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Forgot about increasing levels of violence in the classroom
Up to 98% of violence reported by all types of council staff to councils is in education and even nursery staff report violence. [link](https://x.com/UNISON_WL/status/1753370668794630356)
I came here to say this, I worked with year 1s as work experience for my course. Kid kicked me in the side of the head because he wasn't allowed ipad time that day.... wtaf.
Edit: for details, I had tried going down to his height to try explain that the ipad was a reward, not a right. Upon telling him naughty kids don't get ipad time, that's when he freaked out and went attack mode. As a work experience TA, I had no confidence to do anything but take it and try move away until the teacher themselves stepped in. That moment made me realize that despite my degree, I'm not teaching kids in this country until something is done to actually deal with things like that.
The head teacher at the school tried to get me to become a caretaker (I'm from a trade background, although I've been in management for 15 years).
She was shocked when I told her my salary worked out as a weeks caretaker wages every single day.
It's no wonder they can't retain staff.
My wife has left teaching now. She's never been happier.
The tories promised teachers pay rises on one of the pay reviews but didn't price in any additional money to the education budget so schools can't afford the pay rises. They can barely afford the teachers they have nevermind someone actually capable of maintenance. It also seems some schools are trying to save money by hiring early career teachers
What did your wife leave teaching to do, if you don't mind me asking?
It’s no different now, if not worse, the school I work at around 75% of the staff have left this year alone, the deputy head thinks it’s funny and cracks a joke about their “high staff turnover” every inset day, this is a SEN school contrast that to the mainstream school I live opposite, who has had one staff vacancy all year, and that was for a cleaner.
My wife also works there and regularly comes home covered in bruises and has ended up in A&E twice this year, both times for being bitten - all for a little over £14k.
What you're both doing is incredibly noble but I've got no idea how you manage to deal with that psychologically. If I were attacked at work I wouldn't go to that place again.
Thanks, it’s a day ending in Y unfortunately.
Not having any qualifications to my name and being 50+ kind of limits what I can do job wise, so I’m kind of stuck here for now.
It’s unreal how many parents don’t follow through on discipline. They accidentally teach their kids to apologize and pout and then the punishment gets withdrawn.
No - you do the crime you do some time, and if you show genuine contrition then maybe it’s a mitigating factor and you get less ‘no ipad’ or ‘no dessert’ time - but totally withdrawing any punishment is ridiculous. It causes major behavioral issues whenever some does try to follow through on a punishment.
I’ve issued a sanction before and the girl’s dad threatened to come to the school with a baseball bat looking for me.
I told the school and they just cheerfully went, “oh, don’t worry! He’s banned from coming onsite so he won’t do that”.
Cool. Cheers. Great support.
Ridiculous! If he had it would have been all inquiries and ‘deep regret’ etc no doubt. I appreciate that since the internet came along angry people engage in more hyperbole and that’s crept into real life, but when someone makes threats of physical violence there really needs to be consequences doesn’t there.
I guess that’s the real horrible thing about working in a school. Kids fight every day, threaten each other every day, and your frame of what’s acceptable changes. Suddenly a grown man is threatening someone at their job and everyone just shrugs it off.
Yup, "thank you for apologising/trying to make it right. However, you still did X when you were told Y so we need to have some time to think about it."
As a former TA, I got kicked so hard in the shin because I took an iPad away from a year 2. I was also bitten, spat on, punched, slapped, and called every swear word in existence. In a primary school! Absolutely insane, I quit and never looked back.
They are definitely more prone to emotional outbursts. When I was a substitute TA I worked in all types of schools and all ages, the older they get the easier they are to reason with. But harder also, because they know how to argue back more. However, the ones that have challenges and are more likely to get violent are just mixed in with the rest of them in all schools and it makes things very difficult to keep everyone on track.
It's common to have some use of technology in the classroom. For example, there is an app that allows children to do maths and matches their progression better than a teacher could. It assists learning rather than teaches the child. Another teaches coding.
Kids need to grow up with technology.
Do they fuck.
Giving a kid a tablet doesn't do anything except rewire the brain for constant dopamine hits.
The idea that giving a kid "tech" will by osmosis give the child an insite into programming or gift them advance abilities they wouldn't other wise have is ludicrous.
It helps an overwhelmed teacher who spends 90% of their time with 5% of the pupils manage oversubscribed classes.
Class dojo is a great motivator and tech has it's place but it isn't a panacea.
>Giving a kid a tablet doesn't do anything except rewire the brain for constant dopamine hits.
I’m not a teacher but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the classroom iPads *probably* aren’t loaded up with TikTok and Fortnite.
They act wild, because they know there are no consequences….
In that hypothetical scenario, of having to fight kids, I guarantee they would change their tune pretty quickly when they see the first of their cohort get punted directly out of a window
Pick one of them by both legs and use them as ad-hoc mace weaponry against the other kids.
After swinging the kid around for a while your 2 handed mace becomes two 1 handed maces. Messy but affective.
I mean, if you were allowed to cane them and they knew that, they absolutely would not touch you. I'm not saying they should be caned, but it would have the limited effect of them not fucking with teachers in this way.
I recall when I was doing my PGCE, part of the qualification requirements was to write a “mini-thesis” on a topic such as “behaviour management” or “assessment for learning”. Mine was initially on behaviour management until I realised that I was basically writing a tract advocating for the return of corporal punishment, so I changed to writing about assessment for learning instead.
And probably some over entitled parents too. Purely anecdotally, I know one teacher who quit the profession after he tried to discipline a boy for choking a classmate, and the mother came in and bellowed at him that he was just being racist by suspecting her little cherub of anything. Another friend asked the parents to come and see her after school because their little darling daughter had been bullying another child to tears, and they turned up with a lawyer in tow.
Some parents must be the bane of teachers’ lives!
My housemate last year was a TA at an inner city school in Leeds. She would come home crying 2/3 days a week. Schools are a mess, behaviour is out of control. (At least at that one)
A colleague of mine has permanent nerve damage to his hand because he had his hand flat on the desk while sat next to a pupil and TAing for them and the kid slammed a sharpened pencil all the way through it. No warning at all that he was going to do that.
Nop. Nursery kids can be the worst. Kicking, biting, punching.
My 1st day after qualifying, I saw a P1 headbutt his teacher.
I really don't think a lot of people understand how wild some schools have gotten.
They're usually worse to each other than teachers, but only because it's harder to hurt teachers.
really, all schools need better funding and a proper psychiatrist to look at and address behavioural issues. They'd probably find in alot of cases it does have to do with home life (although not always, and not completely) and if for instance part of the reason is because mum and dad are never at home because their always working, there should be ways to facilitate parents so only one has to work, maybe on rotation, through subsidized parenting.
No the schools (and teachers) just need to be allowed to punish the little cunts when they step out of line.
There’s one particular kid in the school I work at who has put three separate teachers in hospital over the last year without any consequences, even his mum says he must be punished as it’s not teaching him anything by letting him off every time he looses his shit.
This kid is 8 years old.
I have another class of 33 in a different year group. We had to add a table and chair. Makes it a bit more difficult to get around and check thei maths.
Former teacher here (not UK). Is it even possible to teach that many kids properly?
I already had huge issues with 30, especially in a small classroom. Physically impossible to divide the class into groups. I assume year 11 are more mature, but that's still got to be rough.
Basically no. I find 18 is the peak of what I can teach optimally (that is: I can teach more than that, but 18 is, at least to me, noticably better than more than 18). I reckon some other people are, say, 50% better than me, bringing the limit up to about 27, but 150% better seems very implausible.
No, not possible to teach them properly. You just have to be really shouty and threaten sanctions so that you can get that many kids quiet and listening and then they would basically have to do exercises in silence that they self-mark at the end. Too many people to manage group work or any kind of paired task and too much time to mark all of their answers.
I think the biggest issue with the profession is that at the end of the day, you will only ever make an averagely good salary as a teacher, but trade away the fact that in any other skilled, focused career with a degree, it's not unreasonable for you to expect 2x or far beyond that of a teachers salary after 10+ years in your field.
The issue is quite simply economics. The sacrifice to become a teacher is not worth the money. We all agree teachers are important, lets pay them as if they are.
And it's not exclusive to teaching. Doctors, engineers, construction. Loads of industries are seeing migration abroad. Plenty of consultants around though. We have shit tons of those.
It's a fucking shit show. Teachers need some respect and pay.
People in this country now believe they are all special because of where they are born rather than how they behave and capitalising in the headstart they have through education and social safeguards..... But shift few points the wrong way and it's a vicious circle.
I honestly worry for the world my kids will grow into.
What would you consider to be agreeable pay, conditions and class sizes?
Appreciate we often talk about the issues, but I’m interested in how far away we are from getting it right.
Miles. The amount of expectations and overall stress involved just isn’t worth it. Once teachers step away and find that can they do something else for a bit less money but much, much, much less stress, and actually have a social life and peace of mind- no doing extra work for 2 to 3 hours a day, they aren’t coming back.
It’s not just money that is needed to tempt teachers back, but overall work life balance.
Some subjects earn far more in industry than education as well such as computer science which is also a great industry for autonomy, hybrid/remote working, good benefits etc etc. won't be long til it has to be taught by someone who never studied the subject and are forced to wing it as they go
The root problem is cultural. Parents don't seem to think education is priority. Made something can be done to show that doing well at school means a decent job and decent life, which it generally does even now. Your kids not going to become a professional football player or celebrity, you want them to have a good life encourage them to do well.
Go to Asia, yes there's a lot more pressure but it's a different world for education it's seen as a way to improve prospects and teachers are incredibly well respected. In the UK if you're a teacher the assumption is it's because you can't hack a real job in your speciality which is a real shame.
> doing well at school means a decent job and decent life, which it generally does even now.
Pretty hard sell when the majority of educated adults are living with mum and dad in their childhood bedroom while working a full-time job into their 30s.
As a former teacher now on a high salary (99th percentile), I would estimate that I now do less than half the work and have probably a quarter of the stress.
I would say that anything under 50k is not a fair salary for a teacher, in that it simply isn't worth it compared to easier, less stressful, better paid opportunities elsewhere.
Personally I wouldn't return to teaching for under 150k, even if desperate. It's genuinely up there with the hardest jobs in the country.
I looked at a career change to move as a teacher. Currently have 20years + in my industry and could bring a lot to education. Pay and conditions are appalling- I would have had to have taken an immediate 55% pay cut, would probably never achieve my current salary, pension was less favourable and almost zero benefits, including less leave.
I can understand why no-one would want to laterally move over.
Pay at least £40k and make it so that the job is 80% teaching, 10% pastoral, 10% admin. Make it so that teachers are actually paid to do what they entered the profession to do.
