Zachary Marsh is a Parliamentary Researcher, the Chairman of Cambridge City Conservative Association and a Teach First Ambassador.
Britain’s teacher shortage crisis is well established. Despite the Government’s admirable attempts to boost recruitment, troubling retention rates undermine this work and continue to hamper our education sector.
The problem is particularly acute amongst new teachers: one in three leaves within five years. They go for different reasons, but almost all speak of the same overarching emotions – exhaustion, guilt, disillusionment.
I should know, I was one of them. We are thus losing out on some of our brightest, most energetic, and passionate teachers, and chances to transform the lives of young people.
Contrary to what some would have you believe, it’s not all about the money. We knew, in that sense at least, what we were signing up for.
What few anticipate is the brutal and overwhelming reality of modern teaching. Post-covid behaviour standards have plummeted as pastoral and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) need has soared. This perfect storm has been compounded by a training framework that at best feels woefully inadequate and at worst becomes yet another, particularly unwelcome, demand upon our unsustainable workload.
New teachers feel simultaneously unprepared and overworked. As they grapple with the basics of planning, teaching, marking, and byzantine school policies (the reality that there are simply not enough hours in the working day to do it all) they desperately need an effective, supportive early careers programme that suits their needs. The present model is anything but.
The current Early Careers Framework feels more like a bureaucratic hoop-jumping assignment than a helping hand. Upon laying down the last marked exercise book at night, no one wants to crack open their seemingly endless and inefficient online course. Far too much of the content duplicates that taught during initial teacher training, on PGCEs, or during training years.
I’ll never forget the irony of being instructed on how to design a seating plan after a full year in the classroom – and two weeks after term had started.
At times the content does little more than develop a sense of helplessness; being told what you don’t know, without then being given the skills to close the gap, is unproductive and disheartening.
We all celebrate the new wealth of well-researched evidence on SEND that is rightly flooding into teacher training at all levels. Too often however, it is not accompanied by equally well-researched practical strategies to support those SEND students. Nothing disillusions a new teacher more than the guilt of understanding the challenges the students in front of them face when it comes to learning, yet feeling utterly unequipped to meet them.
Which is why the Government’s reforms to early careers training, announced on Monday, are so welcome.
They are refreshingly comprehensive in addressing the issues outlined above. Rather than treating Initial Teacher Training and the Early Careers Framework as distinct entities, the new plans will see them merged into a cohesive training curriculum that avoids repetition. There will be a new focus on practical strategies to support SEND pupils and more subject specific pedagogy to develop specialist mastery.
Workload too has been considered, with more funding to support experienced mentors, although the opportunity to revise the burden on trainees themselves has been missed.
There is still more to be done. Despite attempts to ensure there are enough experienced staff for new teachers to learn from, with new Lead Mentors building on Lead Practitioners, a wider policy to address experience shortages in struggling and deprived schools is sorely lacking.
Moreover the roughly five per cent of new teachers who are Teach First trainees and who, by plunging straight into the classroom, rapidly fall out of sync with the rhythms of teacher training, do not appear to have been reconciled by these new proposals.
Yet for the first time the government seems to have learned a vital lesson. These reforms are positive in themselves, but also reflect a clear understanding that retaining early careers teachers is in large part about training confident, invigorated practitioners.
I have lost track of the times I was told that the energy and passion carried by my new colleagues would see us through. In reality it often shatters unceremoniously on the harsh reality of the education system.
The sky-high expectations placed on modern teachers, the impossible demands made on their time and in the in-at-the deep-end approach to training is not forging the next generation of new teachers. It is burning them out.
If this more realistic approach to what we can reasonably expect can be applied to more aspects of workload and accountability, then we may yet turn the tide of teachers surging from our schools.
Zachary Marsh is a Parliamentary Researcher, the Chairman of Cambridge City Conservative Association and a Teach First Ambassador.
Britain’s teacher shortage crisis is well established. Despite the Government’s admirable attempts to boost recruitment, troubling retention rates undermine this work and continue to hamper our education sector.
The problem is particularly acute amongst new teachers: one in three leaves within five years. They go for different reasons, but almost all speak of the same overarching emotions – exhaustion, guilt, disillusionment.
I should know, I was one of them. We are thus losing out on some of our brightest, most energetic, and passionate teachers, and chances to transform the lives of young people.
Contrary to what some would have you believe, it’s not all about the money. We knew, in that sense at least, what we were signing up for.
What few anticipate is the brutal and overwhelming reality of modern teaching. Post-covid behaviour standards have plummeted as pastoral and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) need has soared. This perfect storm has been compounded by a training framework that at best feels woefully inadequate and at worst becomes yet another, particularly unwelcome, demand upon our unsustainable workload.
New teachers feel simultaneously unprepared and overworked. As they grapple with the basics of planning, teaching, marking, and byzantine school policies (the reality that there are simply not enough hours in the working day to do it all) they desperately need an effective, supportive early careers programme that suits their needs. The present model is anything but.
The current Early Careers Framework feels more like a bureaucratic hoop-jumping assignment than a helping hand. Upon laying down the last marked exercise book at night, no one wants to crack open their seemingly endless and inefficient online course. Far too much of the content duplicates that taught during initial teacher training, on PGCEs, or during training years.
I’ll never forget the irony of being instructed on how to design a seating plan after a full year in the classroom – and two weeks after term had started.
At times the content does little more than develop a sense of helplessness; being told what you don’t know, without then being given the skills to close the gap, is unproductive and disheartening.
We all celebrate the new wealth of well-researched evidence on SEND that is rightly flooding into teacher training at all levels. Too often however, it is not accompanied by equally well-researched practical strategies to support those SEND students. Nothing disillusions a new teacher more than the guilt of understanding the challenges the students in front of them face when it comes to learning, yet feeling utterly unequipped to meet them.
Which is why the Government’s reforms to early careers training, announced on Monday, are so welcome.
They are refreshingly comprehensive in addressing the issues outlined above. Rather than treating Initial Teacher Training and the Early Careers Framework as distinct entities, the new plans will see them merged into a cohesive training curriculum that avoids repetition. There will be a new focus on practical strategies to support SEND pupils and more subject specific pedagogy to develop specialist mastery.
Workload too has been considered, with more funding to support experienced mentors, although the opportunity to revise the burden on trainees themselves has been missed.
There is still more to be done. Despite attempts to ensure there are enough experienced staff for new teachers to learn from, with new Lead Mentors building on Lead Practitioners, a wider policy to address experience shortages in struggling and deprived schools is sorely lacking.
Moreover the roughly five per cent of new teachers who are Teach First trainees and who, by plunging straight into the classroom, rapidly fall out of sync with the rhythms of teacher training, do not appear to have been reconciled by these new proposals.
Yet for the first time the government seems to have learned a vital lesson. These reforms are positive in themselves, but also reflect a clear understanding that retaining early careers teachers is in large part about training confident, invigorated practitioners.
I have lost track of the times I was told that the energy and passion carried by my new colleagues would see us through. In reality it often shatters unceremoniously on the harsh reality of the education system.
The sky-high expectations placed on modern teachers, the impossible demands made on their time and in the in-at-the deep-end approach to training is not forging the next generation of new teachers. It is burning them out.
If this more realistic approach to what we can reasonably expect can be applied to more aspects of workload and accountability, then we may yet turn the tide of teachers surging from our schools.