Ninety three per cent of all children in the UK are taught in state schools. The parents of then other seven per cent may wish to pretend otherwise but the truth is that the prosperity, well being and future of the UK is dependent upon the ability of state schools to deliver the education our young people need. But, as the Guardian has reported, that is in jeopardy:
Britain's leading expert on school recruitment has warned that a shortage of trainee teachers is reaching crisis levels in some of the most important subjects in the curriculum.
In evidence submitted to the parliamentary education select committee, TeachVac, an independent vacancy-matching and monitoring service for education professionals, said that it had identified a “woeful” lack of new teachers in several key secondary school subjects.
This is not a minor issue. As they note:
[TeachVac] has identified an 85% shortfall in the number of trainee teachers needed to fill vacancies in both business studies and social sciences. The number of new teachers for design and technology is also more than a third below what it needs to be and there is a 10% shortfall in the number of IT teachers required.
These are core subjects at the heart of the skill base the UK needs. And we may not be able to teach them.
There are three reasons for that. First, when the government portrays any job in the state sector as parasitical - and large parts of the media join in - any recruitment programme is going to be hard.
Second, student debt is crippling for those on what is thought to be middle pay, which is what many teachers can, at best, hope to earn.
And third, pay is just not good enough.
All of those are the direct result of policy. The first is ideological. The second is born of the desire to economically enslave people though debt which underpins neoliberalism. The third is the austerity mantra.
Put them together and this country will be crippled by denying an education to those who need and deserve it.
We need a new narrative.
The need to supply high quality education has to be at the core of that narrative.
I hope parents of those ten and younger realise what is going to happen to their children. It is not good, and they need to get angry, now.
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They have also made the job an unsustainable world of drudgery and pressure. Experienced teachers are leaving in droves (they’ve had enough) and many idealistic trainees give up when they experience the reality of an impossible lifestyle for themselves.
The last point really saddens me
And it’s not just in teaching
That’s clearly happening in medicine where it is impossible to do the job due to the resources provided
Given the structure of student debt re-payment, how can you claim that debt repayment is ‘crippling’?
It is a 9% extra tax meaning those on modest pay have a marginal tax rate of over 40%
How is that reasonable?
Phil- in any case you can’t view one debt in isolation, you have to put at least three together:
1. Student debt (paying back 9% per year above 21,000)
2. Housing costs due to 35 years of bubbles
3. Likely credit card debts in order to cope with the other two
This is like starting your life with a giant ball and chain attached – an utter disgrace beyond measure.
Don’t forget that student debt reduces the amount of mortgage a graduate can raise by around 20% (check with online mortgage calculator) which will make it even more difficult for graduates.
Sir Michael Wilshaw should take some responsibility for this decline, we are still waiting to hear something positive from him about teachers and the profession. He appears to think we are all useless.
Anybody who has read the ‘Secret Teacher’ series in the Guardian would know this is inevitable. I’m amazed there are any teachers left, it’s very scary.
That’s a very good series
Spot on, Richard.
As an ex-teacher, this blog requires me to avoid a rant on the subject as I feel so strongly about it. I left teaching, a job I loved, in 2000, partly for health reasons but also because I was sick to death of successive (of both parties) using education as an ideological football by incompetent and ignorant ministers who kept weighing the job down with more admin-when it got the point that we all had to fill out forms that required us to prove we were entitled to a bonus and schools hired advisors, I thought, to hell with this ‘bollocks’, I’m off – and became a warden of a Quaker Meeting House. The increased use of ‘measures of productivity’ and the relegation of social and pastoral issues to be called ‘value added'(dreadful phrase)-the use of incentive allowances that created an atmosphere of back-stabbing, the move towards a corporate image with identity tags swinging around one’s neck (‘have a nice day’) became too much.
Mavericks, and inspired teachers who loved teaching were being driven out if you would not toe the corporate line.
Many of our schools still need refurbishment. The private school near me, many of whose pupils come from wealthy families from Malaysia and Hong Kong has a sign outside advertising the building of a performing Arts centre for 3 Million. The gap between the state sector and private is ludicrous -it’s amazing how many ardent Thatcherites have sent their kids to state schools because the private ones are now out of reach; oddly enough they don’t seem to notice the irony of this-perhaps they actually believe they ‘just haven’t worked hard enough.’ (hoisted by their own petard without noticing it!).
Here’s another reason parents should get mad!