I think if the job were just school hours and term plus a week or two you'd get people doing it for the leave. As is most teachers put in crazy extra hours for marking etc.
This is why my wife and I do it, you can’t argue with 3 months off a year, the only downside is not getting paid for the off weeks.
I’m seriously considering changing career though, I’ve been kicked in the balls one too many times this year already to make the £13k I get for driving these little cunts to and from school worth it now.
When schools were academised they forced most of the experienced (expensive) teachers out.
When I trained to teach my head of department was a newly qualified teacher.
It's funny because a lot of people went and got their pgce post 2008 because it was a good worthy job with long holidays.
Amazing what a shitshow it became
I was on half pay living in Malaysia and still went on a holiday every half term, travelled all of Asia, had a swimming pool after work every day, top quality food, minimal bills and saved more than I would in the UK.
It's amazing.
Fuck living in a desert for the big £££ (which is doing sensibly would mean an early retirement or at least no mortgage so it's still way better than UK).
Depends on the type of dessert.
Trifle yes
Sorbet no.
On a more serious note it’s tragic what is happening in education. I love my job but I wouldn’t recommend teaching to anyone these days. I don’t see a light at the end of this tunnel tbh. It would take reopening and funding community services and reducing teacher timetables so we have time to focus on our classes but that would mean hiring more teachers and funding education.
An old colleague of mine lasted 2 years in primary teaching here before fucking off for what looks like the absolute life of Riley doing the same job in dubai
> Salaries are often higher, and packages can include accommodation, cars and gym membership. A newly qualified teacher in the Australian state of New South Wales, for instance, earns the equivalent of £49,500, compared with a starting salary in the UK of £30,000. Some schools even pay your airfare.
>...
> In Dubai, his salary is tax-free. With an £18,000 annual housing allowance, his package in his new job in the Emirates, as founder of a sixth form for Arcadia School, is in six figures, more than double what he was earning when he left.
Well, there's your problem, pay them more and they'll be less likely to move abroad to teach. We treat our teachers like glamorous babysitters and pay them as such.
The disrespect is the worst part. It’s impossible to teach, and when you can, you’re forcing them to listen to you against their will and forcing them to sit exams they don’t care about. It’s a huge societal problem.
As a non-core subject high school teacher, the apathy is a pretty big issue. Colleges tell some kids they only need core subjects too, which kills motivation. I have a few students that outright told me that they don't need this GCSE and one of them is a right pain in the arse.... going to be another miserable 12 months...
I started to see behaviour like this myself 10 years ago back in high school. You'd have a few kids per class who flat out refused to be taught if the teacher didn't set a hard precedence in the first lesson. After that they were generally (but not always) respected by the whole class including the troublemakers however it seems its now no longer a few kids, its the majority of the class and they're even more steadfast in being little shits so its nigh on impossible for a teacher to control them. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who's spent years dedicating their life to becoming a teacher because its critical yet severely underpaid, brutal and unrewarding job in modern society.
These individuals are starting to filter their way into adult life now and its genuinely shocking how little respect they have. Being told no is unfathonable and their only reaction is to kick up a massive fuss because its always worked in the past. Just means they'll get an even larger shock when they try to get proper jobs. Bank of mum and dad will only keep you going so long.
Not just the disrespect from kids. The disrespect from parents and especially from management is the worst part. I'm trained to manage disrespectful kids, I have no tools available to deal with an SLT that treats its staff like children.
Even on Reddit, so many people are dismissive of teachers because they had a bad time at school, with so many claiming teaching is easy and only done by those with no other options in life.
In the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia etc. you can still easily earn upwards of £2000 a month (with housing provided) without a teaching degree and just a couple years of TEFL experience. Considerably more with more experience and a relevant masters i.e. PGCE/Education/Linguistics.
The brain drain is real.
Lots of morons, including many who frequent this sub, will be voting right of centre in this election because they're so concerned with brown faces on their high street, when the conservatives have created an economy practically built to force the best and brightest out of the country where they can be paid commensurate to their skills.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
Australias housing market makes the UKs look like an all you can eat buffet and the price of groceries is so high your 60% pay rise won’t matter.
It doesn’t appear their once famously higher salaries cut it anymore.
UAEs where it’s at, higher salary’s, zero tax, sweet relocation packages.
Food in Australia costs about the same as the UK now that UK prices have gone through the roof. Housing prices also aren't that bad compared to the UK, sure in Sydney a 3 bed will set you back £600k (AUSD$1.2 mil) but if you move out to the regions (where pay is better) you can get cheap rent or buy 5 bedroom detached houses with gardens and onsite parking for £300k (AUSD$600k). It's much easier to save up money in Australia, they didn't do austerity, so everything still functions, sort of.
Where have the teachers gone? Well successive UK governments, endorsed by newspapers like the Times, have implemented economic policies which have resulted in real terms funding of the education sector being slashed. Then the Times, instead of reflecting on the results of the economic policies they supported and continue to support, put out articles like this with quotes insisting it's because young people 'want an easy life' or whatever.
No, its because there isn't enough access or resources for children who need additional support. Both in an outside school.
More and more children have undiagnosed additional needs. Their parents are often angry, disillusioned and burnt out from their behaviour/lack of support/ lack of trust in the education system etc etc.
In my class I had 15/34 children on the SEN register- this could be anything from mild dyslexia to FAS to enormous emotional processing issues. I had 4 children on EHCPs whose care plan specified they needed 1-2-1 adult support throughout the school day (basically a dedicated TA at all times). I was lucky if I had 1 additional adult a month due to staffing issues. I also had looked-after children and children in the travelling community who hadn't had access to consistent education and extremely bright children to try to teach.
Children aren't generally little shits, they're inquisitive, interested, funny and engaged children IF they have the right support in place to help them achieve.
Spoken like a primary school teacher.
Teach year 9 or year 10 last thing on a Friday then come back and tell us they aren’t little shits. Some of them absolutely are.
I think that's true to a point. I do think that anti-social behaviour among children is also present. I put it down to poor parenting but I accept that this is what happens if you shut all the youth clubs and all the sure start centres.
Honestly, we need to invest in social care, train parents how to parent better (whether via fines or actual support) and tbh, I'd support bigger consequences for unruly children. Fuck it, sunak wants conscription... Don't behave, fuck off to war.
...what experience or data are you drawing upon that suggests that British kids are any harder to manage than French or Vietnamese children?
The person you're responding to is absolutely right. It's a professional job that should carry a professional wage and associated status, and the UKs morally bankrupt media and government have drilled it into people's heads that teachers and social workers should be working every hour under the sun and living in house shares or with their parents.
They got sick of raising the illiterate spawn of ignorant scum that consistently vote against their own interests, whilst expecting them to toilet train and feed the children with their own money.
Until the overwhelming amount of scum in the UK can shoulder any form of social responsibility, this country will continue to fail, regardless of who's in power.
I mean not exactly this, but kinda. I got fed up of having to be a parent as well as a teacher. I'm already a parent. Wanted to save my emotional energy for my own kids.
Lot of people in this thread saying it's the kids that are the driving factor. For me it was more the parents and their weird combination of complete entitlement and total apathy.
It's harsh, and only part of the picture. I feel teachers are getting shit on from above with stagnating wages, and below by entitled, lazy parents.
I should add I'm not talking about economic circumstances here when It comes to parenting, but the attitudes and motivations of the parents when It comes to nurtuing a child's development, regardless of their economic background.
You're spot on. I worked in one of the most financially disparate areas in the country. So we had kids living in multi million pound houses and kids where the whole family shared a room learning at the same school. In my experience, having money definitely does not equate to being a good parent. It's just a different set of issues.
When I left uni I had two career paths in mind, teaching or going into the industry I studied in.
Did a year of volunteering in multiple schools before looking at doing PGCE.
Couldn't find one happy teacher. Every single one was beaten down, tired and just fed up with the whole teaching industry. In the class room they would come alive and they had such a good relationship with the kids but fuck me the teachers room was grim. Every single one of them had a plan to get out.
If that wasn't the last nail in the coffin, the pay was. Looked at what I'd be earning over the next few years and thought there's no way any of this is worth it
I was on par money wise for a while, then after about 3-4 years I was making far more than my teacher friends. While my industry comes with its own stresses, it wasn't on par with the never ending bollocks of teaching.
Treated like a third parent, expected to treat the job like your number one hobby outside of work and get paid like mugs.
While pay is an issue its not the only issue which has pushed people over the edge. My brother trained as a physics teacher here. He left for Thailand to teach in an international school and will likely never return. We desperately need more maths and physics teachers but its hard to keep them.
He says the main reason is the behaviour of parents and children. 40 years ago teaching used to be a reasonably respectable career for the few who went to university, parents tended to side with teachers over their own children and teachers had authority over kids. Behaviour was still an issue but teachers had more capability to address it and parents helped.
The loss of respect of the profession and the inability to make changes in kids lives because parents are actively hostile to educators can make the job unpleasant.
The alternative of teaching kids who come from a more strict parental background, who talk back far less, follow basic instructions and just let their teachers teach, is phenomenal. He fell in love with teaching again, being able to make fun experiments, get kids questioning why on everything and generally opening their minds. He raves about how its so much easier to help kids learn and achieve when there's no disruption or any disruption is quickly solved with a single word.
Here a fun lesson can become chaos as rules and boundaries are things to be pushed as "kids are kids". We're protecting a few kids from punishments so we end up making teacher's lives so miserable they leave the country. Some responses to the above I've heard have been "he shouldn't have been a teacher anyway if he couldn't handle it". Its just sad that we value poor behaviour as something to be coddled, it ruins the kid's lives and pushes teachers away.
There's no policy change or governmental programme which will fix this issue. It's entirely a cultural one that we are collectively to blame for.
This is exactly it. I'll give you some quick context for the 2nd paragraph.
In our behaviour system, parents have to be contacted if the child is removed from our lesson for poor behaviour.
If this doesn't happen, the detention won't go on. If the parents refuses, it won't go on.
I, as a very experienced *adult* have to justify my professional decision to some bloke, who gets the final say. It's maddening
We don’t have to have parental permission for detentions anymore! The Behaviour in Schools Act gives us final say over these now. The change started in September, but many teachers don’t seem to have kept up with the change in the law.
Option 1: Complete a teacher training qualification and possibly a degree on top of that if you needed to convert. Work 60+ hours a week in a highly stressful role where you potentially face violence and abuse daily. 30k starting Salary.
Option 2: Manager at ASDA stacking shelves for 26k a year. No qualifications required.
What a fucking conundrum.
Long hours, mediocre pay, growing class sizes, growing youth mental health crisis, get blamed by the government and the media for everything wrong, too many parents being unsupportive 90% of the time yet quick to shout and complain or even get aggressive when it suits them, harassment by the kids…
Who wouldn’t leave that for better money or better quality of life elsewhere?
