Is 6.5% enough- Part II
This is a bit of a follow up to the post I wrote yesterday about the 6.5% rumoured pay offer for teachers. In that post, I alluded to the fact that pay isn’t the only issue, and whilst I do think pay has a significant impact on recruitment, I don’t think low pay is the main driver of people leaving teaching.
Most teachers don’t leave because of pay, although pay you can’t afford to live on doesn’t help, and many schools in expensive towns struggle to recruit more than those in cheaper parts of the same local authority. Most teachers leave because of “workload”.
But what is “workload”? Many schools have taken real strides to address the problem of workload in the last 5-10 years. They’ve got rid of bizarre, excessive marking policies. They’ve centralized planning, so you hopefully aren’t planning from scratch, at least up to KS4. There haven’t been major changes to the exam spec recently, so we aren’t having to rewrite all our schemes of work yet again. I know there are schools which are the exception to this, but they aren’t the norm any more.
That said, teachers are screwed by a part of our contract which states that we have to work enough hours to discharge the duties of our job. Legally, there’s no such thing as an unreasonable planning or marking load, even if there is a (theoretical) limit on the amount of time schools can have us in meetings or parents evenings.
In many schools, a part of “workload” is covering for absent colleagues. These could be unfilled roles within the school, or people who are off sick, or on a planned absence, such as maternity. It is very difficult to find a teacher to take on a maternity cover these days, let alone a temporary position that only lasts for, say, a term. There’s a shortage of supply teachers, as well.
This affects teachers in a few ways. One, physically “covering” the class, i.e. supervising them during a “non-contact”. But, the bigger, more insidious way, is that the remaining teachers in a department often have to take on the planning and marking for these classes. In a large department, split between several of you, it’s a killer. In smaller departments, it’s almost impossible. And often, it pushes other people over the edge into leaving, putting the school into a downwards spiral.
The worst, though, is when the school can’t make cover work that day, and so the remaining three or four teachers are sent to the hall or the library, to teach 5 or 6 classes at once. This is incredibly draining, and worse, you know the students are getting nothing out of it, so it’s putting your classes “behind” as well.
In many schools, this has been happening for at least the past few years, and, combined with covid, means you have classes entering Y11 and Y13 with major gaps. Because teachers care about their students (and because poor grades can sometimes prevent you progressing up the pay scale) teachers often run revision sessions for students after school. This is extra work, extra planning, often involves buying extra resources, and then all too soon becomes expected. Whereas in the past it might be revision or a club, it can become “revision and a club and targeted intervention”- taking up three hours a week. Technically, you can say no, so it’s not included in “directed time”, but saying no to these things is very hard.
There’s also issues around lack of “support staff”. Support staff aren’t just the teaching assistants, who do an amazing job. It’s also people like the absence officer, who chases up students who haven’t turned up to school and their parents haven’t given an explanation. Or perhaps pastoral support workers, who help students with challenging home lives. And many of the duties these people might have done get pushed on to teachers, who now, after their teaching day is over, may be ringing parents to find out why their child wasn’t in school. Senior leadership always told me this was a five minute job, but they weren’t the ones ringing home and finding out that this family had been evicted, or this parent had been a victim of domestic violence, or that a grandparent had unexpectedly died. And all these phone calls would then generate an hour or more’s work trying to find appropriate support for the student.
The truth is education isn’t the only service in this country that is crumbling. But it is the only one where we see young people day in and day out. Councils can cut youth workers. The NHS can extend waiting lists for everything from mental health support to autism diagnosis. Social services can raise the threshold at which they intervene or offer support. Or, even in a crisis, just say no-one is available, because they aren’t the ones with a crying child who’s got nowhere to go in their office.
But schools and therefore teachers have been forced to take all of this on. Schools run food banks, wash the clothes of children who don’t have enough electricity at home, try to sort out social problems like homelessness. Schools have brought counselling services in house (with all the problems that involves) and try to manage students with undiagnosed special educational needs as best as possible. All of this creates extra work for people, and it also creates extra stress- especially when it goes wrong.
If we want schools to do all of this, and in some ways, it might make sense to make a school or college a one stop shop for all the needs young people might have- then it needs to be funded. It needs to be appropriately staffed. Because trying to be teacher and social worker and counsellor to young people is breaking a lot of teachers, and soon there will be no-one left, no matter how high the pay is.
