To work in education is to be exhausted, physically, emotionally, mentally and, when you find the time, spiritually. You find yourself doing some of the most rewarding work imaginable while wondering how you got so lucky to be paid for it; that is, until you open your bank account and see just how much charity is involved in that job.
None of this is new: few teachers go into this for the money, and the ones that do are too silly to last long or to teach in the first place. Now though, fewer and fewer people are choosing to teach at all.
The latest figures from TES are more than a little worrying, with teacher recruitment targets being wholly missed across the board. Last month, the number of placed trainees was 40% below the DFE targets. This when we’re, again, facing (another) staff retention crisis. And at a time where around half of Teaching Assistants have faced physical violence in the last year. As someone who has been hurt in the course of my duties, it’s one thing to accept one’s own level of risk. It’s not okay to expect a national workforce to accept such risks as part and parcel of the job.
The present education workforce as a whole is demoralised, overworked and beyond exasperated with the ever growing lists of targets and pressures that go above and beyond what could reasonably be expected of any teacher. Most of all, we’re tired.
If you want a professional and useful Education service, you need the staff to do it. Not simply bodies to keep an eye on a room full of kids. You need passionate, motivated and committed staff with the energy and focus to deliver the best education and care to children. Teaching staff are distracted by worrying about neglecting their own kids as they work longer and longer to take care of others.
Staff are bone weary to the point of feeling sick at the idea of having to plan yet another ‘fronted adverbial’ task. Teaching staff should be well rested, refreshed and unburdened by the constant stress of modern teaching. Educators should not have to spend whatever spare cash they have on basic school supplies like pens, highlighters and sharpeners, while still worrying about how they’re going to pay the increase in bills or the ever constant threat of a rent hike each month. Even the latest pay increases, (of between 5 and 10.5% depending on your role), represent a real-terms cut and, if things don’t change, will result in further staff cuts as those pay increases came from existing school budgets, not new government money.
This results in a staff that’s out of pocket and out of patience, joined to a sector that’s out of time. The worry from the government is that teachers and support staff will strike this winter and possibly in the spring. While that’s still a strong possibility, the threat most worrying is simply a further mass exodus from the education sector altogether. Those working in education know the effects of what a loss of learning does to children. Just look at our efforts over the lockdown. However, in a system where Teaching Assistants are leaving to become supermarket workers and teachers can use their skill set across scores of different jobs, it’s almost perversely easier to leave altogether than it is to have to see the effects of repeated absences on our students.
Every educator that leaves next week, next month, or next year will be making the same decision based on the reality that they’d run out of time. They’ll have tried to think on their decision, to justify the levels of stress and toll the jobs take when set against not letting their students down. After a certain point, around half of us will take that leap to quit. The government seems ready for a fight against strikes, while ignoring the fact that so many teachers have simply decided and will decide to forgo that fight altogether.
This is where we are, too exhausted to stay, and many are proving to be too spent to strike. We’re a workforce that’s been professionalised, corporatised, and yet still seen by many in power as infantilised. When educators see ministers like Williamson, who was openly contemptuous of the people he was supposed to have led, was rewarded by the latest Prime Minister, and when our calls for decent funding to help students are ignored, you begin to lose any patience you once had left. The government asks us to give them time before making any decisions to strike? They think if we do it would be ‘unforgivable and irresponsible’? They haven’t a clue about their own unforgivable failure to support educators and students in their 12 years of power. And now, time is up.