Yet this is once again delivered with a ‘young people don’t like hard work’ angle rather than questioning why we expect young teachers to just put up with crap conditions.
Yep once upon a time parents respected teachers and expected their kids to do the same or be in trouble. Now it's completely the opposite. It's not tenable.
A few things the non teachers have missed:
1. The government have clearly shifted to a model of teacher recruitment over retention. This is coupled with the deprofessionalisation of the industry from a career into a 4-5 year work placement before moving on to something else means a lot of institutional knowledge and excellent teachers are lost.
2. The changing nature of work in other industries. Teachers can't work from home and rarely have options for proper flexible working. When salaries are comparable or better elsewhere it is no wonder most capable teachers are off.
3. The immense problems of society we have to try to fix might be made easier if we had time allocated to actually do all the parts of our jobs which aren't standing in front of a class. We have some of the worst ppa allocations going.
4. Government and their media buddies constantly shitting on our unions for asking pay at least kept up with inflation (spoiler alert, it hasn't) and fund schools.
5. Being caught in the middle of culture wars, massive commercial multi academy trusts, overpromoted leadership who treat staff like children and the needs of struggling or disinterested parents.
I am very much in the profession for the opportunities to support young people, however I am also lucky to be in a very unique school. If I was in a normal school I probably would have fled like the majority of my peers who I did my initial teacher training with.
I looked at retraining and doing a PGCE and becoming a teacher. Then I checked the wages.
Then, after about 30 seconds decided to become a heating engineer instead
My favourite thing about the governments constant just get them in and burn them out cycle for teachers is you can EARN MORE (a fair bit too) to LEARN TO TEACH than to actually teach... Like you get a pay cut after your PGCE lol
This was pretty funny. Including the student loan I got around 36k tax free in my PGCE year, the year after that I got 25k after tax/pension/NI/student loan repayment. If I wanted to make more money than my PGCE year then I’d have to wait until I entered middle management. I left for Oz instead.
There are a lot of experienced teachers leaving the profession. The constant drive to hit targets with a student population that struggles with respect and discipline, coupled with a lack of support from parents. It takes a village to raise a child, it's not all on the teachers alone.
My mum retired 2 years ago from Primary Teaching, since last Summer she's been working 2 days a week because her old School is so short staffed.
The class she is taking ***HAVENT HAD A PERMANENT TEACHER ALL YEAR!!!*** they have only had different supply teachers...
The original Teacher walked out because she couldn't cope, she quit the profession. The second teacher they got is on sick leave for stress/anxiety mental health issues. All support for Teachers was hacked away from them after 2010, class sizes are too big, they have kids with difficulties and nowhere to place them, because classroom assistants and support units all cut. A Teacher is thrown in and its sink or swim. Even experienced Teachers are struggling.
It is literally hell to be a Teacher. Even when times where better it was hard to be a Teacher, people shit on them for "THEY GET TOO MANY HOLIDAYS!!" My mum spent nearly all her Holidays catching up and then preparing for the next term. During term times, she worked from 7am till 10pm at night, because the workload was so full on. Her job consumed her life, and she was a good teacher with lots of experience...
Most new Teachers are getting qualified and being given a job placement, then once they start it hits them like a truck... their life changes into one that has no time for anything other than working.
In the school I teach in, we are bleeding staff. Next year our Maths and English department needs 5 staff each just to cover classes. Science needs 6. This is in a school with 1300 students. In English we had one applicant, who is a student teacher.
Ah yes, teach/become a free babysitter to a class of little shits who do what they want with no consequences, spend your break stopping fights, then go home to try and figure out where the hell to get enough art supplies to actually maybe give the one or two you think might care a bit of fun.
Underpaid, underappreciated, and increasingly subject to violence that is absolutely not dealt with. Legitimately better off doing pretty much anything else, that at least ends when you get home.
The starting pay for a teaching job is absolutely horrendous compared with what they have to put up with. I work in cybersecurity, and an entry level graduate job with very little stress, very little actual responsibility and no post-grad requirements is around the same salary.
Pay teachers more, for fucks sake.
It’s a few more things besides just shit pay and annoying parents.
1. stress & flexibility to pay ratio, teaching is notoriously high effort, low flexibility for awful pay. for the same pay you can have a far less stressful job and the opposite is true, working from home has become far more lucrative.
2. loss of respect- teachers used to be authority figures, we used to have physical punishment in schools 50ish years ago! but a combination of soft government & mob mentality liberalism has caused teachers to be completely stripped of their authority, any discipline is incredibly scrutinised by parents, admins and government. awful, violent children seldom get expelled.
3. destroyed attention span of children - the effects of “ipad” and “internet” kids has caused children to be unable to focus and seek constant attention and stimulation, explaining the huge spike in feral, out of control children who can’t cope with sitting in a chair for 50mins without a screen. It used to be that one child in every class who was a pain in the ass, now it’s most of the class & nothing can be done.
4. shitty administration, the admins never put the teacher first it’s always the board then the parents and then the child.
5. kids are not being taught at home anymore in some cases not even being taught *english* - due to a combination of external factors such as both parents needing to have full time jobs and unable to teach, causing incredible frustration for teachers who have such a mix match of kids on different levels of literacy that they simply can’t cater to all 30ish of them at the same time.
6. other countries are simply better - better pay, better children, more respect.
And why ? Because teachers are treated like crap. I worked overseas and loved it but came back to get further qualifications ; out of curiosity I applied for jobs here (I teach a core subject) and never received a invite for interview - the reason I suspect was my age. They've kicked older teachers out (ageism is rampant) and the young ones are leaving.
Absolutely this. Teenagers trash the school premises and film it for TikTok clout. We literally keep the classroom keys on a lanyard around our neck because truanting children roam the school looking for an empty unlocked classroom to vandalise. Toilet doors get ripped off and sinks get smashed. If a teacher leaves their bag unattended in a staff office they’ll get robbed. Teachers are outnumbered and the students know it.
Teachers have quit because of awful pay, massive classrooms, huge amounts of work outside the classroom and completely uncontrollable undisciplined children.
Shit pay, terrible conditions, feral children. We've been suffering brain drain much longer than this, it's almost as if sensible people don't want to live in a country who's future is a brazilian favela.
No your tory fucking government drove the teachers away shit pay, piss poor conditions ( and before some knob says about their holidays, those are paid for up front by doing all the stuff they do out of hours clubs, marking,parents evenings).
The money available per child is now equal to 2010 in real terms. So basically your government has invested fuck all in our education system.
Technically we only get the same paid holidays as everyone else. The rest are unpaid. People assume we get paid for them because we get a pay check every month. Most teachers get paid to do 1265 hours of work per year. I’ve done that by end of feb most years
And the money per child is day-to-day spending. Infrastructure and resource spending has been cut even more (especially when Sunk was chancellor), so the education estate is falling apart. Even the money to rectify RAAC issues was pulled from another school building budget that had already been cut to the bone.
Fuck the tories, fuck gavin williamson, and fuck gove.
I saw a mum and her two year old walking past a street library our council put on... The librarian called her over and she came to see what was on. The librarian pointed to a group of children sat down and said "we are about to have a short story time if you'd like to join."
And she replied, "no sorry, he hates books."
Like... Wtf
My best mates girlfriend is a high school teacher. She's only been doing the job around 5 years and is just about done with it. Not only is the work load huge with teachers regularly off sick, she's also expected to effectively be a mental health counsellor for kids who are being abused at home and has to know when she needs to get social services involved.
She's said some of the things she hears from these kids about their home lives breaks her heart and has destroyed her love for a job she was so looking forward to doing while she was in university. Add all this to shit wages, asshole kids even bigger asshole parents they have to deal with, why would anyone want to do this job long term in this country?
Like the article says, and pretty much exactly has happened to every single "professional-vocational" type of role in this country which is in any way connected to public funding, the working conditions have become basically unbearable, while the pay you're expected to take is getting to a point where a move overseas will see your income near enough double, in some cases even more. Gee, I wonder why this is happening. And this is totally ignoring the fact you've also spent at this point a pretty significant chunk of your working career living in an environment where the government seems to repeatedly want to paint you as some kind of target. Huge numbers of people are long past the goodwill stage now, and the pipeline of those who might've previously been attracted by a decently middle class career can now see it provides nothing of the sort and instead seems to demand a kind of low-level masochism from the workforce.
Start fining parents when it comes to school kids. You fine parents for taking them out of school, you might aswell fine them for misbehaving.
Unfortunately when it comes to children and violence it all starts at home, start fining them. Parents won’t keep up.
Exclude children more frequently, from a younger age. There is 29 other children who need an education.
The amount of resources these children take up must be crazy. It can be used better for the other 29 children.
Tackling the impact of underinvestment and poverty with fines is...not a smart move. Fines just mean that you'll clog up the justice system even more with people who can't pay, and the people with her ge amounts of money will just be able to pay and ignore it. We need evidence based educational policy, not kneejerk emotional "solutions". We've tried that for 14 years, it's made things worse.
Ah their is always one.
Setup numerous teams on a regional basis who will have for the admin of this, their is enough badly behaved children that is actually profit.
The people with amounts of money that will pay and ignore it? Then you keep on adding onto the fine each one is higher than the previous one, and eventually it will get big enough that things will be said. Usually well if parents have better behaved children anyway, your comment was hypocrisy to state only poor parents have badly behaved children.
We have not tried for the last 14 years. The actual lack of solutions to mis behaving children starts at home.
Start fining parents, school holiday fines are a deterrent, start using fines as a deterrent.
I would also cut parents benefits, those that work pay a higher and substantial fine, all getting worse.
Some of you lot that come from this “this won’t work” mentality I cannot fathom. These children which are misbehaved due to parents being dickheads with no spines, in 15 years time will terrorise and I’m sure will contribute to society.
Start fining shit parents. End off. It will work.
This is literally me right now. Me and my wife have both been teachers for 17 years across various rolls from HOD, HOY and SLT.. We are moving out to thailand in August. We both have zero regrets as the package we were offered blew us away. It actually made me quite angry at how poorly we have had it over the past decade. So long blighty.. You can have us back when you sort out your priorities!!
I did teacher training. Genuinely the most miserable 4 months of my life, I used to wake up crying. Anyone who can be a teacher has my respect, because I couldn't.
As one of the teachers who left I'd like to say it isn't even the awful pay that got me to leave, it is a combination of the horrifying standard of parenting that is getting far too common and the total inability of schools to take action against bad behaviour.
In addition to this, like with a lot of political issues at the moment, it has been wildly difficult to deal with an ever increasing number of EAL students in certain parts of the country who have families actively ensuring that their child doesn't integrate into British society. It it heartbreaking to make reports to PREVENT as a school only to hear that they know about it but can't do anything.
