Recruit! Retain!

This time of year is a difficult time for teachers and students. The sun has started shining¹, but students are about to do their exams and you are out of time². It happens like this every year. You start counting down to the exams, comfortably in double figures of lessons then you come back after Easter and bang! single fingers, then none at all. Stressful isn’t it? Time to reflect on your year. Can you do it again next year or is it time to look for a different job – different school or career altogether?

Teaching is stressful. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never set foot in a classroom to actually teach. If we look at retention figures for teachers, the figures are appalling at best and absolutely bleak for the future of the profession at worst.

The DFE’s own figures showed that over 40, 000 teachers left the profession after just one year³, which is absolutely shocking. In good news, this figure is better than it was in 2015 when 15% quit after one year. In 2022, it was 11%. Why is this? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Firstly, I think we have to talk about pay. Whilst pay has massively improved for teachers, it’s still nowhere near enough money for the amount of work and stress involved in the job. I was speaking with an ECT recently, and he said his brother was doing three days a week at Aldi and was getting more than he was as an ECT. I don’t actually believe that, but definitely think there’s considerably less stress.

Pay for teachers has improved massively in the last couple of years, but it fell so far during the austerity years that it still feels low, especially when compared with starting salaries for other professional jobs. For example, a doctor (once qualified) earns £38, 831 which rises to £45,900 with the unsocial hours and extra shifts. A second year doctor earns approx £44,000. A rise of about £6,000. A computer science graduate can expect an average starting salary of about £44,000.

A teacher can expect to earn approx £32, 916 in their first year, and £34, 822 in the second. A £2000 rise. Three times less than a doctor. Why the disparity? Both are professional jobs with a high entry level and training expectation. Yes, doctors are highly skilled, and their training is demanding, but so are teachers – or at least good ones. Comparing professions like this is, of course, flawed – I have no idea what a doctor’s daily life is, but then, they don’t know what a teacher’s is like either.

Teachers work very long hours, especially early in their career. At some point they look at their pay, and the fact they can’t afford to buy a house, and think ‘is this worth it?’. A proper pay increase might help with this, but given the transparency around teacher pay⁴, I’m not entirely convinced this is the main factor in teachers quitting. A factor, yes, but not the main one.

Of course, successive governments insistence that any teacher pay rise is funded from existing budgets doesn’t help any. Say we get a 4% increase, but it’s from our current budget, which means we have to give something up that we currently have. So less books? Less paper? Can’t afford to replace the laptop⁵ you need to deliver your lessons? Never mind, at least you had a pay rise⁶!

Bizarrely, teaching assistant (TA) numbers are rising, about 1.9% a year over the last few years – bizarrely because I thought they’d be first against the wall in any budget review. It appears it’s older teachers taking redundancy that helps schools balance their budgets. An experienced teacher is on an average salary of about £46,525⁷, so replace them with an ECT and you’ve just saved the school around £16k, or just less than a teaching assistant. Of course, TA’s should be paid A LOT more, but that’s a discussion for a different time.

Schools combat rising costs the only way they can – make savings in other ways. I know, personally, of schools where the class size for core subjects is 35 students. No TA support either, so guess at the amount of stress that teacher-pupil ratio causes? Think about it: when I started teaching, most of my classes were around 25 students. Now there are ten more. Ten more lots of marking. Ten more sets of parents. Ten more sets of reports.

Per class.

The workload is insane. Think about an average cycle for a unit of work: check what they’ve remembered from last year⁸, reteach what they forgot, teach new content, do an assessment, rinse and repeat. In there, you’ve got the work to mark from the lesson, then the work from the assessment. For 35 kids. Per class. I repeat: the workload is insane.

More importantly: it is unsustainable. Burnout is real. Right now, whilst you’re reading this, your marking pile is looking at you and judging. But the thing is, you’ll stay tonight (or take it home, raising your electricity bill as you mark into the night and ignore your own family) and bash through it. You are tired and just want it to end, but it won’t, because tomorrow it’s the turn of a different class.

Christ. I’m depressing myself.

People have false expectation of what teaching is like. I know ECTs who find it barmy that the time they get for planning, preparation and marking is not enough⁹. Teachers are legally entitled to 10% (approx) of their time to perform all three tasks. For a main scale teacher, this works out to be around 2 or 3 lessons per week if they have hour long lessons. If the government really wants to improve retention rates, they will triple this. The country with the best retention records in the world is Lithuania. Teachers there are expected to work 36 hours per week and ten of those are given over PPA. That’s a similar contact load to the UK, and vastly superior PPA time.

I truly believe teaching is a great profession, and people join it thinking they will be Robin Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer, Edward James Olmos or even Hilary Swank¹⁰. They want to change people’s lives for the better, but the personal cost is too high. The stress of the workload is too great and so they leave. Can you blame them?

Workload has to be sorted out. This cannot continue. We face a real crisis in teacher retention and this is the biggest culprit as far as I can tell.

There are other factors too – like the attitude of students and, worse, their parents, but I’ll save that little bundle of joy for next week.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Yay! ↩︎
2. Shit!! ↩︎
3. New data reveals the scale of the teacher retention crisis | Tes ↩︎
4. The exact amount you can expect to be paid as a teacher is easily available on line. Female teachers earn exactly the same as their male counterparts, which is as it should be. Anyone who thinks women should be paid less for equivalent roles in any sector is a fucking idiot. ↩︎
5. The one your school provides, of course. Not a personal one if you have one – you don’t really want that search history public now, do you? ↩︎
6. Double yay! ↩︎
7. Median, maths fans. ↩︎
8. Nothing. “I ain’t seen this before in my life.” even though I definitely taught it to you. ↩︎
9. Planning, preparation and assessment time, or PPA for short. ↩︎
10. Pub quiz time – can you name the teaching films these guys are in? Answers in the comments to win, well, nothing, but well done you. ↩︎