We need more whistle blowers like this to show just how corporate greed blurs all sense of morality.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coca-cola-paying-diet-experts-to-counter-obesity-claims-im-not-surprised-what-i-saw-there-horrified-a6688441.html
Keith have just read the link in your post. It is frightening how much power these multi-nationals have, and yet society still appears to accept the drivel they hurl. Corporate business is what funds governments unfortunately, and until that changes, I can’t see how anything else can.
My wife is a primary school teacher, and for me, the overwhelming problem is the lack of discipline within the school environment. There is a tipping point, in a class of 30 it only takes 3 children to create an environment where teaching becomes extremely difficult. This problem is cultural, we live in a time where an increasing number of us have no sense of Shame. The amount of bad language aired when some parents drop their children off at school is deplorable. We simply don’t have enough role models in society for our children to look up to. We could devise a near perfect academic system, but without discipline in society it would have no chance of succeeding.
Creating this discipline would be a monumental task, only in times of great necessity has this happened. For me it’s all about what works and tipping points. Society in many areas has tipped far to much to the right. It’s not working. We need shining lights in society free from selfish agendas where the greater good for all is cherished, for this to work not everyone has to partake, just enough to tip the balance the other way.
Hasn’t this always been the way?
actually in my experience… no.
Teacher and headteacher for 35 years retiring in 2004…
“Discipline” in school is a combination of factors…. it is a a reflection of how the society around the school behaves… the charisma and capability of the teachers, and the expectations of the school and fairness of its justice…
but in the end…as ever the way …. parental support is crucial…
Discipline is a red herring as Richard points out. The Right tends to retreat to whingeing about discipline as their policies actively destroy the education system as it is a facile scapegoat.
The issues from the perspective of this husband of a Primary School teacher are many fold.
Teaching to arbitrary national targets ignores the needs and abilities of individual pupils.
The paperwork now involved in day to day teaching to feed a bureaucratic paranoia – ill informed politicians fearful of the expertise and independence of educated professionals.
And of course teachers like anyone in the public sector have had their standard of living ferociously attacked : no payrises for 5 years and pension contributions hiked beyond reason. Why would anyone join this profession at this time under this rotten government?
And this: attempting to ape the alleged educational achievements of authoritarian south east asian city states is bone headed ridiculous.
All relevant
The mast massively so
Agree with most of this (as an ex-secondary teacher who still goes into a school in another capacity). Discipline is a problem in some areas -the divine right of the individual is part of the transAtlantic imports.
I totally agree. I work in a primary school with over 400 pupils, yet the actions of just two children manage to distupt much of the entire school on a weekly basis. Corridors blocked off, staff having to be diverted. The softly-softly approach used to deal with these children (giving them one-to-one attention for the day, or sending them off with the SEN to bake biscuits) is teaching them nothing except that their behaviour is acceptable. No wonder the teachers and support staff want to leave!
I need to clarify my three children assumption, three very disruptive children. In all cases. it’s never the child’s fault it’s societies.
Maybe it has, it’s just how I see the world. I know looking back it appears rosier because we know the future. The present holds uncertainty. Without doubt though behaviour is a huge concern for teachers.
Agreed
I know from experience via my children
James-I went to an inner-city school in the 70’s -it was NOT better then! I can remember a child fighting with the headmaster on stage during an assembly! Ironically, I became a teacher-it was hard work but contrary to what has been said I often wondered why the kids DIDN’T DISRUPT MORE given the bogus values being handed down to them. So au contraire, I would say that the discipline problems are no where near as bad as one might expect. Some of the kids I taught faced social/economic problems of such an order that I was amazed they just didn’t tell me where to go on a daily basis.
Education, like economics is drowning in a sea of bullshit and short-termism as the socio-listing, Basil Bernstein famously put it: “education cannot compensate for society.”
Socio-listing should read ‘socio-linguist’ of course!
Richard,
Good morning to you from this Brit living in Southern Oregon. I would be grateful if you would allow me to republish this post of yours about teachers one day on my own blog: Learning from Dogs?
If granted, it will be fully linked to your blogsite.
Must say that you do a grand job putting the spotlight on UK matters. Do you know of an equivalent reporter here in the US?
All the best for the New Year.
Feel free
I know of no US equivalent
Thanks Richard.
And republished today, including a possible solution to the teacher shortage!
I agree, discipline that’s derived from a sense of fairness, empathy and love is what I advocate. My generation I worry does not have the wisdom to benefit society.
The other point that is causing a lack of teachers is the high turnover. There is retention crisis this is leading to a recruitment crisis. This is an important distinction. The teachers leaving are leaving because of unrealistic expectations and impossible to maintain workloads, as well as the reasons you cite. Replacing them will not solve the problem. The problem will get worse, because the new teachers will not be able to grow and develop because they are coming into an unmanageable situation so will leave etc, etc.
