Teachers leaving the profession

There are all manner of problems related to education these days. The number of pupils in inner city schools that don’t have a firm grasp of the English language, and who have no culture of education - in fact, are in post 11 education and have never been to school. There is very little support for teachers in situations like this where pupils can be bored and disruptive. If you spend half your working day trying to settle a class down so that learning can take place, it’s no wonder teachers are leaving in droves. Large classes, a horrendous work load and not enough support from parents. A recipe for disaster. Of course, if you are lucky enough to get a job in a school in the right catchment area, you will experience very few of these problems. It’s very much a two tier system.

Mollygo

Aveline

Can I ask where these teachers that leave the profession go? Do they all just retire? Or are there jobs that they are better suited to?

DD2 went into technology and management of that dept at a University. She won awards for organisation and client support. And no one threw chairs at her or expected her to do endless lesson plans.

DD now teaches adults who want to learn.

Smileless2012

DS taught in a private school for a year Callistemon, a Christian Academy and said there was no support for teachers and the students ruled the roost.

If parents were contacted about their child's behaviour and they contacted the Principal, it was the student who was supported over and above teaching staff.

DD's friend is H of D in an Anglican school Smileless; it's fine. She moved from a State school where she had been threatened by a pupil and pupil's father until she was terrified, but nothing was done.

Callistemon213

DD now teaches adults who want to learn.

And therein lies the difference.

Greyduster

There are all manner of problems related to education these days. The number of pupils in inner city schools that don’t have a firm grasp of the English language, and who have no culture of education - in fact, are in post 11 education and have never been to school. There is very little support for teachers in situations like this where pupils can be bored and disruptive. If you spend half your working day trying to settle a class down so that learning can take place, it’s no wonder teachers are leaving in droves. Large classes, a horrendous work load and not enough support from parents. A recipe for disaster. Of course, if you are lucky enough to get a job in a school in the right catchment area, you will experience very few of these problems. It’s very much a two tier system.

I don't think that's necessarily true.
Nice little village schools only need one family of feral children to join and it can disrupt the whole school.

I don't blame the teachers. These days they have had a difficult job whatever class and year they're in. In my time as a pupil if you sniffed you had to find a hanky and as a teacher you had to be fair but stern. As a primary teacher I was pushed into a cupboard once by a parent but somehow we ended up OK - not best buddies but understood each other better. There's no way I would suggest teaching to my family these days. What a shame! How can the situation be changed?

Where are the 6500 new teachers coming from announced in the election pledge?

40,000 left the profession in 2022/23.

I assume that means that money will be provided to employ more. There are lots of people trained to teach, but not enough in schools' budgets to take them on.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Nice little village schools only need one family of feral children to join and it can disrupt the whole school.

I don’t doubt that’s right, but parents who can afford it will move house to ensure their children will not have to compete for the teacher’s attention with ‘feral children’, or any other children, who don’t want to learn, especially at senior level. As for the nice little village school, what kind of Head Teacher would allow a family of feral children to disrupt his/her whole school? I know that the head teacher of my son’s junior school - a force to be reckoned with - would not have countenanced it, and that was a village school. Perhaps there are more constraints on head teachers these days.

Good grief Chestnut, how on earth was that man promoted to headteacher?!
My children are the products of two teachers- all of them said it's the last job they would choose.
I'm often slightly amused when people talk about how awful their local park/ city centre/ beachfront is because of crowds of intimidating teenagers whose parents are happy with them behaving badly etc;
The same group sometimes suggest that teaching ( ie thirty of the same age group, every day) is an absurdly easy job.

Aveline

Can I ask where these teachers that leave the profession go? Do they all just retire? Or are there jobs that they are better suited to?

I know of some who have gone to pharmaceutical companies and also to research, very much better pay and no entitled parents

Even in departments the levels of bitchiness and sheer bullying were off the scale.
I really do think those who had gone straight to college and then back into the classroom had never really left the playground themselves.

I totally agree with you. I went back to teaching, when my children were growing up, after changing from a secondary school teacher to a primary school teacher.

I was a rarity in my L.A On my first day, the HT told me I was an upstart and how could I possibly know anything after only doing a one year post graduate certificate.

I had been to university, done secondary training, worked in a promoted post in the Health Service Finance Dept and then did the primary teaching course. How could I possibly have known more than my colleagues, who all left school at seventeen, went straight to college for three years and straight back into the classroom?
I had to work very hard to prove myself, against a lot of bullying and opposition from older teachers, (and obstructive teachers) who ran the staffroom.

I never gave up and gradually there was acceptance, as more graduates joined the school.

I worked in an area of high deprivation and worked with challenging children. I was devastated when I had to retire on ill health.

I left teaching children and started teaching adults which was wonderful because they were keen and wanted to learn. Then I took a big jump into social work and volunteer management . Social work was challenging and rewarding and much less stressful than secondary school teaching ! The pay was similar, not the best, but I was much happier. These days I wouldn’t dream of advising anyone to be a teacher. We have several University lecturers| professors in the family and every one of them is stressed and disillusioned with the way things are these days. Not so much the students with the higher education, more the bureaucracy.

