Teachers totally unable to do their jobs properly

One of my daughters has recently resigned her position as a uni lecturer. She is a different woman. Happy,content and she looks 10 years younger. She loved the students and they loved her but the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy was totally out of proportion. Sad ,because many are following her including my SIL who was a Prof at a local uni and has now gone into private practice. The ones who suffer are the students. Always.

You’d think my DD would have learned too Ginpin, but one is a head and the other, having worked in the private sector because she got fed up of teaching, got a new job as . . . a teacher.

My husband and I were both teachers, we stuck it out until the end but our three daughters would
not touch teaching with a bargepole, having had both Mum and Dad as teachers.

We are so glad they each made that decision.

In my last few years of full-time teaching I honestly think my teaching did stagnate. Not because I was 'coasting' but because so much time had to be given up to proving (for the purposes of OFSTED) that I was planning, teaching and assessing to the required standard, that I was too tired to do it properly. Everything had to be typed out, multiple sides of A4 in ridiculous detail, such as which student you were going to ask what question, how you would manage the TA etc. Powerpoints for every lesson. As an ex-grammar school student I have never learned to touch type and I would be up until 1a.m. every night getting it done. We had to teach ourselves how to use Powerpoint and other programs.
In the past feedback to/from students about progress was often a verbal dialogue. Students were more likely to open up about their difficulties face-to-face. Then it all had to be written on their work for everyone to see.
The only way I coped was to reduce my hours to 4 days a week and spend my day 'off' catching up with it all.

Tanjamaltija

"Totally unable" is clickbait - it could mean that the teachers are not qualified to do their jobs. Two of my three children were teachers, and they brought work home (and delagted tasks that were not the correction of homeworks, to my husband and myself).

*Tanjamaltia
“Totally unable” is click bait”*
Click bait is true, and every time it’s repeated it convinces more people it’s true, especially those who don’t do the job or who have a gripe against teachers.
The workload is heavy, expectations for different planning schemes, different marking schemes and different assessment schemes that arrive sometimes on the whim of a government, sometimes on the decision of a head who has heard about it at a cluster meeting make life harder.
Support in the classroom is such an improvement from when I first started, though you do find yourself providing instructions for all the support staff that are there to work with the children with a wide range of difficulties apart from the TA who is there for my support.
PPA time is another bonus as is subject leader time, though PPA time doesn’t match the time needed. Resource banks where schools pay for them, or free ones from the government are a good idea, but researching them and deciding which ones you need is another time consuming task.
All this needs saying, but it shouldn’t come with the heading ‘Teachers are unable to teach properly”

Says it all

I was a teaching assistant for 30 years in an inner city school. No planning just a theme to work on a story such as where the wild things are, we made a play of it, wrote about in their exercise books, Drew or painted a picture, maths was interesting and fun, we cooked we sewed we did science experiments and history stories. Our PE was twice a week in the hall. Children and teachers were far happier the teachers could concentrate on the childrens learning and not be tired and stressed. Most importantly it wasn’t about the school it was about the children.

Oh, and I forgot. A typed and printed lesson plan for EVERY lesson taught. With differentiation and named intervention for SEN children. 6 or 7 lessons a day. That is on top of the Powerpoint presentation required for every lesson.

coastalgran, in my last UK school I taught 260 students every two weeks. I don't know how long it takes you to mark an assessment, but try that times 260. That is 130 books a week. Plus 2 or 3 meetings a week. Duties at breaktime/lunch time. Planning (the worst part of the job IMO). Data entry. Daily written behaviour reports. Reports. Parents evenings. Open evenings. Moderation meetings.

I'm mostly a tutor now. I earn almost a teachers salary and do 1/10th of the work.

Teaching is hellish. Not not a second of the hell is the students, not even the difficult ones. It is the workload.

I would gamble on the statement that NO UK state school teacher can coast. You'd be out on your ear in a month.

You have to have done the job to realise the enormous workload involved - no wonder so many newly qualified teachers leave the profession before they've been teaching for 5 years!
Much of the workload teachers are expected to do on a daily/weekly/termly basis is just about accountability - proving that the political party in government at the time have got it right - nothing to do with keeping good teachers in jobs or educating the whole child.
And what will be said about teachers when strike action is suggested because of the stagnation in their pay over the past few years? At least the unions care about their members - because their employers don't!

I taught in Further Education for over 20 years and saw a lot of changes in curriculum, funding and resources, but mainly in the increase in the amount of admin teachers were expected to do, caused by the changes in government funding and targets and the culling of admin staff by the college to save money.

So much of my time was spent on filling in forms and inputting data all of which could have been done in half the time by an experienced admin clerk. I used to say that I must be the highest paid admin clerk in the college! That meant of course that the time I spent doing admin took away the time I had to plan and organise lessons, tests and marking, and to give the extra support to those students who needed it.

Oh and then someone in senior management decided that staff should be on duty whilst in the classroom to deal with any incidents that may happen anywhere else in the college. More form filling as a result and disruption in the classroom.

Sorry about the rant, but even though I’ve been retired for 7 years it still upsets me that it was the student’s education that was being badly affected and for some of them it was their last chance due to family circumstances to gain a qualification and get employment.

I had decided to teach in Further Education to try to make a difference to the lives of those who had not got the qualifications they needed for employment. Unfortunately the government funding was not going to the people who needed it most and the targets did nothing to improve the education of the students.