Hi Richard
Glad you have raised this. What makes this worse is that the Deparment of Education are actually placing limits on popular and oversubscribed university-based teacher training places. Like for example the outstanding University of Cambridge Postgraduate Certificate in Education. The government favours an on-the-job craft-level teacher training model: teachers then delivering programmes and approaches that have been tested by large-scale randomised controlled, trials. They want to use repeated universal testing for all school-age children to measure system performance, The problem is this turns education into a production line of semi-skilled workers with knowledge and pedagogy commodified. It might seem sensible to some but the problem is it exacerbates inequality. In order to provide education to the most challenging groups in society you we need teachers who have high levels of skills and the ability to use psychological, sociological and anthropological theory to address the complex problems in society (that schools can go some way to mitigating). Taking teacher training out of universities diminishes this professionalism and is a serious error. It is all part of an overall project to privatise education. It needs to be stopped soon.
Indeed the limitations placed on universities has contributed to the teacher recruitment crisis.
Steve Watson
Agreed Steve, entirely
My daughter is in year 6. This is a statutory test year and her class in September was being shared by two part time teachers. Both have now left and the school was unable to attract anyone to fill the position despite being an outstanding school. They have had to settle for a long term temp/agency teacher! (They already have two teaching in other years.) Cambridge has the worst funding in the country yet housing costs are up there with outer London. Our children are suffering from lack of funding in the fabric of buildings & resources and in the inability to attract staff to teach them. The staffing situation has had a direct impact on her learning already as her teacher last year was poorly and there was a succession of temp’s. I, like many, am unable to supplement her learning by getting additional tuition and have to watch as her grades slide. I hate this government as they are ruining the future!
It’s bizarre that we now have a world where basic services – and education should be excellent but is a basic service in this sense – are collapsing because we have a rentier economy
One of the major problems with our schools is that our government took the chance to reduce teacher numbers when the birthrate went down, instead of reducing class sizes. Trying to teach 30 children in a class has never been easy, and it has never been the best way to teach anyone anything. We are all inured to the strange ways of schools by the fact that most of us went to schools ourselves and the weirdnesses that would strike an alien as odd, seem normal to us.
Changing subjects frequently but criticising lack of concentration, making children go outside and be active when they want to read and read when they want to be active. Dividing the world into subjects which seem to have no relationship with each other, and creating rules and jargon to make them more difficult, not easier, to learn. Stripping all real-world context from some subjects and making them appear to be completely irrelevant to their lives.
John Taylor Gatto imagined a different type of school and a different type of teacher, one which had links to the communities they exist in, and which tried to do work which was of use to that community, rather than the busy work of hundreds of sums of the same type in order to try to drum the routine for long division into a child’s head.
When information is taught in a coherent way that links into the knowledge a child already has, it will be learned much more easily than disparate facts produced in the boring national curriculum way. I showed an inspector the wonderful necklace my child had made in my one and only home inspection for home education. He asked me if I had made him write about what he planned to do, then do it, and then write about what he would have done differently. I said I had not – because that would be a way to drain all the enjoyment out of the exercise. My son later said he thought the whole idea was stupid… because if he could have seen a better way of doing it when he’d got to the end, he’d have undone what he’d done and redone it, not written his regrets down!
Teaching has become crowd control, and the imposition of the national curriculum has not had the rejuvenating and motivating effect it was once purported to be going to have – it’s killed teaching stone dead for anyone who isn’t a natural bureaucrat. Home education is probably the future – individualised learning, and the use of the internet, but children need play, creativity and a chance to use their imaginations every bit as much as they need to learn to read and write and count. Calling that the three “r”s seems countereducational and always has.
As a primary school teacher I am in complete agreement with your comments. The problem lies in accountability and how that is measured and by whom. OFSTED put ridiculous amounts of pressure on Head teachers who can no longer be experimental or pioneering with educational philosophies. Instead schools are being cloned into safe copies of each other implementing the same mundane government endorsed schemes which aim to put teacher accountability at the top of the agenda.
1 adult to 30 children is not the way to maximise learning. Government funded research which suggests that the impact a TA has in the classroom is inconsequential, is of course questionable and has been undertaken to justify cuts, but is frequently quoted by Head teachers who are having to spread the school budget across a multitude of resources. The lack of funding and continual interference from educational experts lining their own pockets, together with pseudo superior, privately educated politicians who think that they know best, has taken all the creativity out of a job that allowed professionals the freedom to educate children holistically through engaging topics and play oriented activities, who are now forced to merely remember facts and figures.