When my son graduated and many were scrabbling about to get internships. I did ask him whether he might consider teaching. An emphatic "no, I remember it all too well" At their above average comprehensive in a leafy suburb, his memories of the teacher's lot were at best half the teaching time lost to low level disruption and at the very worst it's just crowd control.

Aveline

Can I ask where these teachers that leave the profession go? Do they all just retire? Or are there jobs that they are better suited to?

One friend now offers private tutoring ....another friend( French and Spanish teacher) took on a job as a translator for an international charity....an acquaintance took a job in medical sales ( selling theatre equipment to nhs trusts mainly) ..... now she makes really good money...about 130k a year....teaching is long forgotten for her.....teachers have many transferable skills...just need to think outside the box sometimes

My DD and her DH have both left teaching in classrooms now. There were lots of reasons. Government tick boxes. Huge classes. Ofsted.
A friend of my DD left because of Ofsted. She was an excellent teacher and was getting good results. Ofsted sat in on one bad class and and gave her a very poor rating. She was devastated and left soon afterwards.

Many teachers leave teaching due to mental health problems, it really is a stressful job, my husband taught at secondary level for years until he just couldn’t take it anymore.
There are so many pupils with challenging behavioural problems now in mainstream schools who disrupt whole classes and though it looks good on paper to include these children it makes teacher’s and other pupil’s lives a misery. Also even those pupils without behavioural problems can behave like entitled little brats, am no supporter of corporal punishment but now we have traveled too far the other way where kids call all the shots because they know they won’t be hauled up for it, and detention is a joke. Also if a teacher tries to discipline a child it is highly likely the parent/parents will arrive hurling abuse. In my husband’s school a father arrived at the school and punched a teacher who had the temerity to tell his daughter to stop using her mobile, promptly taking it off her when she refused.
Then of course there is Ofsted, the gestapo style inspections, which schools spend months preparing for, instilling the fear of God into staff. These inspectors arrive, clipboard in hand, without warning or preamble, to sit vulture like in the classroom, causing teachers to anxiously try to keep the peace whilst the kids - seeing the inspector - kick off. Thanks to Ofsted paperwork is unbearable.
My husband still has nightmares 10 years after leaving the job.

I think those inspectors are really insulting. Thank goodness we don’t have them here. Who the heck do they think they are ,looming up like smart arses when they haven’t even worked in the school? If I was a teacher there I’d go on strike.

In Scotland, in my experience, HMI were all former headteachers or involved some way in education.

We once had a full blown inspection, which although extremely stressful was supportive.

Does Anybody remember Every Child Matters? Apparently not if they are feral and turn up at a village school.

Cadeby

Does Anybody remember Every Child Matters? Apparently not if they are feral and turn up at a village school.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean or who it was aimed at.

However, when one child (and some of their siblings too) go to the local school near where they live but then disrupt the whole school, terrifying other children, attacking teachers, destroying equipment so teachers are unable to teach, pupils unable to learn then clearly something is wrong.
If staff then decide to leave because they just cannot teach then the school is the poorer for it and the children lose their teachers.

Names might change but posting style remains the same
😁

Cadeby

Does Anybody remember Every Child Matters? Apparently not if they are feral and turn up at a village school.

How long have you been teaching?

LOUISA1523

Cadeby

Does Anybody remember Every Child Matters? Apparently not if they are feral and turn up at a village school.

How long have you been teaching?

I was going to ask the same thing, LOUISA1523

Because Every Child Matters that means the other 29 or so children in the class deserve attention too, attention which they are not getting if staff are trying to contain an out-of-control small child without physically restraining him.

The reasons for giving up on teaching are many and varied. One is the lack of training; nine months of a PGCE does not prepare someone for a career in teaching. the much derided student arriving from the classroom aged 18 spends three or four years focused on the study of education and its practical application; that time gives them space to discover whether they have an aptitude for it and if not they leave. Nine months bolted onto a subject degree is a completely inadequate preparation, and many post-grads realise after a few months that teaching is not their forte but cannot afford to waste the £9000 it has cost.
The influx of special educational needs pupils into mainstream is another factor. More and more badly disabled children are surviving at the same time as many good Special Schools are closing, and Mary Warnock's battle cry, 'all teachers are special needs teachers' was completely unfair, as she later admitted.
Poor behaviour and lack of sanctions are other reasons; look at the hysteria when a brave grandmother admitted she had tapped her grandson's bottom after he hit her; some teachers are subjected to this regularly from pupils considerably older and larger than five years.
Ofsted Inspections are another cause; a local school had a dreadful one recently and two very good young teachers were torn to shreds and later resigned. No blame was apportioned to the Head who had taken these teachers out of the areas and age-range for which they had trained and put them in areas of which they had they had no previous experience , with additional responsibility for 3 newly qualified teachers. The Inspection took place within the first few weeks of the new school year.

Parental and Governor/academy interference is another factor; Academies are run by business men out to make a profit, and fronted by one or two educational professionals. Should the school fail it is passed on to another Academy chain; this was the rationale behind the Inspection leading to Ruth Perry's suicide, and the Lead Inspector has never been held to account.
In the main I enjoyed my forty years of teaching and was never bullied by other staff members at any of the different schools and authorities I worked for. The only bad period was working for a charismatic and utterly corrupt Head who was eventually exposed and given the option of early retirement.