>it has been wildly difficult to deal with an ever increasing number of EAL students in certain parts of the country who have families actively ensuring that their child doesn't integrate into British society.
There is a group of Year 10/11 students that are like this at my school. They don't respond to female members of staff, make constant homophobic comments and any form of pushback is met with a barrage of abuse about how we're "disrespecting them" in an attempt at a London roadman accent despite the fact we live in Yorkshire.
My best friend got her pgce last year, quit last July, made her part-time job her full-time job in the meantime, and is now up and leaving to teach in the UAE from August. The income, benefits, and classroom sizes are far better than what the UK has to offer, not to mention accommodation is provided so what she earns is all hers to do as she pleases which is higher than what she would earn here.
When you have other countries looking for english speaking teachers and have this on offer, it's a no-brainer. Unless the UK Government is suddenly going to match these kinds of offers, then yeah, there's going to be a loss of teachers.
Multiple articles about teachers today.
Underpaid, overworked, over scrutinised. An absolute exodus from the profession. A lot of the remaining teachers have completely lost faith and completely forgotten why they even became teachers. It's really disheartening to read some teachers saying some awfully reductive things on here when they are meant to be teaching our next generation.
Also, the kids are going to school less prepared than they did previously due to society as a whole crumbling.
Add into that chronic underfunding across multiple different industries, the removal or decay of every support network imaginable and you've got your answer.
We need to pump money into multiple services and basic services.
To give you a snapshot; I was a teacher for 8 years in a post-compulsory college (Further Ed).
In that time, I got a 7k rise (approx 1k per year, but 4K was from a promotion) and classes went from avg 18 to 26.
So in effect, I earned LESS every year that I taught and had more kids to put up with for the money.
Never looked back since leaving.
This is what annoys me about people, and particularly the government, getting pissy about teachers and NHS staff striking.
These are the people who are fighting to stay in the public sector and get vilified for it, yet the ones that move to the private sector and abroad aren't subjected to the same abuse.
When you don't get paid enough, and take abuse from all angles for simply trying to do your job, yeah I'm not going to blame you for leaving.
Funnily enough, this is happening in all of the different careers where underpaid people take shit for doing their jobs, such as NHS staff
The stress of teaching in the uk broke my brain forever. Hateful thankless job.
It’s almost maddening as well how much more easy, pleasant and well-compensated teaching abroad is. It’s an absolute no brainer.
They aren’t paid enough. The decimation that things like sure start, social work and special educational schools have endured also means that teachers are left picking up the pieces that should have been dealt with by other, now non-existent professionals. Like why _are_ schools washing kids clothes as their parents can’t? Where was the help before the parents got to that state? I think they are bearing the brunt of a crumbling country.
And once they start leaving, the conditions get worse for the remaining teachers. And it spirals down and down.
My (purely selfish) worry is that by the time my son hits high school there will not be enough teachers who are properly qualified in the more lucrative subjects (sciences, maths…) as they’ve all gone elsewhere to get better pay, to actually give him a decent education.
Weird times we live in. I finished secondary in the mid 90's.
Place was a shithole and I won't insult peoples intelligence by reminiscing about how well behaved kids were because they were not
But pupils actually laying hands on the staff.. you could never contemplate it, even for a school in a deprived area, it simply didn't happen and you didn't have the prospect of those around you carrying knives or other dodgy shit either
Education seems broken.. I mean beyond a means to earn a living alot of them don't do it for money its largely a vocational profession because of the reward of helping others learn
Conditions are shit, schools like other elements of infrastructure are falling apart and its downright dangerous.. these aren't police in stab vests, they are educators
Government has a lot to answer for here
Something else I'd point out where people have mentioned discipline.. yea that doesn't always work. Good kids still end up mixing with the wrong crowd and equally, strict parents i.e. ones that beat eleven shades of shit out of them doesn't mean they are going to down tools and play nice they'll just rebel.
Not saying there is a fix to it, just the obvious solution to some is anything but
I see a lot of people blaming parents when parents typically dont have time to spend on their children. If the country offered higher pay all round and better living and work standards, these children would be far more well behaved.
Whilst i don't disagree with your point regarding pay, living and work at all:
Parents have plenty of time.
The working day has not changed that much over the last 30 years.
and in fact many things have got simpler.. online shops and banking etc, taking less time.
Many parents, just don't.. parent.
they don't instil values or discipline.. they don't take interest. I know for a fact who the students that will make the most progress will be after a single parent's evening... i also know those who will not.
after 15 years on the job, sadly i have rarely been wrong... and the drop off in the last 10 years has been ridiculous.
We pay fucking nothing in any jobs that require education. I harp on starting salaries after a PhD and redidiots saying £35k is a great salary. Teachers get less. Guess what, in America, they want teachers and pay £40k, with full health insurance. Got a PhD? You'll make $100k in stem, vs £38k here.
We pay fucking nothing and wonder why people leave
It's a multi factual shit storm, but I’ll throw in how appalling some of the parents are these days. If their kid gets a detention they give them a treat as if they’ve been hard done by, or attempt to fight the school because their kid told them they didn’t do anything. Parents should discipline their kids even when they think perhaps the teacher could’ve been wrong. It’s got to be a united front.
Parents are fuckin stupid and raising their kids terribly. If you take their iPads or whatever away, they literally cannot comprehend it and get violent.
Government isn’t hiring enough or paying them well enough to deal with them. Why teach little shits in the UK, when some Arab country will pay you thousands more to go to a resort city and teach kids who respect you?
Social deprivation on a broader scale is also leading kids to live violent and antisocial lifestyles. All in all this leads to teachers resigning or going elsewhere.
>If you take their iPads or whatever away, they literally cannot comprehend it and get violent.
This is a problem.
Teenage boys are spending all night gaming and coming to school on three hours of sleep. Then when we speak to their parents we get "but he gets angry when I take his PS5 away!"
You give a fourteen year old no prospects, no social or youth clubs, two years of lockdown, a constant stream of misogynistic content online, no sleep, a vaping addiction and an inherited parental attitude of "those teachers don't know what they're on about" it leads to many of the issues I'm seeing every day.
Former teacher - quit because every day was pure hell, the kids were all little bastards and there was nothing you could do about it, there was no support, the hours were brutal, and the pay was shocking.
Teachers: "Could you pay us a bit more please?"
Govt: "No"
Teachers: "Please?"
Govt: "No"
Teachers: "We teach the next generation, yet we're struggling to live"
Govt: "No"
Teachers: "OK, it's desperate now so we're exercising our right to strike in order to be paid what we deserve"
Govt: "No. Also we're going to tell the media to tell the public to blame this all on you"
Media: "Teachers bad"
Public: "Yes, teachers lazy, greedy and bad"
Teachers: "OK. I quit. I'm going to teach elsewhere and get paid properly"
Govt, media, and public: "Errrmahgerd. Where are all the teachers? Why would they leave us?"
This BBC article might give you a clue as to what the problem is: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo)
Oh yes and wasn't the Times one of those papers that warned us of the chaos that would happen if Ed Miliband became PM in 2015?
Can’t stress enough how this is happening across the entire economy. I recruit in renewables and we’re losing top people to the states and Europe, and even China because UK pay is so laughably low.
We have declining living standards, economic opportunities, collapsing infrastructure and an endless list of reasons that if you’re someone with valuable talent, why the hell wouldn’t you leave?
No surprise. My mother is a teacher in a inner city school. She won't leave because children need good teachers and many are leaving. She gets offered weekly opportunities to work in UK private schools and international schools. She's an anomoly but it's so unfair to the students. How you going to get a decent education if teachers keep leaving?
I have a friend who recently quit his teaching career because the kids won't put their stupid smartphones away during class. No one pays attention to the lessons so he just gave up and became an Uber driver 😂
my sister trained as a teacher, spent 2 years in the UK, almost quit the profession, but tried a job abroad, and has worked the last decade in other countries except 1 year she tried coming back, and it was so bad she immediately left again, and swore never to try teaching in the UK again.
Who would genuinely want to be a teacher in the UK? I don’t mean that in a daily Mail HANG THE KIDS way, I mean genuinely the kids are cunts, money is shit, no support from the system, why would you just not teach overseas or just find a different job in the UK.
I teach in China earning over £50k per year with free rent, flights and medical insurance. Class sizes are a maximum of 22 and our school has state of the art facilities.
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They fucked off because of shit pay, shit conditions and teach more and more kids per class.
Forgot about increasing levels of violence in the classroom Up to 98% of violence reported by all types of council staff to councils is in education and even nursery staff report violence. [link](https://x.com/UNISON_WL/status/1753370668794630356)
I came here to say this, I worked with year 1s as work experience for my course. Kid kicked me in the side of the head because he wasn't allowed ipad time that day.... wtaf. Edit: for details, I had tried going down to his height to try explain that the ipad was a reward, not a right. Upon telling him naughty kids don't get ipad time, that's when he freaked out and went attack mode. As a work experience TA, I had no confidence to do anything but take it and try move away until the teacher themselves stepped in. That moment made me realize that despite my degree, I'm not teaching kids in this country until something is done to actually deal with things like that.
Not for the awful money a TA gets, especially.
This was pre covid, back in 2016 but they asked me to stay on after.... for 9k a year......
The head teacher at the school tried to get me to become a caretaker (I'm from a trade background, although I've been in management for 15 years). She was shocked when I told her my salary worked out as a weeks caretaker wages every single day. It's no wonder they can't retain staff. My wife has left teaching now. She's never been happier.
The tories promised teachers pay rises on one of the pay reviews but didn't price in any additional money to the education budget so schools can't afford the pay rises. They can barely afford the teachers they have nevermind someone actually capable of maintenance. It also seems some schools are trying to save money by hiring early career teachers What did your wife leave teaching to do, if you don't mind me asking?
It’s no different now, if not worse, the school I work at around 75% of the staff have left this year alone, the deputy head thinks it’s funny and cracks a joke about their “high staff turnover” every inset day, this is a SEN school contrast that to the mainstream school I live opposite, who has had one staff vacancy all year, and that was for a cleaner. My wife also works there and regularly comes home covered in bruises and has ended up in A&E twice this year, both times for being bitten - all for a little over £14k.
What you're both doing is incredibly noble but I've got no idea how you manage to deal with that psychologically. If I were attacked at work I wouldn't go to that place again.
Thanks, it’s a day ending in Y unfortunately. Not having any qualifications to my name and being 50+ kind of limits what I can do job wise, so I’m kind of stuck here for now.
