The Observer view on Labour’s plans to reform education is that the “government needs to go further on pay and workload if it is to retain high-quality teachers in schools”:
“. . . schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more.”
I was once a teacher. I have been married to a now-retired teacher for decades. I have met a lot of teachers. The view of almost every teacher, and, equally relevantly, every former teacher that I have ever met was that pay and workload scarcely mattered in themselves. The pay is quite good. The uworkload for a conscientious teacher can be heavy during term time, but as someone rightly points out every time teachers whinge about how long they spend marking homework and planning lessons, the workload is close to zero during school holidays. What really drives teachers out of the profession is the thing that the Observer editorial mentions as an afterthought, “behaviour management pressures”.
The House of Commons report to which the Observer article links says this:
Pupil behaviour
We recognise that teachers feel pupil behaviour has worsened in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic and we are concerned that this is driving teachers away from the profession as well as dissuading prospective teachers. Valuable work is now being done by Behaviour Hubs to help schools and teachers address pupil behaviour and we recommend that the Department expand this programme to increase capacity. The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance
I expect the work of Behaviour Hubs is of some value, like the work of the Behaviour Units, Behaviour Centres, and other Behaviour Things that preceded them over the decades. I truly admire those teachers who choose to deal with the most badly-behaved children, and spreading the word about better techniques can make some difference. But none of these initiatives solved the teacher retention crises of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s, as these Hubs will not solve the crisis of the 2020s.
As for “The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance”, I think it would be better if the Department reinforced the importance of dissolving ineffective partnerships. End them at the request of any party. If a so-called partnership between school, pupil and parent is not working, let it die. In no other area of life is an association maintained by force on one or more of the parties called a “partnership”.
In an ideal world, I would like that philosophy of voluntary association to apply across the education of all but the youngest children, but even in this world, it would do a hell of a lot of good for it to apply where the so-called partnership between school, parent and pupil is obviously a rotting corpse.
Pupils behave better if they know their schools can expel them for bad behaviour. We used to know this as a society, but the threat of expulsion has been neutered by making the process so difficult that schools instead strive to pass the bad kids around all the local schools like counterfeit money. Teachers behave better if they know their pupils can leave. Private schools still do know this, and self-employed teachers know it very well.
Most humans enjoy helping others to learn. Those who join the teaching profession do so because they want to do this good thing even more than most people do. But there can be no joy in teaching without a willing learner. It doesn’t have to be constant happy-smiley-type willingness for years on end, just a basic willingness to be there.
The primary function of many Western education systems, tragically including many private (yes private) schools, has become pushing leftist political and cultural ideas.
From what I have been told many British private schools are not an exception to this rule – they are now dominated by such leftist indoctrination. As for the state system – this is as one would expect it to be.
Sadly Home Schooling is very difficult for many people – especially if they lack much knowledge themselves. It is difficult for a mother and father pass on skills and knowledge if they themselves lack these skills and knowledge.
I suspect there is no complete answer to hand but my lifetime observation, as a pupil, as the husband of a school bursar, friend of teachers, and now involved grandparent, suggests to me that modern schooling is about turning out ‘nice’ children rather than children who may achieve something.
It would be self defeating to champion Grammar Schools as a way of injecting ‘achievement’ into schooling – there would be too much reflexive resistance. But perhaps we could learn from other countries and separate schools (physically or internally) into academic and skills streams. In each case a potential for adult achievement is ‘built in’.
This seems true about contemporary private schools, and why most people shouldn’t bother wasting their money on them.
You’d be better off putting the kids through state school in most cases, and using the money saved and whatever academic skills, talents, contacts and parental authority you have to supplement the kids education to counteract the impact of leftist teaching and the Americanised slop of contemporary culture. Due to work commitments the Mrs and I could never home school the boy, but I’m more than capable of supplementing the boy’s education in fields like history, geography, religion, English literature, and PE for example. Meanwhile, with only a few exceptions, we don’t buy him stories from after the early 1990s (the most recent I think I’ve read to him recently is Roald Dahl and he died in 1990). And we just don’t subscribe to any of the crappy American streaming services.
DiscoveredJoys @11:12am, YES!
Not everyone should go to college. Many others have said this, and for a long time. It’s not like we don’t have models for how this might work. My own high school had two tracks for students: college bound and “skills”. I forget what each track was called, but it was likely plainly worded as this was the mid 1970s so the PC rot had only gotten to the toes of society.
But every student, no matter which track, took 8 shop classes their first two years, 4 per year (did the math for those in Rio Lindo). Things like machine shop (I still have ball peen hammers I made then that I use now), sheet metal (my hammers are in a tool box I made), welding, electronics, fluid power (hydraulics) and construction (Students built a house each year as a senior “capstone” project).