I wonder how many grans who were not teachers will bother to read these excellent posts.
I do agree that the hours are far too long and that there is far too much interference for political reasons. I believe that the present Education sec is furious that teachers have allowed their pupils to criticise Johnson.

grandtanteJE65, what are school books? In our school these were all put into a big skip and we had to knit our own resources. On top of a huge matrix of Curriculum evidence and Records of Achievements, life was just one big work quota. Add in children with special needs, behavioural issues with particular neurological problems and a need to teach different subjects to small groups in the same time period just to make life as difficult as possible. Oh, and in those days, to TA's to lighten the load, just one hour off a week for admin. Extra-curricular clubs were mandatory as were endless staff meetings where we all tried to reinvent the wheel. I was a single parent and my kids suffered. I gave up when childcare became a huge problem and I hadn't realised the huge amount of stress I was suffering. By the end I felt like a huge failure even though I had always tried my best.
I have every sympathy with teachers and it makes my blood boil when I listen to or read derogatory comments about the short working day and long holidays.

Even in the year before retirement I seldom met any teacher who was "just coasting" It's one of those common misconceptions that is bandied about with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. It fits in with "they get such long holidays" and "it's such a short day"

I find your comments quite offensive Coastalgran. Someone who tutors a pupil an hour a week has little idea of what has been marked in class. I certainly didn't coast the year I retired and continued my workload. You do teachers no favours with your unpleasant remarks.

I retired seven years ago. I know that nothing has changed really apart from school reports do look a whole lot simpler than the lengthy tomes that I had to prepare for each pupil. Planning, marking, record keeping, tracking... AAAGH ! We even had to write a half A4 page essay saying what we intended to do with our 90 minute PPE time every week! I wouldn’t mind but I don’t think the management team even looked at half the stuff we had to hand in. I miss teaching but NOT the mountains of paperwork.

All of this burdening of teachers is what we have as a result of letting politicians get their hands on education. I worked as a school governor for over 20 years and saw at close quarters the damage they have done.

I privately tutor English and History to kids from state schools and independent schools in Scotland. The past 2 years have affected these kids and most of this year's lot are struggling with work. In the years before Covid it was better but one of the things that always stuck out was the work that kids handed in at school that was never returned marked for weeks. In the last term before exams it was completely forgotten about. I have done this job for 18 years and produced some great kids who have gone on to fantastic careers. Sometimes they landed with good teachers that were just too busy filling in forms, bad teachers, teachers retiring at the end of the academic year and just coasting. None of which is fair on the kids.

It really is horrific, the workload. No wonder teacher retention is so low and the teacher shortage is going up.

As I've said before, I get a stream of emails about job vacancies daily. Today I had 9 emails, one of which listed 11 job vacancies. The only one I've been slightly tempted by was a 0.5 position.

3 years ago I worked 4 days a week. That wasn't so unbearable. It wasn't just that I had an extra day off for prep/planning/marking, it was the fact that I had less prep/planning/marking because I was teaching less.

I'd love to do a job share. 0.5 timetable and a dedicated other teacher to jointly plan/share marking with. I think that would be my perfect teaching position.

My niece is a Primary school teacher and I know for a fact that at least half of her weekend is usually taken up with unpaid overtime in marking work and preparing the next weeks lessons.
She is lucky if she has Sunday afternoon off - most weeks she sends batch cooking meals for the next couple of weeks.
During the holidays, she is usually in the school first of all clearing the walls of the classroom of display items and then for several days preparing the room for the next term.
As with most government funded jobs, what once was a job with a decent salary has not increased along with the extra hours that are worked to cover the new regulations enforced.
As with many other jobs, also government funded, they rely on the fact that it is a vocation and that they will stick with the job through thick and thin.

My daughter is an English teacher, head of English and part of the senior leadership team too. Her work life is almost unbearable. Days and days with no breaks whatsoever, nothing to drink (so no need for the loo), break duty, after school duty, lunch duty etc. No time to meet with her own staff, crazy amount of other meetings after school. She has a little boy of three and a seven year old so she stays for the school holidays. She’s away at half seven and back around six every day, does dinner, homework, cleans up then starts prep and marking. I have never seen her so miserable.

As far as I can see there is too much government tinkering with an underfunded system just to get headlines for politicians. They don't tinker with public schools. Why tinker with state schools? OFSTED should be abolished and replaced by HM Inspectors as before.

Very true Trisher

"Totally unable" is clickbait - it could mean that the teachers are not qualified to do their jobs. Two of my three children were teachers, and they brought work home (and delagted tasks that were not the correction of homeworks, to my husband and myself).

Grandmabatty -organisation, I agree. Extra meetings, SLT meetings et al. the assumption from one OFSTED that teachers should run after-school clubs. (That one was a good time to be a school governor!)
At least for meetings with the SENDCo I get cover for my class now, so there’s only the occasional chat about a particular child. Planning and marking always took a long time. Efficient use of PPA helps with planning and preparation but the repeated ‘new’ marking strategies extended time needed for that. We also get time to audit resources and evaluate/update the curriculum for our subject lead post.
Despite all that, I’m still ‘teaching properly’ and it worries me that the headline from OZ and comments on here imply that they, or other teachers are not.