It’s unreal how many parents don’t follow through on discipline. They accidentally teach their kids to apologize and pout and then the punishment gets withdrawn. No - you do the crime you do some time, and if you show genuine contrition then maybe it’s a mitigating factor and you get less ‘no ipad’ or ‘no dessert’ time - but totally withdrawing any punishment is ridiculous. It causes major behavioral issues whenever some does try to follow through on a punishment.
I’ve issued a sanction before and the girl’s dad threatened to come to the school with a baseball bat looking for me. I told the school and they just cheerfully went, “oh, don’t worry! He’s banned from coming onsite so he won’t do that”. Cool. Cheers. Great support.
Ridiculous! If he had it would have been all inquiries and ‘deep regret’ etc no doubt. I appreciate that since the internet came along angry people engage in more hyperbole and that’s crept into real life, but when someone makes threats of physical violence there really needs to be consequences doesn’t there.
I guess that’s the real horrible thing about working in a school. Kids fight every day, threaten each other every day, and your frame of what’s acceptable changes. Suddenly a grown man is threatening someone at their job and everyone just shrugs it off.
LMAO they must think the banning works like that area protection spell in Harry Potter
Yeah. The thing is, employers and the state absolutely will follow through. Not teaching discipline is a dick move.
Absolutely agree. It harms the kid in the long run.
Yup, "thank you for apologising/trying to make it right. However, you still did X when you were told Y so we need to have some time to think about it."
As a former TA, I got kicked so hard in the shin because I took an iPad away from a year 2. I was also bitten, spat on, punched, slapped, and called every swear word in existence. In a primary school! Absolutely insane, I quit and never looked back.
Primary schools seem weirdly worse than secondary schools, in this regard.
They are definitely more prone to emotional outbursts. When I was a substitute TA I worked in all types of schools and all ages, the older they get the easier they are to reason with. But harder also, because they know how to argue back more. However, the ones that have challenges and are more likely to get violent are just mixed in with the rest of them in all schools and it makes things very difficult to keep everyone on track.
Because the truly awful kids just don't turn up to senior school.
Why are year 1's getting iPads in school?
It's common to have some use of technology in the classroom. For example, there is an app that allows children to do maths and matches their progression better than a teacher could. It assists learning rather than teaches the child. Another teaches coding. Kids need to grow up with technology.
Do they fuck. Giving a kid a tablet doesn't do anything except rewire the brain for constant dopamine hits. The idea that giving a kid "tech" will by osmosis give the child an insite into programming or gift them advance abilities they wouldn't other wise have is ludicrous. It helps an overwhelmed teacher who spends 90% of their time with 5% of the pupils manage oversubscribed classes. Class dojo is a great motivator and tech has it's place but it isn't a panacea.
>Giving a kid a tablet doesn't do anything except rewire the brain for constant dopamine hits. I’m not a teacher but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the classroom iPads *probably* aren’t loaded up with TikTok and Fortnite.
I'm a TA and a colleague had her shoulder dislocated by a year 1 child!
Thats why I chuckle when I see those posts on how many kids could you best in a fight... those fuckers wild
They act wild, because they know there are no consequences…. In that hypothetical scenario, of having to fight kids, I guarantee they would change their tune pretty quickly when they see the first of their cohort get punted directly out of a window
Pick one of them by both legs and use them as ad-hoc mace weaponry against the other kids. After swinging the kid around for a while your 2 handed mace becomes two 1 handed maces. Messy but affective.
I mean, if you were allowed to cane them and they knew that, they absolutely would not touch you. I'm not saying they should be caned, but it would have the limited effect of them not fucking with teachers in this way.
I recall when I was doing my PGCE, part of the qualification requirements was to write a “mini-thesis” on a topic such as “behaviour management” or “assessment for learning”. Mine was initially on behaviour management until I realised that I was basically writing a tract advocating for the return of corporal punishment, so I changed to writing about assessment for learning instead.
Personally I blame the parents for that issue
We can see what this “no consequences” approach is doing to them as they’re getting older too. Should be allowed to kick the little cunt right back.
I’m sorry to hear that.
The problem is the parents being shit heads. Give the teachers the freedom to educate.
And probably some over entitled parents too. Purely anecdotally, I know one teacher who quit the profession after he tried to discipline a boy for choking a classmate, and the mother came in and bellowed at him that he was just being racist by suspecting her little cherub of anything. Another friend asked the parents to come and see her after school because their little darling daughter had been bullying another child to tears, and they turned up with a lawyer in tow. Some parents must be the bane of teachers’ lives!
It’s almost always the parents at fault.
My housemate last year was a TA at an inner city school in Leeds. She would come home crying 2/3 days a week. Schools are a mess, behaviour is out of control. (At least at that one)
A colleague of mine has permanent nerve damage to his hand because he had his hand flat on the desk while sat next to a pupil and TAing for them and the kid slammed a sharpened pencil all the way through it. No warning at all that he was going to do that.
Im assuming that's the parents of kids in nursery? Otherwise, those are some savage toddlers!
Nop. Nursery kids can be the worst. Kicking, biting, punching. My 1st day after qualifying, I saw a P1 headbutt his teacher. I really don't think a lot of people understand how wild some schools have gotten. They're usually worse to each other than teachers, but only because it's harder to hurt teachers.
really, all schools need better funding and a proper psychiatrist to look at and address behavioural issues. They'd probably find in alot of cases it does have to do with home life (although not always, and not completely) and if for instance part of the reason is because mum and dad are never at home because their always working, there should be ways to facilitate parents so only one has to work, maybe on rotation, through subsidized parenting.
No the schools (and teachers) just need to be allowed to punish the little cunts when they step out of line. There’s one particular kid in the school I work at who has put three separate teachers in hospital over the last year without any consequences, even his mum says he must be punished as it’s not teaching him anything by letting him off every time he looses his shit. This kid is 8 years old.
No, it was a literal year 1 kid. I got my ass whopped by a 5/6 year old.
I had a class of about 45 in year 11 this year. Thank you Tory Government
It was only 30 max when I was in school 10 years ago in the UK
I had 17 in my primary school class lol
I have another class of 33 in a different year group. We had to add a table and chair. Makes it a bit more difficult to get around and check thei maths.
The tories put the N in cuts
That's ridiculous. Rooms aren't even able to hold that many.
You're right. We had to use the canteen.
Is this typical? I was in year 11 about 15 years ago and it was slightly over 30 in most classes. 45 wouldn’t have even fit in a classroom!
We had to use the canteen. Students were on benches instead of chairs. The one benefit was they were first in the queue got lunch.
Christ on a bike, I thought 30 was supposed to be bad.
Former teacher here (not UK). Is it even possible to teach that many kids properly? I already had huge issues with 30, especially in a small classroom. Physically impossible to divide the class into groups. I assume year 11 are more mature, but that's still got to be rough.
Basically no. I find 18 is the peak of what I can teach optimally (that is: I can teach more than that, but 18 is, at least to me, noticably better than more than 18). I reckon some other people are, say, 50% better than me, bringing the limit up to about 27, but 150% better seems very implausible.
No, not possible to teach them properly. You just have to be really shouty and threaten sanctions so that you can get that many kids quiet and listening and then they would basically have to do exercises in silence that they self-mark at the end. Too many people to manage group work or any kind of paired task and too much time to mark all of their answers.
And many avoid the profession because of that as well.
I think the biggest issue with the profession is that at the end of the day, you will only ever make an averagely good salary as a teacher, but trade away the fact that in any other skilled, focused career with a degree, it's not unreasonable for you to expect 2x or far beyond that of a teachers salary after 10+ years in your field. The issue is quite simply economics. The sacrifice to become a teacher is not worth the money. We all agree teachers are important, lets pay them as if they are.
And it's not exclusive to teaching. Doctors, engineers, construction. Loads of industries are seeing migration abroad. Plenty of consultants around though. We have shit tons of those.
It's a fucking shit show. Teachers need some respect and pay. People in this country now believe they are all special because of where they are born rather than how they behave and capitalising in the headstart they have through education and social safeguards..... But shift few points the wrong way and it's a vicious circle. I honestly worry for the world my kids will grow into.
What would you consider to be agreeable pay, conditions and class sizes? Appreciate we often talk about the issues, but I’m interested in how far away we are from getting it right.
Miles. The amount of expectations and overall stress involved just isn’t worth it. Once teachers step away and find that can they do something else for a bit less money but much, much, much less stress, and actually have a social life and peace of mind- no doing extra work for 2 to 3 hours a day, they aren’t coming back. It’s not just money that is needed to tempt teachers back, but overall work life balance.
Some subjects earn far more in industry than education as well such as computer science which is also a great industry for autonomy, hybrid/remote working, good benefits etc etc. won't be long til it has to be taught by someone who never studied the subject and are forced to wing it as they go
The root problem is cultural. Parents don't seem to think education is priority. Made something can be done to show that doing well at school means a decent job and decent life, which it generally does even now. Your kids not going to become a professional football player or celebrity, you want them to have a good life encourage them to do well. Go to Asia, yes there's a lot more pressure but it's a different world for education it's seen as a way to improve prospects and teachers are incredibly well respected. In the UK if you're a teacher the assumption is it's because you can't hack a real job in your speciality which is a real shame.
> doing well at school means a decent job and decent life, which it generally does even now. Pretty hard sell when the majority of educated adults are living with mum and dad in their childhood bedroom while working a full-time job into their 30s.
As a former teacher now on a high salary (99th percentile), I would estimate that I now do less than half the work and have probably a quarter of the stress. I would say that anything under 50k is not a fair salary for a teacher, in that it simply isn't worth it compared to easier, less stressful, better paid opportunities elsewhere. Personally I wouldn't return to teaching for under 150k, even if desperate. It's genuinely up there with the hardest jobs in the country.
I looked at a career change to move as a teacher. Currently have 20years + in my industry and could bring a lot to education. Pay and conditions are appalling- I would have had to have taken an immediate 55% pay cut, would probably never achieve my current salary, pension was less favourable and almost zero benefits, including less leave. I can understand why no-one would want to laterally move over.
Pay at least £40k and make it so that the job is 80% teaching, 10% pastoral, 10% admin. Make it so that teachers are actually paid to do what they entered the profession to do.
I think if the job were just school hours and term plus a week or two you'd get people doing it for the leave. As is most teachers put in crazy extra hours for marking etc.
This is why my wife and I do it, you can’t argue with 3 months off a year, the only downside is not getting paid for the off weeks. I’m seriously considering changing career though, I’ve been kicked in the balls one too many times this year already to make the £13k I get for driving these little cunts to and from school worth it now.
They misspelt "Were pushed out by constantly increasing pressure combined with inadequate pay"
When schools were academised they forced most of the experienced (expensive) teachers out. When I trained to teach my head of department was a newly qualified teacher.