That was all destroyed after I left. But all we need do is hand an old yearbook to today’s school boards as a roadmap for how they might re-build.
One outcome of this was skills with tools obviously, but another was the notion that things that can be repaired, should be. And repairs are often not hard to do. The landfills would be filling more slowly if more people had such skills, regardless of their highest educational level. And maybe some manufacturers, now being run by people properly educated, would make products designed to be repaired…I suspect it would not hurt their bottom line.
@GregWA
I’ve argued elsewhere that any people standing for election as a Member of Parliament should have a certificate for basic life skills. Skills such as changing the wheel on a car, cleaning, baking an apple pie from scratch, basic computing. Even to the point that those who aspire to be politicians and sit a PPE degree at University should find that ‘Domestic Science’ is a necessary and unavoidable component of their curriculum.
Imagine the outcry of those ‘too posh to polish’.
The pay for teachers is not quite good. It’s quite poor – a technician’s wage for a job with professional responsibilities and accountability.
Years ago I quit physics teaching after 5 years and after little more than a year in industry I’d doubled my wages and the pay rises kept coming.
My new job was much less stressful and tiring.
The government constantly advertises for teaching recruits. That is a sure sure the job is not worth doing.
There won’t be a need for anything except Islamic schools soon so the problem will resolve itself. 🙂
GregWA nd DJ, Yes, I agree but my secondary school simply didn’t have the facilities or staff to put on practical courses to anything like that level. Build a house! The problem is of course anyone with those skills can make a very good living without having to deal with unruly brats.
Which kinda segues into my real point. During my adulthood I have seen stuff on TV and read it and it wholly puts me off the idea of teaching (and my background in maths and physics would get me a sweet deal). Why? Teaching stuff I love. Yeah, could do that. Being a surrogate parent, mentor, elder-sibling, exemplar, advocate… Fuck that! That is what families and communities are meant to do organically. And the woke shite… I mean they’d want me to a a bit of general science and would that mean PSHE (sex-ed plus-ultra). Would I have to check my chromosomes at the door? I couldn’t do that. I’d show ’em the bit of, “Life of Brian” where Reg says he wants to have babies. I’d be the poor bugger crucified!
I don’t think I’m alone in only considering teaching if it meant teaching a subject rather than doing that AND bringing the sprogs up.
NickM, maybe use a hybrid model where volunteers, like you, are brought in to teach things the teachers don’t have expertise in? Or because they are stretched too thin.
Again, there’s a model for this: in my high school example, the house the students built was done with a lot of volunteers from the local construction trades. Not sure how that works for teaching physics–all the school needs there in the way of help is you! But for things like welding and building houses, a lot of that teaching could be sub-contracted. Teacher’s unions would never allow it and the first kid to get hurt on the job would have helicopter parents flying in low and fast.
btw, a side benefit of my high school shop classes were the safety films (no video back then…reel to reel film projectors!). Machine shop was the best. How do you think they encouraged us to wear our safety glasses? By showing a film of a surgeon fishing around in some kids eyeball trying to pull out the metal shrapnel!
Like so many things, I like that film now more than I did then!
If they want to pay the teachers more, they could lessen the amount of interplay between schools and all levels of government, which would allow them to dispense with a vast layer of non-teaching admin staff.
If they want an environment more conducive to teaching and learning instead of the undisciplined free-for-all that exists in areas that are full of non-parenting parents, they could put more effort into learning why men have essentially left the teaching profession, and work to reverse that trend. Arguably, men are better at controlling unruly boys than are women.
(Oh, and then they would have to alter some thinking enough so that he men COULD control the unruly boys without lawsuits.)
“I’ve argued elsewhere that any people standing for election as a Member of Parliament should have a certificate for basic life skills.”
Interesting idea. Make a TV show of it! Get Ant & Dec to front it. I’d love to see The Envionment Sec try and do basic electrics. Drills through the ring-main…
“Yeah, viewers! We can confirm Ed Miliband is now definitely carbon-neutral!”
It would be like this Century’s “It’s A Knock-Out!”. I should be an ITV exec.
Could we get Mary Berry to host the cooking element? “The Great British Fuck Off”.
I work at a boy’s school. This is inarguable.
Not every man is better at controlling boys than every woman, but there is a noticeable difference in the average. It is quite noticeable that the teachers who send the most students to the deans are women.
When we timetable junior classes we are careful that every class has at least a couple of staunch male teachers, so they are never allowed to go completely feral.
For the record, I don’t think it is mostly the ladies’ fault. It is just that many of the worst behaved boys come from homes where women are not respected or where their mum has lost control of them, and they simply play up more for the older women. There are a couple who screech though, and that is not a way to keep control of a class of boys.
As much as our principal would like to have a staff that is 80% male, he simply cannot find enough male teachers. And we are a good school.