One of the most depressing thing is the way the arts are completely ignored and marginalised by the accountability of standardised tests and data driven initiatives.
Why am I still teaching ?
I ask myself this every half term when I get chance to actually think, be human and for a short while leave the phenomenal and unending pressure of needing to constantly and unrealistically achieve improvement targets and initiatives, usually set by people working in an office, who left teaching years ago after only a short while in the classroom. The opinion of the media and parents, together with the government and pressurised leadership teams echo the opinion that hardly any teachers are good enough to teach, or able to consistently deliver outstanding lessons, despite the fact the majority of us are achieving excellent results with our children year after year.
Thank you
Fee, this response is perfect. Thank you for expressing it so clearly and eloquently. I wish that home schooling wasn’t necessary. As you say, education should be community-based and intuitive, and if it was, then school would be like home-school only with more opportunities for socialising. Many of us (myself included) would like to home-school, but can’t for practical (financial) reasons, so we are stuck with the system. My children love their (excellent) village primary school, and my son is looking forward to starting secondary school later this year. Sadly, I am fairly sure that he will be disappointed.
The parents of then other seven per cent may wish to pretend otherwise but the truth is that the prosperity, well being and future of the UK is dependent upon the ability of state schools to deliver the education our young people need.
How does this sentence help or contribute to the point being made? My child is in private education and I agree that the state system needs reinforcement and improvement. I am the product of a state education and have made sacrifices to offer this facility to my daughter. Why the need for the snide a snarky opening comment because I am one of the 7%? I can assure you that the salary range of those in that 7% is vast we aren’t all greedy uncaring monsters.
Deliberate attempts to marginalise those who have opted for private education does your cause no good.
Firstly, the job has become impossible. Schools have become mechanisms for their own survival, as they are under constant threat from OFSTED or the whims of the Secretary of State (and the ambitions of the chain academy companies). Lesson after lesson has to be delivered as a piece of performance theatre in some schools. Young teachers fall asleep marking at 9pm on a Saturday night; highly qualified staff leave for an easier life in industry (where you can go to the loo when you want – most teachers struggle to get to a loo at any time thanks to duties apart from teaching). Staff turnovers at some schools hit 25%, often given positive spin by senior leadership who make their minions lif hell.
Secondly, some children are impossible – not only the damaged ones, but also those who treat teachers as servants, those who plot to undermine teachers by making accusations – these methods are readily shared on social media by the kids – and by the new mantra of all consumer businesses (which schools have become, in the exciting world of marketisation) – the customer is right.
Finally, the term ‘education’ is going out of fashion; why teach if you can get the info by Googling it? Why teach anything that isn’t going to be in the exam?
BTW still teaching part-time after 36 years continuous service in colleges and school. It has NEVER been a bigger shambles.
I trained as a TA this year but haven’t had the confidence to apply for jobs because the entire structure of the system just doesn’t make sense. Someone commented on how lessons are changed frequently.. Kids who aren’t at class level suffer because they have barely gotten a concept and then have to finish because it’s now time for numeracy or something else.
Technically I have the degree and the ability to become a teacher. But never in this system the way it is.
I’m not quite sure how it got to this stage. I pray it improves because we at least have the brains and resources to get it right. Someone somewhere is ensuring the education is poor so dependency and lack of empowerment is more frequent. Serves someone’s goals for sure!
Peace xxx
Good luck
Professor Richard Wolff regularly provides an insight into the state of higher education in the US which is a worrying indication of the direction of travel here.
Almost all US universities are now run as commercial businesses, while still maintaining their charitable/non-taxable status allowing generous tax deductible donations from wealthy sponsors.
They are run to maximise profits with the inevitable result that the fees/charges are increasing rapidly, while the level/quality/cost of education is falling just as fast.
Most lecturers are now unpaid/low-paid interns who are working their passage before hopefully becoming a tenured/salaried professor (of which there are now very few). Online/self teaching is the norm for most students. Accommodation costs are high. Student loans have become a noose round the neck of all graduates who cannot even get relief through bankruptcy. College sports teams are big revenue generators, which at least allows poorer students a way to get a scholarship (paid for by the excess fees paid by all the other students)
Many of the top universities have become very wealthy in property and financial assets but pay no or virtually no state or federal taxes at all.
There are some things that should NEVER be run as a business in a civilised democratic society – education and healthcare are just two examples of the nightmare scenario that the US clearly demonstrates will happen here if the Tories have their way. Just look over the pond if you want to see how bad things will get for the have-nots, while the haves just keep laughing all the way to the bank!
Agreed Keith
Thanks for your comments – they have been appreciated