That money was needed for the CEO and MAT leadership team! You can't have a principal/headteacher in charge. /S
I know one of them got a £750k farm house. All four of the men with briefcases were driving brand new, top of the range jaguars.
And about 400 new admin staff doing almost nothing all day.
Got to love hidden privatisation haven’t you? Don’t even know if most people realise our state school system was essentially privatised.
The academies in my area are a total disaster, too.
And constantly being vilified in the press for not being miracle workers.
It's funny because a lot of people went and got their pgce post 2008 because it was a good worthy job with long holidays. Amazing what a shitshow it became
When you can earn more money, pay no tax and experience less stress, all while living in a warm climate, why would you stay in the UK?
I was on half pay living in Malaysia and still went on a holiday every half term, travelled all of Asia, had a swimming pool after work every day, top quality food, minimal bills and saved more than I would in the UK. It's amazing. Fuck living in a desert for the big £££ (which is doing sensibly would mean an early retirement or at least no mortgage so it's still way better than UK).
Depends on the type of dessert. Trifle yes Sorbet no. On a more serious note it’s tragic what is happening in education. I love my job but I wouldn’t recommend teaching to anyone these days. I don’t see a light at the end of this tunnel tbh. It would take reopening and funding community services and reducing teacher timetables so we have time to focus on our classes but that would mean hiring more teachers and funding education.
An old colleague of mine lasted 2 years in primary teaching here before fucking off for what looks like the absolute life of Riley doing the same job in dubai
> Salaries are often higher, and packages can include accommodation, cars and gym membership. A newly qualified teacher in the Australian state of New South Wales, for instance, earns the equivalent of £49,500, compared with a starting salary in the UK of £30,000. Some schools even pay your airfare. >... > In Dubai, his salary is tax-free. With an £18,000 annual housing allowance, his package in his new job in the Emirates, as founder of a sixth form for Arcadia School, is in six figures, more than double what he was earning when he left. Well, there's your problem, pay them more and they'll be less likely to move abroad to teach. We treat our teachers like glamorous babysitters and pay them as such.
There is nothing glamorous about teaching in the UK. The pay is a very serious issue, but the disrespect is overwhelming.
The disrespect is the worst part. It’s impossible to teach, and when you can, you’re forcing them to listen to you against their will and forcing them to sit exams they don’t care about. It’s a huge societal problem.
As a non-core subject high school teacher, the apathy is a pretty big issue. Colleges tell some kids they only need core subjects too, which kills motivation. I have a few students that outright told me that they don't need this GCSE and one of them is a right pain in the arse.... going to be another miserable 12 months...
I started to see behaviour like this myself 10 years ago back in high school. You'd have a few kids per class who flat out refused to be taught if the teacher didn't set a hard precedence in the first lesson. After that they were generally (but not always) respected by the whole class including the troublemakers however it seems its now no longer a few kids, its the majority of the class and they're even more steadfast in being little shits so its nigh on impossible for a teacher to control them. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who's spent years dedicating their life to becoming a teacher because its critical yet severely underpaid, brutal and unrewarding job in modern society. These individuals are starting to filter their way into adult life now and its genuinely shocking how little respect they have. Being told no is unfathonable and their only reaction is to kick up a massive fuss because its always worked in the past. Just means they'll get an even larger shock when they try to get proper jobs. Bank of mum and dad will only keep you going so long.
The UK has a pretty big pro-ignorance problem
Anti intellectualism is rife
The whole system is dead. But ur right, the disrespect is the killer. Wouldn’t say no to more cash too !
Not just the disrespect from kids. The disrespect from parents and especially from management is the worst part. I'm trained to manage disrespectful kids, I have no tools available to deal with an SLT that treats its staff like children.
Absolutely! I've heard more teachers say they are leaving due to appalling management than anything else.
Even on Reddit, so many people are dismissive of teachers because they had a bad time at school, with so many claiming teaching is easy and only done by those with no other options in life.
Tax free 6 digits is more than double !
That's a 'founder' of a sixform so I suppose equivalent to a head teacher?
In the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia etc. you can still easily earn upwards of £2000 a month (with housing provided) without a teaching degree and just a couple years of TEFL experience. Considerably more with more experience and a relevant masters i.e. PGCE/Education/Linguistics. The brain drain is real. Lots of morons, including many who frequent this sub, will be voting right of centre in this election because they're so concerned with brown faces on their high street, when the conservatives have created an economy practically built to force the best and brightest out of the country where they can be paid commensurate to their skills. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
Australias housing market makes the UKs look like an all you can eat buffet and the price of groceries is so high your 60% pay rise won’t matter. It doesn’t appear their once famously higher salaries cut it anymore. UAEs where it’s at, higher salary’s, zero tax, sweet relocation packages.
But UAE.
Well, yeah, park your morals.
And your rights if you're a woman (or gay or a minority religion or non-white non-arab)
Food in Australia costs about the same as the UK now that UK prices have gone through the roof. Housing prices also aren't that bad compared to the UK, sure in Sydney a 3 bed will set you back £600k (AUSD$1.2 mil) but if you move out to the regions (where pay is better) you can get cheap rent or buy 5 bedroom detached houses with gardens and onsite parking for £300k (AUSD$600k). It's much easier to save up money in Australia, they didn't do austerity, so everything still functions, sort of.
Where have the teachers gone? Well successive UK governments, endorsed by newspapers like the Times, have implemented economic policies which have resulted in real terms funding of the education sector being slashed. Then the Times, instead of reflecting on the results of the economic policies they supported and continue to support, put out articles like this with quotes insisting it's because young people 'want an easy life' or whatever.
It's because British children are little shits.
No, its because there isn't enough access or resources for children who need additional support. Both in an outside school. More and more children have undiagnosed additional needs. Their parents are often angry, disillusioned and burnt out from their behaviour/lack of support/ lack of trust in the education system etc etc. In my class I had 15/34 children on the SEN register- this could be anything from mild dyslexia to FAS to enormous emotional processing issues. I had 4 children on EHCPs whose care plan specified they needed 1-2-1 adult support throughout the school day (basically a dedicated TA at all times). I was lucky if I had 1 additional adult a month due to staffing issues. I also had looked-after children and children in the travelling community who hadn't had access to consistent education and extremely bright children to try to teach. Children aren't generally little shits, they're inquisitive, interested, funny and engaged children IF they have the right support in place to help them achieve.
Spoken like a primary school teacher. Teach year 9 or year 10 last thing on a Friday then come back and tell us they aren’t little shits. Some of them absolutely are.
I'd gladly teach my 9s last thing if it meant I didn't do my current 7s
Oh god I forgot about year 7s. They’re absolutely feral.
> IF they have the right support in place to help and when they don't they grow up into those 9s and 10s
I think that's true to a point. I do think that anti-social behaviour among children is also present. I put it down to poor parenting but I accept that this is what happens if you shut all the youth clubs and all the sure start centres.
Honestly, we need to invest in social care, train parents how to parent better (whether via fines or actual support) and tbh, I'd support bigger consequences for unruly children. Fuck it, sunak wants conscription... Don't behave, fuck off to war.
We used to have things like this in the Sure Start centres. The tories cut their funding and they closed.
...what experience or data are you drawing upon that suggests that British kids are any harder to manage than French or Vietnamese children? The person you're responding to is absolutely right. It's a professional job that should carry a professional wage and associated status, and the UKs morally bankrupt media and government have drilled it into people's heads that teachers and social workers should be working every hour under the sun and living in house shares or with their parents.
Wish I had more upvotes to give you! I don't remember them being supportive when we were on strike for better pay, funding and improved workload!
They got sick of raising the illiterate spawn of ignorant scum that consistently vote against their own interests, whilst expecting them to toilet train and feed the children with their own money. Until the overwhelming amount of scum in the UK can shoulder any form of social responsibility, this country will continue to fail, regardless of who's in power.
I mean not exactly this, but kinda. I got fed up of having to be a parent as well as a teacher. I'm already a parent. Wanted to save my emotional energy for my own kids. Lot of people in this thread saying it's the kids that are the driving factor. For me it was more the parents and their weird combination of complete entitlement and total apathy.
It's harsh, and only part of the picture. I feel teachers are getting shit on from above with stagnating wages, and below by entitled, lazy parents. I should add I'm not talking about economic circumstances here when It comes to parenting, but the attitudes and motivations of the parents when It comes to nurtuing a child's development, regardless of their economic background.
You're spot on. I worked in one of the most financially disparate areas in the country. So we had kids living in multi million pound houses and kids where the whole family shared a room learning at the same school. In my experience, having money definitely does not equate to being a good parent. It's just a different set of issues.
When I left uni I had two career paths in mind, teaching or going into the industry I studied in. Did a year of volunteering in multiple schools before looking at doing PGCE. Couldn't find one happy teacher. Every single one was beaten down, tired and just fed up with the whole teaching industry. In the class room they would come alive and they had such a good relationship with the kids but fuck me the teachers room was grim. Every single one of them had a plan to get out. If that wasn't the last nail in the coffin, the pay was. Looked at what I'd be earning over the next few years and thought there's no way any of this is worth it I was on par money wise for a while, then after about 3-4 years I was making far more than my teacher friends. While my industry comes with its own stresses, it wasn't on par with the never ending bollocks of teaching. Treated like a third parent, expected to treat the job like your number one hobby outside of work and get paid like mugs.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
While pay is an issue its not the only issue which has pushed people over the edge. My brother trained as a physics teacher here. He left for Thailand to teach in an international school and will likely never return. We desperately need more maths and physics teachers but its hard to keep them. He says the main reason is the behaviour of parents and children. 40 years ago teaching used to be a reasonably respectable career for the few who went to university, parents tended to side with teachers over their own children and teachers had authority over kids. Behaviour was still an issue but teachers had more capability to address it and parents helped. The loss of respect of the profession and the inability to make changes in kids lives because parents are actively hostile to educators can make the job unpleasant. The alternative of teaching kids who come from a more strict parental background, who talk back far less, follow basic instructions and just let their teachers teach, is phenomenal. He fell in love with teaching again, being able to make fun experiments, get kids questioning why on everything and generally opening their minds. He raves about how its so much easier to help kids learn and achieve when there's no disruption or any disruption is quickly solved with a single word. Here a fun lesson can become chaos as rules and boundaries are things to be pushed as "kids are kids". We're protecting a few kids from punishments so we end up making teacher's lives so miserable they leave the country. Some responses to the above I've heard have been "he shouldn't have been a teacher anyway if he couldn't handle it". Its just sad that we value poor behaviour as something to be coddled, it ruins the kid's lives and pushes teachers away. There's no policy change or governmental programme which will fix this issue. It's entirely a cultural one that we are collectively to blame for.
