We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

More money will not solve the perennial teacher retention crisis

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.

18 comments to More money will not solve the perennial teacher retention crisis

  • Paul Marks

    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.

  • DiscoveredJoys

    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’.

  • Martin

    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.

    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.

  • GregWA

    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.

  • DiscoveredJoys

    @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’.

  • pete

    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.

  • Alex

    There won’t be a need for anything except Islamic schools soon so the problem will resolve itself. 🙂

  • NickM

    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.

  • GregWA

    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!

  • bobby b

    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.)

  • NickM

    “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”.

  • Chester Draws

    Arguably, men are better at controlling unruly boys than are women.

    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.

  • bobby b

    Chester Draws
    December 23, 2024 at 12:46 am

    “As much as our principal would like to have a staff that is 80% male, he simply cannot find enough male teachers.”

    Curious why you think this is so.

    I have my own ideas about it, stemming from listening to my dad – a forever elementary school teacher – and all of his similar friends talk about it.

    Basically, lots of unruly boys – not the truly feral ones, but they’re a minority – crave positive physical contact. That’s why they roughhouse. They lack that contact in their lives, and so are in heaven when they get it somewhere.

    And so they love and respect the teachers who, while being strong models, muss their hair, or who let them lean on their shoulder in their chair, or even at times hug them.

    But society is now in a place where such conduct by a male teacher means “potential molester”, and so male teachers have become near-paranoid about physical contact, and in fact warn newcomers away because the danger has become so real.

    That’s what most of my dad’s male ex-teacher friends tell me, at least. They tell stories of their friends driven from the profession because a principal saw them having physical contact – innocent contact – with a student one too many times.

    Not sure how we get back to a place where guys can do the job comfortably.

    (Caveat: my dad retired over 25 years ago, so my impression may be outdated.)

  • Chester Draws

    That is indeed why the boys, at least at my school, prefer the male teachers. Boys are physical and like directness. They also have a much earthier sense of humour, which is an area the male teachers are hugely advantaged at.

    Teaching suits women because it is clean, reliable and moderately high status. It is a good job for a mother, because it aligns with the children’s hours perfectly.

    Men are prepared to work at jobs that are dirtier, more stressful, less reliable and longer hours, in exchange for more money. Working class men also tend to regard teaching as less high status, because for many of them anything to do with children is women’s work.

    So I don’t think the current system is set up to exclude men: it is merely more suited to women.

    I really don’t think it is the molester worries at high school that keeps men away — though I suspect it is a problem at primary school. It’s trivial how easy it is to avoid any issues of the wrong sorts of physical contact. Not a single male teacher has ever mentioned to me that as an issue, although we all know not to be in a room with a single child in it without doors open and people around. Then again, I behaved the same with young female staff before I became a teacher, so it is never an issue.

    (Because men grow up knowing how to do this, almost all the inappropriate sexual relationships in NZ schools are by female teachers — they are not used to the self-regulation required. They don’t live taking care to avoid any possible suggestion of sexual impropriety with the other sex.)

  • bobby b

    “Working class men also tend to regard teaching as less high status, because for many of them anything to do with children is women’s work.”

    We’re certainly paying for that mistake. Not to denigrate women, but teaching was, for a long time, a male profession. There were good reasons for that, for the boys at least.

    “Because men grow up knowing how to do this . . . “

    And that may be where my 25+-years-old news became outdated. The stories from these guys’ prime years come from back in the 60’s and 70’s – when this new paradigm started – and they were the ones who got clobbered by it. No one back then worried much about appearance, about not being alone in the room with the kid. Now it’s baked in – everyone knows it – but they weren’t prepared for it. And, they tell me, that’s when men started leaving.

    In any case, kudos for doing what you do.

  • jgh in Japan

    But perhaps we could learn from other countries and separate schools (physically or internally) into academic and skills streams.
    This has become my default response to anything school related, but: don’t they already do this? they did at my school in the 1980s. you mean they stopped doing it? etc.

    As with the comment about “shop class” (I assume from the left side of the pond). Another “in my day”, my school, normal bog standard middle England comprehensive secondary school, put all pupils through manual construction classes, metalwork, woodwork, “craft design technology” – before subject options. In my time they had also been putting the boys through cookery, so everybody left school knowing enough life skills to be able to feed themselves.

    But one think that I’ve picked up was a rarity was that my school had an ethos of spotting “thick” kids who were nevertheless good with manual things, and directing them into manual skills classes, with the academic stuff to back it up. So we had kids doing motor mechanics stripping down and rebuilding motorbikes, while moulding them to understand the physics and maths underlying what they were doing sufficient to get them through a decent maths, physics and english O levels.

    I could say that I was a beneficiary of that ethos. I was utterly bored with English language and literature, because it was “making stuff up”, which I had absolutely no interest or aptitude in. But, once I got into science and technology related things, and we started having access to computers, my written English language rocketed, because I was writing documentation, writing actual facts about actual reality. NOT lying. NOT making things up.

    The government constantly advertises for teaching recruits.
    Three times I’ve been lured in by goverment adverts “we want experienced professionls like YOUUUUUU!!!!!!!!! to become teachers” and have applied for teacher training. Three times I’ve been turned down, essentially for being too old. “You went to university too long ago” was one reply. HTF do they think they will get people *experienced* in the real world without them being older?

  • bobby b

    “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!”

    Brings back memories of the film they showed us in Driver’s Ed 50 years ago. Signal 30! That was back when gore was an acceptable teaching tool!

  • Roué le Jour

    jgh in Japan,
    My immediate reaction is that “You went to university too long ago.” Means before we took them over and turned them into left wing madrassas.

    It is virtually impossible to get a government job unless you are a comrade, and very few experienced STEM people are, hence the recruitment problem.

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>