct coloured items for forest school. But in the original letter they sent out regarding what to wear for it, it just states jogging bottoms, long sleave t-shirt - no mention of colours, but now they're saying that kids must come in wearing the correct colours. Who in the flying fuck cares what colour trousers they're wearing? They're making additional work for themselves for no reason. We constantly get updates from school around people not wearing the right stuff. Drives me mad!
Pay them more, entice more people to work, less workload per teacher.