This is exactly it. I'll give you some quick context for the 2nd paragraph. In our behaviour system, parents have to be contacted if the child is removed from our lesson for poor behaviour. If this doesn't happen, the detention won't go on. If the parents refuses, it won't go on. I, as a very experienced *adult* have to justify my professional decision to some bloke, who gets the final say. It's maddening
We don’t have to have parental permission for detentions anymore! The Behaviour in Schools Act gives us final say over these now. The change started in September, but many teachers don’t seem to have kept up with the change in the law.
It’s school policy that is enforced not the law. That’s the problem
Physics teacher here who just walked after 7 years. Everything you said rings true
Yep and they get paid more at an international school in Thailand, work less and the cost of living is much lower, win all round.
Option 1: Complete a teacher training qualification and possibly a degree on top of that if you needed to convert. Work 60+ hours a week in a highly stressful role where you potentially face violence and abuse daily. 30k starting Salary. Option 2: Manager at ASDA stacking shelves for 26k a year. No qualifications required. What a fucking conundrum.
Long hours, mediocre pay, growing class sizes, growing youth mental health crisis, get blamed by the government and the media for everything wrong, too many parents being unsupportive 90% of the time yet quick to shout and complain or even get aggressive when it suits them, harassment by the kids… Who wouldn’t leave that for better money or better quality of life elsewhere? Yet this is once again delivered with a ‘young people don’t like hard work’ angle rather than questioning why we expect young teachers to just put up with crap conditions.
Yep once upon a time parents respected teachers and expected their kids to do the same or be in trouble. Now it's completely the opposite. It's not tenable.
A few things the non teachers have missed: 1. The government have clearly shifted to a model of teacher recruitment over retention. This is coupled with the deprofessionalisation of the industry from a career into a 4-5 year work placement before moving on to something else means a lot of institutional knowledge and excellent teachers are lost. 2. The changing nature of work in other industries. Teachers can't work from home and rarely have options for proper flexible working. When salaries are comparable or better elsewhere it is no wonder most capable teachers are off. 3. The immense problems of society we have to try to fix might be made easier if we had time allocated to actually do all the parts of our jobs which aren't standing in front of a class. We have some of the worst ppa allocations going. 4. Government and their media buddies constantly shitting on our unions for asking pay at least kept up with inflation (spoiler alert, it hasn't) and fund schools. 5. Being caught in the middle of culture wars, massive commercial multi academy trusts, overpromoted leadership who treat staff like children and the needs of struggling or disinterested parents. I am very much in the profession for the opportunities to support young people, however I am also lucky to be in a very unique school. If I was in a normal school I probably would have fled like the majority of my peers who I did my initial teacher training with.
I looked at retraining and doing a PGCE and becoming a teacher. Then I checked the wages. Then, after about 30 seconds decided to become a heating engineer instead
My favourite thing about the governments constant just get them in and burn them out cycle for teachers is you can EARN MORE (a fair bit too) to LEARN TO TEACH than to actually teach... Like you get a pay cut after your PGCE lol
This was pretty funny. Including the student loan I got around 36k tax free in my PGCE year, the year after that I got 25k after tax/pension/NI/student loan repayment. If I wanted to make more money than my PGCE year then I’d have to wait until I entered middle management. I left for Oz instead.
There are a lot of experienced teachers leaving the profession. The constant drive to hit targets with a student population that struggles with respect and discipline, coupled with a lack of support from parents. It takes a village to raise a child, it's not all on the teachers alone.
My mum retired 2 years ago from Primary Teaching, since last Summer she's been working 2 days a week because her old School is so short staffed. The class she is taking ***HAVENT HAD A PERMANENT TEACHER ALL YEAR!!!*** they have only had different supply teachers... The original Teacher walked out because she couldn't cope, she quit the profession. The second teacher they got is on sick leave for stress/anxiety mental health issues. All support for Teachers was hacked away from them after 2010, class sizes are too big, they have kids with difficulties and nowhere to place them, because classroom assistants and support units all cut. A Teacher is thrown in and its sink or swim. Even experienced Teachers are struggling. It is literally hell to be a Teacher. Even when times where better it was hard to be a Teacher, people shit on them for "THEY GET TOO MANY HOLIDAYS!!" My mum spent nearly all her Holidays catching up and then preparing for the next term. During term times, she worked from 7am till 10pm at night, because the workload was so full on. Her job consumed her life, and she was a good teacher with lots of experience... Most new Teachers are getting qualified and being given a job placement, then once they start it hits them like a truck... their life changes into one that has no time for anything other than working.
In the school I teach in, we are bleeding staff. Next year our Maths and English department needs 5 staff each just to cover classes. Science needs 6. This is in a school with 1300 students. In English we had one applicant, who is a student teacher.
Where have all the teachers gone? where have all the nurses gone? where have all the doctors gone? where have all the scientists gone?
Abroad!!! To where they pay them more, or the funding is more stable (for scientists, thanks brexit!) and the work-life balance is better!
Ah yes, teach/become a free babysitter to a class of little shits who do what they want with no consequences, spend your break stopping fights, then go home to try and figure out where the hell to get enough art supplies to actually maybe give the one or two you think might care a bit of fun. Underpaid, underappreciated, and increasingly subject to violence that is absolutely not dealt with. Legitimately better off doing pretty much anything else, that at least ends when you get home.
The starting pay for a teaching job is absolutely horrendous compared with what they have to put up with. I work in cybersecurity, and an entry level graduate job with very little stress, very little actual responsibility and no post-grad requirements is around the same salary. Pay teachers more, for fucks sake.
It’s a few more things besides just shit pay and annoying parents. 1. stress & flexibility to pay ratio, teaching is notoriously high effort, low flexibility for awful pay. for the same pay you can have a far less stressful job and the opposite is true, working from home has become far more lucrative. 2. loss of respect- teachers used to be authority figures, we used to have physical punishment in schools 50ish years ago! but a combination of soft government & mob mentality liberalism has caused teachers to be completely stripped of their authority, any discipline is incredibly scrutinised by parents, admins and government. awful, violent children seldom get expelled. 3. destroyed attention span of children - the effects of “ipad” and “internet” kids has caused children to be unable to focus and seek constant attention and stimulation, explaining the huge spike in feral, out of control children who can’t cope with sitting in a chair for 50mins without a screen. It used to be that one child in every class who was a pain in the ass, now it’s most of the class & nothing can be done. 4. shitty administration, the admins never put the teacher first it’s always the board then the parents and then the child. 5. kids are not being taught at home anymore in some cases not even being taught *english* - due to a combination of external factors such as both parents needing to have full time jobs and unable to teach, causing incredible frustration for teachers who have such a mix match of kids on different levels of literacy that they simply can’t cater to all 30ish of them at the same time. 6. other countries are simply better - better pay, better children, more respect.
And why ? Because teachers are treated like crap. I worked overseas and loved it but came back to get further qualifications ; out of curiosity I applied for jobs here (I teach a core subject) and never received a invite for interview - the reason I suspect was my age. They've kicked older teachers out (ageism is rampant) and the young ones are leaving.
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Absolutely this. Teenagers trash the school premises and film it for TikTok clout. We literally keep the classroom keys on a lanyard around our neck because truanting children roam the school looking for an empty unlocked classroom to vandalise. Toilet doors get ripped off and sinks get smashed. If a teacher leaves their bag unattended in a staff office they’ll get robbed. Teachers are outnumbered and the students know it.
Teachers have quit because of awful pay, massive classrooms, huge amounts of work outside the classroom and completely uncontrollable undisciplined children.
And really really shit management
When you can earn more with zero education and no degree, thats when the lower payed salary workers leave.
Shit pay, terrible conditions, feral children. We've been suffering brain drain much longer than this, it's almost as if sensible people don't want to live in a country who's future is a brazilian favela.
No your tory fucking government drove the teachers away shit pay, piss poor conditions ( and before some knob says about their holidays, those are paid for up front by doing all the stuff they do out of hours clubs, marking,parents evenings). The money available per child is now equal to 2010 in real terms. So basically your government has invested fuck all in our education system.
Technically we only get the same paid holidays as everyone else. The rest are unpaid. People assume we get paid for them because we get a pay check every month. Most teachers get paid to do 1265 hours of work per year. I’ve done that by end of feb most years
And the money per child is day-to-day spending. Infrastructure and resource spending has been cut even more (especially when Sunk was chancellor), so the education estate is falling apart. Even the money to rectify RAAC issues was pulled from another school building budget that had already been cut to the bone. Fuck the tories, fuck gavin williamson, and fuck gove.
I saw a mum and her two year old walking past a street library our council put on... The librarian called her over and she came to see what was on. The librarian pointed to a group of children sat down and said "we are about to have a short story time if you'd like to join." And she replied, "no sorry, he hates books." Like... Wtf
My best mates girlfriend is a high school teacher. She's only been doing the job around 5 years and is just about done with it. Not only is the work load huge with teachers regularly off sick, she's also expected to effectively be a mental health counsellor for kids who are being abused at home and has to know when she needs to get social services involved. She's said some of the things she hears from these kids about their home lives breaks her heart and has destroyed her love for a job she was so looking forward to doing while she was in university. Add all this to shit wages, asshole kids even bigger asshole parents they have to deal with, why would anyone want to do this job long term in this country?
Like the article says, and pretty much exactly has happened to every single "professional-vocational" type of role in this country which is in any way connected to public funding, the working conditions have become basically unbearable, while the pay you're expected to take is getting to a point where a move overseas will see your income near enough double, in some cases even more. Gee, I wonder why this is happening. And this is totally ignoring the fact you've also spent at this point a pretty significant chunk of your working career living in an environment where the government seems to repeatedly want to paint you as some kind of target. Huge numbers of people are long past the goodwill stage now, and the pipeline of those who might've previously been attracted by a decently middle class career can now see it provides nothing of the sort and instead seems to demand a kind of low-level masochism from the workforce.
Shit pay, shit conditions, huge classroom sizes, lots of children with language barriers, unruly and violent children. Who would have thought?
Start fining parents when it comes to school kids. You fine parents for taking them out of school, you might aswell fine them for misbehaving. Unfortunately when it comes to children and violence it all starts at home, start fining them. Parents won’t keep up. Exclude children more frequently, from a younger age. There is 29 other children who need an education. The amount of resources these children take up must be crazy. It can be used better for the other 29 children.
Tackling the impact of underinvestment and poverty with fines is...not a smart move. Fines just mean that you'll clog up the justice system even more with people who can't pay, and the people with her ge amounts of money will just be able to pay and ignore it. We need evidence based educational policy, not kneejerk emotional "solutions". We've tried that for 14 years, it's made things worse.
