Seriously. My buddy doing echo tests of drainpipes a few hours a day for a water company (which took only a few hours of training to start doing) earns double that of a teacher with several years of crippling university debt.
If we want an intelligent, productive workforce in the future, it starts with good teachers being rewarded for taking on the huge amount of stress and time that is teaching. We shouldn’t be relying on the altruism of good teachers putting up with hell for the benefit of our children and leaving only those who don’t aspire to paying their bills or affording a holiday to enter the profession.
How on earth we ended up with teaching being so disgustingly undervalued is beyond me and must change.
I agree with this. Even more so if you add in that we need to make education cheaper for the younger generations. If you are not investing in the future, then you can really expect to have one.
It's not just the poor level of pay, it's also the crippling workload and lack of progression. Beyond a certain point your only way to progress up the pay scale is to move into the middle management of schools, which becomes less and less actual teaching, so to get slightly more reasonable pay you have to sacrifice the reason you got into teaching in the first place. For the teachers I know who've quit though, they could never be paid enough to get back into teaching, the workload and stress, the lack of backup with agressive pupils, hostile work environement generally (multiple people have said the kids are bad for bullying, but the staff are worse). We need to look at teaching in other countries and take note, because they way we've set it up isn't working.
I'm not a teacher so I'm just talking out of my arse here:
I think just having smaller class sizes would be a good step forward. Keep it to about 15 students per teacher and that would reduce the workload, reduce disruption from unruly students but it would also help the students by having more teacher time available to them.
It would require a huge investment though as we'd need to double the number of teachers and also infrastructure in order to have more classrooms. And also increase their pay.
If you can't hire enough teachers, hiring more teachers isn't going to be viable.
It seems more like they should push for external support like dedicated graders. A grader may be cheaper than a teacher while relieving a teacher's workload. It will also be good for classes with multiple teachers as they would have consistent grading.
Only half of the required number of trainee secondary school teachers in England have been recruited as the academic year gets under way, analysis shows.
The NAHT and the NEU will host a joint debate on the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention at the TUC’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday.
Paul Whiteman, the NAHT general secretary, said the shortages meant more children were being taught either by teachers with no qualification in the subject, by teaching assistants or by supply staff.
“The government must rip up its failed recruitment and retention strategy and replace it with a new vision which restores education as a career graduates aspire to,” he said.
“That means at the very least immediate action to tackle crushing workload and fundamentally reform Ofsted, as well as a plan to reverse more than a decade of real-terms pay cuts.”
The unions point out, however, that the number of pupils in state-funded schools in England has risen at almost double the rate of the teaching workforce.
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