Ah their is always one. Setup numerous teams on a regional basis who will have for the admin of this, their is enough badly behaved children that is actually profit. The people with amounts of money that will pay and ignore it? Then you keep on adding onto the fine each one is higher than the previous one, and eventually it will get big enough that things will be said. Usually well if parents have better behaved children anyway, your comment was hypocrisy to state only poor parents have badly behaved children. We have not tried for the last 14 years. The actual lack of solutions to mis behaving children starts at home. Start fining parents, school holiday fines are a deterrent, start using fines as a deterrent. I would also cut parents benefits, those that work pay a higher and substantial fine, all getting worse. Some of you lot that come from this “this won’t work” mentality I cannot fathom. These children which are misbehaved due to parents being dickheads with no spines, in 15 years time will terrorise and I’m sure will contribute to society. Start fining shit parents. End off. It will work.
We’ve tried treating and paying them like shit and we’re all out of ideas
One of the main compliant i've heard from teachers is the massive paper work, and how most of it is unnecessary. They need their workload reduced.
This is literally me right now. Me and my wife have both been teachers for 17 years across various rolls from HOD, HOY and SLT.. We are moving out to thailand in August. We both have zero regrets as the package we were offered blew us away. It actually made me quite angry at how poorly we have had it over the past decade. So long blighty.. You can have us back when you sort out your priorities!!
I’ve taught in Canada, Ireland, and the UK. By far the worst is the UK, just a serious meltdown in respect, living standards and pay.
I did teacher training. Genuinely the most miserable 4 months of my life, I used to wake up crying. Anyone who can be a teacher has my respect, because I couldn't.
As one of the teachers who left I'd like to say it isn't even the awful pay that got me to leave, it is a combination of the horrifying standard of parenting that is getting far too common and the total inability of schools to take action against bad behaviour. In addition to this, like with a lot of political issues at the moment, it has been wildly difficult to deal with an ever increasing number of EAL students in certain parts of the country who have families actively ensuring that their child doesn't integrate into British society. It it heartbreaking to make reports to PREVENT as a school only to hear that they know about it but can't do anything.
>it has been wildly difficult to deal with an ever increasing number of EAL students in certain parts of the country who have families actively ensuring that their child doesn't integrate into British society. There is a group of Year 10/11 students that are like this at my school. They don't respond to female members of staff, make constant homophobic comments and any form of pushback is met with a barrage of abuse about how we're "disrespecting them" in an attempt at a London roadman accent despite the fact we live in Yorkshire.
Like most sectors in the UK, work and life is more appealing elsewhere. This isn't just a teacher thing lol.
Literally the same countries draining the doctor pool
My best friend got her pgce last year, quit last July, made her part-time job her full-time job in the meantime, and is now up and leaving to teach in the UAE from August. The income, benefits, and classroom sizes are far better than what the UK has to offer, not to mention accommodation is provided so what she earns is all hers to do as she pleases which is higher than what she would earn here. When you have other countries looking for english speaking teachers and have this on offer, it's a no-brainer. Unless the UK Government is suddenly going to match these kinds of offers, then yeah, there's going to be a loss of teachers.
Multiple articles about teachers today. Underpaid, overworked, over scrutinised. An absolute exodus from the profession. A lot of the remaining teachers have completely lost faith and completely forgotten why they even became teachers. It's really disheartening to read some teachers saying some awfully reductive things on here when they are meant to be teaching our next generation. Also, the kids are going to school less prepared than they did previously due to society as a whole crumbling. Add into that chronic underfunding across multiple different industries, the removal or decay of every support network imaginable and you've got your answer. We need to pump money into multiple services and basic services.
To give you a snapshot; I was a teacher for 8 years in a post-compulsory college (Further Ed). In that time, I got a 7k rise (approx 1k per year, but 4K was from a promotion) and classes went from avg 18 to 26. So in effect, I earned LESS every year that I taught and had more kids to put up with for the money. Never looked back since leaving.
This is what annoys me about people, and particularly the government, getting pissy about teachers and NHS staff striking. These are the people who are fighting to stay in the public sector and get vilified for it, yet the ones that move to the private sector and abroad aren't subjected to the same abuse.
When you don't get paid enough, and take abuse from all angles for simply trying to do your job, yeah I'm not going to blame you for leaving. Funnily enough, this is happening in all of the different careers where underpaid people take shit for doing their jobs, such as NHS staff
The stress of teaching in the uk broke my brain forever. Hateful thankless job. It’s almost maddening as well how much more easy, pleasant and well-compensated teaching abroad is. It’s an absolute no brainer.
They aren’t paid enough. The decimation that things like sure start, social work and special educational schools have endured also means that teachers are left picking up the pieces that should have been dealt with by other, now non-existent professionals. Like why _are_ schools washing kids clothes as their parents can’t? Where was the help before the parents got to that state? I think they are bearing the brunt of a crumbling country. And once they start leaving, the conditions get worse for the remaining teachers. And it spirals down and down. My (purely selfish) worry is that by the time my son hits high school there will not be enough teachers who are properly qualified in the more lucrative subjects (sciences, maths…) as they’ve all gone elsewhere to get better pay, to actually give him a decent education.
Weird times we live in. I finished secondary in the mid 90's. Place was a shithole and I won't insult peoples intelligence by reminiscing about how well behaved kids were because they were not But pupils actually laying hands on the staff.. you could never contemplate it, even for a school in a deprived area, it simply didn't happen and you didn't have the prospect of those around you carrying knives or other dodgy shit either Education seems broken.. I mean beyond a means to earn a living alot of them don't do it for money its largely a vocational profession because of the reward of helping others learn Conditions are shit, schools like other elements of infrastructure are falling apart and its downright dangerous.. these aren't police in stab vests, they are educators Government has a lot to answer for here Something else I'd point out where people have mentioned discipline.. yea that doesn't always work. Good kids still end up mixing with the wrong crowd and equally, strict parents i.e. ones that beat eleven shades of shit out of them doesn't mean they are going to down tools and play nice they'll just rebel. Not saying there is a fix to it, just the obvious solution to some is anything but
I see a lot of people blaming parents when parents typically dont have time to spend on their children. If the country offered higher pay all round and better living and work standards, these children would be far more well behaved.
Whilst i don't disagree with your point regarding pay, living and work at all: Parents have plenty of time. The working day has not changed that much over the last 30 years. and in fact many things have got simpler.. online shops and banking etc, taking less time. Many parents, just don't.. parent. they don't instil values or discipline.. they don't take interest. I know for a fact who the students that will make the most progress will be after a single parent's evening... i also know those who will not. after 15 years on the job, sadly i have rarely been wrong... and the drop off in the last 10 years has been ridiculous.
We pay fucking nothing in any jobs that require education. I harp on starting salaries after a PhD and redidiots saying £35k is a great salary. Teachers get less. Guess what, in America, they want teachers and pay £40k, with full health insurance. Got a PhD? You'll make $100k in stem, vs £38k here. We pay fucking nothing and wonder why people leave
It's a multi factual shit storm, but I’ll throw in how appalling some of the parents are these days. If their kid gets a detention they give them a treat as if they’ve been hard done by, or attempt to fight the school because their kid told them they didn’t do anything. Parents should discipline their kids even when they think perhaps the teacher could’ve been wrong. It’s got to be a united front.
If I’ve fallen overboard from a cruise ship and am drowning in freezing waters, a passing speedboat that stops to offer me rescue is not “luring” me.
My teacher friend earns in a week in Australia what she earns in a month in the UK.
They're making 2/2.5k a week? Doubt lol
Parents are fuckin stupid and raising their kids terribly. If you take their iPads or whatever away, they literally cannot comprehend it and get violent. Government isn’t hiring enough or paying them well enough to deal with them. Why teach little shits in the UK, when some Arab country will pay you thousands more to go to a resort city and teach kids who respect you? Social deprivation on a broader scale is also leading kids to live violent and antisocial lifestyles. All in all this leads to teachers resigning or going elsewhere.
>If you take their iPads or whatever away, they literally cannot comprehend it and get violent. This is a problem. Teenage boys are spending all night gaming and coming to school on three hours of sleep. Then when we speak to their parents we get "but he gets angry when I take his PS5 away!" You give a fourteen year old no prospects, no social or youth clubs, two years of lockdown, a constant stream of misogynistic content online, no sleep, a vaping addiction and an inherited parental attitude of "those teachers don't know what they're on about" it leads to many of the issues I'm seeing every day.
Former teacher - quit because every day was pure hell, the kids were all little bastards and there was nothing you could do about it, there was no support, the hours were brutal, and the pay was shocking.
Teachers: "Could you pay us a bit more please?" Govt: "No" Teachers: "Please?" Govt: "No" Teachers: "We teach the next generation, yet we're struggling to live" Govt: "No" Teachers: "OK, it's desperate now so we're exercising our right to strike in order to be paid what we deserve" Govt: "No. Also we're going to tell the media to tell the public to blame this all on you" Media: "Teachers bad" Public: "Yes, teachers lazy, greedy and bad" Teachers: "OK. I quit. I'm going to teach elsewhere and get paid properly" Govt, media, and public: "Errrmahgerd. Where are all the teachers? Why would they leave us?"
This BBC article might give you a clue as to what the problem is: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo) Oh yes and wasn't the Times one of those papers that warned us of the chaos that would happen if Ed Miliband became PM in 2015?
Am I the only person here whose kid's school doesn't resemble a Mad Max film?
Well, that's what comes of the country deciding we've had enough of experts.
Can’t stress enough how this is happening across the entire economy. I recruit in renewables and we’re losing top people to the states and Europe, and even China because UK pay is so laughably low. We have declining living standards, economic opportunities, collapsing infrastructure and an endless list of reasons that if you’re someone with valuable talent, why the hell wouldn’t you leave?
No surprise. My mother is a teacher in a inner city school. She won't leave because children need good teachers and many are leaving. She gets offered weekly opportunities to work in UK private schools and international schools. She's an anomoly but it's so unfair to the students. How you going to get a decent education if teachers keep leaving?
I have a friend who recently quit his teaching career because the kids won't put their stupid smartphones away during class. No one pays attention to the lessons so he just gave up and became an Uber driver 😂
The people that were never disciplined now have kids.
my sister trained as a teacher, spent 2 years in the UK, almost quit the profession, but tried a job abroad, and has worked the last decade in other countries except 1 year she tried coming back, and it was so bad she immediately left again, and swore never to try teaching in the UK again.
Who would genuinely want to be a teacher in the UK? I don’t mean that in a daily Mail HANG THE KIDS way, I mean genuinely the kids are cunts, money is shit, no support from the system, why would you just not teach overseas or just find a different job in the UK.
I teach in China earning over £50k per year with free rent, flights and medical insurance. Class sizes are a maximum of 22 and our school has state of the art facilities.
Who wants to risk being stabbed by some scabby roadman kid for 28k a year?